Divided We Stand, United We Fall

I read once that Hitler hated the Commies as much as he hated the Jews. He was disgusted with the way Germany lost World War I, believing that the troops would have won on the battlefield if the politicians had allowed them to. He believed that Germany had been sold out by her own Commies and Jews, both of whom had considerable influence in German politics at the time. Like most stories, there was probably some truth to this one, but Hitler got carried away and became convinced that it was the only reason Germany lost the war. As Hitler rose to power, he offered National Socialism as an alternative to International Socialism, which is what Russia was supposed to be about at the time. He promised to nationalize German industry, but changed his mind later and allowed the non-Jewish German capitalists to retain ownership of their factories, provided that they ran them exactly the way he told them to. The German National Socialists considered this to be a sell out and tried to withdraw their support of Hitler, but it was too late because he was firmly entrenched by then and no longer needed their help. Russia was undoubtedly on Hitler's hit list from day one, but most historians agree that he acted prematurely in launching an invasion against them. He either should have waited until he got his Western Front secure or took on Russia first, before the West suspected the full extent of his ambitions.

Breaking Iraq up into three countries might be a good idea, provided that it could be done without a lot of gerrymandering. I don't know how the demographics are laid out there, but if it's going to look anything like the map of Israel when they get done, it will likely cause more problems than it solves. That's also why it would be hard to break up the United States. They missed their chance when it was just the North against the South. By now it has become such a pitch-patch of ethnic and cultural enclaves that you wouldn't know where to begin carving out a contiguous homeland for each group.

I still like the idea of an all Black militia patrolling the Black neighborhoods. I knew a guy in West Chicago once. (Not the West Side of Chicago, the city of West Chicago which, as its name implies, is situated to the west of the City of Chicago.) This guy I knew told me that they had been having a lot of trouble with Mexicans committing crimes. (The name "Hispanic" had not been invented yet.) When they appointed a particularly large Mexican as Chief of Police, the Mexican crime rate went way down.

"Fusil" is an old fashioned name for a musket, not a rifle. The difference between a musket and a rifle is that a musket has a smooth bore and a rifle has a rifled bore. This was back in the days when they both were muzzle loaders. A modern smooth bore gun is called a "shotgun", but a modern rifle is still called a "rifle". Without looking it up, I'm pretty sure that muskets were invented before rifles. While a rifle is more accurate, a musket or shotgun is more versatile because it can be loaded with either a single bullet or multiple smaller pellets called "shot". Shotguns are rarely used in modern military tactics, but soldiers in the muzzle loading days commonly carried muskets instead of rifles. When they lined up side by side and all fired their fusils at the same time, it was called a "fusillade". This can be devastating to an enemy that is attacking in a close formation, but is much less effective when the targets are spread out all over the place. In that case, you would be better off using carefully aimed rifle shots.

three countries in one

None of the leaders of the western world liked Russia after its revolution.  When Hitler rose in Germany his men were always fighting street battles with the commies, and he was always trash talking them, and the western guys weren't all that worried about his military buildup because they thought he would be fighting Russia, and nothing could make them happier than seeing those two countries at war with each other.

So it was a big shocker when he signed that agreement with Russia.  Communist parties in the United States and Europe lost a lot of their members.  Nobody knows for sure why Stalin signed.  Some think he was playing for time.  Maybe he hoped Germany would exhaust itself fighting Europe and then Russia would stand preeminent on the continent. 

I remember when I was a little kid and the men would withdraw from the women after the holiday meal and smoke their pipes and cigars, the talk would be of the recently fought war, and it was always agreed that Hitler's downfall was invading Russia.  It's the opinion also of books I've read since then.  Well all the generals told Hitler not to try to occupy the Rhine, or to swallow our homeland, but he went ahead and did it anyway and got away with it, so I guess he thought he could get away with anything, so that when his generals advised against invading Russia he brushed them aside.

I think all countries think that they are the center of the universe regardless of whether or not they have Beaglesonian climates.  China famously thought it was too good to soil its robes dealing with other countries.  Americans are famous for not being able to locate France on a map. 

What's a Fusileer?  Is that a fancy old timey word for rifleman?

I don't think we want to take a page out  of Iraq's book, they are not very successful if you hadn't noticed.  It was talked about towards the beginning of the kerfuffle, and now is being brought up again, that maybe instead of Iraq it should become Sunnilandia, and Shitelandia, and Kurdlandia.  The US has been against this because it would make it look like our 'intervention' had been unsuccessful and we had broken Iraq.  But what the hell?  See if we just get out at first it will look like the great sunni/shite war, which they have been itching for, is about to begin.  But it won't be long before they start turning on each other and having these balance of power treaties, and they'll have some kind of uneasy peace.  Or maybe they will have the great war they have been dreaming about.  In either case our boys will be at home with the only thing to worry about being if they get KP, and we will have lots more money in the treasury.

I used to try not to have usual suspects when I was subbing, because in high school I was generally the usual suspect.  I used to get quite irate when I was accused of something I didn't do, but then there were so many times I got away with something that I guess it all evens out, though I didn't feel that way at the time.

Once when I was sitting in a bar in Austin Texas with one of my Champaign buddies and his Texas wife, the three of us struck up a conversation with a girl from Pittsburgh.  Afterward me and him commented on what a thick accent she had, and his wife commented that she thought she didn't sound that much different than us.  My family lived briefly in Chattanooga, and all the neighbor ladies loved to talk with my mother because they loved to hear her accent.

The Illusion of Central Position

I read somewhere that, in the Russian history books, World War II isn't called "World War II", it's called "The Great Patriotic War". I suppose, from their perspective, it was all about Germany versus Russia, with all the other players operating on the fringes. In the beginning, Germany and Russia were kind of allies. They had something called a "non- aggression treaty", until Germany double crossed Russia, driving the Russians over to our side. I suppose the Russians didn't think of themselves as being on our side, they thought of us being on their side. Funny how living in a bleak northern climate can make somebody think that they are the center of the universe, or so I have been told. Those Sunnis and Shiites live in the desert, so what's their excuse? I understand that the desert can get pretty cold at night, but that's not the same as putting up with a long winter. All you need to do is grab a blanket and huddle up with your camel for a few hours, then the sun comes up and it's summer again.

I was going to ask you what a bunch of Sunnis are doing in the Iraqi Army if the Iraqi government is being run by a bunch of Shiites, but then I remembered my old buddies in the Royal Inniskilling Fusileers. The were all Irish Catholics, but they were in the British Army. I asked them about that, and they explained that the Irish Army was small and didn't have troops stationed all over the world like the British army did. If you wanted to travel and see exotic places, you joined the British Army. Besides, the British Army paid better. Since then, I found out that Inniskilling is actually in Northern Ireland, which is technically part of the U.K. I wonder why none of the Fusilleers  mentioned that at the time. They did tell me that, if I ever came to visit them in their home town, I should tell everybody that I'm an Atheist rather than a Protestant, which is what I really was, I suppose because it would be easier to fake being an Atheist than to fake being a Catholic.

So anyway, Iraq has both a Sunni army and a Shiite militia. Maybe our own cities should take a page out of the Iraqis' book. They could organize a Black militia to patrol the Black neighborhoods, keeping the White cops in reserve to bail them out if they get into trouble. You think?

You're probably right about how each generation of kids comes along and disrupts the social order. I remember seeing a kid on my school bus wearing a t-shirt that said, "Yes, as a matter of fact I do believe that the world revolves around me." He was an annoying kid anyway, one of my "usual suspects".

My hypothetical wife once called a catalogue company to straighten out some kind of mistake that had been made on her order. She said that she had a hard time understanding the lady because of her accent, which sounded Black, or maybe Southern. At one point the lady asked my hypothetical wife to repeat what she had just said, claiming that she was having a hard time understanding her accent. What accent? Michigan people don't have an accent! Do they?

the enemy of my enemies

War has a way of bringing people together.  Everybody has a common enemy.  As the Arabs like to say "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."   Of course that is just a temporary situation.  Once the war is won or lost and the enemy is no longer an enemy, the enemy of my enemy reverts to being my enemy.  We loved those charming Russkies with their beards and booze during the war and they us, but afterwards not so much.

One of the reasons, but not the only one, that things keep changing is those damn youth.  They come into the world and they reach their teens and they've only been around say ten years, because you can't count those early years when you are a baby or a toddler, and then you realize that everybody else around has been around twenty, thirty, forty, and so on more years than you, and knows a lot more than you do just because they have been around, and if they have been good citizens they have been reading newspapers.

So you take a liking to BB King, but then if you try to talk about him to some old guy, and the old guy already knows about  BB King, already knows about the blues, already knows all this shit, and if I know old guys, and I guess I do, blabs on and on about it deep into the night, while you sit there twiddling your thumbs because all you know is that song.  Well shit.

So you go out and invent hip hop, something totally new, just as new as you, and so you know just as much as any old guy would know about it.  More, because it's crappy music and nobody but some dumb kid would listen to it.  See, when old guys say something like that, you know your path is true.

