Tuesday it Rains, and other Observations

Knee pain persists but is minimal. We got to the gym yesterday for a weightlifting session. 

We are in the midst of nor'easter here in New Jersey. Lots of rain. We still haven't given the yard the last autumn mowing, damnit. 

Hmmm, we're getting some traffic from the Netherlands. Have we finally gotten some traction in the families' ancestral homeland? [Your nephew discovered you're Krauts-Ed]. Whatever.  Amazon reports no Netherlands sales. So bizarre. Why don't you guys leave a comment here or look us up on FB or Gab?

We wrote yesterday that we're thinking of showing the Australian/Japanese strike* from USS Long Beach's CiC. We've always liked events being conveyed through radio back and forth. This method also allows us to differentiate between strikes. It's also an out from doing a lot of fancy F-111 technical details. USS George Washington and her battlegroup will be joining in. 

As we suspected, Governor Murphy plans to impose vaccine mandates after the election. Project Veritas has the hidden camera footage. James O'Keefe promises more. This blog endorses Jack. Both Maryland and Massachusetts have Republican governors, and New Jersey had Chris Christie just four short years ago. Jack's a good candidate but his ideas aren't great for New Jersey and we think circumstances are a draw.  A Jack victory is not impossible. But this blog remains skeptical. 

We began re-watching Dune last night. Denis Villeneuve's Dune is a visual extravaganza that invokes a lot of science fiction mythology. We can't quite place it, but we know we've seen some of these visuals before in sci-fi art, book covers and magazines. Villeneuve's camera moves slowly across the desert, Caladan... This gives the film a sweeping, epic feel without being pretentious. In fact the visual style is grand but shows rather simple scenes, a spaceship or a bit of brutalist architecture, another important part of the film's visual feel. The background is enormous, threatening to swallow the humans on screen. 

That's a lot of critical gobbledygook for we like what we saw. 

We mentioned before this debate between Libertarian radio guy Scott Horton and Neocon carb guzzler William Kristol. We found Irving Kristol's son as insufferable as ever. He actually said the US didn't do as much as we could have in the 'Arab Spring'. Kristol has the hots for Assad. There's a reason why he, Wolfowitz, etc etc get more and more sinister in the World War 1990 series. But we were surprised to see Horton was a bore as well. His points came down to 'US foreign policy bad' and blamed us for millions of deaths. Horton was better than Kristol, but that's no mean feat. That said we enjoyed his total (and appropriate) contempt for the Neocon. 

*Targets are the SS-11 base at Svobodny and their nearby bomber base an Unkranka. 

There's an Election coming up?

We are reliably informed that a gubernatorial debate took place here in New Jersey last night. Meh. We saw our first campaign ad of the season. In this one Phil Murphy slams the GOP candidate (who's name we won't bother looking up) for attending a Trump rally near Trump National in Bedminster. That's the Somerset County for Trump rally, which we used to attend. Look at us! 

You're goddamn right there was a Confederate Flag.

Polls show Murphy running away with 50+ percent of the vote. You know, we haven't seen a single Murphy yard sign or bumper sticker. There is a fair amount of said materials for the other guy about. The other guy has run a steady, solid, focused campaign. We think Murphy will win, though not quite as decisively as predicted. Say...50-44 or some such?

Will we vote for Murphy? Maybe. The last Dem we voted for was Cory Booker. He was running against one of those perpetual losers whose name we can't recall. Why not? No, we would not vote for that bug eyed song of IBM execs today.

We've spent the last few days listening to Guns n Roses' Locomotive. What a riff. What drive. Sounds like...a locomotive. This song is so complex and technically demanding the band rarely performed it live. Check the licks and the bridge riffs. Just remarkable. Locomotive reminds us a lot of Led Zeppelin's Carouselambra in structure. The beat is similar. Were we to put together a list of GnR deep tracks, this one is at the top.

It's time already for the Stroock family to consider 2022 vacation plans. Ideally we'd like to get together with our dear Irish friends. We had speculated about a rendezvous in Canada, but that doesn't seem in the offing. We'd like not to go back to Ireland. One can only see so many green fields and crumbling castles. Despite being descended on our mum's side from proud Orangemen who fought for Good King Billy at the Boyne and went on to be Tories in the War of the Rebellion, we've no desire to see Scotland. It'd be Ireland with different accents. We are informed by our man on the ground that the Scots are a lot less friendly too. Wales? Back to the Continent sans dear Irish friends? The Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China being the Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China, we may be stuck in North American again.

