We Have a Problem

First of all, I wouldn't force anybody to work. I just naively assumed that most people would rather work for high wages than get paid a lesser amount to not work. On the other hand, maybe not. You're right that there are a lot of people who seem to have no work ethic at all. I suppose it has to do with how you're raised. I think I have a stronger work ethic than you do because I had the opportunity to learn it in my daddy's store. You must have some kind of work ethic, though, because you paint all those pictures. Work doesn't have to be physically hard to be classified as work. It's easier to cut wood with a chain saw than a hand saw, but it's still work. I think what determines if something is work or not is productivity. If something is productive, it's work, regardless of how physically demanding it is. When I cut firewood, it's work, but if I expended the same amount of energy lifting weights in the gym or jogging up and down the road, it would be exercise, not work. Work can be fun or not. Whether you like doing it or hate doing it, it's still work if it produces a product or service that is useful to somebody, even if its only function is that it's pretty to look at.

I think I told you before that, when the paper mill closed, I considered starting some kind of business with my severance money. My hypothetical wife, however, correctly pointed out that I could make more money with less risk in the stock market. I seem to remember reading somewhere that half of all small businesses fail in the first year, and the other half fail in the second year, or something like that. Of course you can fail in the stock market too but, if you choose a conservative approach, you are less likely to lose all your money than you are trying to open a store on Main Street. I suppose the stock market is work too, because you make money, which is kind of like a product, but it doesn't feel like work to me, which is why I cut firewood. There's no money in it, but I don't need to make any more money than I'm already making in the stock market, so I can be productive on my own time. It's kind of like the farmer who won 10 million dollars in the lottery. When asked if he planned to retire he said, "No, I plan to keep farming till the money's all gone."

Michigan is way behind in their road repairs, so hiring more workers wouldn't displace anybody. Nevertheless, they'd have to train their new workers and, like you said, they'd have to instill them with a work ethic so they would even show up regularly. This might be easier said than done, so maybe this isn't such a good example. There is only so much "make work" that could be made, and they're already doing some of that, so maybe there is more to this problem than meets the eye. There may even come a time when most of the productive work will be done by machines, rendering our whole plan obsolete. Well, a lot of it is done by machines already. Of course those machines still need operators and mechanics to keep them running, but not for long. They already have a car that drives itself so, in the not too distant future, human workers might become as unnecessary as horses and oxen........... Back to the drawing board!

Either they taught you something different about race in school than they taught me, or one of us wasn't paying attention. Different races can so interbreed, it's different species that can't interbreed. All the human races are the same species: homo sapiens sapiens. (I'm not making this up, there are two "sapiens" in there, although people don't usually say the second one.) I think different races are like different breeds of dogs. Their appearances and behaviors are different, but they are still all dogs. The reason it gets confusing is that there are no pure races anymore because of all the interbreeding that has been going on for millennia. Hitler's Master Race was a myth. Hitler himself didn't look a lot like the Nordic ideal that he peddled to everyone else. I always wondered how he got away with that.

ya gotta have a plan, man.

Despite my constantly referring to your ilk, I am actually more of an ilk person than you are in that I identify more with my ilk than you do with yours,  I guess part of the reason for that is that it is the ilks who get things done, who pass the bills and make the laws.  You and I can flap our jaws till kingdom come, and nothing will get done.  If we want it done we have to get our ilks to do it.  Maybe it won't be something the ilks had in mind, and maybe they will try to do it, but won't be successful because the other ilk is too strong. 

But a man ought to have a plan, right?  Even if there is no chance it will ever happen, he still ought to have a plan, because otherwise he is like one of those guys who never votes and then complains about the gummint.  He oughta have a plan because when he has been ranting for the last three beers and boring the hell out of the guys on either side of his stool, and one of them finally says, "OK Buddy, what's your plan," he oughta have something more to say, "Fuck all the assholes."

See then the guys would submit his plan to the crucible and tinker with it until it was logically sound and then they could present it to their ilk, who would slap their foreheads and declare "By gum, that is a crackerjack plan," and they'd write it up, and send it to their committee, and those guys would tinker with it, and then they'd have to try to get it past the other ilk, who would attach amendments and whatever and finally there would be something they would agree with and that's how the Fuck All The Assholes bill became law.

Just kidding, sort of.  Anyway our two plans are surprisingly similar.  I would differ a bit on your plan for the poor to work on highways because that job is already being done by highway workers so you would just be taking away their jobs, and then you would have to pay the poor, so it's not like you would be saving any money, and do you really want to drive your streak of lightning car along highways built by people who were forced to build it, and maybe took a shortcut here and there so they could get home early? 

Hey, I read a science fiction story once where machines are doing everything and there is nothing left for people to do, and it makes this guy just feel so useless and depressed, and then he hears about this job.  All this machinery that is doing everything is clanking around all day, and its screws get loose, and they need to be tightened.  Well it's not much of a job, just walking around with a screwdriver and tightening things, but it's something that needs to be done, and it brings a spring to his step. 

So delighted is he, and his wife, who doesn't have to put up with a sulking useless bum all day, that they have a little party and invite their best pals, Sue and Stu, and they eat and they drink, but before it gets too late they have to get up and go because Stu has to work in the morning.  Our hero is pleased, his pal, Stu, has a job too.  When pressed for details, Stu tells him that he is on the loosening crew.

I like makework, not something as stupid as in that story, but something that is modestly useful, picking up papers on the street, some kind of labor intensive work on our infrastructure.  Just as you are breaking with your ilk by wanting to hire the poor, I am going to break with my ilk by wanting to bully them a little.

You know some of the poor do make a spectacle of themselves when you want them to do some kind of work for their supper and lodging.  This is slavery, I have heard them complain, but then everybody who works for pay is a slave, and so what? 

I was talking to a friend who worked with the poor many years ago, and she was saying that one problem with getting poor people jobs is that they were just not in the habit of working, of getting up every weekday and going to work.   They would work a couple days and then take a day or two off.  They would show up a few hours late and think what's the fuss?  They showed up didn't they? 

I don't know how much work you get out of people who have to show up, but I think it's a start, and I think I will leave The Plan there for this morning.

The way I remember what I learned in school was that their were three main races, the white, the yellow, and the black, but they weren't really races since they could interbreed, and because they could interbreed most people were a mixture of them.  Nordics was more of a type within the white 'race,' blonde hair and blue eyes and long faces I think, and maybe something about their noses, maybe snubby because of the cold.  Slavic is just a language group, physically no different than those awful Germans who when they went uninvited into Poland found guys who looked just like Germans, and if their earlobes measured just right they could become part of the Reich.  Crazy stuff, Man.

So What's Your Plan?

It has occurred to me that we are both falling into the same trap. I am telling you what you and your ilk want to do about the poor and then criticizing it, while you are telling me what I and my ilk want to do about the poor and then criticizing it. We probably got this way from watching too many political advertisements on TV. I think it would be more productive if I let you tell me what your plan is and you let me tell you what my plan is. We may not be as far apart as we think we are. So what's your plan?

Okay, if you insist, I'll go first: There are lots of programs already in place to help the poor, and you're right, there always has been. Historically, some of these programs have been more effective that others, but there has always been something. Forget about my ilk, I am not in favor of cutting these people off cold turkey. When you have been feeding birds or other wildlife for some time, and you decide you don't want to feed them anymore, it's not cool to suddenly stop feeding them in the dead of winter. You should wait until summer, when their natural food is more available, and then you should gradually wean them away from their dependence on you. So the first thing we need to do is provide some other way for these people to make a living. Then we need to give them the training or whatever they need to become successful in their new occupations.

That's kind of the theory they have been working with in Michigan for some time now. Able bodied people on welfare are required to either work of go to school for at least 20 hours a week. If your job doesn't pay as much as you could be making on welfare without working, they will make up the difference. The problem with that is that most of the available jobs around here will never pay you enough to get totally off of government assistance. Many people who are even working full time are still eligible for food stamps or some other program. It's not that the welfare programs are too generous, it's that the jobs don't pay enough. Raising the minimum wage doesn't help because most of the jobs around here are in retail stores. If the stores have to pay their help more, they won't absorb that cost, they will just pass it on to their customers, which are mostly the same people that are working for them and in other stores.

Maybe what the government should do is start hiring more people themselves. My ilk isn't going to like this, but fuck them. They have had plenty of time to demonstrate the effectiveness of their trickle down theory. Next Tuesday we have to vote on a big tax increase to fix the deteriorating road system in Michigan. I've got a better idea, put the poor people to work fixing the roads. We are already paying them not to work, or to work for substandard wages. If we pay them to fix the roads instead, we will be getting more bang for our bucks. Pay them well enough that they can afford the higher prices in the stores, which will now have to raise their wages to compete with the government for labor. Of course this isn't my original idea, your man F.D.R did something like this back in the 30s. It was controversial to be sure, and people are still arguing about it, but maybe it's an idea whose time has come.

It doesn't matter who you think is an Indian, or who I think is an Indian. The government has already established the criteria for that. If you're an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, you're an Indian for legal purposes. If you're not an enrolled member, but you still think you're an Indian, then why in the hell didn't you say so on your census form? (I don't mean "you, Uncle Ken",  I mean "you, a generic person".)