Well here's something, of course everybody loves the music of their youth because it reminds them of their youth.  You might feel a little different because you are a folksinger guy, but most of us sixties types hated the music of our parents and 'invented' rock and roll.  And it's big.  it's been going on like sixty years now, and kids listen to it.  You still see young kids going to like Beatles tribute bands.  Of course they have also invented that horrible hip hop crap, but I wonder how long that will last.  While our children and our grandchildren still love rock and roll, will the children of the hip hoppers love hip hop?  Personally I doubt it because it's crappy music, but I suppose time will tell.


Those Iraqi soldiers who threw down their arms are sunnis and they hate their shite government which does not treat them well, and they probably don't hate ISIS as much as we do because ISIS are fellow sunnis. and thus are the enemies of their enemies.  The only reason they are fighting is because we are paying their government to fight, and likely their officers are stealing the money so these guys are not so well trained and well armed.  The shite militias have been more than willing to fight ISIS and do much better than the sunnis, but afterwards they tend to fuck with the local civilians who are sunnis. 

And in Syria and Yemen it is even more complicated.  We are fighting a war of lines drawn on quicksand, and the sooner the last American leaves, the better.


A man's grasp should always be beyond his reach.  Else how is he going to eat an Italian beef sandwich.

Then Again, Maybe Not

Well, I said that I couldn't prove any of that stuff, it's just the way it looked to me. Another way to look at it might be that everybody put their differences on hold for the duration of the war and, once the world was made safe for democracy, it was back to business as usual. Nostalgia for the good old days is a common trait of human nature. Truth be known, if the good old days were really so good, people wouldn't have abandoned them for the promise of something better. Another thing is that many things look better when they're new but, when people get tired of them, or disappointed about the way they turned out, they long for the days of yore when life was simpler. Maybe the reason life was simpler back then is that we were simpler back then.

I don't know why they use Roman numerals to designate World War I and World War II. For that matter, I don't know why they use Roman numerals for anything. I suppose it's just tradition. I do remember that there was supposed to be a World War III, but it never materialized. What we got instead was a series of indecisive conflicts that just go on and on and never accomplish anything. All that money wasted on nuclear weapons and fallout shelters! I saw on the TV news that ISIS recently took another city in Iraq. The Iraqi regulars threw down their weapons and ran away again too, even though they had the bad guys out numbered. What's wrong with those people?

I don't remember fighting with my sister over drinking glasses, except maybe about whose turn it was to wash them. Those glasses were a matched set, probably a gift from somebody. I think a nebbish is something like a ghost. The nebbishes in the cartoons were simple line drawings that were blank in the middle, like they were hollow or something. There was probably some symbolic significance to that because they made fun of various aspects of  contemporary society, like the song about the little boxes made of ticky-tacky. I seem to remember there was a lot of that going around in those days, made you want to turn your back on civilization and go off to Alaska or someplace like that.

I suppose you could say that Beaglesonia is as much a part of the Establishment as anyplace else. If somebody was bothering me there, I would call the cops and expect them to be on my side. I pay my taxes and stuff like that, so the concept of Beaglesonia being a sovereign nation is pretty much a fantasy. Still, it's not such a bad fantasy to have. Like some famous guy said, "Man's reach must always be beyond his grasp. Else what's a Heaven for?"

Beaglesonia: Freehold or Fortress of the Establishment?

I think I do remember the nebishes, didn't they have long rubbery bodies?  Did each family member have their own glass?  Was this something you could fight with your sister over?

Well of course the poor are not organized like the rich and the powerful and your mysterious establishment (your heavenly host one, not my drunken Greeks one),  they can't travel to conferences in fancy Caribbean islands.

During World War II (Why are the world wars always I or II, and never 1 or 2?  One day when I was subbing a regular teacher asked a student to name three wars.  He cogitated a bit and came out with World War One.  Good enough.  Encouraged, he thought he'd push it a bit and ventured World War Two.  Again Fine.  Well hells bells this was going to be easy, World War Three he asserted confidently.  From now on it's world wars 1 and 2 for me.), black soldiers were only allowed in segregated regiments, and if they had to travel through the south to get to the various forts it would be in the back of the bus and forget about a dinner in a nice restaurant. The federal government who you claim wanted us all to be in this together didn't say boo.

I guess when you speak about wedge issues you mean the civil rights movement, which I think would hard to ascribe to your holy host establishment, easier to ascribe to my warring Greeks establishment, but maybe it could be ascribed to black people who were tired of riding in the back of the bus, and idealistic white people who were raised learning in their churches and schools that all men were created equal, and that they should be treated that way.  Is that so hard to believe?  Is it easier to  believe in this murky establishment that holds all power over everything and can never be understood.  Have you ever heard of Occam's razor?

I don't know where the civil rights movement went beyond equality.  I assume you are speaking of quotas, but if 10 percent of the people in the town are black shouldn't ten percent of the employees be black?  Enforcing that might involve some injustices among some white people who wouldn't get hired, but don't those injustices fade in the face of the mill never hiring any black people?

Well here I am arguing quotas, and this is a long and involved argument.  I am just meaning to say, that the civil rights movement never went beyond asking for equality.  But how would you know that since you claim that the HH (Holy Host) establishment can encourage perceptions.

I thought I was the determinist on this bus, and that you were the free-willer, but now you seem to be claiming that the establishment is behind everything that happens (or maybe just things that you don't like) and has the power to cloud men's minds and is an irresistible force.  Does it not follow then that you and your tea party ilk are the minions of the HH, and that even the freehold of Beaglesonia is a piece of the HH puzzle.

Crossing the Rubicon

When we were kids, our family had a matched set of drinking glasses with different cartoons on them. They were famous cartoons, drawn by some famous guy whose name I don't remember, but I think the series was called "The Nebishes". Anyway, one of those drawings was a picture of two guys sitting opposite each other with a table between them. Both guys were leaned back in their chairs, staring at the ceiling, with their feet on the table, which was piled high with a mess of papers and stuff. The caption said, "Next week we've got to get organized." 

I think that may be why poor people have such a hard time of it, they're just not organized. There are Black organizations, Hispanic organizations, Indian organizations, and lots of different White organizations, but there is no big umbrella organization that includes all the poor people together. Although I'm kind of a loner myself, I do believe there is value in bringing people together for a common purpose, as long as they're all in it for the same reason. For an organization to be effective, it needs to have a common agenda that is supported by all it's members. They can have their own private agendas too, as long as everybody agrees that the common agenda takes priority.

During World War II, it was government policy to encourage people to forget their differences and think of themselves as all Americans. After the war, this policy seemed to gradually morph into something different. It seemed like they were trying to drive wedges between the various ethnic groups and turn them against each other. I suspect that they did this on purpose, but I can't prove it. Nobody can argue that these groups hadn't been persecuted and marginalized in the past, and that it wasn't high time to make them all equal under the law, but then it seemed like they went beyond equal. Maybe they didn't really go beyond equal, but it looked like that to a lot of people, and I think the Establishment encouraged that perception.

During the times of the Roman Republic, it was customary for armies returning from a campaign to disband before entering the city. The traditional disbanding ground was on the other side of the Rubicon River. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army intact, it made some people so nervous that they launched a plot to assassinate him. "Crossing the Rubicon" has since come to mean "passing the point of no return" but, in its original context, it meant staying organized when it was no longer necessary to do so, making some people nervous in the process. Well, I think that the Establishment didn't want people crossing the Rubicon after the war. They had done such a good job of getting people to pull together together that they were worried about what people might do next if they ever realized the power that such an effective organization can exert, so they took another idea from Julius Caesar: "Divide and Conquer".

satan and the russkies and the chicoms and Ho Chi Minh cutting a rug on the head of a pin.

I have to admit I did not understand that biblical quote myself.  Well maybe I understood the house divided part, but the divided against itself as opposed to merely divided is a little iffy, and Satan divided against Satan?  Truth be known, and as I'm sure your ilk has long suspected about my ilk, I rather like Satan, well in movies anyway.  He is always so cosmopolitan and witty, while the old priest, just a day from retirement is always so kindly and boring.  It's not even close.

I lost you again in the second paragraph where you took up it seems, with some kind of discourse as to how many satans could dance on the head of a pin like some scholastic monk.  Could more satans than angels dance on the head of a pin?  I don't know, but I am sure they would be the better dancers because they would have the better music.

But I agree with you on those pithy sayings.  If you look at them once they gleam with truth and relevance and brevity, but if you examine them more closely they are like onto a crumbled up gum wrapper.

I suppose we could learn something about those Indians sticking together through the lean years and relying on themselves and all, but probably the most important thing we could take away is to hire a sharp lawyer.

Interesting about how those countries got along.  The Russkies did help the Chicoms in the early days, but I don't think the Chinese ever really liked the Russkies.  I think there is something in Marxism where it is not just a country thing, it is a worldwide movement, and I think during the Russian revolution there was a point where one side (Trotsky) wanted worldwide and the other side (Stalin) wanted to look out for Mother Russia.

