Get with it, clean energy fans. Hire influencers.

Posted on January 1, 2026 by oddmanout215

Lately I’ve been either jogging or writing, and my newsy neighbor Swamp Rabbit wants to know what’s up.

“How come you spendin’ so much time in Bog Water Homes?’ he said, naming the swampy development where we live. “You get laid off from your save-the-planet job?”

I told him clean energy is still growing but 2025 was a bad year for expansion, if that’s what he means by save the planet. Nobody from the Trump gang attended the United Nations climate conference (COP30). Instead, our felon-in-chief and his gang weakened fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, undermined efforts to expand the electric car industry, and permitted new oil-and-gas drilling in America’s coastal waters.

“I had to ease up on trying to sell wind and solar because the fossil fuel goons are surging,” I told Swamp Rabbit. “But that will change when the MAGA regime is overthrown.”

My mangy neighbor snickered. “You sure that’s gonna happen? You see what them yahoos done last month?”

He was referring to the brazenly nihilistic order to halt construction of five offshore windfarms that would power millions of homes on the East Coast. And the EPA’s Orwellian decision to erase all mention of human-caused climate change from its website.

“Wind and solar jawns are losing the information war,” he added. “What you guys need are influencers.”

I had assumed that “influencer” was just another name for salesperson, or marketing consultant, but Swamp Rabbit quickly set me straight. Social media influencers are performers. They have filmmaking skills and are young and photogenic and eager to become indistinguishable from the brands they are pushing.

“Don’t you read Philadelphia magazine?” he said before showing me an article naming the “influencers of the year,” in categories like fitness, fashion, lifestyle, parenting, home and design, and nano. (I had to google the latter.)

“And beauty, of course,” he added. “A beauty influencer would know how to make wind turbines and solar panels look sexy. She could get out there with a ring light and a cute little outfit and sell clean energy at a discount with her $300 skin cream.”

“You’re drunk, Swamp Rabbit. Most people wouldn’t fall for a pitch like that, even on TikTok.”

He snickered again. “Get with the program, Odd Man. Things have changed.”

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Songs for a cool Yule and beyond

Posted on December 26, 2025 by oddmanout215

I was putting together this year’s Christmas playlist with help from my neighbor Swamp Rabbit, who has strong opinions about holiday music.

“No more ‘Jingle Bells!'” he shouted. “There are two thousand versions out there and they all suck.”

He asked me if I was including any serious songs this year. He meant sentimental standards that were hits before your mother was born. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and so on.

“I don’t like having my heartstrings tugged,” I said. “It gives me indigestion.”

“You don’t have a heart.” Swamp Rabbit said. “What about cheerful Christmas songs? I bet you don’t like them either.” He named Mariah Carey’s monster hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which sounds like Phil Spector on crack cocaine.

My mangy friend can’t accept that I’m turned off by songs that hit you over the head in order to coax a certain emotional response. Songs that try to reduce you to tears or pump you up with false bravado.

“So what is on your playlist, Odd Man?”

I told him I still like Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy “Peanuts” theme and singers who summon up the Christmas spirit with humor and elan, like James Brown on “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto.”

“That song’s on your list every year.” he said. “Why don’t you give it a break?”

“It’s one of my standards, you fool. Like I said last year, if you don’t like my list, make your own.”

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CBS News sherpa is guiding 60 Minutes off a cliff

Posted on December 23, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit looked puzzled. “Sherpas are the guys who guide them crazy mountain climbers to the top of Everest,” he said. “What’s that got to do with CBS?”

It took me a minute to explain. On Sunday night I’d waited for a televised football game to end so I could watch “60 Minutes,” which used to be famous for investigative stories that upset powerful wrongdoers. This week’s lead story was supposed to be about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador where they were subsequently abused and tortured.

But not so fast — at the last minute the network’s editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, aired a feature about sherpas instead of the tortured-migrants story, ostensibly because the Trump gang had refused to respond to questions from “60 Minutes” about the latter.

“That’s a really lame reason not to run a news story,” Swamp Rabbit said. “And who the #*&% is Bari Weiss?”

I told him Weiss is the opportunistic hack chosen by Trump ally David Ellison for the editor-in-chief’s job after Ellison and his father, billionaire Larry Ellison, gained control over Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS. In effect this makes her the sherpa for the CBS News team, guiding them to stories her boss wants to cover, and away from stories that would be unflattering to Donald Trump.

Weiss said she is delaying broadcast of the migrants story, not killing it, so that CBS can get “the principals on the record and on camera.” But this is a lie; they’ve already been given a chance to go on record. What she’s actually doing is kowtowing to the Ellison family and Trump, and in effect helping rob “60 Minutes” of the credibility it earned over more than a half-century of mostly first-rate investigative reporting.

