THE SCREAM by EDVARD MUNCH

 

THE UNITED STATES UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP BOMBED IRAN'S NUCLEAR FACILITIES AS A FAVOR TO ISRAEL

That's my take.

I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the news - and was appalled. I'm worried sick this morning after not being able to fall back to sleep. Not only did Trump bypass Congress but ignored United Nations agreements when giving the military orders to bomb Iran's budding nuclear facilities. We are living under a Dictator who rules, not a President who leads.

I AM for a strong DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on our OWN LAND.  We may now NEED IT. 

So here is what we need to be prepared for:

Terrorist attacks on our own land which will likely kill, disable, or traumatize Americans.

Cyber attacks on all systems that run on computers including military installations, hospitals, energy grid, government, and all else.

Individuals and families who are here from Iran or come from Iranian heritage being targeted for bullying by individuals who favor war.

"Christians" who WANT World War 3 as a harbinger of the END TIMES and THE RAPTURE.  (I've already encountered some of these blood thirsty "Christians" at the library.)

More Pro Palestinian versus Israel protesting here in the United States and in Europe. (I wonder if the vegetarian "Peaceniks" are celebrating this morning.)

More Anti-Semitism. In the United States this term is usally applied to Jewish people

"The term "Semite" refers to people who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including Akkadians, Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites, and Habesha peoples. It is also used to describe people descended from Shem, one of Noah's sons in the Bible. The term is primarily associated with the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

***

Less than ONE SQUARE MILE of Los Angeles was WRONGLY REPORTED as AN ENTIRE CITY IN RIOT AND INSURRECTIONS very recently, and the Federal Government sent in thousands of National Guards and Marines ... Further the emptying of the country by CRIMINAL ILLEGAL OCCUPANTS of OUR COUNTRY - which we thought meant gang affiliated violent criminals who lost their souls - is now interpreted to mean just anyone.

Here is the truth about the size of (and relative peace) of Los Angeles:

"It is significantly larger, covering approximately 502.7 square miles. This area includes both land and water, with 468.7 square miles of land and 34 square miles of water. "

  

DEVALUED PENNIES : WHY THE REPORTAGE ON PENNIES IS ALL WRONG : CONSIDER YOUR PIGGY BANK : OPINION BY CHRISTINE TRZYNA

DEVALUED PENNIES : WHY THE REPORTAGE ON PENNIES IS ALL WRONG : CONSIDER YOUR PIGGY BANK

Ever buy an expensive coat and think "but it's a good investment because I'm going to get years of wear out of this?"  You're not thinking about single use, you're thinking about REUSING the item.

Let's say the coat is a stretch for you, your budget, because it's a couple hundred dollars. You start thinking about the classic cut, the winters ahead, and that, so long as you don't get too fat or too thin, you can wear that coat hundreds of times.  If you wear that $200 coat fifty times a winter, for five winters, you can see how little it costs PER WEAR. ($200 divided by 250 =?)

You might also do this when you thrift shop and are buying used clothing. You might think "Someone else shrunk these pants and they are not new off the rack, but at only $10, if I wear these pants ten times that's only a dollar a wear.  (Jeans that fit are often a great value per wear. The designers changing the essential shape of them, the length, the width of the leg by year is the only thing that makes a purchase of jeans questionable value-wise.)

So what I'm getting at is THE COST OF MANUFACTURING A PENNY IS NOT THE POINT AT ALL. It's the FACT that pennies are reused thousands of times.  If they were not, we would not have so many years of them STILL IN CIRCULATION. Pennies may cost more to make them than a penny, but if you consider REUSE they are a terrific value.

The devaluation of the dollar makes the value of pennies so devalued some people don't think we need them. But that is not the point.

We do. We do not need prices or taxes rounded up to a nickle.

Once there are no more pennies, the nickles will be next to be exterminated.

Here is a true story.