But they sort of soft-pedaled it, I don't remember either side making any bold declarations.  I can see where someone might have thought they were all in it together.  The thing that always strikes me is that one of the first things the newly minted commie country of Vietnam did was go to war with Chicoms.

A House Divided

Contrary to popular belief, Abraham Lincoln did not originate that old saying, he was actually quoting Jesus out of context. Jesus had been accused of being in league with the Devil because He had demonstrated the ability to cast out demons. His response was, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. Can Satan be divided against Satan?"

Back in the day, neither I nor my ilk believed in the Russia-China split. We believed that all those Commies were in it together, and that they couldn't be divided against each other any more than Satan could be divided against Satan. History seems to have proven us wrong on that, but we sincerely believed it at the time. Truth be known, the only reason Satan can't be divided against Satan is that there is only one Satan, and he can't be divided against himself. Whenever there are two or more individuals involved, they certainly can be divided against each other, but that doesn't necessarily mean that either one of them is on our side. Come to think of it, Satan could be divided against one or more of his demons without being divided against himself, and two or more of his demons could be divided against each other, with or without being divided against Satan. That's the trouble with those wise old sayings, if you think about them too much they turn out to be not so wise as you originally thought they were. While I may no longer believe that the Establishment is all in it together, I'm still pretty sure that they are all in it against us. Well, maybe not against all of us, but certainly against me. Well, maybe not so much against me as not for me.

I still think we could learn something from those Indians. They kept their tribes together all those years when they had no legal reason to do so. When the law changed in their favor, they were well positioned to take advantage of it because they already had their cooperative structures in place. I'm sure that they don't all agree with each other all of the time, but they seem to know how to pull themselves together when it's in everybody's best interest to do so. Right now the federal government is more or less on their side, but it has not always been so. Maybe all those years of dealing with the White Man's forked tongue taught them how to roll with the punches, stick together, and rely on themselves rather than expecting somebody else to take care of them.

The establishment, holy host or drunken greeks

Wasted about half an hour this morning trying to figure out how to make that font darker.  Why the fuck would they make the font grey when they could have just as easily made it  black?  A lot of the trouble in this world of ours is caused by people making something less clear and simple than it should be, in favor of making it more obscure just because somebody (probably the boss's son in law) thinks it would look cooler that way. 

All I could figure out in my half hour search was that it probably can be fixed, but it won't be easy.  And you know those computer things, sometimes you can spend all day on it and get nothing accomplished, that is if you are lucky, most likely you will just make everything worse.  I am done fooling with it for the moment.


I didn't know that thing about the Indians came to be running casinos, and I assume it is the same thing that allows them to peddle cigarettes without all that state tax on them, maybe booze too? 

But they can't peddle pot because the federal law is against it, even when the state law is for it.  I was thinking about that because on this week's trip me and a couple friends visited a pot dispensary in Colorado.  What an experience.  Normally you have to skulk about to  get your pot but here we just asked the concierge about where is the nearest dispensary, and she called on one of the younger employees who had all the information, but said this is just what she heard, she had never been there herself, which nobody believed.

So let's see, you have to present an ID, and you have to be older than 18 or 21, and that's enough to get you into the inner room where dope flowers (all anybody smokes anymore is the flowers) are displayed in cases with a little tag which indicates their THC content, and some information about their healing properties which I don't think anybody reads, and you pick your dope and they wrap it up and you pay them.  Technically you can only smoke it yourself, and only at home, but as long as you sneak around a bit and aren't too bold nobody minds.  What a world we live in.


I've heard that story about Nixon opening up to China because no liberal could have gotten away with it, but I don't think there was any establishment guiding his hand, I think he was doing it as a personal coup.  Actually I think we would probably have done it at any time, except maybe not when a democrat was in power, as you pointed out.  And the whole point was not so much that the Chinese were now our pals, but both of us wanted to stick it to the Russkies.  I don't remember that there was much of a fuss about it at the time.  Maybe on the far right.  Do you remember a kerfuffle on the part of your ilk at the time.

I think both parties are equally warlike.  The Republicans are more vocal than the dems (witness how currently they are all calling for stronger action against ISIS, but when asked specifically about boots on the ground they begin to mumble).  After Vietnam it took about thirty years for us to catch war fever again, and it will probably take thirty or more years for us to get it back again, and right now almost nobody wants boots on the ground.  I wonder how Rand Paul's dovish stance will help him in the primaries.  I say that if he does gain traction with that, you will see some of the other republican candidates changing their tune.

We've talked about the establishment before.  I think our differing opinions on that are that you see them as some kind of secret council that meets and makes decisions that they all follow, whereas I see them as kind of an unruly mob fighting each other for whatever they want at the time.  Perhaps we could compare your establishment to God and his angels, and mine would be more like the Greek gods who we were always fooling around with each other, and dragging us mortals into their fight.

Perhaps I quibble, but I don't think Chicago deserves the murder capital name.  Overall, because our per capita rate is higher than New York of LA we probably have the highest total, but per capita I think we are about tenth in nation.

Counting Indians

I have given up trying to count the Indians in Cheboygan and Emmet counties. The Sault tribe has not responded to my written request for information, but I was able to find out some more about them on the internet. They have over 40,000 members, with about half of them living in the Upper Peninsula. The rest of them seem to be scattered all around the country. There are five counties in the U.P. that are more than 4% Native American: Mackinaw, which is right across the Bridge from us, has 17.3%, Chippewa has 15.8%, Schoolcraft has 8.8%, Luce has 5.0%, and Alger has 4.1%. The rest of the U.P counties, as well as the seven L.P counties that I looked up, each have less than 4%. I'm not sure why our local Indians seem to exert influence out of proportion to their numbers. It may be just a perception thing on my part, similar to the concern I have previously expressed about other minority groups "taking over" the country. Of course they are not really taking over, it just seems that way to my paranoid mind.

The Treaty of 1855 dissolved the tribes as legal entities, but many tribes stayed together on a social basis until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 provided a means for them to regain their legal status as semi-sovereign nations. This act was controversial when it was passed and has survived several court challenges over the years. I'm not sure why, but it has been difficult for many tribes to acquire the necessary federal recognition. The Sault tribe got theirs in 1972, and the two Traverse Bay tribes got theirs in the 1980s, after having several previous applications denied.

Indian Reservations aren't what they used to be. Prior to 1934, there were sporadic attempts to break up the collective reservations and parcel the land out to individual Indians. Some of these parcels were subsequently sold to non-Indians, resulting in a pitch patch of reservation and non-reservation holdings. In Michigan, the Treaty of 1836 gave the Indians first crack at homesteading 40 and 60 acre tracts before the White settlers were allowed in. It was a good idea on paper, but it didn't work out the way it was supposed to. Many of the Indian homesteaders were screwed out of their holdings by various legal and illegal means. Some of these lands were eventually repurchased by subsequent generations of Indians and either held as private property or given to the federal government "in trust", which makes them part of the reservation system. More recently, the tribes themselves have been buying up tracts of land and adding them to the system in like manner.

I was thinking that we could learn something from the Indian experience that might help us in the Beaglesonian War on Poverty, but now I'm not so sure. Indians have historically experienced the same kinds of problems as other minority groups: discrimination, poverty, poor schools, crime, and substance abuse. Since the restoration of their tribal identities, they have made significant progress in overcoming these obstacles. The profits from the casinos have been invested in various social programs aimed at improving the quality of life and general well being of the tribal members. They sometimes even donate money to their White neighbors for similar efforts. Unfortunately, all modern tribes do not have casinos, and the ones that don't are not doing nearly as well. Furthermore, the other minority groups do not have anything like the cooperative tribal structure of the Native Americans. They do organize groups from time to time, but these groups don't seem to have the same effect on their members as the modern tribal organizations.

That casino thing kind of happened by accident. One tribe, I forget where, had a substantial Bingo operation which the state tried to shut down. Come to find out, there is no federal law against gambling and the states generally do not have jurisdiction on federal lands. From there it wasn't much of a stretch to tribal casinos. Here was a service for which there was a significant demand that was not being met. The tribes saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. If there is a lesson to be learned here, that's probably it.  

My Ass Too

I'm going to answer your post of today before I forget, and I might make another post later if I think of something. Have a nice trip.

For the purposes of today's discussion, "they" means the Establishment, whatever their ilk.

What you said about the two ilks makes a lot of sense. The main reason I voted for third parties all those years is that it seemed to me the two major parties were working together while just pretending to oppose each other's agendas. When Richard Nixon betrayed Taiwan and kissed up to Red China I thought that they had him do it because a Democrat would have never gotten away with it. Before that, we had that escalation of the Vietnam War by Johnson. If a Republican had tried that, he probably would have gotten more opposition from Congress, so they had a Democrat do it. After all these years, I'm not so sure anymore that they are all in it together, but I'm still convinced that they are all in it.

