Tag: New Year’s Greetings

Happy New Year!

The Daily Escape:

Dory with lights, Ogunquit, ME – December 2023 photo by Eric Storm Photo

This is the last Wrongologist column of the year because tomorrow is the first day of 2024. Cartoon lovers shouldn’t worry, there are a few cartoons at the end of this post. We will spend tomorrow attending a New Year’s Day concert of Baroque music at the auditorium of a local prep school.

You will see plenty of year-end reviews of what happened in 2023, most of which will concern what went wrong. So no need to recapitulate the bad news here. Despite all that, 2023 also was a year with significant positive developments:

  1. We engineered a soft landing for the economy, meaning that we didn’t have a recession and the widespread unemployment that would have come with it.
  2. The US will end 2023 with one of the largest annual drops in homicides on record (-12.8%), according to AH Datalytics
  3. In 2022, the insured share of the US population reached 92% (a historic high). Private health insurance enrollment increased by 9 million individuals and Medicaid enrollment increased by 6.1 million individuals.
  4. US healthcare spending as a percentage of the GDP was lower last year than it was 6 years earlier. Health care spending grew by 4.1%, and the share of GDP devoted to health care fell to 17.3%, lower than the 18.2% share in 2021.
  5. The WHO approved a new and affordable malaria vaccine. More than 600,000 people died of malaria in 2021, with children under 5 years representing 80% of malaria deaths in Africa. The US still reports about 2,000 malaria cases each year. The majority of them are contracted abroad.
  6. Two sickle cell disease treatments gained FDA approval. Sickle cell is a debilitating condition that affects around 100,000 Americans, most of them Black. One is the first medical treatment to be based on the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
  7. Sweden and Finland joined NATO. Germany is no longer dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.
  8. The Webb Telescope made huge advancements in human understanding of the Cosmos.
  9. And finally, as Wrongo has written elsewhere, today, despite his best efforts, he turns 80!

The Christmas season brought our family one piece of arguably bad news. On both sides, we are a blended family. That means the holiday season can bring quality time with extended family members who do not share your political and/or cultural sensibilities. But no worries, it’s just one day, except when it isn’t.

One of our kids while participating in a “Yankee Swap” of gifts, wound up with an autographed copy of Ted Cruz’s book, “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America”. Imagine having to act excited with this as your New Year’s read. As expected, there are many 5-star reviews on Amazon, but Wrongo wants to quote this one:

“A most difficult book to read. Almost never do I feel inclined to post a book review on a public site, yet I am compelled to do so here. Practically everything Cruz expresses outrage over are previously debunked, decades old tropes.”

Your mileage may vary. Wrongo OTOH, participated in a different Yankee Swap, receiving a grandson’s “75 songs that changed my life” along with a written description of each. A fantastic gift!

Here are the cartoons of the week. Gov. Haley can’t figure out the word puzzle:

The Elephant resolves to begin this year like last year:

The new baby doesn’t look so cuddly:

Enjoy the peace and quiet of this New Year’s holiday. There’s plenty of time to be nervous about the other 364 days.

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A New Year Brings New Work

The Daily Escape:

Merced River, Yosemite NP, CA – December 2023 photo by Graham Holmes Photography

We’ve enjoyed a few days away from the news, seeing kids and grandkids while eating non-stop and playing games in the living room. But it’s nearing the time when we will need to refocus on the state of our country. These are overstimulated times, as the abuse of all caps and exclamation-points around the internet shows us.

It’s doubtful, as the song goes, that “Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight“. It seems that next year will be very much like 2023 where the “bad vibes” were everywhere, despite all of the good news about the economy.

Here’s one finding from a poll by YouGov  that was performed between December 11th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 adult citizens, with a 4± point margin of error:

The bad vibes were overwhelmingly felt by Republicans, 66% of whom felt that 2023 was “One of the worst years in American history” even though it clearly was not.  From the NYT:

“The “vibe” is bad, voters can’t see that the economy is good.”

The economy is really good. Unemployment is near its historic low. Inflation is nearly controlled. While the Fed raised interest rates rapidly to slow economic growth, we are now likely to experience a soft landing of the economy. Back in December 2022, the Financial Times (paywalled) published a survey that showed 85% of economists were projecting a recession in 2023. But it didn’t happen, largely due to US fiscal policy (adding money to people’s pockets) overriding the impact of the Fed’s desire for a restrictive monetary policy.

Maybe people believing that the economy was bad shouldn’t be surprising. FOX, along with other media have been telling people non-stop that the economy is a problem (and using inflation as the proof). With few exceptions the Democrats haven’t responded clearly. Biden tried to brand the economy as Bidenomics, but neither he nor the Democrats mention every day how great the economy is.

Without hearing from the Dems, most Americans hear that the economy is bad and nobody contradicts that. So one side uses proper messaging techniques and the other side wonders why they’re unpopular. This is true for the Dems on issue after issue.

Heading into 2024, Wrongo is putting on his armor, because next year’s not going to be easy. In fact it’s going to be a shitshow. We know that we’re having an absolutely make or break election for president. Control of Congress is on the line as well. It’s now becoming clear that unless there’s a legal miracle, Trump will not be judged guilty in any of his pending criminal cases prior to the election.

That means it’s up to us voters to get the 2024 election right: Overwhelming turnout, hammering the message locally and not simply relying on the national Democratic apparatus to get things done for us at the local level. If we fail, it’s hard to see how America recovers fast enough to keep the entire world from turning to chaos with a Trump win.

From Rick Wilson: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“If I could weigh one magic wand and accomplish one simple change in the minds of anti-Trump voters, Republican or Democrat, it would be this: stop believing in miracles. Miracles are in short supply….It’s taken me a while to overcome the hope that something derails Trump….But nothing does. He is a protean force in American culture now, seemingly beyond all sanction. He is not going to jail….He won’t be disqualified from the ballot in any states when the Supreme Court is done. Trump is going to be the nominee; he is going to lure the media into his narrative frame once again.”