When I got my dog, and had to watch for hazards such as broken glass, rotting meat on discarded chicken bones, and so on, while walking her, I began to find pennies.  I stooped to pick up her poo. I stooped to pick up pennies.

I had a piggy bank in my closet and I threw the coins in there and forgot about them.

I was using a library further from home than most people would travel. The library closest to me had become scary, requiring constant security and visits by the police. I traveled to this other library which was quiet and underutilized until about three in the afternoon, when the school children came in. That branch was supporting seventeen schools!

One day the head librarian, anticipating a lack of funding for their summer reading program, told me that she was not going to be able to give participating children the things she had in the past. They usually got back packs, school supplies, even new shoes for gym. I said I would try to help.  I called office supply stores and tried to get the school supplies, but was told they needed months to process such requests.

One day I walked into a 99 Cents Only Store on the way to that library. I asked for the manager and she was willing to give me things people had returned.  However, while some of these things might work as prizes, there weren't school supplies.

I went home and while laying in bed, trying to figure out how to get what was needed, I remembered my piggy bank.

I'd never counted how many pennies I'd stooped to pick up while walking my dog.  I opened the piggy bank and there was over $40 in it! (40 X 100 = ?)

I called the manager at that 99 Cents Only Store and asked her if she would be willing to take this amount to provide me the school supplies. She was. I warned her it was all pennies.

I turned over the piggy bank and she gave me so many boxes of crayons, pens and pencils, color markers, notebooks and diaries, and so on that, when I got this all to the library, I was told that it would be enough for several summers. Maybe even years.

That was the true value of pennies.

C 2025 Christine Trzyna

REAL PEACENIKS DON'T CHOOSE A SIDE

REAL PEACENIKS DON'T CHOOSE A SIDE

A while back a man I met, who was an important person in a Peace nonprofit, invited me to go along with him to one of their events. It was at a beach city rather far away and he promised he would provide transportation and get me back home on time, which was important to me because I'd agreed to pet sit for some other friends who were leaving town that evening. 

He did come and get me and he did get lost on the way and he did drive through an area that posted that there was no parking, so security guards gave chase, but he got a space near their set up. ***

Soon I realized two things. One was that I was expected to volunteer rather than just sit there and listen to some speakers. And I was through volunteering. Second that it was assumed that, without really knowing anything about this Peace nonprofit, I was joining them.  No, I was just checking them out. Along for the ride.

At one point they got a group to take hand made posters on a walk-around because they had heard media would be there. I kept sitting under a tent. I didn't like hearing that locals called them Anti-American, but that was not my beef with them.

It was that a woman speaker, who I'd known about from another setting, tied Peace into Vegetarianism (or as that Veganism?) and not eating beef.

Yet, as a chiropractor once told me, we have carnivore teeth and carnivore intestines.

Yet, hunger and starvation are so common on this earth that I can never put someone down if all they eat is what they can afford; five for a dollar instant noodles, 7/11 hot dogs, cat food without owning one, dandelions and mud. **

I hate it when I hear people talking The Liberal Mob but in this case it really as. What, I asked myself, was that walk-around actually doing to create Peace? Nothing! These people were calling attention to themselves as superior in knowledge and intelligence.

Since then the war between Israel and Iran broke out, on top of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And the man starting tucking a Palestinian flag into his hat just to become a walking advertisement and sided with them or, you could say, Iran. Yes, this broke our friendship.

This was followed by my sudden understanding that the small group of protesters that proudly gathered on a street corner every Friday night so cars going by them could honk had also sided with the Palestinians. And the above mentioned woman speaker who tied Peace into not eating beef was one of them and had also wrote a letter to the editor of a small liberal newspaper and he, a Jew, published it.

Ah... choosing sides and cheering for ANYONE committing war is NOT the ideology of a REAL PEACENIK! Destruction is evil.  It doesn't matter who has started it or who is doing furthering it, or who is winning. It's a horror upon this earth. It wastes people's lives. I have no way to cause PEACE ON EARTH but I do wish for it. And there's that song that goes "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me."