I've got nothing against poor people. I used to oppose giving them all that assistance back in the day when there were plenty of good paying jobs to be had. So what did they do? First they took away all the good jobs, and then they started cutting back on the welfare. I don't know whether or not they want to make us all poor, but I'm pretty sure they want to keep us all dependent on them. What we need is another way to make money that isn't dependent on any of those ilk bastards, but I don't know what that is. If we ever discover a way, we'll have to also figure a way to roll it out to the public without drawing too much attention to ourselves, or they'll take us out before we ever get it off the ground.

I agree that anybody carrying a gun for Uncle Sam should be directly employed by Uncle Sam. It's hard enough trying to hold those guys accountable without adding another layer of bureaucracy between them and us. I don't know what they're paying the military these days, but I would be surprised if they weren't paying the contractors more than that. It's not about saving money, it's about maintaining control and being able to pass the buck when something goes wrong. The very word "privatization" doesn't mean what it used to anyway. All it means now is contracting with somebody else to do their dirty work for them. When they took away my job on the State Street Bridge, they said they were going to privatize it, but what they really did was contract with the Cheboygan County Road Commission to do the work previously done by employees of the Michigan Department of Transportation. The job was still being done by government employees, just different government employees, and they called it "privatization".

It seems that you Chicagoans can't tolerate the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history being credited to a Michigan city, so you're trying to beat Detroit out of that well deserved distinction. Poor Detroit! They once had the title of "Murder Capitol of the World", but somebody beat them out of that one too. I don't remember what city that was. Was it also Chicago?

privatization my ass

Well I guess there are several ways of measuring poverty, one is with that absolute line where anybody who falls below is poor and anybody who falls above is rich, but  you kind of have to keep moving it.  If you do that percentage thing than we always have the same amount of poor, though I suppose you could fiddle with the percentages, you could change them to tenths or thirds or whatever.

Here's something.  Me and my ilk hate throwing money at the military, but at some sense we realize we do need some kind of army, but we know you and your ilk love throwing money at the military, so we can feel it's ok to fight defense funding as hard as we like, because we know you guys will always make sure the military gets plenty.  Likewise you and your ilk know we want to throw money at poverty so you can feel free to fight those programs as hard as you like because you know me and my ilk will always make sure the poor get something.

Actually you seem to be more sympathetic to the poor than most of your ilk, remember what Ayn Rand said about the poor (You can feed them if you like, but I won't).  And actually the poor get short shrift anymore.  You could never launch anything like the war on poverty these days, because nobody cares much about the poor, it is all about the middle class.  But middle class is pretty vague, I think what they mean is most voters.

I suppose it's okay to have somebody not in the army peeling your potatoes, but i don't think they should be carrying guns around because they are just not going to be as loyal, and the worst thing that can happen to them if they fuck up is that they get fired, and not by the firing squad.

But during the Iraq war it seemed like we were paying plenty of mercenaries.  A lot of the neocons behind getting us involved didn't want to just topple Saddam, they wanted to create a whole new country, and as long as they were doing that they might as well make it a assize faire dreamworld, and privatization is part of the capitalist dream. 

I think on the face of it, it doesn't make sense.  If you have a crew of say street sweepers for your city, then you pay them and they get all of it.  But if you hire Al's Street Sweepers to do it for you, then you pay Al who pays his street sweepers and keeps a nice slice for himself.  I guess you save some money because Al pays his street sweepers peanuts, but then do you want the citizens of your city to be paid peanuts?  And generally, as Chicago has discovered, when you pay people peanuts they don't do such a good job. 

Speaking of cities, the word spoken most frequently in my city is Detroit, as in are we going the same way?  It's pensions.  For years we robbed the pension funds of our public workers and now that debt is catching up with us.  We have tried to weasel our way out of paying the pensions, but the courts won't allow that.  Our current Republican governor would never raise taxes, and I have to admit, the dems are not either, so our bonds keep getting downgraded costing us millions or billions, I forget which. 

Meanwhile out my window, the city is bustling, there are cranes everywhere putting up new buildings, so what is going on here?

I'm leaving for a Sulllivan bank trip and a get together with old pals in Denver tomorrow morning and I won't  be back until Sunday night so I guess we will have about a week to think about things before we return to the arena, I mean the discussion table.

Job Security

It seems that, with your plan, the poor would still be poor, they'd just be less poor than they were before. I guess that's better than nothing, but shouldn't we be trying to elevate them beyond poverty? While we're at it, shouldn't we also be trying to keep more people from sliding into poverty? One of the unintended consequences might be that the government wouldn't have to hire as many people to administer the various welfare programs, which would add to the unemployment rate. As you said, however, they could just raise the poverty threshold, but then we're right back where we started from. It seems that a lot of people have a vested interest in this thing.

You mentioned something about the bottom 20%. I have read and heard a little about that over the years. As I understand it, they divide the population into five groups which are called "quintiles". The bottom quintile is considered to be poor, the top quintile is considered to be rich, and the other three quintiles are somewhere in the middle. When they talk about the gap between rich and poor, they are talking about the differences between the average incomes of each quintile. What they don't tell you is that everybody doesn't stay in the same quintile all their lives. The bottom quintile is largely composed of children and recently arrived immigrants. After awhile, many of these guys move up into the next quintile, displacing people who have moved up into the next quintile, and so on. If you look at it from that perspective, a larger income gap between quintiles can be a good thing. When somebody moves up, he is moving higher up than he would have if the gap were narrower. Of course people can move down a quintile too, which isn't such a good thing, unless they're retired like us. A retired person doesn't need as much money to live on because his kids are grown, his mortgage has been paid off, and he doesn't need to wine and dine his girlfriends anymore. If you just count income and not assets, which I think is what they do with this quintile thing, you can have a low income and still be well off. If you have enough money in the bank, or other investments, you don't really need an income anymore. It's probably more complicated than I think, most things are, but that's all I remember about those quintiles.

When I first came to Berlin, we didn't have to do any KP duty, they had German civilians hired to do that. I think they were paid by the German government as a way to pay back some money they had borrowed from Uncle Sam after the war. Shortly after I arrived, though, the debt must have been  paid off, because the German KPs were gradually phased out and replaced by GIs. I think they let them work until they retired, because the last one in our mess hall was an old guy who we called "Konrad". (We used "Konrad" as a generic name for all Germans, much like all GIs were called "Joe" during the war. Nevertheless. I think this guy's name really was Konrad.)

We had some Germans pulling guard duty with us too. They wore uniforms, but not the same uniforms that we or the German military wore. They all seemed to be pretty young, so maybe it was kind of a junior military apprenticeship program. At first the just had them on the main gates, mostly to serve as translators or deal with people that didn't speak English. Towards the end of my hitch, though, they started putting them in as replacements for our guys on more and more guard posts because we were way understaffed due to the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Guard duty in peacetime is actually pretty boring. Other than the gate posts, most of the time you are guarding a motor pool (parking lot) or an ammo dump, which is mostly underground with steel doors that are designed to be explosive proof. It is unlikely the anybody is going to try to break in because they know it's well guarded, although we did have one incident where a German teenager was shot on one of our guard posts. After a thorough investigation, it was determined that the kid walked in through a big hole in the fence that had been there for as long as anybody could remember. They talked about fixing the hole, but I don't know if they ever did. I don't know how they could contract guard duty out to civilians in wartime, but apparently they do it nowadays.

the morning crew raises questions

I've heard that joke in some form somewhere before.  One bad thing about  growing old is you've heard all the jokes.  One thing I liked about subbing was these kids had only been on the earth about ten years and hadn't heard much of anything.  Once, passing out papers I said, on a whim, to a particularly surly kid, "Don't say I never gave you anything," and the whole class cracked up, what a clever teacher, how had he thought that up.

I'm not all that serious about my plan, but it does follow my general thesis, if we want to help the poor, let's give them stuff.  And we are all spitballing here anyway aren't we?  I don't know if that Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation was taking into account how much these poor people were getting on welfare, I suspect not because that amount can vary.  I don't think the guy who gets one buck would find much change in his life, but the guy who got five thousand would.

Of course the Assistant Secretary could decide at any time to raise the poverty determination level and then we would be back in the soup.  Is there an absolute level that can be determined for who is poor and who is not, or do we just sort of assume that the lower twenty percent, say, are always the poor? 

Nobody gets rich by having more babies.  However much more money they get it is probably not even going to cover the cost of that extra baby, let alone leave enough money on the side for the welfare queen to ride around her brood around in a welfare Cadillac. 

Well why do they do it?  Well I don't know.  Well they are young and stupid, which even a couple wise old men like ourselves have to admit we once were, and I am thinking just off the top of my head, that we would have played our part in any of these unwed teen pregnancies without thinking twice. 

While having babies at a young age certainly contributes to poverty, it is not the only cause, maybe it should be considered a separate issue.  It is a more interesting topic though because instead of a lot of boring numbers with all those zeros trailing behind them, it is about sex.  If babies came out of cabbage patches, a lot of these irresponsible young girls wouldn't go there, but sex on the other hand, people want to do it, our basic biological drives want us to do it, we are fighting nature to try to keep it from happening.