When we went to school, they told us that "White" is not really a race, it is a nickname for the Caucasian Racial Group. "Celtic" is a race, "Slavic" is a race, "Nordic" is a race, but "White" is not a race. I considered putting down my race as "Slavic", but I don't know what they're teaching about that in the schools nowadays. Chances are the census people wouldn't know what I was talking about, and there wasn't room on the form to explain it to them. It was easier to just check "White". At my age, I find myself doing things the easy way more and more. I need to save my time and energy for more important things, like blogging and cutting firewood.

pouring money down a rathole

What, we have been taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor for the last 50 years in this country?  Why 50?  I guess maybe you are talking about the war on poverty which I don't think lasted much after Lyndon, and there wasn't that much given out even while Lyndon was in office because he ended up pouring much of our treasure down the rathole of Vietnam.

But to some extent we have been giving to the poor as long as, oh, recorded history.  Way back, let's go to early Christianity, though surely it was being done before them.  To the Christians it was simply a good deed.  It wasn't a matter of getting the poor back on their feet which nobody expected to happen, and I suppose it helped you enter the pearly gates, although you weren't supposed to bargain with God like that.  Just make Him happy and see what happens.

And that sort of thing has gone on forever, the giving of alms, the poorhouses, the United Charities.  I still give a buck every now and then to a bum on the street.  A buck doesn't mean much to me, but it probably means a lot to the bum, so aren't I increasing its value, like a good American?

There are those arguments about whether helping the poor should be the job of the charities or of the government.  There is Ayn Rand's reply to "Who will help the poor?"  "You can if you want to, Myself, I don't want to."

As a longtime reader of mine, you know that I divide the poor into three categories, the lazy, the nutsos, and the unfortunates.  I assume each category comprises roughly a third, though I have done no research on that.  Nobody wants to give any money to the lazies, I think we are obligated to give money to the nutsos because it's not their fault, and I think everybody wants to give to the unfortunates because we expect they will use it wisely, and we ourselves, us good citizens, know that there but for an unfortunate the grace of god go we.

I don't think the argument that we have given money to the poor in the past, and yet there are still poor people, so it obviously doesn't work, so we should stop doing it, is a very good argument.  Of course we will always have poor people.  Look at all the money we have spent on the army, and yet we still have enemies.

Lincoln was never rich in the sense that Nixon and Johnson became rich.  Just being a lawyer wasn't enough to make you rich in those days.  I don't know about those Lincoln quotes, or any famous person quotes, a person lives a long time and says a lot of things and you can pick and choose like in the bible and make any point you like.

I don't think you can make any progress on your research into the percentage of Indians in your county until you decide what your definition of Indian is, and even then if you do all that extensive research and come up with a number, somebody, like me, is apt to simply say, "That is not what a consider an Indian," and dismiss it out of hand.  And what difference does it make?  How would a higher percentage of Indians change anything?

Interesting point.  I have always identified myself as White on the census, as I am guessing you do.  Why do we do that?  We could say anything, and nobody would know better.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Of course not all rich people are alike, and not all poor people are alike. Nevertheless, if just taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor would eliminate poverty, it would have been eliminated by now. They have been doing that for 50 years in this country and, according to the prevailing liberal propaganda, the gap between rich and poor just keeps getting wider and wider. Okay, so let's just take more money from the rich and give it to the poor. If you keep doing that forever, there surely will come a point when everybody has the same amount of money. That may sound good on paper, but then how do you get anybody to do anything?

Funny you should mention Lincoln. He might have been born poor, but he became a lawyer before he became a president. He may not have had as much money as some other guys, but I don't think you could rightly say that he was poor. I used to have a quote by Lincoln, but it seems to have gotten lost when my old computer died. I thought I had made a hard copy, but I can't find it now. I'll have to put it on my things to look up on a rainy day list. The gist of it was the fact that some people are rich proves that others may become rich. The inequality of wealth is what inspires people to work harder to get some of it for themselves. The part I remember is: "Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, rather let him strive diligently to build one of his own, proving by example that his too will be safe from violence when built." Of course that's easier said than done, but so are a lot of other things.

You made a good point about tax money being everybody's money. If you raise taxes to help the poor, or for any other purpose, the liberals as well as the conservatives have to pay their fair share, so I will concede that liberals are just as generous with their own money as they are with other people's money. I still say that just giving money away will not solve anything, there needs to be some kind of plan that insures the money is being used effectively. You know, "Give a man a fish......."

When the constitution was written, the various Indian tribes were considered to be sovereign nations under the law, and Indians were not considered to be U.S. citizens. That was changed by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Any Indians who wanted to retain their sovereign nation status had to give up their land east of the Mississippi and relocate to Indian Territory, which later became the state of Oklahoma. Any Indians that elected to stay in the East lost their legal status as Indians and were supposed to eventually become U.S. citizens. That policy played out differently in some states, with most Indians being encouraged to head west at gunpoint. In Michigan, however, most of the Indians elected to stay put and nobody made them leave. Many of them got screwed out of their land by one crooked dealing or another, but they didn't leave the state, and their descendants are still here.

The Indian Reconstruction Act of 1934 provided a means for the re-establishment of tribes as sovereign nations, sort of. It wasn't automatic, there was a long bureaucratic process involved, and some tribes are still trying to get federal recognition. The members of federally recognized tribes hold a dual citizenship, they are U.S. citizens and also citizens of what the government calls "sovereign dependent internal nations". Calling them "sovereign" is a bit of a stretch, it would be more accurate to call them "autonomous", but that's the government for you. These reconstituted tribes, usually called "bands", elect their own government, and they also get to vote in the regular elections. The tribal government themselves determine the criteria for membership. If they say you're an Indian, then you're an Indian. The Sault Band has a copy of an Indian census that was taken in the late 1800s. If you can trace your ancestry to someone listed in that census, they will enroll you as a member of the tribe. There are some Indians who can't find any of their ancestors listed in the old census. Nobody denies that they are ethnic Indians, they just don't have the legal status of tribal members.

Why any of these Indians, tribal and otherwise, would deny their Indianship to the modern census takers while proudly proclaiming it to anybody else who will listen, is a mystery to me. I know you don't care about it, but I do. I will try not to bore you with it anymore unless I find credible proof that these guys make up substantially more than 4% of our local population. Then I will certainly say "I told you so!" because that's what Beaglesonians do.

Where is it written that you have to like gays to be a real American? It's not in the Bible or the Constitution, so I think it's just something that your ilk made up to aggravate my ilk.

the rich will always be among us

Everything is better for the rich, better education, better food, better housing, etcetera.  Well there is the church, where you get eternal life.  There were the kings of olden days who didn't have all that much money themselves, and were always cajoling and threatening the rich nobles around them.  I suppose there were fiery speaking revolutionaries, but those guys never lasted very long.  There was, there was, Abraham Lincoln!  How about him?  Born in a log cabin, and all, and I don't think even when he rose to power he ever had much money, unlike two recent guys, off the top of my head, Dick Nixon, and Bill Clinton who were born pretty poor, but lined their pockets along the path to power.

But your point is well taken, here in the United States, and probably elsewhere, but we are mostly always talking about the US, it's mostly rich people who run things.  Of course not all rich people are alike, there are many progressives among them, if you walk along the north shore at election time you will see posters in every window for the democratic president.

I may sound like I am against rich people, and probably sometimes when I get all het up on my revolutionary rhetoric (while sitting in my condo tower with a cat in my lap), I may say something intemperate about the silver spoon suckers, but it's not all rich people that I am against.  Just the Koch brothers and their ilk.

You seem to think that if you give money to the poor it will just evaporate and then nobody will have it.  They will buy food, and that will help the farmers, they will move to nicer places and that will help the construction industry, some of them will get an education, better jobs etc.  Your ilk tends to think that they are all welfare queens driving Cadillacs from their mansions to the grocery store to buy steaks and lobsters from the grocery store to take along on their luxury cruises.  It's not so.

And my people, my progressive ilk, are not spending somebody else's money when they pass bills to help the poor.  They are spending tax money and they paid their fair share of taxes and so did the people who voted them in to do their good work who must have been the majority or else the guy would not have gotten into office. 

I think before you can continue with your Indian research you will have to come up with a definition for Indian.  Likely your definition will have something to do with how many of one's ancestors were Indians going back what, three hundred, four hundred years, and I don't see how you are going to determine that.  Why not except my definition?  Everybody who tells the census taker that they are an Indian is an Indian and everybody who says they aren't, aren't Indians.  What different does it make if you county has four or ten percent Indians anyway?

So you are finally admitting that gay marriage is no sweat off your nose.  On the other hand it will bring a good deal of happiness and stability to what, a few percent of the people in this country, who work and pay taxes just like you, and yet you are agin it, and your full panoply of reasons you are agin it, is because you just don't like it.  And you call yourself an American?

The Golden Rule

Not the one in the Bible, the other golden rule: "He who has the gold, rules." The rich people have always controlled this country, and most other countries for that matter, and they always will. Who else is going to do it, the poor people? If they are smart enough to rule the world, why aren't they rich? Money buys power, but that's not so bad considering the alternative, which is violence. Well there's one other way: bullshit, but it takes money to get your bullshit out to the people, so we're right back where we started from. Most politicians start out as lawyers. Have you ever heard of a poor lawyer?

