Towers, Tanks, and Bad Water

I don't know why some towns have water towers and some don't, but it might have something to do with fire protection. We had a big water tower at the paper mill, and it was strictly for fire protection. The intent was that, if we lost electric power during a fire, we could use the water in the tower to continue fighting the fire. That's probably what those tanks on top of buildings were for too. We also had two big diesel pumps located in a little building by the river bank. If the water pressure in our sprinkler and fire hose system fell below a certain point, the diesel pumps would automatically kick in to make up the difference. At some point, our insurance people told us that we didn't need the tower anymore, and it was dismantled and removed. I don't know what changed, maybe it was that the pumps became more reliable like you said.

When you live in Chicago you get used to city water and don't notice the chlorine taste, but out of town visitors will notice it and wonder how you can drink that stuff. When my parents moved to Palos Park they had a well, and the water was terrible. I guess it was safe enough, but it tasted bad, like rotten eggs, and soap wouldn't make suds in it. They had a water softener system that cured the soap suds problem, but now the water tasted like chemicals instead of rotten eggs. They soon got a water cooler, like the ones that office workers gather round to gossip. Distilled water came in five gallon jugs, and when the one on top the cooler ran out, they would remove it and put a full one in its place. The jugs were delivered by a guy who also picked up the empties. They just used the cooler water for drinking and cooking, the softener water was fine for everything else except watering the plants. For that they had one faucet that came directly out of the pressure tank in the garage and didn't go through the water softener. They eventually got city water, but they kept their well for watering the plants, and their water cooler for drinking.

With all the uproar about Flint, our local TV news has been interviewing water people in various area towns. Traverse City gets its water from Lake Michigan, but some of the other towns have municipal wells like Cheboygan. Traverse City treats its war with chlorine like Chicago does, but I don't think any of the well water around here requires any kind of treatment. Cheboygan had some water problems for years, but they finally replaced all their hundred year old pipes with plastic, which seems to have solved it. Cheboygan water always tested safe, but there were complaints about the taste and the smell from some neighborhoods. Part of the problem was the pipes. I don't think they had any lead ones, they were mostly cast iron, but they did find a few old pipes that were made of wood, believe it or not. Another problem was that some of the lines dead ended, and the closer people lived to the dead end, the worse their water was. When they laid the new pipes, they made them all run in loops so the water can circulate and not get stagnant. Some of the towns on the TV news reported that they have been replacing their old pipes in stages for years, and will continue to do so till they're all new. One guy said that their old pipes were supposed to last a hundred years, and they did, but the hundred years are up now, and the new pipes are supposed to last twice that long.

Last I heard, Flint was not planning to replace their pipes, they are still trying that chemical thing that is supposed to seal them up and prevent further leaching. I also heard that, like you said, people in high places knew about the problem long before it was announced to the public. What were they thinking, that if they just ignored the problem it would go away by itself? Heads should roll over this!

last night's debate

We got a dryer at some point, I don't remember when.  It was not my problem, I just dirtied the clothes, probably didn't even bother to put them in the hamper, because I remember Mom always telling me to do that, so I probably just left them laying wherever I took them off and then in the morning there would always be clean clothes and I didn't give the whole thing much thought. 

I do remember in the winter and when it rained the clothes had to be hung in the basement, which was probably no fun at all because it was dark down there and there were no fellow housewives to call out to over the fence.  There was a furnace down there, and it used to be like some many-armed monster before we got the gas furnace which was smaller and sleeker, but not very interesting.  Once we got that the coal bin became my Dad's workshop, though like me, he was not the workshop type.  When I was beginning to smoke I'd come home from high school, and I think I would steal a cig from my older sister's purse.  Parliaments, they had a recessed filter, and I would go down to the workshop to smoke it.  It had one of those dangling light bulbs and there was a mirror and I would watch myself smoke.  I looked so cool.  Probably I never looked so cool again.

Flint seems like an awfully big city to have a water tower.  Back in the day of the fire Chicago had a water tower which somehow escaped the conflagration.  It still stands all fancy and castle tower like on North Michigan Avenue.  Once when I was in Milwaukee I took a walk north by the lake and there was a tower that looked just like the Chicago tower.  Turned out the architect was the same guy.

The city used to be full of water towers, tanks we called them, every tall building had one, but anymore I guess pumps have gotten better and they have mostly been taken down.  Too bad, they looked so cool.  Probably not as cool as me smoking in the workshop.  I would comb my hair carefully to look like a delinquent and try to look menacing into the mirror.  I was the toughest guy in that basement.  

When I first moved out of my parents' attic after coming back from Texas I lived in an old hotel turned apartment building just north of downtown.  It got awfully cold in the winter and I would turn on the burners of the stove.  I never thought about venting, but I never did wake up dead, so I guess it was okay. 

One morning as I was setting off to work, I wasn't sure if I had turned the burners off.  I was like 99 percent sure, but still, maybe I should check, but you know, if I went back to check on things everytime something like this happened I would never get anything done.  Coming home after work once I got a couple blocks away I smelled smoke.  Oh fuck.  Could that have been me?  Was my apartment and all my stuff burned up?  What about the apartments of all the other people who lived in the building?  Wouldn't they be pissed?  Would some of them be dead?  Oh fuck.

Turned out it was a gas main maybe a mile west, there had been some fires, but none of it was my fault. 

Your man Rand got into the big boys' debate.  He didn't have any gaffes, but he didn't say anything particularly memorable either.  At one point he and Rubio, the boy scout, teamed up on Ted, "The Weasel," Cruz, and they had him sweating a little bit, but he wriggled out of it with some blather.  You know now that Trump has lead the way, nobody feels any compulsion to tell the truth about anything or to make any sense.

The mini dwarves, the preacher, the harridan, the other preacher from Pennsylvania, and some guy named Gilmore, ranted about Trump at the kiddie table but after the debate two of them ran off to attend his rally. 

While I was watching the big boy's debate, I got to wondering what was going on with the Trump rally, so I peeked into CNN and there it was.  It was hard to tell what was going on.  There was a stage in the background with a lot of flags, but mostly it was just talking heads in those little inset squares.

I was thinking to hang around the networks a little at the end of the debate to hear what the scuttlebutt was, but it was late, and nobody every knows anymore who won or lost a republican debate, and it was late for me so I stumbled off to bed to await the next poll.

Where Was Moses When the Lights Went Out?

I'm not sure where they got the idea that Moses wrote the first four books of the Bible. I don't think it says so anywhere in those four books, or anywhere else in the Bible for that matter. It does say that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and that, when Moses brought them down from the mountain, they were written on two "tables", which Moses smashed to pieces in a fit of rage when he caught the Israelites worshiping the golden calf. I just looked it up to be sure, it says that God wrote the commandments on the tables Himself, not that He dictated them for Moses to write down. Since the master copy was destroyed, I assume that there was a back up copy, perhaps stored in the Cloud, because the commandments obviously were not lost.

The reason I don't believe that Moses wrote any of those books is that Moses himself is always referred to in the third person: Moses did this and Moses did that. Of course anybody can write a story in the third person, but most authors, when writing about themselves, usually do so in the first person: I did this and I did that. Furthermore, all the stories in Genesis take place before Moses was born, so he couldn't have been an eyewitness to any of them. If Moses did indeed write that book, he must have gotten the information from somebody else, maybe God Himself. But then why didn't God write Genesis with His own hand like He did the Ten Commandments?

I don't remember having a wringer washer in my parent's house. We had an automatic washer and dryer, but sometimes my mother hung clothes out in the yard if the weather was decent. The washer must have been possessed by spirits or something because it had the habit of moving away from the wall during the spin cycle. We kept both machines in the kitchen because our basement was prone to flooding.

