13 October—Certainly, 44th District Republican State Representative Anne Dauphinais of Killingly (which, for those many Litchfield County people who may not know anything about the far side of the Connecticut River, relaxes in the state’s aptly named Quiet Corner, smack on the Rhode Island border) may have gone a little too far a couple of days ago in comparing Gov. Ned Lamont to Adolf Hitler just because of Lamont’s vaccine mandate for state employees, which the outspoken representative likened to concentration camps.

I’ve called our beloved gubernatorial autocrat “King Ned,” after all, and noted, in The present and future king, that “not since the United States declared independence from Great Britain and King George III has our country experienced a ruler on the throne as long as King Ned Lamont, Connecticut’s former governor.” And, as everybody knows, I never go too far. Well, hardly ever. Read on.

While Rep. Dauphinais might well consider tempering her remarks, she nevertheless deserves some credit for refusing to apologize. Not only does she quite obviously have the courage to stick to her guns in the face of adversity, but it’s entirely possible that even vaccinated people can carry and pass along the dreaded novel coronavirus; it’s not unlikely that the various tests for the virus may not be all that accurate, either positively or negatively; and the effectiveness of the masks worn by most people is more anecdotal than statistical. So what?

So Good King Ned is threatening to fire and actually is firing recalcitrant state employees (but only probationers so far, newbies who don’t yet have the unions behind them) first and foremost as a show of his absolute power because that’s what kings and dictators do. Henry VIII did it. Hitler did it. Ned’s doing it. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice if His Majesty exercised his virtually unlimited imperial power in ways to benefit Connecticut’s hard-pressed taxpayers rather than the unions to whom he kowtows in spite of everything he keeps telling us?

In further defense of Rep. Dauphinais, Adolf Hitler—although an undeniably horrible person by any stretch of the imagination—unlike Donald Trump, wasn’t all bad. He liked dogs and often slept with Blondi, the German Shepherd bitch Martin Bormann (Hitler’s private secretary) had given him. We won’t speculate on what Wolf (which is what very close friends called Hitler) and Blondi did in bed.

And Wolf could be quite considerate. It seems that his girlfriend (and wife for her 40 last hours), Eva Braun, didn’t much like Blondi. Or sleeping with Wolf, apparently. (Maybe they both shed.) So he was nice enough to give her two Scotties, Negus and Katuschka (nicknamed Stasi, for some reason, which name the post-war communist East German security service, Staatssicherheitsdienst, adopted as its acronym). Eva loved her Scotties, which is quite understandable. And Scotties don’t shed.

Sad to say, Hitler, having lost trust in Heinrich Himmler, tested one of the cyanide suicide capsules the SS boss had given him on Blondi, who had recently whelped. It worked. Not that it would have made any difference, because Wolf had intended to have her killed anyway, just to keep her out of the hands of scumbag Joe Stalin’s Soviets. It’s reported that Wolf was inconsolable upon Blondi’s death. We know the feeling.

It was reported in 2005 by a nurse who had been present in the Führerbunker at the bitter end that Blondi’s death affected the people in the bunker more than Eva Braun Hitler’s suicide, which Eva probably wasn’t too happy about either. Had she not been suicided [sic], it’s not unlikely Eva would have received minimal, if any, punishment at the Nuremberg trials.

And the day after the Führerbunker suicides, innocent little Negus and Stasi were shot by Hitler’s dog handler, along with some other dogs, including his own dachshund. All the dogs certainly deserved better . . .

12 October—As if the prospect of our beloved (and entirely trustworthy, of course) federal government knowing the smallest details about our financial life weren’t bad enough, consider that you don’t need to have opened an account with Facebook or even visited it for the antisocial juggernaut network to know all about you.

And, probably to a somewhat less disgusting but equally intrusive extent, the same goes for virtually all the businesses we visit online, even if we just look but not buy. What do algorithms know about curiosity? That’s why even the good online businesses bug us incessantly about things we might have looked up on their websites. Are they trying to wear us down? Of course.