I don't think it would be any different if there were no political parties. If we didn't have political parties, we'd have something else, and it would be run by rich people too. The Democrats are no better than the Republicans in that respect. Poor people might be more likely to vote Democrat, but I doubt that there are any poor people among the party leadership. Democrats might be more generous to the poor than Republicans, but not with their own money. All they do is take money away from some people and redistribute it to other people. They seem determined to reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. Where is the money going to come from then? Why, from the government of course, because they are the only ones who can legally create money out of nothing. So we all end up becoming wards of the state, and the state, in it's infinite wisdom, will decide exactly how much money each of us should have.

I told you that my findings about the Indians were preliminary. What I need to do is call the Sault tribe headquarters and ask them exactly how many of their 40,000 members live in Cheboygan and Emmet Counties. Then I suppose I should call the Little Traverse Band and ask them the same question. I don't know if those traditionalist Indians have a headquarters, but My daughter use to hang out with them, so she might know. I'm going to wait until I see her in person because I also want to get her take on why some of these guys are not reporting themselves as Indians in the census. She is way more of a people person than I am, so she might be able to make sense of this.

Okay you're right, the gay marriage thing is not going to have a material impact on my life or my marriage, but that doesn't mean I have to like it, or vote for it.

the battle of the ilks

Of course there are some of my ilk who speak of conspiracies, and worse, the politically correct ones who tie logic up in knots and then accuse everybody who disagrees with them of being a racist or a sexist.  I do think this memo thing is better sourced than most of the wild things that come from your ilk.

Still there are rules, and I should know because aren't I always trying to impose the crucible on your more free wheeling style.  See I was assembling an argument of the nature that the tea partiers were being led by a very rich oligarchy, and going beyond dumping money they were now organizing their own campaign workers so that we were moving towards a society where there would be no more political parties, just various rich guys contending to put their men in.  Well even as I type that it seems highly unlikely, just something we are getting a little closer to, but I doubt we'll ever get there.

And I think you would prefer that, a country where the very rich ruled, but once they sucked all the money out of you, they would leave you alone, as opposed to Obama's socialist paradise where you would have to marry your gay dog.  I think you would like to go back to the way things were about a hundred years ago when the businesses bought the government and there were no regulations and you never saw blacks or hispanics or gays making a spectacle of themselves.

I think my ilk is more afraid of yours than vice versa.  When my dems abandon socialized medicine and settle for Obamacare, I am disappointed, but I realize that it's the best we could push through the rep infested congress, and we dare not go very far leftward lest we offend the people and end up with reps ruling the whole roost.  Whereas your ilk, who I have to admit right now are in primary mode so that they are nuttier than usual, propose crazy things like that anti gay marriage amendment that has zero chance of passing and outrages most of the country, but they don't care what the rest of the country thinks.  When the press goes into these small Iowa and New Hampshire towns when they want to take the political temperature they go into places like Joe's Bait House, they never go into a Starbucks and interview my keyboard clacking, latte lapping, ilk.

You neglected to mention the white man's germs.  Likely the Spanish empires would have gone out of favor in the normal tumult of politics, except for the fact that about half the Indians were wiped out by our diseases.

Of course I believe that there are more poor white people than poor black people.  My ilk is always bringing that up when we are battling your ilk over welfare.  We think, mistakenly I believe, that your cold cold hearts are more likely to be melted by white people, who look like you, standing in your welfare line, rather than a bunch of blacks jumping and jiving to their crazy hip hop music. 

This story about whites not applying for welfare until they saw black people, which is sourced to a story you heard, makes no common sense at all.  I am casting it aside with the mild admonition to cogitate upon it yourself for a couple minutes to see if it makes any sense.

And I don't know about your Indian population research.  It sounds like you are making a lot of assumptions, and right there in the census data you have the amount of Indians who declare themselves so I will go with that.  Actually, outside of those guys who are officially connected to the tribes and get a cut out of the gambling and smoking swag, I think pretty much anybody who wants to call himself an Indian is one. just like being a cowboy, if you buy a hat you can be a cowboy too.

So the supremes take up gay marriage Tuesday, and indications are that they will declare it to be what the founding fathers would have wanted had they lived a few hundred years longer. The republican hopefuls in Iowa are hooting and hollering like Yosemite Sam, and declaring that it will ruin the country.

So I guess I have to ask, because you said in black and white about a year ago that it would devalue your Beaglesonian wedded bliss, so I am wondering how is that going?  Are you less happy in your marriage?  Has the state of Michigan collapsed into moral anarchy?

Time is Money

Well maybe not but, as I grow older, it seems that my time keeps getting more and more precious to me. It's not that I'm doing anything important with my time, it's just that I don't want to waste any of it doing something that I'm not very interested in. Of course I've heard of the Kochs, and I've heard of PACs, but I don't know which PACs are Koch PACs, and I don't care. The story about the secret memo might very well be true, but I don't care about it enough to spend any time or energy tracking down the evidence. I just thought it was funny to hear your ilk speaking in hushed tones about some secret conspiracy. I thought it was my ilk's job to do things like that. I don't pay much attention to my ilk anymore either so, for all I know, they're still doing it.

Funny that you get outraged when the Reps do something but don't mind so much if the Dems do the same thing. I'm just the opposite. I expect the Democrats to raise my taxes, that's what Democrats do, but when the Republicans raise my taxes, that pisses me off. In my world, the Republicans are supposed to be the good guys. Of course they're not, which is why I voted for third parties for decades, but I eventually got disenchanted with them too, and somebody should be the good guys.

The more I think about it, I think you're right, it was Cortez who conquered the Aztecs, and it was Pizzaro who conquered the Incas. I'm more familiar with the Inca story, but I'm sure the Aztec story wasn't all that different. When the first Europeans came to the Americas, there weren't many of them, so they formed alliances with the local tribes. The tribes were happy to have the help fighting off their enemies, and the Europeans were happy to establish a foothold. Once their mutual enemies were neutralized, the alliances usually fell apart but, by then, more Europeans had arrived and the foothold was expanded into a thriving colony, eventually pushing the locals out of the picture. The British did it a little different in India. There they kept some of local leaders around and supported them in puppet governments. Each local satrap would have a British "advisor" assigned to "help" him govern. They tried something like that with the Zulus in South Africa, but the Zulus were not as easily advised as the Asian Indians, and the British had to fight a bloody war to put them in their place.

I know you find this hard to believe, but not all poor Americans are Black. We've got lots of poor people in lily white Cheboygan, although they're not as poor as they used to be before I moved here. The story I heard was that, once the Blacks started signing up for welfare, it inspired our local Whites to do likewise. At first out local government resisted them, not wanting to bother with the paperwork, but eventually they realized that the increased workload justified hiring more staff, which justified a bigger budget, which justified applying for more state and federal grants. Maybe time really is money after all!

I never thought of myself as a contrarian, I just don't follow the crowd. If the crowd wants to follow me, I don't have a problem with that but, if I turn around and see that they're not following me, I just keep going. I think I would have liked Morgan Park because I used to like military stuff in those days. It wasn't until I got into the real military that I began to dislike it, and then it was largely because they weren't military enough for my taste. I don't know about that thing at the university. It was experimental anyway, and I never heard anything more about it, so it was probably a flop. I don't think either one of them would have caused me to change my plans. At the of seven I resolved to move to the country when I grew up, and that's exactly what I did.

I did some looking up over the weekend. My preliminary findings suggest that the number of Indians in Cheboygan and Emmet counties is closer to 10% than 4%, but I haven't been able to find anything conclusive yet. That U.P tribe is actually headquartered in Sault St. Marie, not St. Ignace. They have about 40,000 enrolled members spread out over seven counties. I conservatively estimate that at least 10% of them are in our two counties, which would give us 4,000 Indians right there. The other tribe is much smaller, with over 4,000 members, but they are only spread over two counties, one of which is not in our study area. Their headquarters is in Petoskey, which is in Emmet, so it seems reasonable to assume that at least half of their members live in Emmet County. That would raise our number to 6,000, which is 10%. Then there's those traditionalists I told you about. They are not a federally recognized tribe, but they beat on their drums and pray to the Great Spirit, so I think they are real Indians. I don't know how you would count them, but my daughter might still know somebody who's in it, and I'm going to see her on Mother's day. Watch this space for further developments.

searching for the truth

You've never heard of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers' Pac?  It is all over the news, and living in a purple state you have heard from them plenty.  Well all these Pacs just slide their name in at the end of the commercial very quietly, and their names all sound the same because they don't want to be identified with their slurs, they want you to think you have the idea that you thunk it up yourself.

The part where they have picked five candidates is something they have announced themselves.  The part about establishing their own get out the vote thing they have not.  Well we'll find out soon enough if that is true, it's not the sort of thing you can hide.  It sort of falls into line with what I know and what I have been thinking.