Well back to numbers.  I really don't think we will save all that much by bringing the boys home.  But I will concede there will be some savings, and I think it's generally a good idea. 

And of course you are right that with our troops come a lot of money.  I think that is the main reason the locals want us in Afghanistan, all the money we spend, all the people we hire, all the bribes we make.  There is the story about one of the first Americans to come to Afghanistan, and he asked one of the locals, "Boy you guys sure hated the Russians didn't you?"  The guy replied, "Are you kidding me, look at those roads, look at those hospitals, the Russians built all that, we loved the Russians."  "But," the puzzled American asked, "You were constantly killing them, you drove them out."  The Afghan shrugged, "Well they were occupying our country."

Halliburton did end up in doodoo, there was another one, Blackwater, that was driven out of business, but I think they just mainly changed their name, and in both cases some little guys paid the price while the cheeses sat in their counting houses counting all their money.

What do you think about that privatizing of the war?  It kind of fit into that libertarian let private enterprise do everything mindset, but in actual fact it led to friends of the guys running the war making a lot of money.  And it always seemed flawed at the heart.  Don't you want your own guys defending your army and not guys you are paying to do it? 

That last paragraph it sounds like you are talking about money as a zero sum thing, like if a dollar is in another country it can't be in ours, but in fact money is elastic.  I think we talked about this one at length at some point in our correspondence, but I am not sure if we came to any conclusions.  Well how often do we come to any conclusions?

But anyway it seems like the more money there is in one country, the more money there is in every other country.  When Greece goes down the tubes it doesn't make Germany richer, it makes Germany poorer.  We are all taking in each others laundry aren't we?  If some country can't pay to have their laundry done anymore don't we have less money coming in? 

It can't be that simple.  But then maybe it can.

Leave It For the Night Crew

Stop me if you've heard this one:
A little boy was hanging around the house getting in his mother's way, so she suggested that he go to a nearby construction site and see what he could learn by watching the men work. When the boy returned, he offered to demonstrate what he had learned that day. He told his mother to hold on to one end of a long piece of string while he held the other end, stretched it tight, and sighted down its length. "Just a cunt hair to the left," the boy said, which resulted in him being sent to bed without any supper. His mother repented of her harsh action after thinking about it for awhile and realizing that the boy had just repeated, in good faith, what he had heard. She fixed up a tray of food for the boy and brought it to him. She told him that she was sorry that she had over reacted and asked him if he wanted some supper after all. The boy's laconic reply was, "Fuck it, leave it for the night crew."

I think I understand your plan better now, but I still have some questions. When they classify somebody's income as being below the poverty level, do they count the government assistance he is already getting as income? I know that some programs, when determining eligibility, only count your income, while others count both your income and your assets. I think that, basically, you want to bring everybody marginally above the poverty level. This would reduce the number of poor people on paper, but would their lives be noticeably better as a result?

Last I heard, they were paying single mothers based on how many kids they had, which gives them an incentive to have more kids, which means more poor people in the next generation. My plan addresses that issue, while your plan does not. Don't get me wrong, I still like your plan better than mine, if only for the reason that it your plan has a better chance of actually being passed someday. Hitler gave mass sterilization a bad name, and some people haven't gotten over it yet. I think that Hitler had people castrated, while all I want to do is tie off their tubes, but the public still may not be ready for my plan yet. You might be right that, as people's incomes rise, the birth control will take care of itself. There's an old saying about birth control that the people who need it most use it least.

I believe there is more money to be saved by bringing our boys home than you think. Most of the units stationed overseas seem to be National Guard now. They are paid more when they are deployed like that than when they are home being weekend warriors. They are rotated in and out of those overseas assignments at six to twelve month intervals, and they have to be transported both ways. I don't know if they bring their vehicles and artillery with them or if they just relieve the other guys in place and use their gear. As Napoleon said, "An army travels on its stomach." I don't know how much food is bought locally and how much is shipped from the U.S., but anything bought locally is plowing money into their economy instead of ours. I know you don't believe this, but G.I.s spend a lot of money downtown and, the longer they are in the field, the more they spend when they do hit the streets. That's one reason why the locals cry bloody murder whenever a military base is closed down. The other reason is that there are lots of civilian jobs on a military base. While the G.I.s handle most of the clean-up work, there is all kinds of building and grounds maintenance that's done by civilians. Last I heard, they were even contracting out routine military duties like compound guard and K.P. to free up the troops for combat assignments. There was a big scandal awhile back about a U.S. company called Halliburton screwing up jobs like this, but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

You're basically right about how the circulation of money fuels the economy, but don't forget that every dollar spent in another country is fueling their economy when it could be fueling ours.

a job for the night economist

I was joking about that 7 AM solution.  I thought that idea of having a line that separated those in poverty from those not in poverty was kind of silly.  Well not really, you need to have some kind of number like the ages of 18 and 21, even though some are mature at 14 and some are never mature.  That number of 10,000 was rather arbitrary, but the way I meant it was that a person earning 5,000 would get 5,000 more, and a person making 9,999 would get a buck.  And it would be every year. 

I don't think we are going to save 5 billion on the military by just bringing them back from overseas, I mean we are still going to have to pay them and pay for their equipment.  Though I do agree with the general principle of bringing them back home. 

What are they doing out there anyway?  Right now they mostly fighting in the mideast and Afghanistan, fighting people who are fighting each other, and oftentimes we are not sure what side we are on.  What are we fighting for?  Oil and Israel and anti-terrorism.  We have the oil, Israel can fend for itself, and without leading Uncle Sam around by the nose they might be inclined to make some kind of deal, and as far as terrorism, I think it is mostly inspired by us making deals with the leaders of their kingdoms.  If we aren't fucking with them, I don't believe that they will be fucking with us, because they would so much rather fuck with each other.  And there is something inherently unstable about having this military giant in the field kind of willy nilly picking which side to be on.

And what are we doing elsewhere in the world, in all these bases?  Keeping the peace?  What peace?  And I guess the way we are keeping peace out there is by the threat of stepping out of our bases and kicking ass, but whose ass?  And who thinks we are going to get our guys stepping out of their bases anyway? 

I wonder what kind of disadvantage we would be at without those troops abroad, and I'm really not that convinced that we need that many troops to defend our borders because who do we expect will be coming after us?

So then back to the poor.  It used to be that rich guys liked to have the poor around so that they could exploit them in their sweatshops, but anymore machines are running those sweatshops, and we just have no use for the poor, and we middle class types are sliding into that category.  I suppose the rich could just let us starve to death.  We could get into one of those dystopian futures where the rich live in these walled citadels and the poor run ragged between them.  But can the rich remain rich in their citadels?  How are they going to pay their armies?  Gold isn't worth a thing if nobody else wants it, how can you have hedge funds, don't you need somebody to peddle goods to?

So let me think this through.  The government pays the poor so that they can buy goods from the rich, and the government taxes the rich so it can by those goods.

That doesn't sound right, but then isn't that the way money works?  I work for my paycheck and then I get it and I buy the stuff I need and the people who sell the stuff buy it from the factories like the one I work in which gives them enough money to keep me on the payroll.  Isn't that the way the money goes?

7:30 AM and I believe I have hit a snag.  I believe I will leave it to the night economist (Beagles) to figure this out.

Say What?

Your proposal was not as clear to me at 10:00 PM as it was to you at 7:00 AM. Are you proposing to give each household, one dollar, two dollars, or whatever it takes to move them above the official poverty level, or are you proposing to give each poor person $10,000? Either way, are you proposing to give them this money just once, or once a year? If you give it to them just once, it will only move them out of poverty for one year, so I'm assuming that you want to give it to them every year. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Assuming that it's $10,000 a year, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our military to raise that kind of money, all we'd have to do is bring them home and put them to work defending our own borders instead of everybody else's borders. Most of our military seems to be National Guard these days anyway, and they are already supposed to be defending our nation instead of everybody else's nations. I'm not sure when they changed that, but they should change it back.

My next question is, How much money are we already spending on the various programs for the poor? Is your proposal intended to replace that, or add to it? If you want to add to it, your proposal just might work. The way our economy is heading, we may all be on the dole eventually anyway. Since 70% of the economic activity in this country is consumer spending, and they don't want to pay us to work anymore, they will have to find some other way to put money in all of our pockets or the whole economy will eventually collapse. There is no way that 1% of the people can support 70% of the economy forever, regardless of how rich they are. They must already have almost everything they want, so how much more stuff can they buy? If our economy goes down, the Red Chinese economy goes down too, and you know they aren't going to let that happen.