Then there are the rap-sheets credit-rating agencies keep on us that we’ve accepted for decades—with unenthusiastic resignation, to be sure—because we realize that their intrusive surveillance is necessary for our own convenience. And we grudgingly accept that we can’t do a bloody thing to correct any of the misinformation that they’re all so quick to sell.

You don’t want to know what your tattletale smartphone tells everybody, including the government, about you, from where you are to what you’re doing to how much you’re spending on what. Not to mention if you’ve been spending too much time around somebody harboring the novel coronavirus. And who knows what else? And you needn’t have installed intrusive apps and authorized whatever it may be for your privacy to be invaded.

On the subject of covert federal government surveillance, how many of us have bothered to exercise our right guaranteed under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552) and the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) to inspect the dossiers the FBI and other government agencies have on us? There’s likely a hell of a lot of misinformation gathered and compiled, for whatever reasons, by government operatives. Just like the credit-rating agencies, only worse.

Keep in mind that the FBI, in addition to legitimate law-enforcement activity, has from its earliest days unashamedly, usually unlawfully, spied on people who have simply exercised their right to speak out against government policies, Constitution be damned. And it’s nonpartisan.

And the NSA—which will in all likelihood deny any request to inspect its files for what the agency will insist, usually without justification, are national security reasons—is authorized to do virtually anything to monitor, collect, and process information to protect the good guys. That includes keeping dossiers on any people who may have had even casual intercourse—make that communication or contact—with known or suspected bad guys. Better safe than sorry, after all.

What can you do about all this surveillance anywhere and everywhere? Grin and bear it. And, of course, keep calm and carry on . . .

11 October—If the ultra-left’s plan to require reporting of all financial transactions and activity over $600 (or any amount like that) ever comes to pass, the next step will be for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s paper supplier to embed microchips in all paper money so that the IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, and anybody else with a suitable scanner will be able to follow the progress even of one-dollar bills.

That’s not as crazy as it may seem at first glance. Something like 90 percent of dollar bills in circulation have been shown to contain cocaine residue, so microchips in the bills would allow authorities to trace the progress of the coke dealers and users; and—more important—collect big fines to pay for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion giveaway.

Embedding microchips in paper money certainly isn’t a problem. Crane and Co.—the paper supplier to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing since 1879, as well as to Tiffany’s—has been putting anti-counterfeiting devices in bigger bills for some time. And the printing itself involves holograms and other clever, sneaky devices. So why not microchips?

And let us not forget that microchips can be made so small that they can be injected through minuscule 25-gauge hypodermic needles we don’t even feel when we get our COVID-19 shots. Ain’t technology great? And can’t you come up with a better reason to not get a COVID jab?

10 October—Is anybody surprised that the ruling party in Washington wants to further invade our privacy by making financial institutions report to the dreaded Internal Revenue Service any transactions or activity over $600? Not just cash, mind you, like the pain-in-the-ass $10,000 form 8300 reporting requirement from the Nixon era.

That’s the plan of the ultra-left Democrat cohort—the wannabe socialist sociopaths who call themselves progressives—to generate the wherewithal to finance their unrealistic, unworkable, ungodly $3.5 trillion suck-up to buy themselves votes by essentially preempting tax evaders before they can do what most people do and will still find a way to do.

That’s the widest-ranging spending plan of all time that President Joe Biden insists will cost absolutely nothing. Not that it matters, but nobody takes Joe seriously anyway, especially his own Democrats. When you think about it, has anyone ever taken him seriously?

Wasn’t former senator and vice president Joe Biden allowed to get the Democrat nomination to run against Donald Trump only because he was the least obnoxious, belligerent, and controversial—as well as the most ineffectual—of the contenders last year? And after 44 years on the public payroll as a party loyalist and uncontroversial seat holder who made a name for himself by accomplishing absolutely nothing, wasn’t it about time he got his reward?