Aye and there's the rub, it sort of falls into line with the way I see things.  See maybe that is the kernel from which all those conspiracy theories grow, and by conspiracy theories I mean the far out stuff like the truthers (9/11 was an American plot) and the birthers (Obama was born in Kenya).  If you hear that your next door neighbor, who you know be a drunk, crashed his car at Deadman's Curve, you nod your head.  If you hear that he was singing soprano in the church choir, you think maybe the guy who told you is a liar, or a guy who doesn't  check out his stories very well.

It is a problem, you know we all start out looking for the truth, and everytime we come across a fork in the road it behooves us to submit it to the crucible and come out with the most likely truth.  But in fact we all have a bias and tend to favor the right or the left and this can lead us astray.  The thing to do is question ourselves, maybe give more weight to the other side.  When I am outraged by something the reps do, I make myself turn it around and think what if the dems did the same thing.  And not surprisingly, it often wouldn't piss me off so much if the dems did it, so then I am not so hard on the reps doing it.

So I guess maybe I was unsteady ground with bringing up the article that was based on mysterious memo, but I was bringing it up in order to show how the tea party is manipulated by rich donors, and I did have a source, it wasn't just something I read in a book only a can't remember which one.

I was a little apprehensive about using the Kochs as an example, I should have added, 'and their ilk,' because there are a lot of guys like them.  On the fringes of the left they have become like legendary ogres, the Koch Brothers this, and the Koch Brothers that.  I don't approve.

I too wondered how did Cortez, with that handful of clanking conquistadors conquer the great civilization, and read a book and it was as you said, everybody around them hated the Aztecs, so it was no big deal to get that wagon rolling.  What did you want me to look up about Japan?

My assertion about Europe having a less well-defined poverty class, I am embarrassed to admit comes from an article I read some time ago, and I am embarrassed to admit that I don't remember (I will look it up, but not right now).  Anyway back when we were lads it was common knowledge that Americans were taller than Europeans, because basically we were Europeans who had moved and were eating better.  Maybe it was twenty five years ago, this guy was doing a study on that and discovered to his amazement that at the current time Europeans were taller than Americans.  How could that be?  Well one thing was that the Europeans were eating a lot better, and the second thing was that most Americans were as tall as Europeans, but poor Americans were considerably shorter and that took the American average down.

And of course the poor Americans were black, and from that I drew my assertion that if white people were poor we would be more concerned with helping them out than if they were black. 

Anymore though Europeans have accumulated big minorities of muslims, and I have read that they haven't done as good a job of assimilating them (different religion, different language) as we (white guys) have done for our blacks.

Well one well wonders what kind of Beagle you would have been today had you attended the military academy or that U of Chicago school.  I would guess, given your penchant for contrariness the former would have made you more left wing and the latter more right wing, but I don't think either one of them would have changed you all that much because it seems like from birth you have been headed for The Freehold.  What do you think of that analysis?

Who's Paranoid Now?

I had a little extra time tonight, so I looked up your link. Let's see: a secret memo, from an organization I've never heard of, divulged by an unnamed source, to a left wing nut publication. Should I believe it? Who knows, it might be true, just like it might be true that Obama was born in Africa.  Even if it is true, it won't change my vote, so I don't care about it. I doubt that the rumor of Obama's African birth changed anybody's vote either. Speaking of Obama, how did he manage to get elected twice if those evil Koch Brothers and their ilk are so influential?

According to what I have read over the years, the British Empire was so successful because the countries they colonized, except us of course, were so busy with their tribal infighting that they didn't notice the British slipping in between them. I think that Spain and France had similar experiences. The one I remember is Cortez (Or was it Pizzaro?), who conquered the  mighty Incas with only 150 Spanish soldiers, augmented by thousands of other Indians he was able to recruit because they already had a grudge against the Incas. They didn't have to divide and conquer, just conquer, because the dividing had already been done for them. I'm don't know much about Japan. Why don't you look that up for me?

While you're looking things up, I'd like to know the source of your assertion that Europe has a lower percentage of poor people than the United States. If it's true, it must be a fairly recent development because, according to what I learned in school, America was built by European immigrants who came here looking for a better life. Some of them were religious dissidents, to be sure, but most of them came here looking for economic opportunity. I suppose it depends on what you call "poor". I think a poor American would be considered a rich American if he went to Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania, or Bulgaria. I'm not sure about England, but I seem to remember that France had some kind of race riot a few years ago, and it was blamed on the poverty of their colored people.

I guess the education we got in the Chicago Public Schools was good enough. Where would we have gotten a better one? I remember my parents were considering sending me to Morgan Park Military Academy for awhile, but they decided against it. I went with them for a tour of the place, and I was favorably impressed. The problem was that we lived just far enough away that they would have required me to board there, and my mother didn't think that was such a good idea. There was another time they were considering enrolling me in some kind of experimental program at the university of Chicago. The deal was that you could advance to different grades according to your ability. You might be in one grade for one subject and in a different grade for a another subject, and kids of all different ages might be in the same classroom at any given time. It sounded cool to me, but my mother was worried that being around all those older kids might "give me ideas". Funny, I thought that's why you went to school in the first place, to get ideas.

 

school daze again

Republicans do advertise more than democrats.  I don't know personally because I live in a true blue state, so I don't see much advertising except for local races, but your state is purple, possibly magenta, so I imagine you see a lot every election day.  One of the prices you pay for having your vote count is that you have to watch, or at least mute your tv for, those commercials. 

I'm with you on one thing though those commercials are all so similar on both sides and they run them back to back and you hardly know which one is against who.  On the other hand those guys who do the research must have some reason for thinking those commercials are effective.

Here's an article I read last night.  The Koch's are going to back five republicans in the primary and then pick the one they like the best and back him, and then they have their own independent get out the vote operation.  Used to be politicians had to buy a political party, and now they are just building their own.  http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/koch-brothers-2016-election-memo-117238.html?hp=c1_3

There is a thing about minorities.  Some say the reason England and Japan did so well in the world until lately is because they were all the same kind of people, and countries with colonial backgrounds, where the colonizing country drew the borders so that each subdivision had some of each ethnic group in it to keep them from uniting and rebelling.

Well I don't know, we'd have to go over that country by country and I am not sure how that would turn out.

One thing that I think does stand out is none of the European countries has as high a percentage of poor people as the United States, and I think that is because if a Frenchman sees another Frenchman in poverty he wants to help him out, whereas if a white American sees a black American in poverty, he is less likely to identify with him.  Of course now Europeans are getting their share of poor muslim immigrants.

I used to play the lottery all the time, hoping I would hit the big one and be able to quit my job.  Now that I am retired and have enough money to get by on I don't bother.  I bought a ticket once when it went way high, but then I realized that if I won I would have to show my face and some guys would want to kidnap me, and I would end up surrounded by burly body guards.  Well I suppose I could have gotten an all female bodyguard group like Khaddafi had.  Why didn't I think of that?

You don't know that if you give a poor person money they will waste it.  Some of them will get good educations and good jobs.

Schools are getting really complicated in Chicago.  We have magnet schools that everybody is trying to get into, and people don't necessarily have to send their kids to neighborhood schools, there is some complicated system where a certain percentage of kids can switch to certain other schools, and I think most grade school kids vie to get into a high school like high schoolers vie to get into colleges.  And then there are the charter schools who despite getting more money and more motivated students and are more likely to kick out kids that they don't like, don't do any better than the regular schools.

The percentages are something like 45 percent black and 45 percent hispanic and 10 percent white.  White people in general are richer than minorities and they tend to send their kids to private schools, though so do rich blacks and hispanics.

All Chicago schools get an equal amount of money, and poor schools generally get a little more because they are eligible for poverty grants.  The money is less effective because poor kids are so hard to teach.

I think home schoolers are like ten percent concerned parents who want to give their kids a good education and ninety percent holy rollers who don't want no secular education shoved down their throats.

As a collectivist, I don't like home schooling.  I think we should all share the public school experience.  Like I said in the last post, I think we got a good enough education, and from my experience subbing, the kids in the average schools got a good enough education too.

Do you think Sawyer and Gage Park gave you a good enough education?

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

If the Republicans are raking in more money than the Democrats, and they are both doing about the same amount of advertising, what are the Republicans doing with all their extra money? Maybe they're just stuffing it in their pockets, but how would that help them win elections?

I think I'm finally starting to understand what you have been saying about Cheboygan people getting along. Actually they do argue a lot, but probably no more than people in other towns. The reason our minorities don't cause trouble is that the only significant minority group we have is the Indians, and they have already gotten what they wanted, so they don't raise hell about it anymore. So what's wrong with that? Do you want to ship a bunch of your minority people up here just so we can have the same problems you have? I suppose we couldn't stop you, but I also suppose that, if they wanted to be here, they'd already be here.

I've got nothing against other people gambling, I just don't care to do it myself. Nobody is forcing those fools to squander their money in the casinos, they are doing it of their own free will. If the Indians are making money off of it, then good for them. I did vote against the lottery, but that was only because I knew it wouldn't lower our taxes one bit. The more money they get, the more money they will want. People are like that, and not just government people either.