I told you wrong about those water towers. I saw on TV today that Flint has one too, so they must not be exclusively used in towns that get their water from wells. I don't remember ever seeing one in Chicago, but many of the suburbs had them, and probably still do.

Rural well pumps do not work when the power goes out so, if Moses was alive today, he would not only be in the dark when the lights went out, he would also be without running water, refrigeration, TV, and probably heat, unless he had a wood stove or fireplace that didn't require a circulating fan to operate. Not having the ability to bring forth water from solid rock with the tap of a staff, we keep several plastic jugs out in the garage for such contingencies. We can use our gas cooking stove for emergency heat, but we have to watch it because it's not vented. If we start getting sleepy, we just turn the stove off for awhile. For some reason, our power rarely goes out in really cold weather, so that's never been a big problem for us. We seldom lose power for more than a few hours where we live but, in the Black River area only a few miles away, they have been known to lose it for days at a time. Some of them have portable generators that enable them to run their refrigerators and a few other things, but I don't know of anybody who has a whole house generator except the hospital.

Are they letting my man Rand in the regular debates now? Last I heard they had separate kiddie table debates for the lesser luminaries. I did hear that a dozen or so candidates have dropped out, so maybe there's now room for everybody at the grown ups' table.

laundry day

I know I'll end up hearing more than I want to, but where does Judeo-Christian tradition get the idea that Moses wrote the first five books?  Surely he had to hear about most of that stuff from somebody else, or maybe God just whispered it into his ear. 

There's really nothing on night time tv for me.  I used to like some sitcoms, but they are all gone now.  I am ashamed to admit that I used to watch Survivor, but I can't take it anymore.  The idiots and the scheming were okay, but they got into the habit of making speeches about how Survivor was the leading force in their life, taught them courage or love or whatever.

For awhile I was watching the murder channel, but for some reason they dropped the more lurid shows that I liked, and sometimes I felt a little guilty about enjoying the stories about real people who got killed.  Lately I discovered an obscure network. Heroes and Icons, that shows reruns of Hill Street Blues, one of my favorite cops shows of yore where the cops aren't always as pure as the driven snow and the crooks aren't all scum. 

I notice though, that you get a different kind of commercial on these obscure channels.  Instead of cars and over the counter drugs and Geico (Progressive, with that goofy Flo has some pretty good commercials, strange that something as boring as car insurance should have the best commercials), you get commercials for those for-profit ripoff schools and California psychics.  Whatever happened to the commercials where all these hot babes were lounging around in their lingerie just waiting for you to call and chat them up?  Or how about where the guy drove his snazzy convertible up the driveway to his mansion and babes spilled out of the car and out of the house just waiting to jump his bones while he stepped aside for about a minute to tell you about the book he wrote that you could buy and become as rich as him with only working about ten hours a week.


Wringers, reminds me of basements,  Between the kitchen and the dining room in the little hallway was this plain little door that opened up into this whole dark world, the stairs were a little rickety and it smelled of soap because right at the bottom of the stairs was the washing machine.  I seem to remember a wringer being attached to it.

There would be a dryer later, but not in the days of my youth.  In the days of my youth the whole mess was put in a basket and hauled out to the backyard.  Up and down the block in the backyards that ran parallel to each other between the backdoors and the garages the mothers were hanging the wash.  This would be a Monday of course.  One of the charms was that every mother was doing the same thing on the same day, so all the backyards blossomed together.  The sheets were like the sails of a mighty ship and the ladies' undies were racy, and your own embarrassing, and the whole block smelled of soap.

Every now and then I am walking through some neighborhood, it doesn't have to be a Monday, mothers don't do everything in unison anymore, but from some exhaust pipe connected to a laundry room in some apartment building will come that smell of laundry soap, and I am taken right back.

Right back to when our moms were young and strong and we were cute I suppose.  Was it fun for the moms, going down the lines with clothespins in their mouths, on a warm summer midmorning with clean clothes billowing in the wind, or was it drudgery?  We kids playing underfoot and shooed away lest we knock the clothes down somehow, would just go on to something else that tickled our fancy, but for the moms there was no choice, the clothes had to be taken down and folded, and some of it would have to be ironed (Tuesday?) and inserted into several different dresser drawers, and day by day dirtied and hampered and the whole dirty mess would be back in the basement on Monday for the whole cycle to recur.

I am sure we never asked her then, if it was drudgery or pleasure, but if we had I expect that the question would have been meaningless for her, it had to be done.


So if you lose electricity do you still get some water from the pressure tank, but once that is gone are you out of water?

It's a big bummer for me, Trump not being in the debate tonight, though possibly he will show up because you never know what he will do.  But maybe without him all the dwarves will turn on that giant Cruz (hard to think of him as giant, that weaselly little rat face with the high pitched nasal squeal).  That might be interesting, Rubio is quick with a knife, though Jeb will probably end up cutting himself.  Your man Rand could shine, but he hasn't shone much sheen in the past.

Who Wrote the Book of Love?

Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Most modern scholars, both religious and secular, consider that to be unlikely, although many fundamentalists still believe it. Genesis in particular seems to be a collection of tales that were handed down by word of mouth for centuries before they were written down. I think the Flood story is the only one that has been found in Mesopotamian literature but, as I have said, the other stories seem to hearken back to the same source. The Bible never really explains where the angels came from, it seems to assume that the reader already knows that. I read somewhere that the concept angels and demons probably pre-existed organized religion. People believed in multiple deities or spirits before they came up with the concept of monotheism. Angels and demons might be a way of embracing monotheism without totally abandoning the old polytheistic belief systems.

I'm not familiar with the Wounded Warrior commercials. We usually hit the "mute" button when commercials come on and try not to pay attention to them. There are some cute ones, like the Geicko commercials, that we will listen to the first few times we see them, but that's about it. The "tit in a wringer" metaphor used to be common around here but, come think of it, you hardly hear it anymore. I suppose that, if you said it front of a young person, they would ask you what a wringer was.

Okay, FEMA is probably all right, as far as government agencies go. I guess I got that idea mixed up with the bailout issue but, of course, it's not the same thing.

Municipal wells are much larger than individual household wells, and most towns have more than one of them. Any town that has a water tower probably gets its water from wells. The purpose of the tower is to provide constant delivery pressure regardless of the amount being drawn at the moment. Water is pumped into the tower, and then is gravity fed from there. Water level in the tower is controlled automatically. When the water falls below a set level, the pumps kick on and, when it rises back up to the high level target, the pumps kick off.

Anybody that is not served by a municipal water system gets their water from a well nowadays. Modern wells are not dug with a shovel like they were in days of yore. A casing pipe of 4-8 inches used to be driven down by a pile driver type mechanism, but I think most of the drillers have rotary augers by now. Once the casing strikes usable water, a smaller drop pipe with a cylindrical stainless steel screen on the end of it is slipped inside the larger pipe. There used to be lots of pump configurations, but I think everybody has gone to the submersible pumps by now. As the name implies, the pump goes down inside the pipe and is submersed, I think near the screen on the end. Submersible pumps almost never fail but, if they do, you need to call the well driller to come change it out, you can't do it yourself.

As the well driller shoves the casing pipe down the hole, he may strike water veins at several levels, but he can't establish the well until he finds water that he can screen, which means a gravel vein. Anything else will plug the screen, and will inspire the well driller to say "I can't screen that shit!" In our area, screenable water is usually found between 100and 200 deep. (Our well came in at 115.) Before the well is approved for use, a water sample must be sent off to Lansing for testing, but I have never heard of a well around here flunking the test. Some well water has excess minerals like iron or lime in it. It's safe to drink, but it might taste funny, and you may need a water softener before you can get soap to make suds in it. This is a common problem in some Chicago suburbs, but I've never heard of it around here. I understand that falling water tables are a problem out west, but I've never heard of that around here either.