More:

“The miracles in politics are the ones we make. They come from work planning, preparation, organization, and focus. Nothing will set the Democratic Party back further and faster than the fantasy that somehow the law or fate will take Trump out of their way. This one will take a lot of work at every return, and there are no shortcuts.”

The DNC sends us their mealy-mouthed-please-send-money-now emails every week. They must up their game if they hope to win. Also, Wrongo can’t understand why so many Americans can’t see the handwriting on the wall. This isn’t a time for third parties, it isn’t a time to “send a message” to Biden.

The best defense for our democracy is to speak out and encourage everyone we know to vote.

We close this year with our final seasonal Christmas musical presentation, selections from the 2023 Christmas Carols Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. This is snippets of the whole carols, which may disappoint some:

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What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

The Daily Escape:

Happy New Year from the Wrong family

At the Mansion of Wrong, it is our annual party for our oldest friends. We’ll start with a wonderful vintage champagne. Then, move on to caviar sandwiches, and lobster rolls. All of that will be followed by perfectly cooked medium-rare beef tenderloin and a great Cabernet.

For this one day, we’ll act as if the problems of the world are at bay, so that we can concentrate on what is right with our world, despite how much awfulness there is everywhere we look.

One ray of hope as 2019 commences concerns a mother’s reaction to a tragedy. Mollie Tibbetts, a 20-year-old student at the University of Iowa went missing while out for a jog this July. Her body was recovered a month later, and an immigrant who was living and working in Iowa was charged with her murder.

Her killing became fodder for the Right’s efforts to stir up the nation’s anti-immigrant feelings. Some people were animated by deep and ugly racism. But Mollie’s family have chosen a path of solidarity in the time since their daughter’s alleged murderer was arrested. The WaPo has an update about the Tibbets’s actions.

It seems that Tibbetts’s mother, Laura Calderwood, has taken in a local Latino teenager whose parents initially fled Iowa amidst the local anti-immigrant blowback her murder provoked. More interesting, the kid Calderwood is effectively fostering actually knows Tibbetts’s alleged killer quite well. These two stories, on different arcs, are now taking shape under the same roof.

Calderwood says that hosting the boy who wants to finish high school before moving on, accords with her own belief about doing the right thing. She also thinks it is what her daughter would have wanted.

On New Year’s Eve, we are all searching for some reason for hope, for optimism in the face of so much that’s wrong. As we close out a truly awful 2018, it’s important to reflect not just upon the global cruelty, and the intense xenophobia at home. We should also acknowledge that mercifully, there are Laura Calderwoods who demonstrate an entirely different path.

Here is a song for New Year’s played two ways. There are many versions of “What Are You Doing New Years?” and these are two of Wrongo’s favorites. First, the saxophonist King Curtis in an instrumental version from 1968:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Next the great Ella Fitzgerald with the best vocal version, from 1960:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcuK7wW8bU

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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New Year’s Eve, 2016

Today is Wrongo’s birthday! We will spend the evening with close friends, great food, champagne and music. We will talk about how as 2016 draws to a close, America is a deeply unsettled nation.

We can’t decide about our national priorities. We hear from the pols and pundits that it should be jobs and the economy, but they also say it should be national security, or it must be to repeal Obamacare and lower the tax burden on the faux job creators. But they also say that we should remain the world’s policeman, so why weren’t we at the table for the Syrian cease-fire?

Tomorrow we are offered the “fresh slate” that the Universe sends our way each year, so here’s to pretending we’re going to be completely changed men and women in 2017!

Let’s get to some New Year’s music:

First, a snippet of the 2014 Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert, “The Radetzky March” by Johann Strauss. Daniel Barenboim conducts, but he mostly walks around the orchestra shaking hands with the players. He conducts the audience once or twice. Note the audience’s enthusiastic clapping. The Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert is broadcast live around the world to an audience of 50 million in 90 countries. The demand for tickets is so high that people pre-register one year in advance in order to participate in a drawing of tickets for seats the following year:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Second, it wouldn’t be New Year’s at the Mansion of Wrong without playing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” This year, we will be listening to the version by The Orioles from 1949. Formed in the late 1940s, The Orioles are generally acknowledged as R&B’s first vocal group. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lgtk79GQlA

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

The final tune for New Year’s is about sentimentality and hope for the future. It’s Barry Manilow’s “It’s Just Another New Year’s Eve” from the 1977 “Live” album.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Blogging will resume on January 2, 2017.

 

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Happy New Year!

Today is the Wrongologist’s birthday. That’s right, nearly everyone in the civilized world tries to have a drink with Wrongo on New Year’s Eve. It makes New Year’s Eve among his favorite holidays.

Christmas, not so much. The double bind that Christmas has become is summed up by those annual Lexus commercials. They promise that if you’re nice enough to Santa, or if your spouse truly loves you, there could be a $50,000 luxury car outside, wrapped in a bow.

Really? Tell that to the average American (whose wages haven’t gone up, even though much of their daily living costs have increased) that the reason they don’t have a Lexus waiting for them is that their spouse or significant other just doesn’t love them enough.

It is easy to hate what Christmas has become here at the end stage of the Empire.

But New Year’s is different. Here is Johnny Swim, the Wrongologist’s favorite new musical group of 2014, singing a song written by Frank Loesser in 1947, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”:

Happy New Year, and thanks to all of those who read this blog.

No need for a long list of resolutions that we would all just break in January. Let’s settle for a wish that 2015 brings each of us a better economy, better health, and fewer global crises to worry about.

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