My Indian counting project is moving along slowly. I managed to track down the number for the smaller tribe, 1026, which is about half of what I expected. The larger tribe in the U.P. wanted me to put my request in writing, and they said email was okay. They also wanted to know what I intended to do with the information, and I told them. I have not received a reply yet, and I'm beginning to think I'm not going to. You never know with those Indians, though. They like to do things at their own speed, and they often joke about being on "Indian time". My daughter explained that those traditionalists are probably all enrolled in one tribe or another, so we don't want to count them twice. She also told me there is yet another tribe that I need to count, The Grand Traverse Band, not to be confused with The Little Traverse Band, which I have already counted. As their name implies, they are a larger outfit, but I don't know how many of them live in our two counties.

I will have to track them down on the internet because their headquarters is in Traverse City, which is not in our phone book. Remember when you could call "information" to get out of town phone numbers? I don't know when they stopped having that, but they did. The way I found the other two was by calling their casinos, at the suggestion of my hypothetical wife. The casino in St. Ignace was able to patch me in to their headquarters in the Sault, but the one in Petoskey was not. Petoskey is in our phone book, but the only other number listed besides the casino was the tribal police. I apologized for bothering them with something like this, but they were happy to patch me in to their headquarters, where I talked to the tribal chairman, who patched me in to the lady in charge of enrollment. She had left for the day, even though her machine said the office was open till 5:00 and it was only 4:00 when I called , so I left a message and she returned my call the next business day, which was Monday.

a major problem solved by 7 AM.

The way we define poor people is that they don't have much money.  There is some official government body that does this, although I think other organizations have their benchmarks.  You hear it all the time and it always seems to have the same format so much money for a family of four.  It always seems to be a family of four.  Sure enough if you type 'family of four' into google up pops the suggested poverty guidelines.  Actually you get hits with other family numbers but not so many as with four, so one suggestion that hits me right off the bat is to urge families of three not to have any more while those with four should get to it and make one more.

Here it is, The Office of The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/15poverty.cfm  Apparently The Chief Secretary for Planning and Evaluation has bigger fish to fry, and god only knows what The President for Planning and Evaluation is up to.

And there are poverty thresholds and poverty guidelines, and apparently Alaska and Hawaii have their own thresholds and guidelines.  I would examine this document more thoroughly but it looks pretty boring.  $24, 250 for the proverbial family of four, and $11,770 for a family of one, which doesn't sound like much of a family, but maybe he has a couple of cats, or maybe a bird or a fish. 

So there it is, instead of fooling around with our reproductive equipment, at great cost, mind you, why don't we just hand every family of four making $24,250 a buck, every lonely guy making $11,770, a buck, every family of four making $24, 249 two bucks, and so on.  Doesn't seem like it would cost that much.  Further google research reveals that there are 45 million poor in the US, so if we round that to 50 million and let's make it 10,000 per person because many of those poor are in the same households, and I believe that takes us to 500 billion.  Is that a lot of money?  Still googling around I see that the US expects to take in two trillion this year which is a quarter of the government's yearly take, and 640 billion of that goes to the military.

So there you go, make love not war.  Like I noted earlier we haven't had a military victory since Grenada, and we certainly don't feel safer since, well when did we feel safe?  Anyway obviously this problem of national defense is not one that we can solve by throwing money at, since that is what we have been doing for hundreds of years and we haven't become safer.

And you know the bible is always exhorting us to be nice to the poor, so there we go, and even if North Korea and ISIS and Iran, and those guys with the funny name who are kicking up that fuss in Yemen, take advantage of our having no army and slaughter us all in our beds, we are all going straight to heaven for aiding the poor.

So there you are.  I had been meaning to get into the question of punishment and revenge, but  having solved the problem of the poor by 7 AM, I believe I shall spend the rest of the day in indolence.

It's Not a Perfect Plan

Okay, maybe it's not even a good plan. You're right that it would have to be global to be effective, and that would require some kind of global authority to administer it, and I don't want to touch that one with a ten foot pole. I was just thinking that we could try it in the U.S. first and see where it went from there. Actually we wouldn't be the first, they did something like this in India back in the 70s, but I don't know how it turned out for them.

The savings would come from having fewer poor people to deal with in the next generation. The more I think about it, we don't even know if poor people have more kids because they are poor, or if they are poor because they have more kids. Maybe it would be better to find some other way to lift them out of poverty, and let the birth control take care of itself. See, that's the thing, I want to lift them out of poverty and both of our ilks seem to want to keep them there, my ilk for the cheap labor and your ilk for the cheap votes. You're right that poverty will probably never be totally eliminated, but that doesn't mean it can't be reduced.

I picked age 18 as the cutoff point because that's the legal age of consent for stuff like this. Funny that they let you fuck at 18 but they don't let you drink until 21. Why do you suppose that is?

If you'd have caught that kid and brought him to the office, what would they have done to him? My guess is not anything worth you working up a sweat over. What was his offence anyway, running in the halls? Well, you were also running in the halls. Didn't you ever hear that two wrongs don't make a right?

a discourse ending in an exciting chase scene

Is this just planned for the US?  I don't think there is a problem with American citizens having too many babies.  Well it's a problem for them when they can't afford them and they cut short their schooling, and the kid doesn't get much of an upbringing, and then they have kids and then on and on.  I want to pause here and say that I am talking about all poor people and so I am talking about white and black people here.  I just want to say that because sometimes I hear that applied to 'them' and them are black people, and it is generally used in some kind of argument for not giving them any money because see, that's what they do with it, so let's stop throwing money at that problem.

I've wandered off topic.  The point I was trying to make was that the problems of worldwide population growth, overcrowding, pollution, and global warming need a solution that is world wide.

You're awful ready to pile onto the national debt with your bond issue, but then the problems we are interested in are always the ones that are best solved by throwing money at them.  I think the payments would have to be awfully high, and I am not sure where the savings are coming from that would be applied to pay off the bonds, and then a lot of people who weren't planning on having children anyway would take in the extra bucks while those who wanted a lot of offspring would just keep having a lot of offspring.

I don't know why you are choosing the age 18 as too young to have a baby.  I'm guessing you are just using it because there has to be some age when people are too young and 18 is kind of a standard in our society, probably the remnants of some old feudal law in Europe, like 21 its alternative.  I think rubbers is what teenagers call them and condoms are what adults call them.

I didn't expect to find us so aligned on the death penalty, I agree with you on pretty much every point.

Your story reminds me of that quote, not exactly sure how it goes, something like nothing clears your head like knowing you are to be executed in the morning.  I know it doesn't go exactly like that because I have been all over google trying to find it but can't.  Anyway I remember the first time I heard it of thinking how incisive and the second time oh there it is again, and eventually it becomes annoying.  Like that Faulkner quote about the past not being dead, it isn't even past yet.  It seems like young writers hear this the first time and think, isn't that great, and can't wait to use it, and we old people just keep hearing it again and again.


How about this story?  It was the last day of school at DeDiego, in fact it was just after the bell rang, and I was walking out of my classroom and towards the free air Claremont Avenue, and some kid dashed ahead of me.  I said, "Hey  you," which is a phrase I think I used a hundred times in every subbing gig, because he was running or something and I planned on oh, wagging my finger in his face for fifteen seconds, just to uphold the principles of decorum and decency, but the little bugger just took off in the other direction. 

Well here was a much bigger crime, defying a properly ordained enforcer of good social form, a chase ensued through the clamoring halls of DeDiego and in short order the miscreant had escaped.

And a good thing, I realized looking down at the stairway he had scooted down, unseemly sweat beading my distinguished brow.  I had already dismissed my class, I was off the clock, had I caught the kid and brought him into the office, it would have cost me maybe fifteen minutes of a lovely early summer afternoon, the kid, it would certainly have put a damper on the beginning of his summer vacation, the people in the office would certainly not have been pleased to have to deal with one more thing before they could close the books and be off on that trip to the ocean or to the mountains.

So in this case was punishment not delivered a good thing?

From Birth to Death

As I said before, the trouble with the pill is that it's not 100% effective, and it's not effective at all if you don't use it. There is nothing wrong with passing out free pills, but vasectomies and tubal litigations are more reliable. Vasectomies can  sometimes be reversed, I'm not sure about tubal litigations. There would be no way to prevent somebody from taking the money and then attempting to have the operation reversed, so my plan isn't 100% foolproof either.

I'm not sure how much we'd have to pay people to make this option attractive, but not too attractive.  We don't want everybody to do this, but I think we should offer it to everybody to avoid being charged with racism or genocide or something like that. If it looks like too many people are choosing the option, we could reduce the payment and vice versa. The program could be financed with a bond issue because it will save money in the long run. We just have to make sure they apply the savings to paying off the bonds instead of diverting the money to some other program.  

I don't think it's a good idea for anybody under the age of 18 to have a baby, married or not, but we can't offer the option to minors because they are not legally capable of making a decision like this. All we can do is give them pills, rubbers, and things like that and hope for the best. Speaking of rubbers, when did they start calling them "condoms"? That  must have been one of the language changes they slipped in when I was out of the country back in the 60s.