A household water system pumps water into a small pressure tank in the basement or crawl space under the house. There is a certain amount of air in this tank and, when the water compresses the air to a set point, a  pressure switch shuts off the pump. Similarly, when the pressure falls below a set point, the pump turns on. I guess this serves the same purpose as the municipal water tank, it gives you reliable pressure without the pump having to run all the time. You wouldn't want to run the pump all the time because it would waste electricity when nobody in the house is using water, and might shorten the life of pump.

dat ol yeller dawg, and lusty turkeys

At the risk of having to endure more bible stories, and what the hell, I'll probably get them anyway, who is narrating the book of Genesis?.  I mean if God is quoted talking about 'us' to somebody, doesn't that imply three parties, God and whoever He is talking to and whoever witnessed Him talking.  It might be that the angel (and what's the deal with angels anyway?), told the third person, or maybe that person told another person because by that time there were at least a couple humans around.  Well I have Gilgamesh to plow through this weekend, twelve tablets, but they are short tablets.

That county fairs and turkey fuck thing was the way you announced you were a man of the world in central Illinois.  It was used when some odd occurrence arose as in "I been to fifty county fairs and a turkey fuck, and I ain't never seen nothing like that."  I don't know if there is an actual turkey fuck in the sense that people would attend one, or if it is just a figure of speech.  I'll google that this weekend when Gilgamesh becomes kind of dry.

Speaking of charities have you seen where Wounded Warriors has got their teat in a wringer (surely you have that expression up there) because only 60 percent of their money went to said warriors.  I never liked those commercials, not so much their sappiness but that gravel voiced narrator, some country singer, one of those guys who never takes off his big old cowboy hat.  It sounds like he is selling Chevy trucks, or is it Ford, oh hell I guess all truck commercials have those gravel voiced guys, beer commercials too, except those light beers where they don't want anybody who sounds old.

Where was I?  FEMA, I don't really know, they have a tough job going into emergencies and trying to figure out who gets what, and you know everybody is going to try to get as much as they can even if it means fibbing a bit, and some guy is always going to get more than some other guy and so the other guy will be complaining, so I don't take those complaints against them very seriously.  It seems to me they probably do a good enough job because they don't get all that many complaints.

I think the F in FEMA stands for Federal so that that means it is of the feds who your ilk hate greatly as opposed to local government which you guys prefer.  So FEMA can give you the money directly, which isn't that the sort of thing you hate, the hairy arm of the feds reaching out to touch you, or they can give it to your beloved city or county government to distribute which I would have thought you would like, but now you don't because you suspect them of having sticky fingers, so for a guy with a tornado torn roof you are awfully picky about where you are getting your money from.

Possibly greater Cheboygan is well served by well water, but that would be because there aren't that many people there.  It's not going to work with a bigger city.  And you know, it's not like there is an unlimited amount of water down there as cities of the west are finding out to their dismay.

My mistake, I misread what you said about Trump and libertarians, although with that shaggy mane, he does look like a yellow dog doesn't he?  I'm bummed out because he is saying now that he won't be in Thursday's debate, and I have the pale ale and the chips all waiting in the kitchen, it just won't be the same without his sneering face.

So do you have your own well then?  How does that work?  How far down does it go?  Does it have some kind of filter?  Does it have a pump going all the time?

That's a Good Question

There are only a few places where God uses a plural (or is it collective?) pronoun like "us" or "we", and I think they are all in Genesis. I remember the question coming up in Elsdon Sunday School at least once. Nobody knew for sure, but the general consensus was that He was talking to angels, or maybe Jesus who, according to the Gospel of John, was with God from the beginning. Well maybe, but it also could be construed as evidence that some of the stories in Genesis have roots in the polytheistic culture of Mesopotamia.

When you get into Gilgamesh, pay particular attention to its version of the Flood story. The head god, whose name I have forgotten, felt it necessary to recruit the assistance of all the other gods and goddesses in his plan to drown out humanity. Afterwards, some of the lesser deities were sorry that they had cooperated in this venture, which might be the origin of the Biblical verse that says God "repented" of His decision to cause the Flood. To my knowledge, it was the only time that God ever repented of anything.

I have never heard of your "county fair and turkey fuck" quote. We've got a lot of strange people around here but, to my knowledge, the only turkey fuckers we have are other turkeys.

When the government collects and redistributes money, some of it invariably gets siphoned off along the way and never reaches the intended recipients. To be fair, the same thing could be said about private charities. I suppose that, the larger an organization is, the more overhead costs they have, so there isn't necessarily anything crooked going on here. I think what got me started on this kick was when you said that, if my house was destroyed by a tornado, I would be happy to have FEMA come bail me out. My contention was that FEMA would probably not bail me out directly, they would send the money on a more indirect route and, by the time it got to me, there wouldn't be much of it left. Truth be known, I don't know this for a fact, I was just speculating. I have heard FEMA being criticized for the way they handled that hurricane relief in New Orleans a few years ago, and for the way they have responded to some of those big wildfires out west but, to be fair, I don't know enough about it to speak with authority on the subject. Of course, that's never stopped me before.

I don't know what kind of help they are giving the people of Flint, but it has occurred to me that they might be further ahead to just drill a well for every household in the city and abandon the municipal water system. I know that Chicago draws its water from Lake Michigan, which is pretty clean, but they still have to treat it with chlorine to make it safe to drink. Although Cheboygan sits on the shore of the Straits of Mackinac, which is even cleaner, they get their city water from wells, and I don't think they treat it with anything. All the rural households have their own wells, and they seldom have problems with them. In the old days, many wells tapped the surface vein, which is the first water you hit below the surface of the ground, and is subject to contamination. Nowadays, though, there are codes that dictate how deep a well must be, and nobody drills their own anymore. Professional well drillers don't come cheap, but they are probably cheaper than the multi-billion dollar cost of replacing all the pipes and pumps in Flint.

I never said that Trump was a Libertarian or even a libertarian. I said that, if we end up with a choice of either Trump or Hillary, I would vote for the Libertarian candidate, no matter who he is. It wouldn't matter if the Libertarian candidate was a yellow dog, or even a gay dog, because he's not going to win anyway, and I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I never voted for either Trump or Hillary.

I'm sure that I've seen photos of you, probably on Face Book.

 

still in Genesis

Why are we talking about Genesis again?  Oh that's right, I started it.  I wanted to use  that thing about being one's brother's keeper in the context of your seemingly tossing the good folks of Flint under the bus because they deserved their fate because they had run their city into the ground, so why should you have to bail them out? 

I just wanted to take that phrase and run, but the bible scholar felt a need to elaborate, and it turned out that I had gotten it mixed up with original sin, something that might not have happened if I hadn't left the church in my early teens, and I have to admit before that time i had been an avid reader of the Sunday Pics (Was that what it was called?  Those little mini Classic Comics versions of the bible?), but not so much of the good book itself.

And now I think we have progressed to dueling stories of what it means, and isn't that the nature of a bible story?  It can mean whatever you want it to mean?

But wait, what is this?  Behold. the man has become like one of us  Who is us?  Who is the good lord talking to?  I'll put wiki Gilgamesh down for my weekend reading, but I rather agree that parts of other more ancient religions made their way into the bible, it only makes sense.

The reason we have government is not to collect money for the poor.  I would like it to do that, being a liberal and a bit of a bleeding heart to boot, but it would still be the government if it didn't do that.  It would still be the government if it hadn't bailed out the banks.  I don't see how this bailout thing comes into the discussion and especially not the bailout of a paper mill that never happened.

I think this whole thing is just a way of badmouthing government which your particular subset of your ilk would skip a county fair and a turkey fuck (Do they use that example in northern Michigan?  It is all the rage in central Illinois.) to do any day of the week.  But that's just something government did that you didn't like.  It's not an inherent feature of government.  I didn't like it when my government went to war in Iraq, but that doesn't mean I stopped believing in government.

