We weren’t sure about what to do today. There was the natural inclination to blow things off with the weekend but the serious discussion with case manager Paula suggested there were already too many new best friends suddenly huddled by the fire and we need to stay focused through the case management meeting on Monday is a good idea.

It is very much like the tariff discussion and how that relates to the Tik Tok legislation and how deep into the pockets of our grandchildren we want the Mandarins to be wiggling their polished, pointed nails. We understand not wanting Beijing to have access to all that riaw decisional data. But who is it we are actually giving it to? And which panel of robots?

And like assisted home health care, who we are going to trust with managing the remainder of our sentient lives. There is a lot of hysteria about the tariff question. Based on the response by some long-standing partners there is some reason to believe that we have been picking up a big chunk of the defense budgets of everyone in the old anti-communist alliance.

That is beyond the Fulda Gap and includes all the parts of a conflict that went from tw0fronts in Europe and Asia to four,, including high earth orbit and down to the ocean depths. We have said it before: We like the way the Europeans have permitted themselves to live while we held the bayonets and wired the ocean and orbit for sound. We would just like a chance to join them, which may require some adjustment.

Some of the benefactors of our tax dollars are waking up, taken a look at the new landscape and decided to sit it out or double it down.

This global reordering will take the remainder of this decade to sort out. The Trumpian model of an integrated /north America and Greenland is one with some selling points. The crushing of the radicals in Tehran and Beirut and Gaza might be be a cheerful start already underway. And we may have been thinking of that for a half century.

How Latin America might combine with China, or align with a ‘NAGA North’ with the middle east (temporarily) settled is an interesting new thought.

There could be bold new lines drawn more firmly across global lanes of transit and vast swatches of water.

All of us currently looking for decent retired assisted living find none of this conflict attractive and think we should all stay cool and treat this as the end of another expensive struggle and look at the table to see what might merit some peace and a little time to let a new model evolve without that population bomb going off. That is a relief. It has retired to the backroom of bad big science ideas like the East is Red and We Gotta Go Green by next week.

I quit following the market about the first time I retired and have never been much of a follower, but you can see how cause and effect get jumbled up in Public Health matters. It is sort of the brief moment of Fame for a woman named Elizabeth McDonough. She currently serves as the Senate Parliamentarian. She owned determination of whether the reconciliation of the budget bill which is part of the Really Big Bill passed in the early moments of this Saturday by the Senate can be passed to the House without confronting a filibuster,

That would enable the tax structure imposed on a temporary basis in the first Trump Administration to become permanent. That includes “no tax on tips” along with some for people like us.

We want to thank Elizabeth for getting us this far and hope the House comes back to do thier part of the dance. And let Spring finally arrive!

V/R
JR