It's not easy to restart a homeland.

You do not have to be Jewish or even like Jewish individuals or culture to understand WHY there's an Israel.  I understand the complications pointed out to me such as there are so far fewer Jews than Moslems, or biblical prophecy says God gave Jews their homeland back after centuries of wandering, but when it comes right down to it, people like me think who we're looking at when we see Pro Palestinian protesters on street corners is...

NEO NAZI'S

That makes us very uncomfortable.

We know there was a Holocaust in Europe in World War II. (And we do not look forward to World War III and do not believe in End Times and The Rapture.) We know Jews were blamed for a bad German economy and ours is failing. We know Adolph Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker and that at rallies people were excited by his message just like some are excited by President Trump's. We know dehuminization started with comparing Jews to rats, and people started believing they were not humans but needed to be exterminated. And we know that the murders started with people who were disabled in care homes, people who were gay, people who were dependent on the state for income being euthanized as undesirables for their weakness and expensive dependency; our homeless could be next. We know this one:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

According to AI, "This is a famous passage from a sermon by German pastor Martin Niemöller. It is a powerful statement about the dangers of indifference and apathy in the face of oppression and the moral interconnectedness of all people."

Am I saying that no Jew is at fault for furthering war? Hell no. But, a real PEACENIK doesn't cheer when buildings fall and innocents lay under them. They aren't watching the media and yelling "Kill them all!" If you're for PEACE, you'll suggest trying to come to an agreement or staying out of each other's way until another agreement can be reached.

The Friday corner protesters are especially horrible because that neighborhood is full of Italians who have Jewish roots. So in that way it becomes a small town spectacle designed to aggravate and since when does a protest for PEACE turn out to be so passive aggressive if not obviously violent?

Don't think I'm claiming to be a PEACENIK but I sure am trying to be. I'm reminded that there is no glory or beauty in what's going on in these wars. These wars are ecological disasters for the whole planet and have and will effect all participants negatively, especially the children, for generations forward. In those ways there is no winning.

Christine Trzyna

C 2025 

Additions on June 22, 2025 First Day of Summer

*** No he did NOT get me home on time.

** It used to be said that it was less expensive to be vegetarian due to the price of meat but I don't think that's true anymore.  My experience with vegetarians is that they have become a new elite due to the affordability of expensive supplements as well as the cost of organics and other "special" foods. 

In Los Angeles one child in five goes to bed hungry.  School lunches are sometimes a child's only meal.

CONGRESSWOMAN LAURA FRIEDMAN ON PROTEST CHAOS IN LOS ANGELES

 

GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA NEWSOM GIVES SPEECH ON THE TROOPS SENT BY TRUMP TO LOS ANGELES

BERNIE SANDERS ON PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMPS SEIZURE OF POWER

TRIVIAL or SUPERFICIAL or LIGHTHEARTED ; THE LIST OF THE MOMENT

WHAT'S NEW?

I'm Curious : 

Will the advent of the Olympics really inspire the Powers That Are to end Homelessness in Los Angeles, or will the city put up facades that lie, kind of like the peasants did in Austria, to hide their poverty, when King Franz Joseph and his entourage came through?

Who even wants to be President of the United States any more? (A CEO earns more.)

What happened to my high school friend's children who were such brats twenty-five years ago? Did they grow out of it or are they demanding adults?

I Might Just Be Done With : Going to any event that advertises that FOOD TRUCKS will be there. 

So funny! : I went with a friend to an adult crafts class that was so childish (felt lady bug cut outs glued to magnets) that I told her I was going to have to start wearing a paper pinned to my shirt that said "If I'm lost please call my mother."

AM I WHO I KNOW? Impossible. I don't know anyone!

Celebrity I (once) met (just saying) : Marty Balin (Martyn Jerel Buchwald) singer/songwriter of the Jefferson Airplane who passed in 2018.