Meanwhile, the Ellisons have sought Trump’s help in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, another network Trump is determined to gag. To help with this he might lean on his ally Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, who backed a previous Trump complaint about “60 Minutes” as well as Trump’s attempt to have ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel canned.

“This is straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook,” I said. “You can’t have a true dictatorship without first having control of the mass media. Trump and his cronies are trying to establish the American equivalent of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.”

“There you go again,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Every time the Trump gang does something despicable you start yelling ‘the Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming.'”

“Crypto-fascists is more accurate,” I said. “And they’re already here, but not enough Americans have noticed. They’re too busy watching football games.”

Footnote: You’ve got to wonder about people like Bari Weiss. She’s been a right-winger for a long time, but she once fancied herself a free speech advocate and even ran a publication called The Free Press. Was that a pose or did she expect all along to end up taking orders from a billionaire fascist? Was ideology the deciding factor or was it just about the money?

Coda: The good news is that totally suppressing news stories isn’t so easy these days. The tortured migrants story that Weiss shelved is already available on the internet:

https://x.com/spaceghost/status/2003307508665094301

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2+2=5 and other core beliefs of the MAGA crowd

Posted on December 15, 2025 by oddmanout215

[Trump] lied and said that prices are coming down. He lied when he said prices were at an all-time high under President Biden. They’re at an all-time high right now. He lied when he said that inflation was low inflation. 2.7%, that’s the number he used, is well above the Fed’s target.” — Economist Justin Wolfers on MS NOW

Wolfer’s quote could serve as a fitting response to Trump’s rant last week at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, PA, a curious choice of venues. Does Trump think most people are unaware of his colossal failures as a casino owner in Atlantic City? That they don’t know how many of his grand projects ended in bankruptcy, including Trump Taj Mahal, possibly the ugliest gambling palace in history?

Casinos aside, do they really agree with Trump that affordability is “a Democrat hoax”? Swamp Rabbit wanted to know.

“The MAGA crowd invested all their fear and hate in supporting that old fraud,” I told him. “They won’t switch gears this late in the game.”

My mangy neighbor was perplexed or pretending to be. “I was gonna buy a couple bell peppers at the Acme but they cost two-fifty each,” he said. “And a 22-ounce container of coffee costs 20 bucks. But them MAGAts ain’t up in arms about price increases. Trump must be doing something right.”

“Trump knows how important it is to convince people to believe him, not their lying eyes. You can’t install a proper dictatorship, or establish a viable cult, unless you get your hardcore followers to embrace magical thinking. Once it takes hold, the facts don’t matter. 2+2=5. If the orange buffoon says it, it must be so.”

“But that’s crazy, Odd Man. The peeps will know when they’re running out of money, running out of credit. If the money ain’t there, they can’t buy things. That’s reality.”

I told him that the normal notion of reality doesn’t register with the MAGA crowd any more than it did with the Make Germany Great Again crowd in the 1930s. You can’t tell Trump’s true believers that climate change is real, even as the polar ice caps melt. You can’t tell them tariffs are just another means of taxing the working class, or that their king only cares about self-enrichment. Or that getting rid of immigrants and “woke” Democrats won’t solve their problems.

“Okay, you’re mostly right,” he said. “But Trump sounds loonier every day. Nobody’s denying it, not even the mainstream media. The MAGAts are gonna have to change their tune soon.”

I shook my head. “You really think they’ll admit to being made fools of by the most corrupt and hateful guy ever to occupy the White House? Sounds like magical thinking, Swamp Rabbit.”

Footnote: Trump posted this on Truth Social in response to the killing of Rob Reiner and his wife:

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace.

Swamp Rabbit said only a psycho would write something so self-delusional and vile. Trumpers will shrug and say: “That’s just Trump being Trump.”

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Giving thanks at the swamp

Posted on November 28, 2025 by oddmanout215

I couldn’t remember whose turn it was this year, so I went ahead and bought the turkey hoagies at Wawa while there was still time. When I got back my neighbor Swamp Rabbit was sitting on his porch, sipping whisky from his broken mug. He protested when I berated him for conveniently disappearing when it was time to buy Thanksgiving dinner.

“I figured you would take care of the food and I’d buy the booze,” he said.

“Very funny. You know I don’t drink, pilgrim.”

As is our custom on this holiday, we discussed the idea of giving thanks. Of gratitude, that is. Swamp Rabbit said he was grateful for the Jack Daniels company and for pro football, but he couldn’t think of any other reasons to give thanks. I told him he was an idiot. He should be grateful he isn’t in Ukraine, or dodging bombs in Gaza. Or running from Trump’s masked stormtroopers, otherwise known as ICE.

“What’s up, Odd Man? You ain’t normally a glass-half-full guy. Your dark clouds don’t have no silver linings.”