So are you saying the poor folk of Flint would be better off with a sack of money than a nice school to go to or lead-free water to drink?  Where do you get your water?  I assume some kind of well, but I've never heard you speak of it.

Wow, Trump as a libertarian, I am trying to get my mind around that.  If anything isn't he an authoritarian?  He'll just do things and screw anybody who stands in his way?  Doesn't he stand for a very strong central government?  Maybe it's because everybody outside of say a quarter of the people who are madly in love with him, thinks he is bull goose loony, and you libertarians have a reputation for being pretty wacky yourselves, so he sounds like one of you to you guys.

I don't know if I've seen a recent photo of you before that fb one.  Have you seen photos of me on fb?

Okay, One More Time

"And the Lord god commanded the man saying, 'You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,'" - Genesis Chapter 2, verse 16 (RSV)

"Then the Lord God said, 'Behold. the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever_'" - Genesis Chapter 3, verse 22 (RSV)

We have discussed this before. I have long been of the opinion that the Adam and Eve story is totally misinterpreted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. My guess is that this story and others in the Book of Genesis likely originated in Mesopotamia. The God of the Old Testament more closely resembles the Mesopotamian gods than he does the God we have today. Go read the "Epic of Gilgamesh" and see if you don't agree with me. Wiki has a pretty good synopsis of it if you don't want to read the whole book.

Of course there is no guarantee that the money going into government programs would be redirected to a good cause if there were no government programs. Nevertheless, If they are going to collect money for the poor, they should give it directly to the poor instead of spreading it around the bureaucracy and expecting it to trickle down to the people it is supposed to help. My paper mill bailout was hypothetical, based on the bailouts of the banks and auto companies which were real.

The Libertarian platform is certainly not perfect but, faced with a choice of Trump or Hillary, I would vote for a yellow dog if he ran as a Libertarian.

Like I said, the emergency managers appointed by our RINO governor have supreme power and can over rule the mayor and the city council, which I'm pretty sure this guy did when he ordered the change in Flint's water source. I doubt that he knew the water was poison, but he could have ordered some tests before he made the decision. Better yet, if there had been no emergency manager, the duly elected officials could have made the decision themselves, and subsequently had to answer to the voters if they got it wrong.

The way I heard it on the TV news, the chemicals they put in were to seal the pipes so as to stop the lead from leaching into the water. They didn't need those chemicals before because the water in the Detroit River is not nearly as corrosive as the water in the Flint River. I understand that the chemicals themselves have made some people sick, so they might have discontinued their use by now.

I am not up to date on the latest news from Flint, so you may have heard something that I haven't. I didn't watch any TV or go on line yesterday because we went to visit my daughter in Charlevoix, which is where the picture you saw on Wiki was taken.

or maybe that bible story means something else

I don't take that - are you sure it's not a real fruit?  Couldn't it be like a fig?  They ate a lot of figs back in those days I hear - story the same way you do.  I see it more as being Promethean, of man taking the handles of good and evil into his own hands and figuring it out himself, instead of saying "Yes Sir" everytime god thunders on about something, and you know he is always thundering on about something or other.  And you know I have long quibbled about just because he is all powerful doesn't mean he is always right about everything.  This whole thing about him wanting us to gather together on Sundays, awfully needy if you ask me.

And he put the damn tree right in the middle of the garden, and being all knowing, he knew that we would eat of the fruit, so what the hell?  What is he getting all righteous about it?

I think the riots of the sixties are overblown, not that many got killed, and I believe they were the rioters themselves, and what they ruined was their neighborhood, they didn't come downtown and they didn't come into any other neighborhoods.  But it did make splashy news, and I'm sure it scared some white people, but those people were already moving out to the burbs and taking their money with them, so I don't think the riots had much of an effect on white flight.

I don't think anybody, well hardly anybody, there are still objectivists running the land, is against helping the poor as a platitude, but when it comes to a particular situation and real money coming out of their pockets, they seem to find an excuse not to do it.  Like blaming the poor, like saying they ran their town into the ground and now they are coming to us for help, well the hell with them, which was your remark that set me off. 

In paragraph three you go into your anti-government rant, but somehow you involve the government in the siphoning of money that would otherwise go to the poor, like there is this mighty river of money which would go straight to the poor if it weren't for government interference, like somehow, if people didn't have to pay taxes that money would go straight into the poor box instead.  And then at the end of the paragraph we come across the odd phrase 'assuming that somebody wants to help them,' which implies that maybe you aren't that fired up about helping the poor and maybe that money river isn't there after all, so then how is government to be blamed for siphoning it off?

Back in the days of the 2008 republican debates, i had a soft spot for the elder Paul, mainly how he talked sense about not going to war while all the rest of them wanted to make the mideast sand glow.  Could he be so bad?  Sure most of his other ideas were bull goose loony, but what if we had peace, would that make up for the nutso stuff?  And then one day I heard an interview with him about food and drug regulations and of course he was against them.  "But," the interviewer stuttered, "what about drugs that don't contain what they say they do, and what about drugs that are flat out poison?"  Well then, he said with the calm countenance of somebody who has everything figured out, those companies would get a bad rep and nobody would buy their products and they would go out of business so there is another problem solved by the free market.

I don't think you feel the same way, I think when you go downtown and buy a bottle of aspirin you want to know there is aspirin in it and not sawdust or arsenic.  What I am trying to say is we need regulations.  I'm sure some are illogical and some are just the source for shakedowns, so I can see where it would make sense to campaign against certain regulations, but when your ilk gets roused it's generally all regulations that they want to get rid of.

I'm not sure where regulations come into it in Flint.  I'm sure some regulation was ignored.  There is certainly evidence that the people, including the guv who were running this operation knew the people were getting poisoned.  The last i heard was that there are some chemicals they can put in the water to keep the pipes from leaching lead, but when they went from Detroit water to the more corrosive Flint river water they stopped using the chemicals to save money.

Why would FEMA give money to your paper mill rather than you.  Where do you get this idea?

Hey, saw you on fb.

One More Bible Lesson, Then on to Flint

The fruit that Adam and Eve ate was not a real fruit, it was an allegorical fruit: "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil". The whole original sin argument comes crashing down if you consider that, before they ate the fruit, they didn't know the difference between good and evil, so no court in the land would have convicted them of sinning. The big question is, why didn't God want them to know the difference between good and evil? Maybe He did want them to know the difference, but He wanted them to figure it out for themselves instead of relying on some higher power to spoon feed it to them. Maybe God was tired of babysitting those two and wanted them to grow up and take responsibility for their own destiny.

The reason I mentioned the riots is that some people blame them for the decline of the cities. While it's true that Detroit never really recovered from the Riot of '67, it was shortly afterwards that the good jobs started slipping away. While the riot may have driven out the many shopkeepers who chose not to rebuild, the really good jobs were in the auto industry, and I don't think the rioters trashed any of the auto plants. The auto plants left for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the eternal quest for cheap labor. Now, you can say it that way, or you can say the unions drove the auto plants out, depending on your point of view.

I'm not against helping poor people, I'm against bailing out corporations, school districts, municipalities, counties, townships, and states. The CEOs, school administrators, and government officials are certainly not poor people, and every dollar that goes to them is one less dollar that's available to help the poor. Of course, there's no guarantee that the money saved would be redirected to the poor, it might be squandered on some pork barrel project, but it's still money that's not available to help the poor, assuming that somebody wants to help them.

The Flint water problem is a direct result of the Emergency Manager law, a law that was soundly defeated by a vote of the people, and then reinstated by some devious political chicanery. Now our RINO governor wants the feds to come bail him out. That's what happens when you reward incompetence, it just encourages more incompetence. If you really want to help the poor, give them good paying jobs and the training required for them to qualify for those jobs.