Joe’s a good guy. And he does what he’s told.

What else is there to say about Joe Biden? Oh yeah. At least he’s not Donald Trump. That’s the only reason he got elected . . .

9 October—Hobbling home from the post office the other day, just past the Noyes Memorial Building (a.k.a. the Litchfield Historical Society) on East Street, I was rather taken aback by a couple on the sidewalk in flagrante delicto. Indulging in sexual intercourse, brazenly copulating in public. They obviously didn’t care who saw them humping, screwing, getting it on, schtupping. And, of course, fucking. Our friends across the pond call it rumpy-pumpy. It was East Street, so what the hell, you say. But was the audacious couple making love?

That got me to thinking about the word “love.” What does making love really mean? Does love at first sight actually have anything to do with love? Or is love merely a euphemism?

Consider the concept of love. But first let’s get the tennis expression out of the way. In that sport’s scoring, love means nil, nought, bupkes. Or zero. A zero is an oval. Goose egg. Or just plain egg-shaped. The French for “the egg” is “l’oeuf.” Brits mispronounce all languages (including American English), so they made l’oeuf into love. Easy as that.

Leaving tennis, then, love, simply defined, is a state of feeling that manifests itself in solicitude, delight, affection, and other nice, desirable things. So can a person actually love a perfect stranger? Or is love at first sight simply and more accurately lust at first sight? Isn’t the spark between two people really lust rather than love?

If you’re lucky, physical attraction—lust—will lead to love. Familiarity certainly can breed contempt, but it can also breed love.

And the very expression “making love” is totally ridiculous, even ludicrous, a brilliant euphemism if ever there was one. The act of copulation is purely physical and neurological, after all. It feels good. That’s why all animals strive to copulate; they don’t consider that they’re procreating in order to propagate their species and they probably don’t know anything about love. If actual love is involved (in whatever species), it’s only because anything and everything feels better when you do it with someone you love. But it’s an indisputable fact that in the real world love isn’t a requirement for sexual intercourse among Homines sapientes, even religious ones.

And I’m not going to quote Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love.”

Incidentally, the couple copulating on the East Street sidewalk were bumblebees. Evidently they didn’t want to do their rumpy-pumpy in front of their friends in the hive . . .

8 October—“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” That’s the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment. It’s what could be called a portmanteau or carry-all amendment, in that its meaning is very generalized, even vague, thus allowing for very broad interpretation.

The Constitution is replete with articles and amendments like that. Some would call that generality and vagueness one of its charms or beauties; others would consider it just a shortcoming or defect. Whatever it is, it’s one of the reasons the Supreme Court manages to keep busy.

When you think about it, couldn’t heinous crimes like rape and murder be construed as being among those retained by the people? They’re not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, after all. (Only treason, piracy, and counterfeiting are in fact mentioned.) Of course, that’s ridiculous, and the Necessary and Proper Clause—dear old Article I, Section 8—deals with it by empowering Congress to make all laws necessary for executing its own powers and those of the federal government as a whole.

And there’s the rub, for better or worse.

When James Madison wrote the Constitution and the first ten amendments, he assumed that people would be half-way intelligent, rational, and imbued with some degree of common sense.

Yeah, right . . .

7 October—Here’s the promised update on my inauspicious start with Barclays on 20 September. When the website contact information proved totally useless, as expected, I googled Barclays corporate information and found, among other things, the Office of the President’s email address. Not really CEO James Staley’s, to be sure, doubtless just another customer put-off, but nothing to lose.

I also discovered that Jes Staley, as his friends call him, an improper Bostonian of Democrat persuasion, had some sort of relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, twice tried to identify an anonymous whistleblower against advice, was censured by Barclays’ board, and fined £642,430 and deprived of a £500,000 bonus by British regulators, inter alia; but was able to hold on to his lucrative job because he was popular with shareholders. Evidently he did something right, after Barclays had gone through five CEOs in seven years. Jes has said he’ll leave Barclays at the end of this year, when he’ll be 65.