IF I COULD TRAVEL BACK IN TIME : Late spring/early summer 2023.

I'M LISTENING TO : Coverage of the so called "riots" and "insurrection" which never happened in the last few days Los Angeles. (Someone get out a dictionary and show President Trump the true meaning of these words.)

INDULGENCE? I wish! A long deep soak in a pristine claw foot tub.

Book I Recently Read Cover To Cover : I've read no books from cover to cover in recent months, though I have skimmed. This question should be "What magazine article did you read in its entirety? 

Book(s) I Keep Meaning To Re/read : Confessions of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris, 

Films I Recently Watched From Beginning to End : Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen), The Hoax.

AM I WHAT I EAT?

I'm Drinking : black tea

I Just Overate : potato salad

I'm Craving : potato salad

I'M GETTING BETTER AT :  threading a sewing machine and filling a bobbin

I FEAR : The Republican agenda to break Los Angeles.

C 2025  Christine Trzyna

THE JACARANDA TREES ARE BLOOMING as I WRITE OUTDOORS AT A PARK

Purple everywhere and flowers dropping, none that have perfume. Green grass.  Cool out.  Cloud cover.  I can see the laptop screen.

The last several days, writing, printing, and snail mailing letters of protest and advocacy.  Will any of them solicit response?  Don't know.  Have to get my anger out of my system.

In the works, one to the library, which has been taking a survey.

Fearless squirrels coming to see what I have in my lunch bag. Luckily this park has many pine trees with plenty of pine cones so they are not entirely addicted to processed and inappropriate people food out of garbage cans.

Be Productive.

Evenings with a friend, watching old films. Eating Reeses peanut butter cups every night, more than I ever ate in my entire life.

Later I hope to sew a carry bag for my friend, as a gift for him, for Father's Day.

Terrible worries about the economy, job loss, and the desperate need for more truly affordable housing. "It's going to get worse," he says, frequently, when I find articles about the excessive number of for sale houses on the market, how first time home buyers are backing out of buying, afraid their incomes will not support mortgages.

We've been watching the construction of a major, potentially community changing, housing project.  Advertised as "From the low 600,000."  These town homes are clustered together so that it appears that all that's between them is the car access.  We see how their address clings to a single family home neighborhood rather than the busy street that some of them front.  Will there be soundproofing? Two sets of them have been completed, and we think someone is living in one, perhaps a show-piece furnished, but we don't think a single one of them has been sold.

The front doors are narrow and painted the color that must be the color of the year, a yellow like a chunk of cheese or maybe a school bus. "How can you even get any furniture through that door?" "Maybe they think people are going to order their furniture from Ikea, assemble it indoors, and never get it back out again?" It looks like two rows of these town homes made of wood and plywood have been left standing and we see no workpersons continuing to work. Is the builder waiting for inspections? Moved crew to another site? Out of money?

Who wants a townhouse in this neighborhood? 

What will happen to the government housing? The ma and pop stores with low rent?

I think of the seniors who have lived in their own single family home, purchased years ago for much less, inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, the horror that $40,000 a year is barely livable for one person.  I think that if you have a house you can sell for a million, these town homes might be a sensible move. But... how many seniors want to do three stories of stairs?  The promised electric car plug-ins suggest that these are targeted to attracted young people, techies, people with income of $100,000 a year or more. A way into housing, perhaps without expectation of ever making the pay off?

We muse over the economy between meals.

My friend and I go to eat fast food a lot these last few months. Neither of us were ever much into fast food but it works with a temporary lifestyle. McDonalds, Wendys, Popeyes, Kentucky Fried, Jack in and Box, even once Arby's. Too much fried.  Too many fries.

We look to see who else is eating, what cars there are in lots or going through drive-throughs. We think indoor dining is empty.

We think Rite Aid. All those employees who have loyally held on.

If AI is going to take over so many jobs, how will all those people earn their living?

Another squirrel.

More purple flowers.

C 2025 Christine Trzyna