I have heard bad things about FEMA, but I don't know whether or not they are true. Be that as it may, if my house blew down, it wouldn't do me a bit of good for FEMA or anybody else to give money to my township, county, state, or the paper mill that laid me off 25 years ago. Either give the money directly to me, or get out of the way so I can rebuild my own damn house.

getting back to Flint

Another bible story.  Well it serves me right.  Didn't I start out like a smart aleck quoting scripture, and then didn't I end up, like an Elsdonite who has lost his way, quoting it incorrectly?  You're right I remember now, it was that pomegranate, I heard it was a pomegranate, seems like there is some well known engraving with Adam and Eve, hurriedly clothed, arms full of meager possessions being driven out of Eden by that angry God.  You can almost hear Him saying, "And stay out," as the gates of Eden slam shut.  And I think that's where mortality and the 66 hour workweek came about.

I always thought the moral of the story was that God didn't like vegetarians, though I was always surprised that a vegetarian would kill his brother, they are usually so, well you know.  On the other hand Hitler was a vegetarian.

I think anymore the common consensus is that the Mayans overworked the land, had too many people in a small area and couldn't grow enough crops.  I believe one of those Hunger Games type movies showed Chicago as it might look a couple centuries after it was abandoned.  And then there were those tv shows about how the world would look if man was to disappear.  It was nice, forests growing again, the seas filling with fish.  Too bad we wouldn't be there to see it,

Here we go again with The Riots.  I assume you mean the riots of the mid-sixties about the time Martin Luther King was killed.  I don't think anybody thinks they had anything to do with the job drain.  I don't know why you bring it up.

I think jobs going overseas and automation are to blame for the job drain.  We used to need a lot of people make stuff that we only need a few to make now and the rest are twiddling their thumbs and not getting paid for it.  I remember as a kid they told us about automation and then claimed that it would create as many jobs as it destroyed, I gave that the old Bohunk fisheye, how can that be?  And I was right.

But I wanted to talk about Flint.  What set me off was your saying that the folks there had run their city into the ground, and so it's their fault, they had sinned by being foolish, and why should you have to dip into your larder to help them out?

See now, if you just said, I have mine and life is unfair, so what? And fuck them.  At least that would be logically consistent.  But this whole thing where you have managed your life prudently and as we know, never sinned, so why should you have to bail out a bunch of imprudent sinners, is hypocritical. 

This goes way back to I think about a year ago, (why is nobody cataloging us?) when we had our epic discussion about aiding the poor.  I think that discussion ended up, as most of ours do, with you saying, "Gosh Uncle Ken, you're right again, as usual," but I haven't the time this AM to look that up.

One problem with my side of that argument is that some of the poor are lazy bums.  Some of the poor are poor because they are lazy bums, but some of them are mentally or physically disabled, and some of them are just misfortunate.  Do we refuse to aid them because some of them are lazy bums?  And what if a starving lazy bum comes knocking on your door asking for a handout, do you refuse him because he is a lazy bum?

But these are not the issues of this morning, which I might add is becoming light at the rim of the lake, and time for me to be getting on to other things, so it's summary time again.

Basically it's not the fault of the people of Flint that they are poor and had an insensitive overlord appointed by a republican (you say RINO) governor who led them to impure waters and made them drink even after he knew it was poisoning them.  Just like if a tornado hit Beaglesonia and your house was ripped apart, there would be FEMA guys there to help you out and they wouldn't be saying fuck this guy because he didn't build a stronger house.

Oh and sometime next week I want to get to the similar to Flint situation that we are facing right here in the city that you would like to see revert again to the swamp at the bottom of the lake.

A Strange Story

Cain and Abel were born after Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, so they didn't have anything to do with original sin. Cain was a "tiller of the ground" and Abel was a "keeper of sheep". Both of them made a burnt offering from the produce of their labors. For some unspecified reason, God was pleased with Abel's offering and not so pleased with Cain's offering. Cain complained to God about this, and God basically told him not to worry about it. But Cain did worry about it, which caused him to murder his brother. When God asked Cain where his brother was, Cain came up with the smart alecky remark, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Of course God knew exactly what had happened to Abel, so He wasn't fooled for minute. The "brother's keeper" quote is frequently misapplied to mean we are all supposed to be our brother's keeper when, in the original context, it meant nothing of the sort. When God confronted Cain about the murder, He told him that, since he had desecrated the ground with his brother's blood, Cain could no longer be a tiller of the ground, but would henceforth be a "wandered on the earth". Cain was worried that people would try to kill him for his crime, so God put a mark on Cain which was supposed to prevent anyone from harming him.

This story is obviously allegorical because, if taken literally, there wouldn't have been anybody else on the earth for Cain to worry about except his parents, and he wasn't likely to run into them as he wandered on the earth. Cain later took a wife from another tribe, of which there shouldn't have been any yet, which is another reason to believe that the story was never intended to be taken literally. What then was the true meaning of the story? Well, Cain subsequently "went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden." as if God wasn't everywhere like He is today. Then we get a short paragraph of "begats" which tells us that one of Cain's descendants "was the father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle". Another "was the father of those who play the lyre and pipe", and another was "the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron". It seems then, that Cain's primary importance resides in his progeny, which doesn't explain why he had to kill his brother, the keeper of sheep. Somebody else must have been the father of all shepherds because, as far as we know, Abel died childless.

Another interesting story, not from the Bible, is the way the Mayans apparently abandoned their cities and dispersed into the jungle. Nobody knows exactly why for sure, but it has been theorized that they got tired of fighting wars, paying taxes, and sacrificing their children to their heathen gods. Another theory is that their economy just went to hell for one reason or another. I was always fascinated by the pictures of those ancient ruins overgrown with vegetation. As a child, I entertained the fantasy that something like that would happen to Chicago some day. As it turned out, it happened to Detroit first, but maybe there's hope for Chicago yet.

The big cities in the U.S. have always been a magnet for poor people and immigrants seeking cheap rent and any kind of job they could find. After a generation or two, if their situation improved, they naturally wanted to move out to the country, where they could have some elbow room and a nice lawn. I suppose, if their situation didn't improve, they're stuck in the cities even unto this day. You guys in the ivory towers are a different breed, instead of moving out of the city, you moved deeper in, but you still abandoned your old neighborhoods, so maybe you're not so different after all.

I'm not sure that I know why the jobs left the cities. Some of them may have followed their people to the suburbs, but most of them seem to have gone overseas. I doubt that the job drain caused the riots because the job drain didn't begin until after the riots. Of course that doesn't prove that the riots drove the jobs out either. Maybe, like the Mayan thing, nobody will ever know for sure why our cities went down. Archeologists might be still debating it a thousand years from now.



      

your brother's keeper

So I see that you northern Michiganders or maybe it's the libertarians, or probably it's both, echo the proud question of Cain from olden days, "Am I my brother's keeper?"  Of course in that case Abel was trying to cover up a murder, somehow thinking he could put one over on god, and failed to beat the rap and got all of humankind tossed out of that swell garden and made us mortal and maybe worse than that, made us all get jobs.  One wonders why St Augustine didn't chose this event to be the original sin.  Murder is worse than eating some apple, which probably wasn't even an apple.

I just wanted to quote a little scripture, and you, as a bible scholar, know that scripture can be used any which way to prove whatever point.  And in this case I get the distinct impression that northern Michigan doesn't feel much loyalty to southern Michigan.  Probably northern Michigan liked southern Michigan better when Detroit was an economic engine and paying those fat taxes that built the roads and other infrastructure that made northern Michigan a leafy paradise.

But times change.  I kind of feel that way about the suburbs here, the way they owe their existence to the city, but now they want to turn their backs on it and leave those nasty urban problems behind.  And what are those nasty urban problems?  The noise and the dirt, but mainly the poor, with their unsightly neighborhoods, their petty crime, their constant drain on resources.