The Great Nuclear War of 1975 remains stubbornly on schedule. In reading the last few days we've found plenty of cracks in the granite. That is, we've found places where we can expand on what's happening, give the reader more info. Once we're done with '75 we're gonna play right on to '76. A screen read through, then a printout read through. 

Alert reader(s) may notice we've updated the Future Projects page. 

Will's Good Idea for the week of 4-11-21

We don't really have a good idea. We didn't write yesterday. Of late we've colluded with Russia over the weekends. But after our KGB handler asked us for an article and then rejected it, we're miffed, peeved even. Let's put it this way. We're sitting in the passenger seat, legs crossed, arms folded, looking out the window and muttering, 'We're fine.'*

We did research some Soviet missile and nuke stuff. The whiney grognard bitches are really going to come after The Final Storm, 'Why everyone knows the Soviets had a secondary command and control system that enabled them...' Yeah, yeah. I write and sell lots of novels and you don't. So get fucked.

We'll be cleaning up and adding to the existing scenes. This week is gonna get messy. We also need to add a lot of the afore mentioned Soviet nuke stuff. We think by May 1st** we'll be able to write the actual attack sequences.

Here in New Jersey we seem to have peeked and fallen off. NJ.com reports:  'The state’s rate of transmission declined again Saturday to .98, following a steady drop through the week from 1.07 on Monday. Any number over 1 indicates that the outbreak is growing, with each new case leading to at least one other case. A declining transmission rate means the spread is slowing.' Dang, this blog was starting to worry. Of the four horsemen of the Dem Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China apocalypse,  Governor Murphy is the least worst. At least he's not a total A-hole like Killer Andy C. And don't get this blog started on Nurse Ratchet out there in Michigan. She should leave the governor's mansion, preferably via a second story window. These people deserve no compassion. 

Oh look: 'The Natanz site lost power Sunday just hours after starting up new advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium faster, the latest incident to strike the site amid negotiations over the tattered atomic accord with world powers.' This blog is really wondering if the Iranian nuclear program is a gigantic bluff. We know the Israelis have pulled off many feats of daring-do. Just think of the stuff we don't know about. For as the Imams say, the Jew is Clever.

And then there despicable Jews. Gab CEO Andrew Torba writes: 'Over the course of five years Gab has been attacked and smeared by many different Jewish groups including the ADL for simply defending free speech online. Now today the ADL is trying to cancel Tucker Carlson for daring to speak the truth about the reality of demographic replacement that is absolutely and unequivocally going on in The West. These are not “hateful” statements, they objective facts that can no longer be ignored. The ADL wants the government to throw me in jail and shut down Gab for allowing free speech to exist online. Texas Governor Greg Abbott sat in front of an Israeli flag with a Jewish State Representative and called Gab an “anti-semitic platform.” This week the American Jewish Congress is attacking Gab and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene with a smear campaign. When I countered their smear campaign with the facts, they played the victim and claimed that I was “attacking” them.' This Jew has had a home on Gab for six years now. The AJC is merely wrong. The ADL is evil, useless. They're a leftwing pressure group, nothing more. 

*You gals know it's totally hot when you do that, right? It's like staring at a block of ice which needs to be melted. And melted it shall be

**Heh, comrades

6/4/20 In New Jersey

Long time reader(s) know we've been mildly supportive of Governor Phil Murphy, both in general and his handling of the Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China specifically.

Whoops:

Gov. Phil Murphy has repeatedly claimed his policies to reopen New Jersey after the pandemic-related shutdown are rooted in science, citing the mantra that "data determines dates.” But in a letter to state lawmakers, whistleblowers who identify themselves as members of the state's Pandemic Response Team say they have no idea what specific data points the governor uses to make those decisions, because he rarely consults with them. They say this leads them to conclude the administration is "making things up as they proceed or making decisions and justifying them on the back end."

There's another batch of whistleblowers running slamming Murphy for his Wuhan Virus actions.

Yesterday he was being a total wanker, saying the protests were important and ok as long as people wore masks and social distanced.  SaveJersey askes: 

What I would now like to know: why is it okay to protest for George Floyd but not against Phil Murphy? ...Will any protesters or organizers be charged for violating the stay-at-home order?...If not, will the citations issued to anti-Murphy protesters be dismissed?...Weigh in anytime it’s convenient, Mr. Governor.

Prick.