You may be right about that abortion thing. Truth be known, I don't hear much it anymore because I seldom hang out with teenaged girls. I only talked to one of them about it, and I thought it was ironic that she still had to go Down Below to get one after all these years. I'm pretty sure there has never been an abortion clinic anywhere around here, seems like something like that would have made our local newspaper, but I don't know for a fact that none of our local doctors has ever done one. That would be hard to keep track of, because doctors tend to move in and out of the Cheboygan area a lot. I've been going to the same dentist for some 40 years, and now he's getting ready to retire and turn the practice over to his daughter, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

You may also be right when you say that poor people have the deck stacked against them and that everything is harder for them. So what's your solution to that? If you take all my money away and give it to some poor person, chances are they would quickly spend it, and now there would be two poor people instead of one. We have discussed this before, but I wondered if you have had any new ideas since then.

The schools were integrated a long time ago, but I seem to remember you telling me that they don't do the bussing thing anymore in Chicago. Does that mean that they have returned to the concept of neighborhood schools?  If so, does the city spend less money on schools in poor neighborhoods, or is the money they do spend less effective because the poor kids are harder to teach? I suppose the children of the really rich go to private schools. We have a couple of private schools in Cheboygan but they're not necessarily for rich people. One is for Catholics, and there is a much smaller one for holy rollers.

Then there's the home schoolers, but nobody keeps track of how many of those there are. They are considering legislation to require parents to register their home schooled kids but, as of now, they don't have to. I don't think the regular schools keep a good track of their populations either. They have a counting day twice a year, and anybody who is not in school that day isn't counted for the purposes of state aid. It's just numbers, not names. A few years ago a school in nearby Pellston was criticized for their high drop out rate. The principal countered that all those kids weren't drop outs, some of them had just moved away. When asked how many, he said he didn't know. When I was driving busses, they told us to just pick up any kid we saw along the route. If a family with kids moved in or out of the neighborhood, it was the other kids who told us, not the school. If a new kid lived on a road that we didn't normally go down, the parents had to call the bus garage and tell us or we wouldn't know about it. I don't know how they can operate schools like that, but apparently they do.

maybe we Chicagoans should move to Cheboygan because everybody there gets a long hunky dory

I do indeed have an ilk, the democrats, and even when I am not in agreement with them on some issue I still think of them as my people, because they are the only people who stand between liberty and being a slave to the Koch Bros and their ilk.  My people, my ilk, do indeed get a lot of money from the labor unions who these days are really scared by the anti union republicans.  More importantly they are also boots on the ground, dedicated guys who will drive the righteous to the polls come election day.  But the money we get pales in comparison to what the republicans get.

The point of the Lyndon story was that even if some politician is mouthing the words you love to hear, that doesn't mean he isn't controlled by somebody else who has a different agenda.  I E, the Koch brothers buying their minions bullhorns.  YesLyndon was a democrat, deceiving the voter is a bipartisan practice.  And I am, as always, even and fair handed.

I'm always at a loss when you speak of the white Christian freehold of Cheboygan where everybody gets along and there is no disputation, except a little long ago from the Frenchmen pretending to be Indians, but that was a long time ago, and now they happily peddle smokes and take the suckers' money at the roulette wheel.

Well you know we all despise the vice that we don't care for, and I've always hated gambling.  You can only spend so much on booze before you pass out, but you can gamble the farm away in a heartbeat.  And I hate those, well around here it is mostly riverboats without motors, with all their neon and noise and the billboards promising that you will get rich.

Of course the state does that too with the lottery, but that money goes to the state, and as a former state worker, I can assure you that the state will spend your money wisely.

Back to Cheboygan.  If you have more than a few doctors, you probably have at least one with a suspiciously large number of coat hangers in his closet, and as you continue to shut down clinics there will be more and more doctors, and semi doctors, like that, like it was back in the good old days before Roe vs Wade.

The education establishment is indeed always trying to peddle some new educational razzle dazzle, like if we change the seating in the classroom and use some techno whiz bang learning will grow by, oh pick any number.  If there was some razzle dazzle in the last fifty years that worked, we would be doing that now, but basically the classroom is little changed from the way it was in our day.

And I can make a lot of fun of the crap they taught us back in those days, but you know, they taught us enough so that when we got out of school we could figure out that most of what they taught us was bullshit, so I think they did pretty good.

But we have been hearing about a crisis in education for easily the past twenty years, and I think that's why the educators go through all this razzle dazzle crapola like they have found the answer and no everything will be hunky dory.

The fact is that rich kids are getting educated just fine.  The poor kids are getting educated not very well.  Poor kids are harder to teach because poor people have things stacked against them from the day they are born and everything is harder for them, and every day and in every way the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so there is just going to be more of that.

Money is the Spice of Politics

You and your ilk are always complaining about all the money the rich people give to the Republicans. (If I have to have an ilk, then you have to have an ilk!)  What politicians need money for is advertising, and I think the Democrats advertise about as much as the Republicans. So who gives the Democrats all of their money? I recently read somewhere that the labor unions, a.k.a. "Big Labor", give a lot of money to the Democrats. If that's true, then you and your ilk better start looking for another source of funding because labor unions seem to be a dying breed in this country. I'm not in favor of that, it's just a fact of life. Anyway, Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat, so what's your point?

I haven't gotten involved in this Common Core thing because it's just school, and the schools are always changing the way they teach things. Today's new math is tomorrow's old math. I seem to remember learning that from you.

The majority of the poor pregnant teenage girls in Michigan don't have to go Down Below to get abortions because they live Down Below. Cheboygan girls have always had to go Down Below to get abortions because none of the doctors around here have ever wanted to do them. I am reminded of a verse from the song "Small Town Blues", written by an old friend of mine back in the 60s:

"My sister went away for a visit,
Word was out that she had missed it.
It was all over town she'd gone to see a doc.
She was visiting her grandma.
Now ain't that a crock?"

I was new in town the first time I heard that song, so I didn't know what he was talking about until somebody explained it to me. It seems that, in those days, any time a teen aged girl went out of town for a few days, the gossip mill churned out the story that she had gone Down Below to get an abortion. I don't know how often the story was true, but the gossip mill churned it out every time regardless.

I guess Bohunks like their spices too, but I think they are different spices. My dad used to put a lot of garlic in his sausage. I don't know what else he used, but I don't remember any of his stuff tasting peppery. It's the pepper that I don't like, both the black pepper that comes from a shaker and those little hot chili peppers. I like sweet bell peppers, but that's not the same thing. Truth be known, I'm not a great fan of exotic food at all. I prefer the good old American stuff like pizza, spaghetti, Polish sausage, bratwurst, and chop suey.

a tale of lyndon

Tea partiers used to wear those tricorner hats, and the more fashion conscious of them used to complete the outfit with those tight pants that ended at the knee, and then they had some kind of stockings and some kind of ballet shoes I guess.  Well those were the ones featured prominently in the press.  Well you know the press, like in a gay pride parade they always go for the most flamboyant.

And they were all over the press, they got huge coverage, they were certainly never blanked out.  Fox is always claiming something gets no coverage in the lame stream media, that actually gets pretty big coverage, but they want their fans to think that the lame stream media is against them, and they don't have to worry about their fans finding out about this because their fans are proud that they never watch the lame stream media.  I know you are not a Foxie, but they have a big influence on all right wing media.

And it was a very smart move on their part to infiltrate the republican party.  On the left we had those dopy occupiers who were too pure to infiltrate anything, and just hung around their occupy places looking like a bunch of bums, and then faded away. 

Let me tell you a story about how Lyndon Johnson got his start in politics.  There were these guys, the Brown Brothers, who wanted to build a dam somewhere around Austin, but they needed federal funds which weren't forthcoming.  They needed a man in Washington, and it so happened that a representative had died and there was an opening.  A bunch of guys threw their hats in the ring, and among them was Lyndon, an up and comer.

The Browns (they are the ancestors of Halliburton) were extreme right wingers, and they despised the ground Roosevelt walked on, well would've walked on if he could, and Lyndon Johnson was screaming Viva Roosevelt all through the district because the people in the district loved Roosevelt.  What Lyndon actually believed has always been something of a mystery that we won't go into now.

Well the Browns saw it clearly, even though they hated Roosevelt, they knew that being for him would help Lyndon win the election, so when they handed him his bundle, they didn't ask him to tone down the Roosevelt, they just asked him to get the dam approved when he got in.

Which he did.  Lyndon tried to cozy up to Roosevelt after he won but Roosevelt thought he was some Texas hillbilly and didn't have much to do with him, so Lyndon cozied up to Sam Rayburn and began his rise to power.

And probably you already know that I am going to make a comparison between the Browns and the Kochs.  Among the rages of the tea partiers was taxes and regulations, which the Kochs also hate.  The other stuff, the religious stuff, the zany conspiracy stuff, the Kochs didn't care about much one way or the other.

But here was a gang of useful fools.  The Kochs started handing out dough financing candidates running against the RINOs, and in retrospect weren't all that successful, and probably lost the republicans some elections.  But they scared the shit out of the RHINOs who never knew what nut with a fistful of dollars was going to run against them in the next primary, and they all moved way to the right, which was just fine with the Kochs.

At the beginning of the tea party movement you had some of those guys railing against big business, but they never got any of the Koch dough and you don't hear from them anymore.  Oh sometimes there might be a peep against big business, but it's very vague and no specific bill is referenced.