It's mainly a problem of big cities because when the jobs the poor once had fade away they can't afford to chase them out to the burbs and it's the place to seek your fortune if you don't have one.  It kind of taints the image of big cities because those living in burbs and small towns come to think of cities as being composed of a bunch of freeloaders.

But Flint is not a big city.  I've been there. 

No I haven't.  Thank goodness for google maps and wiki for helping me avoid an embarrassing mistake.  I've been to Benton Harbor, the poor sister of St Joseph at the southern edge of Lake Michigan about a tenth of the size of Flint.  But I think they are both alike in having lost jobs and being populated mainly by poor black people left behind by the whites who left with the jobs. 

Knowing your homebody tendencies I'm going to guess that you have never been to Flint or to Detroit either, so I'll tell you my view of Benton Harbor.  It is a hellhole.  The downtown is empty, the streets and sidewalks are shabby, in truth I did not want to investigate the residential areas.

Well it's their fault isn't it?  It's their city, and didn't they wreck their bed and now it is only fitting that they should lie in it?  But it's not like the people who live there now ever ran the city, they worked the menial jobs.  When the whites began leaving the black people began to get elected to the city government, but like as not, they weren't as well educated as their white predecessors, and the people that elected them like as not, being also uneducated, didn't make the best choices, and then what do you do when jobs leave your city?  What are the wise choices that could be made?

It's time for me to get on to my other pursuits, but I will be back tomorrow.  Let me wrap up a bit.  I don't think it's fair to blame the poor for their misfortunes.  This water thing, indications are that the overseers knew the water was bad and didn't do shit about it until just lately, and I think that's the main scandal.  We have a bit of the same situation here with a Republican governor threatening to take over Chicago schools so that he can break the teacher's union.  And though I have been pouring a lot of blame on the burbs and the small towns, we city folk are pretty insensitive to our poor also.

Taking Over Flint

To understand what's going on in Flint, you need to know something about the Emergency Manager Law. Soon after our governor took over, he proposed the EML as a way to rescue school districts and municipalities that were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. What they do is appoint an emergency manager to take over the troubled entity. This guy has supreme power, he can over rule the mayor or the superintendent, the city council or the school board, and can even  nullify union contracts. After the law was duly passed, somebody organized a petition drive to put the measure on a referendum ballot. The law was subsequently voted out by the electorate, but the legislature and the governor immediately passed the law all over again, changing it just enough that it qualified as a brand new law. I voted against the law myself, but probably not for the same reasons that most others did. I voted against it because I don't believe the taxpayers should have to bail out any failed organization. They made their bed, let them lie in it.

Be that as it may, the City of Flint was one of those that got an emergency manager. Detroit was another one, but that's a whole nother story. Flint had been buying their water from Detroit, which pumped it out of the Detroit River, which is not as polluted as you might think because it's actually a channel that connects Lake Huron with Lake Erie. Anyway, Flint's EM decided that they could save some money by cancelling the contract with Detroit and pumping their own water out of the Flint River, which is way more polluted than the Detroit River. Some time later, unacceptable levels of lead were found in Flint's water supply. I don't think that the lead actually came from the river, but the other chemicals in the river interacted with the lead pipes in Flint's antiquated water system. I thought they said they were going to switch back to their old water source but, either they haven't done it yet, or it's too late because the damage has already been done and, last I heard, Flint's water still has the lead in it.

People are saying it's the governor's fault, and it kind of is because he's the one who pushed for that Emergency Manager Law in the first place, but I don't think it's fair to say that he deliberately poisoned the people of Flint because most of them are Black. Be that as it may, now he wants to pump more millions of dollars into Flint and is even asking the federal government to get involved. And you wonder why I call him a RINO? It probably would have been cheaper in the long run to just let places like Flint and Detroit go down the drain. If those people can't take care of their cities, they shouldn't have them.

I agree that a bear attack in your neighborhood is unlikely. An attack by two legged predators is way  more likely, but many Chicagoans probably go through their whole lives without that happening either. If you're not interested in guns, and are not willing to put forth the effort to learn how to use them properly, then you certainly shouldn't buy one.

Flint

Yasser Arafat was the cheese of the PLO.  The PLO has been around a long time, and as these things go with insurgent groups, and I guess all groups, they may begin with fire-eaters, but after awhile they aren't eating so much fire, and some guys get into it just to get ahead, and it becomes corrupt.  And it hadn't had much success in liberating Palestine.  Hamas was the new shiny fire-eating incorrupt organization on the block.  For some reason Israel and the US let the Gazans have an election to choose their leadership, never dreaming that they would vote in Hamas which is what they did.  So now the Gazans live on this tiny strip of worthless beach with Israel to the north and east and Egypt to the south and the sea to the west which is monitored by the Israelis and madmen running the government and every now and then they take some little potshot at Israel who retaliates massively, but still they pick themselves up and launch another potshot.  They are hard to deal with, I admit.

I'm a little pressed for time today so I am going to look up that Gaza strip election later.

The population of various middle eastern people is increasing more rapidly the population of their, what do you call them, white, residents, but they are not near to becoming minorities.  Did you ever hear the story of the marching Chinese where if they were to begin marching out of China four abreast the march would last forever because there would be enough left behind to continue to make babies.

I suppose a bear could always migrate along the railroad tracks like that cougar was thought to have done and climb up Marina City and tiptoe past me while I am watching the murder channel on tv and eat me down to the bone when I went to take a leak or grab another beer, so maybe I should buy myself a shooting iron.  I could probably buy a nice holster and wear it on my canoe trip to Beaglesonia to attend your wedding to your gay dog.

I'm finishing up this post in the pm because I had to leave early this morning and i just heard the network news guy in a preview on the local news say they are going to have an interview with your guv over this Flint Michigan thing.  Maybe there will be fodder for the institute in that.

Okay, It's Coming Back to Me Now

Now that you mention it, I seem to remember that PLO-Hamas thing. I guess they are two different political parties like the Democrats and the Republicans, only with guns. I also remember a guy named Yassir Arafat, I think he was the founder of the PLO and used to be in the news a lot, but then he died. Maybe they are still arguing over who should be his successor.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Jews became a minority in their own country, just like the Europeans are becoming a minority in Europe. It's funny how those little countries can put out so many people and then spread them all over the place. Look at Europe during the Middle Ages with those Goths, Vandals, Vikings, Saxons, and Normans all breaking over Europe in waves for centuries. I'll bet more people came out of Scandinavia than there are people in Scandinavia today. Then there were the Huns and the Mongols, both coming from Mongolia. Mongolia is a bleak and barren place, so I can understand why their people would be hankering for greener pastures. But how did such a wasteland generate all those people in the first place? The Mideast is mostly a desert with a few green river valleys to break it up, yet millions of people are pouring out of it and threatening to swallow Europe right up. And you know what? I'll bet when they're done, there will still be just as many people living in the Mideast as there ever was.

I read on Wiki awhile back that Illinois doesn't have an open carry law. Even hunters must keep their guns unloaded and enclosed in a case except while they are actually hunting with express permission from the landowner. Michigan requires that when you transport a gun in a motor vehicle, but an exception is made for people with concealed carry permits. Our DNR is not happy about it but, apparently, the concealed carry law trumps the hunting regulations. When I was in Alaska, the only gun law they had was against concealed carry, everything else was wide open. It was not uncommon to see somebody wearing a pistol or carrying a rifle, in town, in the country, and even in the bars. I don't remember hearing of anyone getting shot, accidently or on purpose, but I do remember hearing about a guy who was apparently eaten by bears and/or wolves, they didn't know for sure because there wasn't enough of him left to do an autopsy. The guy was staying in his primitive cabin out in the boonies, and apparently he tried to go to the outhouse unarmed. Everybody said it was his own fault for being so careless.