“Well, maybe I’ve seen the light. There’s only so much time we get to walk this Earth. Better to be grateful than hateful. There are no atheists in foxholes. No curmudgeons at the pearly gates. No point fretting over climate change and fascist morons. Nothing we can do about it.”

Swamp Rabbit held a mouthful of turkey hoagie. Too shocked to chew, I thought. After swallowing, he downed a full cup of Jack.

“Damn, Odd Man, I ain’t never heard such talk from you. You’re poking fun at me, ain’t you? You’re putting me on.”

He waited for me to confirm his suspicion, but I was having too much fun. I put down my hoagie and shook my head.

“How ’bout them Eagles, Rabbit?” I said. “You think we can beat the Bears this week?”

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Charlie Brown tricked again by MAGA Lucy

Posted on November 12, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit snapped open a cold beer and groaned as he read aloud from a story on my laptop:

President Donald Trump has come under fire after he hosted a “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party just hours before millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“You can’t make this shit up,” he said. “The truth is sicker than anything them satire writers can come up with.”

That’s because effective satire depends on exaggeration, I reminded him. It’s hard to exaggerate the depravity of people like Trump and his Mar-a-Lago revelers. You can’t satirize them, you can’t shame them.

Democratic party leaders — Chuck Schumer and his fellow dinosaurs — don’t grasp this simple fact. Exhibit A is their failure regarding the government shutdown, the purpose of which was to shame Trump and his toadies into extending the Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) subsidies. Without the subsidies, premiums will jump way up in January and many low- and middle-income people will no longer be able to afford health insurance.

In the end, the Dems settled for next to nothing: a little more funding for SNAP, the rehiring of some laid-off federal workers and — get this — the Republican promise to hold a vote on extending subsidies at some future date.

“That’s like Lucy promising Charlie Brown she ain’t gonna move the football the next time he tries to kick it,” Swamp Rabbit said, referring to the old Peanuts comic strip. “Them dumbass Democrats fall for it every time.”

I told him most Senate Democrats are too cowardly to risk taking a stand on any issue that might endanger their re-election chances. It’s no coincidence that the eight senators who caved to the Republicans — exactly enough to end the shutdown — are either retiring or are not up for re-election next year, and therefore won’t face a possible backlash from angry Democratic voters.

“The Dems are hoping we’ll do their jobs for them by voting to kick out the Republicans in the midterms,” I explained.

Swamp Rabbit threw his empty beer can off his porch and chuckled. “Too bad we can’t kick out most of them Dems, too, and start from scratch.”

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Why it’s so easy to vote against Republicans

Posted on November 7, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, Victor Cortez, knocked on his door on Election Day, checking to make sure he’s still on the straight and narrow. After they conferred, Victor drove him to the polling place on Christian Street — “Gotta do my civic duty,” Swamp Rabbit said — and I went along for the ride.

“It’s been a long while since I done this,” he said when we got to the voting booths. “I ain’t sure which buttons to push.”

A cloud of dust was stirred up as I patted him on the back. “You’ll figure it out. Just don’t let anyone push the buttons for you.”

Voting this year was easy for me. In the distant past, I sometimes felt guilty for voting the straight Democratic ticket. Surely I’d overlooked some Republican candidate who wasn’t an apologist for bigots and corporate thieves and despoilers of the environment. But then Donald Trump’s era dawned, and it soon became clear that Republican officeholders, all of them, were in lockstep with him.

And they still are. Trump has proudly abused the powers of the presidency. He has usurped the powers of Congress. He was convicted on 34 counts of business fraud. He was convicted of sexual abuse. He said he was a victim of voter fraud, an obvious lie, and he helped incite a riot at the Capitol over this issue on January 6, 2021.

But Republican officeholders don’t care. They keep on goosestepping, either because they believe in Trump’s fascist agenda or because they’re afraid crossing him will end their political careers.

“Think about it,” I told my swampy friend after we voted. “Congressional Republicans tried to keep Trump in office after Biden won in 2020. During the certification process, more than 140 of them voted to overturn the election results. That makes them traitors. They don’t deserve to be in office, and neither do the other Republicans who condone what they did.”

“So what do we do, arrest them for bowing down to the Mango Mussolini? You don’t make no sense, Odd Man.”

“We vote them out of office next time around — if we still have a democracy, that is. We’ve got a long way to go, but this year’s elections might be a good start.”

Footnote: About the Randy Newman song — it was released in the Nixon era, but it could easily be about our current Republican president. I’d like to hear a song about why so many working people vote for pathological liars, knowing they’ll regret it later.

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A movie about conscience. (No wonder it wasn’t a hit.)