But I digress. I complained to bcusofficeofthepresident@barclaycardus.com (a real chore to type) and got this immediate boilerplate response from an “executive specialist, Office of the President”:

“Thank you for your recent inquiry to Barclays. In efforts to continue servicing our cardmembers and protecting our employees during this pandemic, we will be providing our written response to your concerns via email once our investigation is complete. When you receive our response, which will come from Intralinks VIA, please click the link contained in that message to create a unique username and password. These login credentials can then be used in the future to review our response and any additional documents we have sent you. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out via the phone number contained in our response to you.”

 Needless to say, I never got a response from Intralinks VIA (whatever that is) or the reach-out phone number. But yesterday I received a phone call from the very executive specialist whose name was on the boilerplate response. He was effusively apologetic, of course, as well as appreciative of my input, and reassuring, blah, blah, and blah.

And today I paid off my first balance to Barclays. By phone, just as I’d been doing with Chase for however long I had their AARP card. No problems. Hope springs eternal . . .

6 October—A good friend of mine in England has a daughter called Pandora. Her sisters are Scarlett and Portia. All that’s irrelevant to my indictment and inditement (look it up) of this week’s Pandora Papers travesty, but a cute hook.

For the benefit of those few readers who haven’t yet sated their abundant curiosity about what the super-rich and ultra-powerful do to preserve their wealth and financial privacy, the Pandora Papers are some 11.9 million leaked documents that prurient journalists from all around the world have published to expose secret offshore accounts of three dozen current and former world leaders, as well as over a hundred billionaires, business leaders, and other celebrities.

To no one’s surprise, following the time-honored practice of the trade, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—ICIJ, the people responsible for the massive, largely irresponsible invasion of privacy—hasn’t revealed its source or sources for the leaked documents. Hopefully, that information will be leaked before too long.

Even though no claims have been made that any of the offshore—i.e., outside the country where the money had been made—accounts were or are unlawful tax evasion, as opposed to entirely lawful tax avoidance, most of the embarrassed account holders, caught totally with their figurative pants down, have reacted defensively, as if they have to justify what they do with their wealth.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using onshore or offshore tax havens, trusts, corporations, LLCs (limited liability companies, which even all too many financial gurus mistakenly call corporations), partnerships, or other means of preserving wealth and privacy when the preservation is done within the laws of the countries affected. In fact, tax, business, and estate laws of most countries implicitly encourage taking advantage of all the loopholes built into the codes for that express purpose. (We won’t speculate on the motivation of the politicians and experts who craft the laws and codes.)

And you don’t have to be rich or powerful to take advantage of every legal means open to you in order to keep and grow your wealth for yourself and your heirs. And, of course, to keep your affairs (financial and otherwise) as private as possible.

So what the ICIJ has done really stinks. But it’s fascinating reading. And I’d never have guessed that Tony Blair, the former British Labour Party leader and PM, and his wife, Cherie, a real left-leaning harpy in public, were so wealthy. Surprising not to find the Clintons in the Pandora Papers . . .

5 October—It looks like the People’s Republic of China—familiarly known as Red China or Mainland China—is ramping up its bellicosity by doing things like flying fighter planes over the Republic of China—familiarly known as Nationalist China or Taiwan, after its main island—and generally violating nautical territorial boundaries of American allies in the Pacific.

The People’s Republic—the bad guys—huge in area (3.7 million square miles) and population (1.5 billion), has since its founding in 1949 maintained that the Republic—the good guys—minuscule in area (14,000 square miles) and population (23.5 million), is really still a part of the mainland political entity and merely a province of the big red monster state.

It was in 1971, despite valiant diplomatic efforts of the United States, that the United Nations, to no one’s surprise, screwed Taiwan by kicking the little democracy out in favor of the big red dictatorship; and in 1979 that the Carter maladministration followed suit. The United States also abrogated our mutual defense treaty with Taiwan at that time, replacing it with the Taiwan Relations Act, which was all that was possible given that we no longer officially recognized the good guys. Typical.