I don't understand your question about whether concealed carry or open carry is safer. You seem to be saying that, if one person does it, everybody has to do it. I don't know how many people in Michigan have concealed carry permits and, just because they have a permit, doesn't necessarily mean that they carry their guns around all the time. I don't see a lot of open carrying going on, but I don't get around much anymore. Mostly, if a person is carrying a gun around here, it's for a reason, usually because he's hunting. I just said that, if I felt the need to carry, I would rather do it openly so that the bad guys would leave me alone and I wouldn't have to shoot them in self defense. The advantage of concealed carry is that you don't get accused of brandishing or disturbing the peace or something. If I had to carry a gun in town, you're damn right I would be brandishing because there would be no peace to disturb.

who many guns could an open gun toter tote if an open gun toter could tote guns, openly.

Outside of looking for the WMDs I don't think the UN had anything to do with the second gulf war.  You may be confusing them with NATO.  I don't remember any Iraqi violations of the no-fly zone.  Isn't the whole point of a no-fly zone that if you fly into it, we shoot you down?  I do remember freedom fries.  I stepped into a convenience store restroom about that time and on the wall with the rubber machines and other things of that ilk was one advertising freedom ticklers, as opposed to French ticklers.

The Palestinians who lived in Israel when it was first formed are the citizens I was talking about.  They are treated pretty shabbily, but they do have the vote and their birthrate is higher than the Israelis, and by 2035 they may become the majority. 

You know the Arabs never perfected the nation, so they just had this big area in the middle east where they fought each other constantly before and after the crusaders.  The land where Israel is today was kind of a backwater, it didn't have a strategic position or natural resources to speak of and just went back and forth.  I think the Ottomans made it part of the province of Syria, and then the English and the French remade borders after ww1, and about that time the European Jews became interested in making it their homeland.

I don't know what the status of the Palestinians living in the west bank is citizen-wise.  Since Israel controls the borders it says who can come out and who can leave.  The Gaza strip is separated from the west bank.  Both were ruled by the PLO but then they let Gaza have an election and they voted for Hamas.  Those are the guys who are lobbing the missiles over the border, God knows why, do they expect the Israelis to capitulate over that? 

Hamas still rules that godforsaken stretch of beach surrounded by Israel, and Egypt on the south is not too crazy about them either.

I know this is all hypothetical, but if you were open carrying your fire arm, that must mean the law allowed open carry and that would mean that anybody else could open carry, so you would be walking gun-toting streets.  Probably most of these toters would be law-abiding citizens, but just as sure some of them wouldn't be.  And they might as well shoot you as anybody else since everybody is toting a gun, and of course if they were going to shoot you it would be in the back because nobody wants to risk your quick draw.  So how does that make you any safer than if everybody, including yourself, is concealed carry?

Winning the War, Losing the Peace, and Brandishing Your Piece

Okay, so the U.N. wasn't involved in Desert Storm, but didn't they have something to do with those "no fly zones"? I seem to remember that Iraqi violation of the no fly zones was one of the justifications for the second Iraq war. The other justification was those elusive WMDs. First there were U.N. inspectors looking for them, but Saddam wouldn't let them go into some areas. Then he kicked the inspectors out of the country, then he let them back in, but they still couldn't find those WMDs. At that point W started talking about "regime change", WMDs or no WMDs. I remember that the U.N wouldn't support an invasion, so W started putting together his "coalition of the willing". Some people were pissed at France for being unwilling and threatened to boycott French fries unless their name was changed to "liberty fries", but I don't think anything ever came of that.

Is Israel allowing Palestinians to become Israeli citizens now? Last I heard they weren't, but lots of things change without me hearing about it. I read on Wiki once that, when they first proclaimed the modern State of Israel, they offered citizenship to any Palestinians living within their borders. Most of the Palestinians were not interested in that, preferring to leave the country and vowing to come back some day as conquerors. I also remember reading or seeing on TV that the Palestinians today are not citizens, although some of them want to be. As it is, they can't get a passport to travel out of the country because, technically, they have no country, because Palestine is not a sovereign state. Was it ever? Before the occupied territories became the occupied territories, were they ever organized into a Palestinian state? Some time ago, I remember hearing something about elections in the Gaza Strip, but they elected Hamas, which nobody outside of the Gaza Strip would deal with because they were terrorists. What ever became of that?

Michigan had their open carry law long before they passed the concealed carry law, but you never saw anybody openly carrying, and you still don't. I read somewhere that this was because Michigan also has a law against "brandishing" a firearm or other weapon. One of the justifications for passing the concealed carry law was that the open carry law was ineffective because of that brandishing law. Last I heard, our legislature was looking into the problem. It turns out that the brandishing law doesn't define exactly what it means to brandish something, so they are trying to come up with a legal definition of the word. I don't know if the gun nuts really want to openly carry their pieces all over town, maybe they just want to prove that they can. It is presently illegal to carry a concealed weapon into a school building, but it's legal to openly carry one in there. I have not heard of anybody actually trying to do that, and my guess is that they wouldn't get very far if they did. If I felt the need to carry a gun downtown well, first of all, I wouldn't live in a town like that, but if I did, I would much rather carry it openly than concealed. My intent would be that the bad guys, knowing that I was carrying, would leave me alone and I wouldn't have to shoot anybody.

pancho and lefty

The UN had no part in Desert Storm or in stopping short of deposing Saddam.  They were pretty much against the war from the get go.  At the time stopping short of toppling Saddam was controversial, but in retrospect, seeing how well knocking off Saddam worked for the son, it was probably a wise move.  Came across this paragraph while consulting with the wiki, it rather surprised me.

There was some criticism of the Bush administration, as they chose to allow Saddam to remain in power instead of pushing on to capture Baghdad and overthrowing his government. In their co-written 1998 book, A World Transformed, Bush and Brent Scowcroft argued that such a course would have fractured the alliance, and would have had many unnecessary political and human costs associated with it.

In 1992, the U.S. Defense Secretary during the war, Dick Cheney, made the same point:
I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties, and while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the [1991] conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.

And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam [Hussein] worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.^[126]

— Dick Cheney

That was another odd thing about the neocons, some of them like Dick and Rummy were reasonable people before they caught the fever.

The Israeli thing is indeed complicated.  The one problem is all the countries around them vowing their destruction, but they have been able to defeat them pretty handily, and now they are all off fighting each other.  The other problem is the problem within.  Predictions are that their Arab citizens will outnumber their Israeli citizens within about thirty years.  I would use the carrot more than the stick myself, but the Palestinians are hard to deal with.

I think the most commonly accepted reason for the drop in crime is simply that the country's median age is going up and young people commit more crimes than old people.  I was pretty opposed to concealed carry, I was expecting a bloodbath, but then as you pointed out, it doesn't seem to have made much difference either way.

I guess packing heat wouldn't be that bad in the wintertime when you are all bulked up, although just last Friday a notebook fell out of my coat pocket and now all my jotted down wisdom is lost.  But I guess you wouldn't just stick your gun in your pocket.  I've seen on tv where some guys just shove it under their belt, but then you know where it's aiming then.

I guess you get a holster, and isn't that one more damn thing you have to pay money for and then you have to remember to put it on and take it off and it doesn't look all that comfortable.  And what about when you took your coat off, and what about summertime? 

I was going to say something about Texas leading the way in open carry but the wiki tells me that about half the states have it.  Damn that would make me nervous, walking into a grocery store of a local bar and everybody is openly packing.  But I don't know, isn't a little better than if you don't know who is and who isn't.  What's that line from Pancho and Lefty?

Pancho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel


So what is the deal with open carry?  To people want to intimidate their neighbors, or do they just want to dress a little more comfortably in the summer?

"Ah Yes, I Remember It Well"

Remember that old song? This guy and this girl are reminiscing about how they met and fell in love. The trouble was that they each remembered it differently. They go back and forth giving their version of the story and, at the end of each verse they sing together, "Ah yes, I remember it well."