Well most people, especially of your ilk don't know much about Common Core, which has nothing to do with making America look not so hot in the history books, but all you guys really care about is that Obama is sort of for it, and that is enough to get out the torches and the rope.

If you are a poor young pregnant girl there is no way you are getting down below to get an abortion.

Taco Bell food is not hot.  They have some kind of hot sauce which is not all that hot either, but maybe too hot for Beaglesonia, where Lawry's Seasoned Salt is the standard for exotic cuisine.  Myself I look to taste the meat and the heat, more for my money, like a good Bohunk.

They Had Hats?

I didn't know that the tea partiers had hats, and I don't believe I've ever seen a Tea Party demonstration. I heard tell of one on the internet, I think it was shortly after Obama was elected the first time. What I heard was that a whole bunch of them went to Washington D.C. and marched around like a bunch of Hippies. I heard that the news media blanked them out, which is why people were talking about it on the internet. Estimates of their numbers varied between thousands and millions, depending on who was telling the story. I thought at the time that they had made a mistake, putting themselves in the same class as your people.

Some time after that, I read in the newspaper that they had begun to infiltrate the Republican Party, which I thought was a brilliant move. They would go to those boring meetings at the county level and pack the hall with their own people. Our labor union at the paper mill was like that. The meetings were so poorly attended that, if you could mobilize a dozen people, you could dominate the meeting and pass anything that you wanted. The trouble was that two dozen of the opposition would show up at the next meeting and repeal whatever it was you got passed at the last meeting. Maybe that's what's happening with the Republicans now, the Tea Party threat has gotten the establishment types off their asses and down to those boring meetings. While hijacking a major political party might be an overly ambitious undertaking, it beats forming a third party, which just splits the conservative vote and allows the liberals to win.

That's the trouble with the concept of majority rule, there is no majority. There's just these special interest groups that form tenuous alliances with other groups. They might get something passed, but the alliance tends to fall apart after that, and it's back to business as usual. I don't know why the U.S. is stuck in the two party system. It's not a law or anything like that, it's just a tradition. Third parties form from time to time but, as soon as they start to become a force to be reckoned with, one of the two major parties assimilates them.

There are already 19 candidates running for the Republican presidential nomination? The election isn't till next year for Pete's sake! I did hear that our RINO governor is thinking about running. Well, why not? Everybody else is.  I wouldn't vote for him in the primary but, if he gets the nomination, I would have to vote for him against Hillary.

I have heard of that Common Core thing. I'm not sure what the objection is, but I think it has something to do with them re-writing the history books to make the U.S. look like the bad guys. I thought that the liberals did that a long time ago.

If somebody really wants an abortion or a gun, they will get it regardless of what the law says about it. All the regulations do is discourage some of the people who don't really want it all that much. When abortion was illegal in Michigan, our local girls had to go Down Below to get one, and they still do. If abortions could be gotten Down Below when they were prohibited by law, I find it hard to believe that a few chicken shit regulations would make them unavailable.

Although I have never eaten at a Taco Bell, my hypothetical wife, who has, tells me that all their food isn't overly spicy. Neither of us had ever heard of tacos until, on somebody else's recommendation, we tried some back in the 1970s. We decided that they wouldn't be bad if they didn't have that hot sauce on them. My hypothetical wife took one apart and said that she thought she could make something like that  herself and just omit the hot sauce. About the only spice we use on our meat is called "Lawry's Seasoned Salt". It enhances the flavor without overpowering it. She uses a small amount of chili powder in her chili, but none of those little hot peppers that scorch you both coming and going. We like to taste the meat, not the heat.

democracy and fine cuisine

I guess I am a north sider now.  I live just four short blocks north of Madison, but most everywhere I go besides downtown is north.  There are still white folks on the south side but they live west by Midway airport and south by Beverly, and the Bridgeporters, they are still there, and actually some formerly black enclaves by 35th, and 79th by the lake are now getting a sprinkling of whites.

I think you have stumbled upon the true essence of democracy.  When you think you are getting the short end of the stick, make a public spectacle of yourselves, show everybody else that you are pissed, and also that there are a lot of you. and that you vote.  If you don't do anything and just wait for your wrongs to be redressed it probably isn't going to happen. 

And of course your people do it too.  A couple years ago you couldn't turn on your tv without seeing a bunch of tea party types in their silly hats and that flag with the cut up snake (actually that snake flag was also a favorite with us sixties types, but we didn't go for the hats.  It's not that we didn't love costumes, we certainly did, but those hats were full of dangly stuff and passing the joint around you were likely to set the hat on fire and then there goes your hair, your long beautiful hair), but those seem to have died out now.  When is the last time you saw a tea party demonstration?

I suppose that you don't need to, now that you have the republican party by the nuts, though lately I see where the moderates, the despised RINOs, are charging right back.  Nineteen republicans running for president, and don't tell me they won't be making a heap big spectacle of themselves.

I see where common core is going to be a big issue.  Common core was just meant to set up some standards so that we could see if kids were learning what they are supposed to be learning.  It's just readin, n ritin n rithmetic, and at one point most all the republicans were for it, but now, except for Jeb Bush I think, they are every man Jack and Carly Fiorina agin it.  I think somewhere along the line Obama came out in favor of it, and if he's for it, they gotta be agin it.

Here's something about regulating guns and abortions.  If you regulate clinics out of business, then you can cut down on abortions because generally young pregnant girls are pretty poor and don't have the means to travel three or five hundred miles to get an abortion.  But if you regulate gun stores out of your neighborhood, it is not a problem at all for somebody to drive to the next state and fill his trunk full of guns and bring them back and sell them.

Really, you like Subway, that soft doughy bread, those condiments made of cardboard?  Ugh.  I don't think you can call Taco Bell Mexican food, it's more like how many different dishes can you create out of flour tortillas, some shredded cheese, some meatlike stuff.  You never see anything like the stuff they sell there in a Mexican restaurant, and in fact you never, never, find a Mexican in a Taco Bell.  Having said all that, I have a soft spot for Taco Bell. I like something they call a Mexican pizza which you certainly won't find down Mexico way, and nachos, who doesn't like nachos?

I like spicy food.  It always makes me feel like I am getting more for the money.  We Bohunks like that.

Indians! Indians!

The reason I talk about the Indians so much is that they are the only formerly oppressed minority we have that now thinks they should have special privileges. You guys have your Blacks, your Hispanics, your gays, but all we've got to complain about is our Indians. Of course you North Siders love your minorities, but all the South Siders have moved out to the suburbs just to get away from theirs. 

Truth be known, our Indians haven't caused any problems for a long time. After they got their special hunting and fishing privileges and their casinos they kind of settled down. They pissed a lot of people off with that hunting and fishing thing but, decades later, our game and fish are about as abundant as they ever were, so no real harm was done. Maybe that's because there are so few of them although, at the time they were making a public spectacle of themselves, it seemed like there were a lot more of them than there really was. Maybe that's why all those minorities make public spectacles of themselves, to fool people into thinking that there are more of them than there really is. This makes the politicians sit up and take notice because, if there were more of them, then it would be in the interest of the politicians to kiss up to them and get their votes. I wonder what would happen if all the regular people got together and made a public spectacle of themselves. Could we fool the politicians into kissing up to us? I guess we'll never know, because the regular people are too busy arguing among themselves to band together in any common cause.

Funny thing, I don't remember people getting  nearly as upset about the casinos as they did about the hunting and fishing thing. There is considerable opposition to the proposed new casino by Mackinaw City, but that's just because they want to build it in a rural neighborhood and the neighbors don't want all that traffic in their own back yard. They can't build it right in town because their site plan includes a big hotel and restaurant complex. Mackinaw City is already chock full of hotels, motels, and restaurants, and their owners certainly don't want any more competition. Then there's the other Indians in St. Ignace who don't want any more competition for their own casino.

I found an interesting article on Wiki: "Gun Laws in Illinois". You should read it, you might be surprised to find out how many gun laws you already have on the books. The courts have struck a few of them down over the years, but your people turned around and passed new ones that accomplish almost the same goals. It seems that the courts have said the same thing about guns that they said about abortions back in 72, you can't totally prohibit them, but you can regulate them. The fact that Illinois regulates guns and Michigan regulates abortions suggests that guns are about as popular in Illinois as abortions are in Michigan.

I forgot to tell you about the Arby's, we have one of those too. I can't believe you don't like Subways, I thought everybody liked Subways. I never went to the Taco Bell when it was here. I don't like Mexican food, too Hispanic for my taste. I do like the Gringo chili and the Gringo tacos that my hypothetical wife makes. I think the only thing she does differently is leave out the caustic spices.

it's a free country

Well the whole point of the Illinois concealed carry thing is that the supremes cram stuff down everybody's throat, and if they don't like it too bad, that is the role the founding fathers gave the court as written in the constitution, so quit yapping about it.

Of course none of the minorities in the white Christian paradise of Cheboygan has made any trouble.  Being outnumbered a hundred to one tends to make one hold one's tongue. 

Gays in small towns generally leave them when they grow up because a bigger city will have more gays, just because it has more people and because other gays will have flocked to it, so I don't imagine you have many of them living there, and that they keep a low profile.  Moderate internet research did reveal a gay bar in Petoskey, but I don't know how big it is.