Cutting to the chase, then, the People’s Republic isn’t just posturing to show its military might in order to get what it wants. And it wants more than little Taiwan, to be sure. No, the PRC is actually goading the United States and our and Taiwan’s allies to see how far we’ll go to defend the only bastion of democracy in the area.

It’s not a happy prospect, by any means. And how far will we good guys go? When diplomacy fails, war follows.

But I can just see doughty old President Joe Biden coming back from a peace conference in Beijing, standing on the White House lawn, having disembarked from Marine One, waving a piece of paper (I won’t speculate as to the brand) and declaring, “I have returned from China with peace in our time.”

Biden, of course, would be plagiarizing (and typically misquoting) British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938, after being sweet-talked and hoodwinked by Hitler in Munich, echoed Benjamin Disraeli’s declaration after the 1878 Congress of Berlin, “I have returned from Germany with peace for our time.” And, lest we forget, Disraeli himself had taken the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer.

Peace for our time? Dream on. And why the hell isn’t the People’s Republic of China considered part of the Axis of Evil? Along with Russia, of course . . .

4 October—This weekend was quite busy in Litchfield. The sunny, temperate weather, along with boredom, curiosity, quaint architecture, and a few historic locations helped lure excessive vehicular and pedestrian traffic to the inner city, a.k.a the Borough, as well as somewhat less traffic to the more verdant and tranquil hinterlands. And then there were cars, trucks, and motorcycles just passing through on their way to other places, contributing to a congestion and sonic nuisance—if not a nightmare this particular weekend.

Bantam had its own congestion, thanks to the highly publicized Arethusa restaurant.

We should be thankful and delighted that a lot of the traffic was just passing through Litchfield, rather than hanging around to dine on the borough sidewalks, take up parking spaces, jaywalk out of pedestrian crossings, and litter the green and sidewalks. (Yes, I have seen tourists discard paper cups and other trash on our precious sidewalks and green before getting into their vehicles, without even bothering to check if anybody was watching.)

Most people I’ve questioned on the subject don’t like having tourists “ruin” life in Litchfield. “Ruin” is indeed the word most used to describe the effect tourists have on town life. No kidding. The prevailing view is that local businesses don’t really need tourism to survive.

Certainly, eateries, mostly in the Borough, appreciate the tourist trade, even though it tends generally to supplement the dependable, non-seasonal local trade. And other retail businesses get more tourist browsers than actual buyers—not too surprising given the rather astronomical prices most of them boast.

It’s the weekenders we love. They pay taxes on real estate (and sometimes even on motor vehicles), don’t send their kids to public schools, and patronize the expensive restaurants and shops. What could be better?

But tourists? Let them congest and pollute other places. Litchfield deserves better . . .

3 October—Connecticut has the very highest taxpayer debt of all the fifty states, $79.5 billion. According to Truth in Accounting (a conservative nonprofit with a good reputation), that works out to $62,500 each of Connecticut’s taxpayers is on the hook for to pay all of the state’s bills. That’s almost double what it was in 2014.

Not that we in overtaxed and overburdened Connecticut care, of course, but coming in a close second is New Jersey, with only $58,300 per taxpayer to pay off its debt. New York is several places behind, with a mere $20,100.

Compare those unquestionably abysmal figures to the average debt burden in the United States: $9,300, which is some $2,000 higher than last year. And, lest we forget, Alaska had a taxpayer surplus—that’s right, a surplus—of $55,000, the highest of the few states in the country that actually had surpluses rather than debts.

And, while not immediately relevant to Connecticut’s embarrassing and entirely self-inflicted fiscal distress, if the price of milk had risen at the same rate as nationwide health-care prices since World War II, a gallon would cost about $160 today, according to a study from the University of California.

But keep this in mind: In government, all debts can be reduced or erased simply by raising taxes, no matter what they’re called . . .