Stroock to Murphy: You're no Hitler

This blog hasn't talked much about locking down versus opening up for one simple reason. We're at ground zero, more or less, and our perspective is warped. 

New Jersey has 130,593 cases, Somerset County 3,364 and Bridgewater, 405. The rate of infection is slowing. Still, when people say it's time to end the lockdown, well, we're not so sure about that.

We say, ask the experts. They're never right. This time their fancy slide rule models were all wrong. Back in the late 90's, experts thought up the idea of giving ARM mortgages to people with bad credit, and were telling us eating a low fat, high carb diet was the way to be healthy. So yeah, no. Expertise is worthless. So if an expert says do something, we say do the opposite.

Anyway, we know people like to kill Governor Phil Murphy for his Tucker Carlson interview, but aside from saying he wasn't thinking about the Bill of Rights, we thought he did fine. And he has done fine. We haven't seen him issuing edicts from the throne, he isn't scolding people. In fact, this Monday he was congratulating the good people of New Jersey for not acting like knuckleheads after opening the parks last weekend.

A lot of this is tonal. Murphy comes across as saying, through his mask, mind you, 'Look, folks, you need to social distance for a while, ok?' And he's given us clear benchmarks for when things can open back up. Basically that's when the hospitalization rate shows a steady, sustained decline.

Murphy is the complete opposite of that little Hitler, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer... 

Monday Metal

Governor Murphy just made the announcement:

And it's Coffee for the Win

There are 222 cases of the Wuhan Coronavirus from Wuhan in Bridgewater and 26 deaths. Somerset County has published some interesting data on the infections. It's mostly old people. The price of gas has finally plummeted here but the store shelves are a bit thin. Our local Shoprite is only getting deliveries every other day or so. Meat is in short supply. We already have a strategic toilet paper reserve that borders on hoarding. Actually toilet paper is getting easier to find.

Again, for the record, we think Governor Murphy did ok, more or less, on Tucker Carlson the other night. No, we're not happy with his answer on the Bill of Rights.

Murph has extended the school lockdown till May 15th, which leaves a glimmer of hope, actually since he hasn't shut it down altogether.

[Oh, he's Murph now is he?-Ed}

Yesterday Dr. Oz said we could open the schools again and only lose two three percent. We don't think that came out the way he meant it. At this point millions of parents are thinking those would be acceptable losses....

Since their father is a coffee addict, the Stroocklettes have expressed interest in same, especially Middle Daughter, whose a bit on the short side. Mrs. Stroock, who lives more or less like a Mormon, expressed concerns about coffee stunting Middle Daughter's growth. So we googled it. According to the NYTs, Harvard and the Mayo Clinic (ham on 5*), this is a myth.

[You're trusting the NYTs and the Ivy League now? Do you hear yourself, luv?-Ed]

Like all good husbands we don't get a lot of wins here, so we're celebrating like it's VE Day.

*Reference.

Murphy Gets Tucked

Our own Governor Phil Murphy was on Tucker Carlson last night for an extended segment. We don't have many complaints about the man generally, and have no complaints about him specifically on the Kung flu. A tough an interesting interview:

Inforos Latest

Here's our latest piece at Inforos:

In response to the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak, President Trump holds daily press briefings in which he describes his administration’s efforts and spars with the media. He then hands the podium off to Vice President Mike Pence, chair of the Coronavirus Task Force. The former governor of Indiana comes across as cool, collected, and in-charge. Pence will probably be the Republican frontrunner in 2024. Last week, the press really focused on an important issue: is calling the virus the ‘China Virus’ racist? In true Trumpian manner, Trump scoffed. And so, he goaded the press into picking another fight that will make them look silly.The Wuhan Coronavirus is sweeping through the New York Metropolitan area...

Click on through to the other side.

2/24/20 in New Jersey

Sad news:

Gov. Phil Murphy disclosed Saturday he has a tumor on his kidney that is 90 percent likely to be cancerous and he will soon undergo surgery. Murphy, 62, told NJ Advance Media that doctors caught it at an early stage and have “complete confidence” they’ll be able to fully remove the tumor. He said he does not expect he’ll have to undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

Thank goodness for the prognosses. A friend of ours had a kidney tumor recently and it turned out to be benign. Ninety percent is not 100%. Good luck, Governor. 

2/19/20 in New Jersey

This is gruesome:

A new study finds that New York and New Jersey are losing more residents than any other states. New York topped the list, losing 307,190 residents, and New Jersey came in second with 97,124 residents moving out.