We have had quite a few gay guys in the watercolor class, and I can't say that I have seen them ever make a spectacle of themselves.  We have a whole lot of them in the city, and they generally don't make a public spectacle of themselves.  Well one day of the year they have the gay pride parade which is quite the public spectacle, but not near the spectacle, for instance of the St Paddy's day parade, or the Italians or the Filipinos or anybody else who likes to march to their music wearing their native costume.

I don't know, I don't think you'd object to the St Patrick's day parade, I don't think you'd object to the Cheboygan White Straight Christians parade, if they had one, even if they made a public spectacle of themselves.  I don't think you hate public spectacles in and of themselves, and you claim that you are fine and dandy with GBHs as long as they don't make public spectacles of themselves.

So it seems that the only thing you don't like is when GBHs make a public spectacle of themselves, which never happens in Cheboygan because there's hardly any of them, and you claim that you don't much care about what happens down south, so why are you complaining at all?

Oh that's right, because the folks down south are trying to make you marry your gay dog.  Well pucker up Buttercup, because it is going to happen.  Well not really, no gay dog, no marriage.  Whatever is between you and your hypothetical wife will be exactly the same.

I don't think whatever gays there are in Cheboygan will have a hard time at all finding people to marry them, bake their cakes, play music for the party afterwards, attend if for no other reason than the free bar, and likely make a public spectacle of themselves because what the hell it is a free country isn't it?  Well except for grim Beaglesonia which doesn't cotton to that crap, and there is Beagles himself armed with Old Betsy and scowling that righteous scowl on the frontier.

But hey wouldn't a marriage in a rye field which is just sprouting in the spring be delightful?  And here is a wad of cash so big that Old Betsy could be outfitted with a gold trigger, and wouldn't she love showing that off to the Beaglesonian family of armaments? 

It's business Baby, business.  Don't you always vote for the party of business?  Go with the flow.  Pluck a flower and plunk it into the barrel of Old Betsy, and join the march, kick up your heels, make a public spectacle of yourself.  It is a free country.

Again I don't know what your fascination with the goings on of the local indians is all about, but I don't share it.

Subway, you know abstractly you would think they would have good food.  If you look at that array of black olives and sliced peppers, and what all, you'd think you were in for a tasty sammich, but maybe its the way they have their meat wrapped up in that what is it, waxed paper, seems to leech all the flavor out of it, and that bread, that soft doughy creepy bread that they are proud of baking every day, it just sucks.  I would walk many miles from their most special sandwich for a lukewarm bean burrito from Taco Bell.

Poor Cheboygan so far from the Red Lobster, so close to socialist Canada.

I'll Take your Word For it

I looked up that concealed carry thing. I found an article about the Appeals Court ruling, but not the Supreme Court ruling. I did find one Supreme Court ruling that said the State of Maryland doesn't have to allow concealed carry, but they have to allow open carry. At that point I decided that, if I keep chasing this one around, I won't have time to write a blog tonight. I find it reasonable to assume that the Supreme Court upheld the Appeals Court ruling in the Illinois case, so let's just go with that.

We seem to be spinning our wheels on that abortion thing, so let's give that one a rest too.

I want to correct an error in what I said yesterday. The combined population of Cheboygan and Emmet counties is closer to 60,000 than it is to 40,000. I added Cheboygan (26,000) and Emmet (33,000) and came up with 39,000, which I rounded off to 40,000. I told you that math was my weak subject! Anyway, that means we have about 2400 Indians instead of 1600, which doesn't change the fact that we don't have nearly as many Indians as I thought we had. We could debate the meaning of "all kinds of people", but that won't get us anywhere either.

The point I was originally trying to make is that none of the minority groups in my neighborhood has caused any trouble lately, and nobody has caused any trouble for them either. I seem to remember we were originally talking about gays. I'm sure we have some gays here, but they don't go around making a public spectacle of themselves like they do in some places, so nobody bothers them either. I don't know what will happen if that gay marriage thing passes. I suspect that some of our gays will get married, but they might have a hard time finding anyone to perform the ceremony. Then again, all they need is one guy who is willing to do it, and lots of people are authorized to perform marriages. There's the judges, who might be required by law to marry gays, although I haven't heard that was part of the proposal, just that county clerks couldn't deny them a license. My daughter and her ex were married by an old friend who had recently gotten one of those mail order divinity degrees. He's a nice guy, but kind of a loose cannon so, if he can do it, I suppose anybody can do it.

Anyway, back to the Indians. There are at least two tribal organizations that I know of in the area. One is near St. Ignace, which is actually in Mackinaw County, just across the Bridge. They operate a casino on reservation land, but you don't have to live on the reservation to be a member of the tribe. I think most of our Cheboygan Indians are enrolled in that one. I believe that the casino is owned collectively by the tribe. I'm not sure what they do with the profits, but I think they disperse them around the tribe in some manner. If they don't pass them out as dividends, then they must use them for public works projects on the reservation. I know those guys have their own police force because, whenever a DNR officer encounters a tribal member, he can't give them a ticket. The tribes have their own hunting and fishing regulations and, if the officer suspects the subject has broken one of those, he calls in the tribal police. Apparently the jurisdiction of the tribal police is not limited to the reservation, just to tribal members, wherever they may be.

The other tribal organization that I know of is The Little Traverse Band, in the Petoskey area. I don't know if they have any reservation land, but they did buy a former bowling alley and turn it into a casino. What they do is give the land to the federal government "in trust", and it becomes kind of like a reservation, no matter how small it is. These guys were opposed in their effort to open the casino by the guys from St. Ignace, their principal objection being that it would compete with their own casino. I don't know who made the final decision, but the Little Traverse guys prevailed and the casino finally was opened. Now they want to build another one near Mackinaw City, which is on our side of the Bridge, about halfway between the two existing casinos. This time they are being opposed by some White guys as well as the other Indians, and they have been arguing about it for years.

We used to have a Taco Bell, but it closed down some years ago. We have a MacDonald's, A Burger King, a Big Boy, and two Subways, but no Red Lobster. I really wish we had a Red Lobster, I think the nearest one is in Traverse City, over a hundred miles away.

pour me another cup

I do drink coffee in the morning.  It does get me perky, but I am perky without it too, in the morning.  Time was I would close the bar every night, which wasn't so bad because the bars closed at one, but then I would sit in my kitchen and drink beer and type out stories, that never amounted to much, for a couple more hours and sleep till shortly before noon.  Anymore I am a five to nine guy.

I never said YOU wrote the law to be misleading.  I never said you wrote the law at all, and I didn't say you passed it.  The people you voted in wrote it, and it is a little disturbing that you, a bulwark of democracy, the informed voter, were not aware of their intentions.  But it is no big deal since had you been informed you would have driven to the polls to cast your vote a little faster, there would have been a bigger spring in your step when you left the polling place.

I don't remember how it started, I think you said that no abortion clinics had been shut down in Michigan, maybe you said there were none in Greater Cheboygan, but that is like an area of 40,000 people.  I would be surprised to learn that you had a Taco Bell.

Anyway I merely wanted to point out that abortion clinics in Michigan had indeed been closed down, and while I was at it I decried the way the guys that did it pretended they were doing it only for the safety of the clinic clients.  Oh both sides do it all the time, note how I included my own people with that war on women thing, but I wanted to decry this self-serving bullshit because I am, as a Beaglesonian Institute Fellow, a champion of the shining sword of truth.

And I include in that what I think is a little dishonesty on your part in claiming that you are not a Republican when in all ways you behave like one. 

I expect that if you pick any little hamlet anywhere in the world, you would find that it has all kinds of people, short people, tall people, fat people, skinny people, rich people, poor people, good people, bad people, in that sense every little town has all kinds of people.  But in general, what people in the rest of the country mean when they speak of all kinds of people is not a community that is over 90 percent white and Christian.

I don't understand your fascination is with Indians and Frenchmen.  The census takes people at their word, the tribal chiefs surely only allow a certain few to share the profits of the casino.  If a guy can get a break calling himself an Indian, he will call himself an Indian.  When he doesn't get that break anymore, he well may become a Frenchman because chicks will think he knows all about fine wines and he might get luckier.  But you know all this.

You will have to take my word for what happened in Illinois because it appears that you are loath to look it up yourself.  Let me help you out.  'Supreme Court Illinois Concealed Carry'  Copy it and then paste it into that little google window.

And the whole point of that was I was getting tired of hearing you whine about how the supreme court had rammed things down your throat, like you were some kind of victim of unfair assault, when in fact it happens to everybody on the other side when the Supreme Court rules, of which Illinois and concealed carry is an example.  It is the duty of the Supreme Court, as proscribed by those saintly founding fathers who wrote up that sacred document The Constitution, to rule regardless of what the majority in some state want.

And furthermore, as I pointed out in the last letter, you only think the supreme court is being high handed when it rules against you.  When it is on your side you think it is fine and dandy.

Now I think I shall have another cup of joe.

PS.  When my spellcheck comes across Beaglesonian it thinks I want to say Beatlemania.  Geez.

Too Much Coffee......By Half

Actually, I don't even know if you drink coffee but, if you do, it sounds like you drank way too much of it this morning. Be that as it may, I might not have made this as clear as I could have, so I'll try again.

