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4 days ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
Let’s face it, life ain’t no day at the beach. We come into the world crying and those tear ducts are going to be used again even when we sometimes aren’t quite sure just what has upset us. Sometimes it even seems as though it’s just all too much. The tears can be a coping mechanism, I suppose, so long as we don’t allow ourselves to drown in them.
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6 days ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
By Dan Embree, via Jaime O'NeillMy esteemed friend, Dan, shares history with our very own mad king. Read on, ye varlets. * * * 1 June 2025Dear Mr President,In real life, I’m a professor of medieval stuff – originally of Old and Middle English literature, but in my retirement I’m professing history, editing chronicles (accounts written at the time) of the 15th-century struggles known as the Wars of the Roses.
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1 week ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
I wrote the piece appearing below this brief introduction some 13 years ago. It's depressing to think of how much things have changed back to the way they were then since Donald Trump set out to Make America Great Again. His first notable steps in that direction were to make American White Again. And racist. You know, like the good old days. But does anyone really care anymore?
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1 week ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
Written by Captain Embree, retired. Shared by Jaime O'Neill, just tired. * * * 25 May 2025Dear Mr President,Your press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Thursday that when putting on secretive dinners to reward the anonymous chief buyers of your crypto meme-coin and when hosting tours of the White House purchased by the chiefest of those chief buyers, you were not acting in your presidential capacity, but in your private capacity – “in your personal time”.
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2 weeks ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
This is the 270th letter my friend Dan Embree has written to the worst president we ever could have imagined. Shared by Jaime O'Neill. * * * Dear Mr President,Say, whatever happened to that Big Beautiful Boeing deal – you know, that 13-year-old plane the Emir of Qatar hasn’t been using for years and has been anxious to flog to you as a – well, not exactly a “gift” but as some sort of “freebee” for the Department of Defense to pretend to “use” for . . . I don’t know . . .
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3 weeks ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
“What experience and history teach is that people and governments never have learnt anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” — Hegel, a little over two centuries ago In “Homeland,” the title story of a collection of stories by Barbara Kingsolver published 35 years ago, the first-person narrator tells of the time when her indigenous ancestors in the Carolinas were forced from their lands, a time they referred to in their native tongue as ”the time when we were not.”...
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3 weeks ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
By Dan Embree, shared here by his old friend, Jaime O'NeillI love a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit paid by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thoreau who was in jail for protesting the war with Mexico in 1846. Emerson purportedly asked Thoreau what he was doing in the slammer to which Thoreau replied, "what are you doing out there?" I repeat this anecdote from memory, which is not as good as it once was. But this is surely the time to recall even apocryphal stories of resistance.
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4 weeks ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
I’m going to be 82 years old in a few months. My mom died going on 16 years ago and I’m not ashamed to say I miss my mommy. We bonded when I was born and her husband was far away, first in the brig on Treasure Island for having punched a Chief Petty Officer who uttered what dad considered to be an insult to my mother by telling dad he wouldn’t be granted a leave to be present when I was born.
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1 month ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
By Dr. Dan Embree to 45 and 47 via Jaime O'NeillIf it's Monday, it's time for another of the letters from Daniel to Donald. This one's a doozy. They're all good, but today's letter is exceptional even by Dan's standards. He shared it with me, and I'm proud to share it with you. It's from a guy who knows what he's talking about to a guy who doesn't. Let's hope Stephen Miller doesn't explain it to Trump. I chose the image at the top and the music at the bottom.
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1 month ago | 
smirkingchimp.com | Jaime O’Neill
President Trump has signed hundreds of executive orders for everything from water pressure in the shower to those annoying paper drinking straws, and still there is no presidential order addressing the horrors this country has endured stemming from the legions of crazy cat ladies who threaten the very foundation of this long-suffering nation.