Michigan was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to abolish the death penalty, way back in the 19th Century. Legend has it that this initiative was the result of a popular saloon keeper being executed for killing his wife, who was not so popular. For whatever reason, we haven't had the death penalty for a long time, and nobody seems to miss it. I think that what motivates most people to advocate the death penalty is simple revenge. While I agree that there are certain people who deserve to die for their crimes, I think that the death penalty is more trouble than it's worth. With all the endless appeals, there is a good chance the guy will die of old age before he gets executed. Then there's the chance that he might be innocent, and you can't undo death.

I once read a short story by some famous Russian author called "Seven Who Were Hanged". It was about these six people, who were caught conspiring to assassinate a government official, plus one other guy who was arrested on an unrelated charge and thrown in with them. As the title implies, they all were hanged in the end but, before that, an interesting point was brought out. The government official was informed of the plot and assured that it had indeed been foiled. They told him the exact day and time that the assassination had been planned to happen, and assured him again that it wasn't going to happen now. Nevertheless, as the appointed hour approached, the official got more and more nervous. When the clock struck the hour, his heart leaped and a shudder shook his whole body. From this experience, he concluded that killing a person is not nearly as inhumane as telling him ahead of time when he is going to die. This epiphany, however, did not inspire him to extend clemency to the conspirators.

crime and punishment

If you replace the carrot with the stick in your plan we get the red Chinese plan of last midcentury.  Actually that worked out pretty well I think.  The guys who wrote freakonomics correlated the legalization of abortion with slackening of crime twenty or so years later.  You were speaking of tube tying rather than abortion, but either way we get a decrease in population which can only be a good thing, for reasons you elucidated. 

Of course, as you've said, something like this has zero chance of ever happening because most people, besides us crackpots, would hate it, but we're just a couple of old farts flapping out gums so what the hell.  I do prefer the carrot to the stick if we want this to work, because I don't think we could pay people enough, and if you made it voluntary I don't think enough people would sign up to make any kind of difference.

There is religion, people join that voluntarily and in droves.  There were the shakers, but that points to a problem in keeping the religion going.  There were, and still are, monasteries and nunneries, but I think there was a lot of fooling around going on in them.

Is teen pregnancy a problem?  haven't we always had pregnant teens?  I think you mean unwed teens, and more to the point, poor unwed teens.  Wait a minute, did you say consenting adults?  So only people above a certain age are eligible for the tube tying bonus?  That sounds a little strange.  What if we just signed them up for the pill?  I think we already do that in a lot of cases.

But anyway, poor unwed teens, and maybe even poor wed teens, because the problem is how can poor people raise kids.  Murphy Brown can give her kid whatever the kid wants and can send the kid to the finest schools, and it doesn't even have to hurt her career because she can afford daycare.

See the thing is it kind of comes down to the rich vs the poor.  On the other hand, as people rise into the middle class they begin to have fewer kids.  The kids don't die as much because healthcare is available, and you don't need them to help on the family farm, because likely they have moved off the family farm.


So they are deciding on the death penalty for that Boston guy and the Colorado movie house guy.  Basically I don't give a shit one way or the other if they kill them or let them live out their lives in prison. 

It always seemed a little odd to me that the left would be for abortion and against capitol punishment, and the right the opposite.  Always seemed to be if you were for one you should be for the other.

Unlike the rest of my ilk I have never been that against the death penalty, but with all these guys on death row turning out to be innocent I have changed my mind.  What is it all about?  Do we want to punish the bad people or cut down crime and make us decent citizens safer?  A little of both, some other reason?

I don't think we have ever discussed this before, have we?

The Final Solution

I guess you're right, I got a little carried away with my metaphors last time. I keep forgetting that we don't get paid by the word here. Okay, here's another idea, and I'll try to be brief this time. It will never pass because both of our ilks will just hate it, but there's no harm in throwing it up and seeing where it lands.

Let's pay the poor, no let's pay everybody to become surgically sterilized. It would have to be strictly voluntary of course, and would be in addition to, not instead of, any existing programs. I seem to remember reading that they were doing this in India, but that was a long time ago, about the time I got my vasectomy, which would make it sometime in the 70s. I never heard how it worked out for them, and I don't know if they're still doing it.

Let's face it, there are way to many people on this planet. All the good land is occupied, and people are starting to fill up the mountains and the deserts too. It's only a matter of time till we are all standing shoulder to shoulder from sea to shinning sea. As the world becomes more crowded, there will be less of everything to pass around. We won't have to worry about the gap between rich and poor, we will all be poor.

Kids are expensive. The more kids you have, the less money you have for yourself. Reducing the birth rate alone will go a long way towards reducing poverty. Since poor people generally have more kids than rich people, reducing their birth rate will eventually result in less poor people to take care of, which means more money will be available to spend on each one. Less people, both poor and otherwise, will mean less competition for jobs, which will reduce unemployment and drive up wages. The wars and plagues of the Middle Ages accomplished the same things, but my way is more humane. It's also more humane than abortion.

My plan may not help much with the problem of teen pregnancy because we would have to limit it to consenting adults. Then again, with less kids being born, there will be less teenagers to become pregnant in a decade or so. Who can argue that the world wouldn't be better off with less teenagers in it?

                       

hells bells and a bucket of blood

Well hells bells Beagles.  Hells bells?  You know what's hellish, looking up a phrase that a rock band has decided would make a groovy name.  Three different  pages is my limit for internet research, and none of them gave me an origin, though one claimed that the phrase was originally hells bells and buckets of blood.  Kind of groovy, if I was forming a rock band, I think I would go with the longer phrase, or maybe just gone with bucket of blood, but that is probably already taken.  Once years ago, I happened to be in the hip part of town and came across a poster advertising the band Piss Bucket.  I never heard of them again, but maybe they changed their name to the Backstreet Boys or something.

Where was I?  Oh I was driving a car with an oil problem and then I abandoned it in Alaska, and the cops never came to tow it away because they were too busy dealing with urban derelict buildings, but actually they weren't dealing with them at all, they were dealing cards, but then they suddenly ran out of cards, and then I woke up and realized I had to get in my Beaglesonian post for the morn, but then I realized I was already writing it, and I wondered hells bells, hells bells and a bucket of blood, what ate we talking about here.

That's the trouble with these metaphors, they can go anywhere.  What if we are the Backstreet Boys driving from town to town, and whenever we run out of oil we just flash a smile and the tween girls buy us quarts of oil, and if we bought a new car they might think we were some other band like Piss Bucket.  And if we were Piss Bucket we would just steal oil from garages after our gigs and we could never buy a new car because none of us would want to sign Piss Bucket on the check.

Oh we were talking about poor people.   I think we were going to bat around ideas for a solution to poverty, but then I claim that we can never really solve that problem because, like terrorists or just nuts who buy a super gun and shoot up a school or movie or someplace, they will always be with us, but I think we should just try to make it a little better.

There's a facebook page about Forgotten Champaign and mostly it is about, oh remember that Dog 'n Suds on Second and Green in the fifties, but a day or two ago somebody posted something about the Vietnam protests and then somebody wrote something for them and somebody wrote something against them, and now two days later and a couple pages they are all going at it tooth and fang about who is really supporting the troops.

Why can't they be like us, and get a nice little blog that nobody reads and we don't bother nobody.

The Devil Is In the Details

I first heard of those P&G satanic rumors when I started working there. I thought it was some kind of a joke, but apparently some people took it seriously. When it got to the point that they believed it was actually hurting sales, the company's legal department tracked down some of the rumor mongers and took them to court. At least that's what our managers told us. I don't remember hearing anything about it in the news media, but I wasn't paying much attention to the news in those days.

You're probably right that people think of money spent on their own issue is a wise investment, while money spent on other people's issue is a total waste, but there is another, more objective way to look at it. If your car is leaking oil, the logical solution is to get it fixed so it stops leaking. If it runs out of oil, the engine will seize up and be permanently damaged so, if you don't have the time or money to fix it right now, you can check the oil level more frequently and add oil as needed. If you keep doing that indefinitely, though, you may reach a point when you have spent more on oil than it would have cost you to fix the leak.

Then again, some cars are not worth fixing. If the transmission is going bad, the body's rusted out,  and the engine has 200,000 miles on it, you may elect to keep dumping oil in it for another month or so while you shop around for a better car. When I was driving through Alaska and the Yukon Territory, I frequently saw cars that looked like they had been pushed off the road and abandoned. A guy at one of the gas stations explained to me that it was okay to salvage parts from those cars, if they looked like they had been there for awhile, because the owners were never coming back for them. The cost of having them towed hundreds of miles to where they could be fixed exceeded the total value of the cars. I asked him why the cops didn't have them towed and impounded until the owner paid all associated costs. He said that the cops around there were spread out pretty thin, and they had more important things to do with their time than that.