Posted on November 5, 2025 by oddmanout215

OK, I’m busted. Last week I implied that the movies shown on Netflix are invariably mediocre, but within days The Forgiven (2021) proved me wrong. It takes place at a luxury residence on the fringe of the Sahara Desert — the movie was shot on location — where a bunch of debauched Westerners are throwing a wild party. Fiennes plays David Henninger, a cynical alcoholic who accidentally hits and kills an impoverished Moroccan boy while driving drunk to the party with his long-suffering wife Jo, played by Jessica Chastain.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit listened and said, “You shoulda wrote that the Netflix original movies are always mediocre. The Forgiven came out years ago in theaters. It wasn’t produced by the Netflix peeps. Where you been?”

Anyway, the plot hinges on whether Henninger, a privileged character, will face consequences for killing the boy. and things begin to look bad for him when the boy’s father turns up at the party house seeking justice. What follows is Henninger passing through various stages of denial on his way to concluding he’s unworthy of forgiveness for the hit-and-run and, in general, for being a lifelong bad guy.

“I saw the movie,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Fiennes plays a selfish creep who’s sick of himself. He’s good at that. The other peeps at the party are creeps too but everybody’s funny in a snarky way, don’t you think?”

Nobody’s laughing when Henninger is pressured by the angry, grieving father to journey deep into the desert for the boy’s funeral. It’s clear early on that he’s a stand-in for rich people everywhere who exploit the poor and ignore their misery. But he becomes a vehicle for the film’s guilt/redemption theme. He grows a conscience.

Swamp Rabbit cackled. “Take a look at the scumbags who run this country. Ain’t no such thing as conscience. No wonder that movie wasn’t a hit.”

I told him that only psychopaths don’t have a conscience. That guilt/redemption is a universal, timeless theme. That The Forgiven is clunky in spots but substantial, a smart story about the mystery of human nature. The sort of story Graham Greene or Paul Bowles might write. Or Albert Camus, maybe.

“Yeah, but them guys are dead,” Swamp Rabbit said. “The only mystery is how a pale, beautiful redhead like Jessica Chastain could hang out in the desert sun for so long without getting burned to a crisp. She must have slathered on a gallon of sunblock.”

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I do believe in spooks!

Posted on October 31, 2025 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was concerned about my mental health. He had decorated the front of his shack with jack-‘o-lanterns and plastic tombstones and so on, and he was wondering why my shack looked so dark and uninviting.

“You need some skeletons and bats and maybe a curbside Freddy Krueger,” he said. “Here, have some of these.”

We were standing on his sagging front porch. He reached into a plastic cauldron and tried to present me with a handful of candy corn.

“Get that shit away from me,” I said. “I’ve got my own way of celebrating holidays. You should check out my annual Halloween playlist. No repeats from last year.”

I showed him the list of songs on my phone and he scowled. “Halloween is supposed to be fun. These songs are too scary. Most of them ain’t even Halloween songs. The peeps will think you really believe in spooks and monsters.”

“I’m like the Cowardly Lion,” I said. “I do believe in spooks. Monsters, too. How can you live in this world and not believe in spooks?”

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Netflix stars upstaged by sexy ‘superyacht’

Posted on October 29, 2025 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were discussing the steady stream of mediocre movies that Netflix cranks out for subscribers.

“I saw a new one last week called The Woman in Cabin 10,” I said. “It’s about an ace reporter who solves a murder mystery involving a bunch of billionaires sailing on a luxury yacht to some charity event.”

Swamp Rabbit brightened up. “A whodunit, right? Is it any good?”

I told him that Keira Knightley, as the annoying reporter, should have been thrown overboard. That the storyline, which depends on the old doppelganger gimmick, was too predictable.

Swamp Rabbit frowned when I said “predictable.” He told me there are only six or seven basic story categories and they all use formulas that writers created thousands of years ago. He asked why I kept watching the movie if I didn’t like it.

“It was late and I was too tired to write or read,” I explained. That’s what Netflix movies are for. They lull you to sleep when you don’t have the energy for anything else. The more predictable the story, the more likely you are to doze off.

“The peeps like predictable,” he said. “Human nature don’t change, so why should stories?”

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “The most interesting character in The Woman in Cabin 10 is the yacht.”

It’s true; the real star is the 274-foot-long Savannah, shiny and streamlined, with video walls, an underwater viewing area and cabins that look more like staterooms. This “superyacht” reportedly was built for about $150M and costs $1M a week to rent.

Big money, but well worth it if you know your viewers want to fantasize about the lifestyles of the rich and fatuous. As Swamp Rabbit noted, human nature doesn’t change. The Woman in Cabin 10 would have been popular in the Great Depression, when audiences preferred movies where the actors wore tuxedoes and evening gowns and drank martinis and flounced around in Art Deco penthouses that shimmered in heavenly light.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with fantasizing,” Swamp Rabbit said. “”Real life is way overrated, especially if you’re poor.”

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