Which helps explain why Casa-de-Stroock's property was once again re-assessed down. 

The state lost nearly a hundred thousand people in a year. Hey Governor Murphy, you think this is a reflection on you? Maybe the sky high property and sales taxes?

1/30/20 in New Jersey

Via News12NJ: 

Gov. Phil Murphy says his administration has set up a 24-hour hotline to answer the public's questions about the deadly virus that has hit China and beyond as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepares to screen travelers at Newark Liberty International Airport flying into the U.S. from China.

Our middle daughter is obsessed with this. Coronavirus is totally a thing with the kids.

Of course we live in Chindia. We're a little....nervous isn't the word. Pensive? Apprehensive? We think most of our Chinese neighbors are from the Beijing metro-area or Taiwan. Right? Right!

7-18-19 In New Jersey: A-SALTED

Governor Phil Murphy is suing the Trump Administration over the SALT deductions:

New Jersey went to court Wednesday to challenge a new IRS rule that bars residents here from circumventing the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions enacted by President Donald Trump.

In announcing the lawsuit, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy blasted the 2017 Republican federal tax overhaul as a “weaponization of the tax code,” that was “created to punish states like New Jersey.”

The NJ GOP is blasting Murphy, saying he should be doing something about the state's outrageous property taxes, which are outrageous. Holy Merde:

The average deduction for state and local taxes exceeded the $10,000 limit in 20 of New Jersey’s 21 counties, and more than four in 10 households in the state had taken advantage of the tax break.

It's not that nice a place to live.

For those wondering, Casa de Stroock is just under the limit. The house down the street sold for $570,000*. Three bedrooms. Thank you real-estate bubble.

*American

7-16-19 In New Jersey

Governor Phil Murphy is off to India:

Gov. Phil Murphy will soon embark on another international trip to help boost business in New Jersey — this time to India, a country with strong ties to the Garden State.

Murphy announced Monday he will be the first sitting New Jersey governor to visit India on official business, taking a seven-day, six-city economic tour in September of a country he called one of the state’s largest trade and investment partners.

Smart.

'Strong ties to India...' he ain't kidding.

Indian-Americans represent the largest group of foreign-born residents in New Jersey, Murphy’s office said.

Of the state’s nine million residents, about 420,000 are Indian-American — “one of the fastest growing communities in our state," Murphy said.

Long time and attentive readers will know we live in Chindia. Just this week we have a new family moving in and they're from...India! Interestingly they're Indian Christians. Wonder what they do for Dewali.

More than half the families on our block are Indian. 

Without asking we're sure our new neighbor works in IT and is moving from Edison.

7-11-19 in New Jersey

Governor Phil Murphy is a little man:

The Murphy administration has specified $235 million in programs the governor is putting a hold on until revenues meet projections.

Gov. Phil Murphy announced that he would hold $235 million in reserve when he signed the fiscal year 2020 budget on Sunday. The money will be released once revenues meet expectations.

The programs range from $50,000 for a traffic study in Little Ferry to more than $100 million in aid for struggling cities and towns.

That last item is a blatant attempt to hurt municipalities and stick Senate Leader Steve Sweeney with the blame.

Murphy lost the battle over his phony-baloney Millionaire's Tax and now he's going to pout.

Governor Phil Murphy is a little man, petty.

Sweeney 2021!

7-5-19 in New Jersey

As we have said before, Governor Phil Murphy is setting the stage for a presidential run in 2024:

Gov. Phil Murphy marked the July 4 holiday Thursday by announcing New Jersey’s government would once again oversee resettling refugees in the state, three years after former Gov. Chris Christie ended the practice.

The Democratic governor also signed an executive order to create a state Office of New Americans to help immigrants and refugees resettle here.

Murphy cast the moves as his latest broadside against Republican President Donald Trump’s administration.

“While the federal government takes action that prevents immigrants from seeking the American Dream, New Jersey will fight for our brothers and sisters and stand against the hatred and bigotry coming from Washington,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, said in a statement.

That's first rate virtue signaling. 

Wonder where the refugees will end up. Probbaly Newark. Murphy will know better than to piss off subrubanite Dems by dumping a bunch of Central Americans in their midst.

Actually, we're all for placing these people in Camden. They can't do worse.

This blog earnestly hopes State Senate Leader Steve Sweeney runs in 2021.

Sweeney! Sweeney! 

When Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean beats our own Tom Malinowski in next years NJ-07 Congressional election, he'll be in great shape for a run at Trenton in 2021.