The same can be said about derelict buildings, some of them aren't worth fixing up, and some of them aren't even worth demolishing. An urban derelict building will eventually be demolished as a matter of public safety if there is money in the budget to do it but, if the city is broke, the building might stand there until looters, arsonists, and the forces of nature reduce it to ruble. Buildings in rural areas are often left to rot like that because the owner has no plans for the site and/or the time and money to do anything about it. One thing the owner isn't likely to do is slap another coat of paint on it just to improve its appearance.

Of course people are more important than cars or buildings, but some of the same principles still apply. When I say that just throwing money at the problem won't help, I don't mean we shouldn't spend money to help people. I mean that we should put the money where it will do the most good instead of just dealing it out like cards in a poker game. Otherwise, we will eventually run out of cards and the players still won't have what they need to play the game effectively.

satan is groovy

Proctor and Gamble?  I'm sure you have mentioned that before but it never clicked, or maybe it clicked and we have been all over the subject and I have forgotten.  I think that happens sometimes, but I don't remember.  Anyway, Proctor and Gamble, the satanists!  C'mon now, at the end of these enlightenment sessions didn't they make you put your fingers to your heads to look like horns and have you chant, "Satan is groovy."

Oh that was a big rumor way back in I think the seventies, and that was before even the internet.  It seems to have died down.  I think the internet just competed with flashier rumors that spread at the speed of DSL, and it seems like we like our rumors more political these days.  Pick any president's name, or anybody well known, and add 'the antichrist," and you will get, well let's see, Hillary gets several pages, but then you expect that.  Justin Bieber gets a lot. Huckabee, surprisingly to me, not so much.  But probably that just proves he is, because isn't the antichrist somebody that nobody thinks is the antichrist?

I personally thought the lame stream media always kept an ear to the Beaglesonian Institute to hear what the finest minds of our time were thinking.  Let's see if they start reviving the rumor about P and G after I post this. 

You know I read a science fiction story once about a man with a hammer.  Okay I didn't, I just didn't want to break my streak of science fiction story inspired insights.  But that story about the man with a hammer to whom every solution is a nail reminds me of the responses to an incident that suddenly pops into the nation's sleepy consciousness.  My ilk, who always wants to help out the poor, think it's because we don't help out the poor enough, the police types think it's because we don't respect the cops enough, the family values types think it's because we, well not them, those other guys, have lost our family values. P and G thinks it's because we don't realize how groovy Satan is.

And maybe we can put to rest this whole thing about how throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it.  What people mean when they say this is that throwing money at your problem, which they don't care about, doesn't solve it, but you can be damn sure that they want money thrown at their problems.  Oh and problems never get solved.  We have had some form of welfare forever and we still have poor people, we spend plenty on hospitals and doctors and yet we still die, we spend god awful money on the army and we still have enemies and we have not conquered the world. 

But some of that welfare has helped some people get out of poverty and into the middle class, and we generally live longer, and the military, well we conquered Granada. 

We all like to blame the politicians for our troubles, well generally I blame your politicians, and you mine, but say they were responsible. they are sitting in their offices smoking cigars while the cops in the street are enforcing the laws, so these are the guys that piss off the poor.

And you know for all my bleating about the poor, they are not such nice guys.  They are generally pretty ignorant, some of them are no-goods, and that's why they are poor, and they are constantly fighting each other to get a leg up, and they have lousy manners.  I'm sure they piss the cops off, and then the cops maybe get in an extra punch when cuffing some guy, and that makes them hate the cops more, and so on and so on. 

There are problems we will never solve, we can only try to make them a little better.

I think we should vote in that nice Anne T Christ who the P and G PAC are backing, she seems to have a plan.

Strange People and Angry People

That paper mill crew was a strange bunch to be sure. We used to speculate about what made us that way. Some thought it was working the swing shift, which kept us in a perpetual state of jet lag. Others believed it was because we had been together too long. Many of those guys went to school together, married each other's sisters, and then ended up working together for 20 or 30 years. Of course some of us were transplants from Down Below, but after a decade or so, you almost couldn't tell us from the indigenous natives. Then there were the guys who went Down Below to find work, or did a stitch in the military, and then came back home. The managers were mostly from somewhere else, and were rotated in and out of there every few years, but some of them ended up turning down promotions so they could stay right there. It doesn't necessarily take all kinds, but we had all kinds.

Proctor & Gamble has a long tradition of social engineering. They were one of the first manufacturing companies to provide retirement finds for their hourly employees, way back in the 19th Century. Most of their plants were non-union, and most of their employees were content to remain that way. The Cheboygan plant went union soon after Charmin bought it, and P&G inherited the union when they bought the plant from Charmin. I don't think the management was ever comfortable with that arrangement, believing that you shouldn't need a union when you worked for such a benevolent  company. The guys who had worked in the auto plants for awhile came back with a different idea of what a union should be than the guys who didn't. The United Auto Workers Union was born in strife and violence, and many of its members never got over the mindset that the company was the enemy. Much of the paranoia about brainwashing likely came from the belief that they were trying to socially engineer us out of our union, and there was probably some truth to that. I took it more the way you said. It was a refreshing break from the daily grind, they were paying me to sit on my ass, and providing free coffee and donuts to boot. What's not to like?

I saw a thing on the TV news this evening about all those alleged police brutality incidents. They interviewed several experts who had different opinions about it. They brought out some of the same points that we have been discussing, and I thought that nobody read our blogs. A couple of them blamed the whole thing on poverty. One said we need to spend more money, and the other one said that we shouldn't throw good money after bad. He didn't say we shouldn't help those people, he just said that we need to come up with a plan that works instead of just dumping money on the problem. I have been treating poverty as a separate issue, and I'm still not so sure that it isn't. Why would being poor make you hate the police, or make the police hate you? I can see why it would make you hate the politicians, the bankers, and your boss at work, but the cops are just doing their job, or should be.

I don't think the cops are supposed to go around shooting people just because they find them annoying, and I think that most of them don't, most of the time. I can see how someone might crack under the stress of a job like that, but of course that doesn't make it right. Maybe they should rotate them in and out of the high crime neighborhood assignments periodically, like the military rotates people in and out of combat zones. Too much time on the front lines can ruin the best of soldiers.

victimhood

Sometimes those guys at the mill sound pretty backward with all that talk about sucks and 'radicals,' was it, and brainwashing.  Well I imagine they did pretty repetitive and boring jobs and that tends to get tongues wagging just to break the boredom.  What about this brainwashing?  Did they think it was a big joke or did they think it was something sinister?  You know when your employer pays you for your time and he expects you to do this and that, that is all fine, but when you suspect he is trying to tell you how to think, that sticks in the craw.  Moreso than when the preachers and the politicians do it because he has that forty hour a week and paycheck power over you. 

I don't know how much poor people thinking that that is their destiny to be poor, keeps them poor.  You can convince a guy otherwise, and he can try not to be poor, but the odds are still stacked pretty high against him. 

But there is something called victimhood which is generally used in a racial manner, which my ilk hates, but I think there is something to it.  This is where a black guy sees himself as the victim of white people and so there is nothing he can do but well, piss and moan.  If they get a job, I am thinking of some black employees my sister had, they feel like they got it because the company has to hire so many black people, so they don't feel like they should have to work that hard, and if the boss complains it is just another instance of whitey beating up on blacky.

Well my ilk is kind of responsible for that, everytime there is some black/white confrontation we like to bring up 200 years of slavery, and Jim Crow, and Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream.  Which is all good stuff, though it gets pretty boring, but maybe what we should be thinking of more is the here and the now, and the particulars of this particular confrontation. 

If you carry around this attitude of victimhood all the time, you are never going to get anywhere.  I'm not saying that black people aren't the victims of history, and that there still isn't a lot of racism around that will make their lives harder, but they are not going to get anywhere if all they do is keep harping on that.

I remember that part about spending the remainder of your budget at year's end, lest you get less in your budget the next year.  The end of the fiscal year was always Christmas for my state agency and we could all expect a new computer or whatever, because after all if the money didn't get spent it could somehow find its way back to the taxpayer, or as we phrased it, be wasted.

My state agency was big on SPC, (Statistical Process Control) and it's offspring ISO, and a whole plethora of alphabet systems, which I think were pretty good in their original incantation, but when applied by your average company blockhead, not so hot.  Well it gave the guy implementing it tremendous power because he was telling people how to act, and when you get to regulating things it's like eating potato chips, you just can't stop, and maybe you can regulate a few things in your favor, because don't you deserve it for doing all this hard work, and if anybody questions you, why they are against SPC, and therefore against Progress, and therefore against the American Way.

It has been brought up that most of the cops in the Baltimore thing were black, and my ilk replies that police brutality is police brutality.  That is another thing about these incidents, is it about police brutality, racism, classism, body cams, man's inhumanity to man, etc?

I think it's generally agreed by both our ilks that it is stupid to give shit to a cop, regardless of whether the cop was right or wrong, so there is a bad on the victim right from the start.  But this doesn't mean that this wrong gives the cop the right to kill the guy.  The issue seems to be generally did the cop actually kill the guy, but if he did, saying the guy had it coming, is not an excuse.