I had not heard of that abortion law they passed back in 2012 until you told me about it, or at least I don't remember hearing of it. From reading the link you provided, I got the impression that it was just another regulatory thing. Of course the article only summarized the law and, if I had taken the trouble to look it up and read the whole law, I might have gotten a different impression. If, as you said, the real purpose of the law was to shut down abortion clinics, I said "Good for them!" Then you seemed to imply that I deliberately wrote the law to be misleading about it's real purpose. Then I said that I didn't pass the law, they did. Even though I was not directly responsible for the passage of the law, I did indeed vote for the people who were. I have said before that our RINO governor isn't perfect, but at least he's not a Democrat, or words to that effect. If I had known that he had signed a law like that, I would have thought more highly of him, and maybe not held my nose so tightly as I voted to re-elect him to a second term. If this law had been advanced as a ballot proposal, I probably would have voted for it. I say "probably" because ballot proposals are not always what they seem to be, and I would have studied the matter more closely if I had the responsibility of voting on it.

  I got to thinking today about that Indian thing. I remember being surprised to find out that only 6% of Michigan residents are hunters, it seems like there should be more than that. When you think about it, though, 6% of Michigan's population is at least a million people. That's a lot of people, but it's still only 6% of the population. Okay, the combined population of Cheboygan and Emmet Counties is about 40,000. If only 4% of them are Indians, that's about 1600 Indians, which is a lot of Indians, even if it's only 4% of the population. Maybe it's not a lot to a city boy like yourself but, in a town this size, if 1600 Indians came marching down Main Street all at once, people would sit up and take notice. I still might call the nearest tribal headquarters and ask them how many enrolled members they have in our two counties but, for now, I will grant you that we don't have nearly as many Indians as I thought we have. I don't know how we got into this numbers game anyway. My original assertion was that we have all kinds of people, not how many we have of each kind.

I don't know what happened in Illinois with the concealed carry issue, but I believe most states have had some kind of concealed carry law on the books for a long time. What happened in Michigan and, I believe, most of the other states, was that they changed the wording from "may issue" to "shall issue". What this means is that, before, you had to have a good reason to get a concealed carry permit, and now they have to have a good reason to deny you one. To my knowledge, this was all done by state legislation. I have not heard of the U.S. Supreme court being involved in it. They were involved, some years ago, in a case where Washington D.C. wouldn't allow a retired security guard to keep a handgun in his own home. That's when they said the Second Amendment applied to individual gun ownership and not just the state militia, reversing a previous court decision from a long time ago.
I'll have to look this up one of these days, when I get time.

too clever by half

Of course I am more of democrat than you are a republican, but still these protestations that you are not really a republican, you just happen to vote for them in every election, is awfully coy, a little too cute by half (whatever that means, when did 'by half' become a qualifier, and what exactly does it mean, but it has a nice ring, and I know I will be the one to look it up because Beagles is mowing hay or going fishing).  You vote for them every election, you vote in the primaries to choose its candidates, you have ideas on where the party should go, you identify strongly with their most prominent faction, you accuse others of being RINOs.  So what did old Tail Gunner Joe so when he was accusing people of being commies, if it walks like a duck etc.

So what should we call you Republican In Actions Not Name (RIANN), Republicans For All Practical Purposes Who Pretend That They Are Something Else (RFAPPWPTTASE)?  You know maybe a third of the republicans are like you, fuzzy headed libertarians who espouse some pipe dream libertarianism, and are only voting republican until, I don't know, the saucer people come and build your libertarian paradise, and the other third are holy rollers who are only voting republican until the second coming, and the other third are fat cats who actually run the party and dupe the other two thirds with lip service while enacting the only true purpose of the party which is tax cuts for the rich and no regulations that might interfere with their businesses reaping huge profits.

You say you didn't pass the law, the abortion clinic regulations law, but you voted in the guys who enacted it, and surely, as an informed voter, the bulwark of our democracy, you explored the issues before casting your vote.

I expect you were just fine with the Defense of Marriage Act, and I expect you would be just as fine if the supremes decided that gay marriage was illegal throughout the country (you said earlier that it defiled your own marriage), and if the court had ruled that abortion was illegal everywhere, and you have no problem with us Illinoisans being forced to tolerate concealed carry even if most of us don't want it.  You pretend it is the means that bother you, but actually it is the actions that you are concerned with.

Well Hill is out now.  I'm glad she is no longer pretending like she just can't decide, that was way too clever by half for me.  I did look it up.  Whenever things like that come up, I think maybe I won't bother, or maybe I'll wait till the afternoon or evening when I am lolling about and don't have paper to be converted into masterpieces to deal with, but it burns inside me and I always end up looking it up before I finish the paragraph, and in this case, even after reading like five or six entries, which is pretty deep internet research for me, I really couldn't find a definition or origin which was clear to me.  

I think that 'too clever by half' means 'too clever,' or maybe more clearly 'way too clever.'   It has something to do with the way the British, and the whole point of this is that it sounds British and therefore intelligent isn't it, use the word half, where by half means something like 150 percent, something to do one assumes with spooning sugar into their tea. 

Actually it is kind of Clintonian, not the half thing, but the way they have with parsing words just a bit too cleverly (What 'is' is), so that everything they say it sounds like they are lying, which is probably true most of the time anyway.

See, Hill is a dem, and most likely the candidate of the party, and I find her pretty shabby, and yet I don't act like I'm too good for her, like she is some clown the dems will give the nomination to, and I don't have anything to do with that because I live in my urban tower and have these pure liberal/socialist ideals that are too sensitive for the fingers of grubby pols, and I will probably vote for her, but only because she will be running against some yahoo like Rubio, not that I, high-bowed visionary that I am, am actually a DEMOCRAT. 

I don't claim that because I am not too clever by half.

I was going to segue into what Juan Pierre had to say about her, and then into how nutso you gun nuts are (not that you are a gun nut, you just vote like one), but I think maybe I will give partisanism a rest for the morn, and work on my latest masterpiece.

The Same Only different

"If you believe abortion is murder, then by all means you should fight it.  We all should do what we think is right, right?  But in this case it would behoove you to admit that you are making up all these clinic safety rules to fight abortion, and not that you are concerned that people entering the facility might trip over the welcome mat."

First of all, I didn't pass this law. I never even heard about it until you told me. It's possible that, when you say "you", you mean it in the plural sense, as in "youse guys", in which case it's still wrong. I am not presently a card carrying member of any political party. I vote Republican because I disagree with their agenda less than I disagree with the Democrat's agenda. I had no part in setting either of these agendas, I just pick the one I dislike least and vote for the guys who at least pretend to support it. I also had not heard of any abortion clinics closing until you told me. I don't follow the news nearly as closely as you do, so I can't possible know about everything that is featured in it. One reason I like talking to you is that you do indeed know more about some subjects than I do. I am interested in your perspective on things because most of the people I know don't have one. I'm not complaining, I chose this life style and I'm basically happy with it, but it's nice to hear something from the outside world once in awhile. Of course we disagree a lot, but what fun is it talking to someone who agrees with everything you say? You might as well talk to yourself, which I still do, but not nearly as much as I used to before we started communicating.

The reason I brought this abortion thing up was because I noticed a similarity between the way it was passed and the way they are passing this gay marriage thing. Some states had already legalized it, some states had not, and some states had decidedly voted against it. Right in the middle of this, along comes the court and mandates that all the states have to allow it whether they want to or not. You keep referring to these court decisions as "the law of the land". Well, when I went to school, the courts weren't supposed to initiate legislation. The can interpret the law, they can overturn a law if it conflicts with the constitution, but they aren't supposed to make new laws out of nothing like the Federal Reserve makes money out of nothing. The "right" to abortion did not exist on the federal level until the Supreme Court created it. There was reference to "the right of privacy", which is kind of in the constitution, although not in those exact words. The constitution also mentions the "right to life", stating that no one can be deprived of it "without due process of law". The court weaseled around this by declaring than an unborn baby is not alive, which is kind of true in a medical sense. A doctor would say that an unborn fetus is "viable", which means that it has the potential of life, but is not technically alive at the present time. Be that as it may, the Supreme court is not the last word on any law. If they overturn a law, all the legislature has to do is pass another law with slightly different wording, and the process starts all over again. A controversial issue like abortion may never be finally resolved to the point where nobody is interested in pursuing it any further.

The gay marriage issue is the same only different. What's different about it is that all the states have traditionally recognized the marriages performed in another state, even if the other state had different laws about marriage than they did. There is something in the constitution which seems to require them to do this, but it has a loophole or two in it, which is probably why the proponents of gay marriage have not used it as their primary argument. The idea that two people of the same gender could marry each other is a fairly recent development that the Founding Fathers could not reasonably have anticipated, therefore the court will be breaking new ground here. Like the abortion issue, though, some states have already signed on to this and some have not, so it may be that the only place to resolve this is at the federal level. Whatever the feds do, it's not likely that everybody will be pleased with it, so this thing might go on and on forever. Too bad we won't be around to see what twists and turns the issue will take over the next century or so. It took fourscore and seven years to abolish slavery, and another hundred years to fully emancipate the former slaves, and some people still aren't happy with the way that one came out.