The more I think about it, I was against the second Iraq war when they first started talking about it. I figured that Bush was just trying to redeem his father's failure to finish the job when we were there the first time. As I remember it, the U.N. had something to do with that, which was consistent with their history. Every time the good guys start to win, the U.N. wants to call a cease fire, which gives the bad guys time to rest and regroup, thus assuring that the war will go on indefinitely. Anyway, I think what changed my mind was when W made a speech saying that, if we can turn Iraq, the rest of the Mideast will fall like dominoes. I suppose that, in those days, I figured that all those Islamic countries were in it together. Most of the 9-11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, which was supposed to be on our side, but we ended up fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It didn't matter to me which country we took on next, as long as the ultimate goal was to extinguish Islamic terrorism world wide. I know by now that the situation over there is way more complicated than that, but hindsight is 20-20.

That Israeli-Palestinian thing is also more complicated than I made it out to be, but I was trying to be brief. I must have been about three years old when the modern State of Israel came into being, but I remember people saying how nice it was that the Jews finally had their own homeland. By the time I started school, there was one war after another being fought over the matter, and everybody I knew was rooting for Israel. In 1967, about the time I got out of the army, Israel won a decisive victory and occupied a lot of territory that wasn't part of the original deal. They soon gave Egypt it's part back in exchange for Egypt's recognition of Israel's right to exist, and I suppose people expected the rest of the occupied territory to be returned under similar circumstances. The thing is, the rest of the Islamics still refused to recognize Israel so, naturally, Israel didn't want to give them their land back. Decades later, I found people still arguing about it on the internet. Some people who weren't even alive yet in '67 can't seem to understand why Israel is being so stubborn about this. I remember a few years ago, when Israel returned the Gaza Strip to Palestinian control, rocket attacks were being launched against Israel from that ground within a day or two. Was this supposed to encourage Israel to give back the rest of the occupied territories? Funny thing, the Islamics don't seem to care about Israel anymore, now it's the U.S. that is the "Great Satan".

I understand that crime rates have been declining in this country for some time. There is probably more than one reason for this, but the gun nuts don't seem to be hurting the cause any. I remember that, when the liberalization of the concealed carry law was being debated in Michigan, the antis were ranting about how it would return us to those thrilling days of yesteryear when everybody settled their grievances with a six gun showdown in the middle of Main Street. Well, that hasn't happened, and crime rates continue to decline. Some say the rates are declining because more citizens are packing heat, but that may be just wishful thinking. Be that as it may, guns, like gays, seem to be here to stay, so we might as well get used to them. I won't make you carry a gun if you don't make me marry my gay dog. Deal?

tough guys packing heat

Why did you think invading Iraq had anything to do with 9-11?  Was your theory that those guys all look alike?  Neocons were guys who were relatively liberal on social issues but were crazed hawks when it came to the middle east.  Their theory was that they would ride into Baghdad under a snow of rose petals, the Iraqis would pay the costs of our invasion out of oil money, then under our guidance they would become a democracy, their neighbors, seeing how groovy democracy is, would become democracies themselves, and being democracies they would be nice to Israel.  With all that deep thinking how could anything go wrong?

They kind of kept this a little under wraps while they were talking the simpleton into it, and suspecting that the American people would maybe think their theories unrealistic, they made up the whole weapons of mass destruction thing because fear trumps logic.  My dems were no heroes in this, including the big girl, almost nobody wants to be on the peace side of a country going to war. 

When things started to go a cropper, people who should have given the whole project a bigger fish eye in the beginning, began to examine it, and the neocons were in a brighter light.  Eventually the usage of neocon was broadened to include anybody who was for the war, and that's probably why the guy on the internet called you a neocon.

I've known a few Jews too, and a few Muslims, and a few Christians, and atheists, and Irish, and Pollacks, and some of them have been swell guys and some of them have been big fucking assholes.  You don't judge a country by the people you meet living in the USA, nor by the people who live there either, who are all probably nice enough guys, except for the ones who aren't.  You judge it by its current government.  The Germans were terrible when they were Nazis, swell guys when they were our bulwark against the commies, and lately they seem to be ok, but I have to tell you they make me a little nervous.

That whole thing about the British and the UN and partition is all dressed up in legalities but it was basically a battle of force and the Israelis won.  I agree that the Israelis live in a tough neighborhood, and that the Palestinians aren't the easiest people to deal with, but, without going into a lot of detail on it, I think they give their local Palestinians too much of an iron fist.  And they influence our foreign policy way too strongly to whatever their leader wants at the time.  And this is after taking way more money from us than any other country gets.

What I am saying is people coming out of a gun store and asked a question by a reporter are probably just saying whatever to advance whatever agenda they have.  Every time CTA rates go up they interview people on the street who say that they are never going to ride the CTA again, and yet ridership does not drop.

People who were too young to buy a gun before are buying their first gun.  Otherwise people who haven't owned guns before are probably not going to buy them now because why?  What has changed?  You are aware that crime is way down aren't you?

Okay women, probably some women are buying their first guns, probably because now we have concealed carry and there are so many cute new holsters.

I was watching the debates last night of course, even the kiddie table debates that your man Rand turned his nose up at, and there was the Huck going out of his way to mention the last time he was at the gun shop loading up on iron.  Well, hell all the rep candidates do that, they every last one of them have a gun for each hand and foot and tongue and whatever, and for the front room and the bedroom and the kitchen and the bathroom because you never know where you are going to be when the need to shoot somebody is going to come up.

And I was thinking what the fuck does the Huck need a gun for?  Does he have the midnight shift at the Seven Eleven?  Does he haunt seedy neighborhoods in search of illicit pleasures?  We were talking about tough guys maybe a week ago, and i think it is exactly that.  If you asked the Huck if he was planning on shooting somebody, he'd probably give you this long and rambling folksy explanation with a few references to the good lord, and in the end he would not have said no.  And if it so happened that the need arrived, you can just see him blowing the smoke from the barrel with a Clint Eastwood squint.  Because he is a tough guy too.

The Bad Old Days

When I saw the title for your last post I thought you were talking about the 1990s, but let's not go there tonight.

I know something about union history, but you probably know more about it than I do. I think it's unfortunate that the union movement was born in violence, but I suppose that's the way things were done in those days. At some point the federal government got involved, which was probably a good thing, all things considered. Now we have laws that govern the way companies and unions interact with each other but, like many other laws, they are often honored in the breach. Some of our paper mill people seemed to be nostalgic for the bad olds days. Although they weren't alive back then, their ancestors were in the thick of the battle and they probably grew up hearing their stories. The way I looked at it, management were not our enemies, they were certainly adversaries, but not blood sworn enemies. It's like two lawyers arguing in a court room, each one champions the interests of the people they represent, but they both are loyal to the rule of law, and there's no reason they shouldn't be friends on their off duty time. Most of our managers and most of my union brothers and sisters didn't agree with my interpretation, which is probably why I had such a hard time convincing them of anything else. I did have some success settling grievances at the first stage, which is like settling out of court, but when it came to larger issues of policy, I was a voice crying out in the wilderness.

Silly me, I thought at the time that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, and that was reason enough to go to war. The first I heard of those neo-cons was when somebody called me one on the internet. I explained to him that I wasn't neo-anything, I had been this way all my life, which was at least twice as long as he had been around. I'll have to say that I have been following this stuff with more interest since I started talking to you about it. Before that I was only vaguely aware of current political events, believing that I already knew all I needed to know about that stuff. Silly me!

I suppose the reason that I think of Israel as the good guys is that I have known a few Jews in my life and they seemed like nice people. I have never heard anything good about the Muslims, but then I haven't ever met one in person either. From what I have read on Wiki and in National Geographic, Israel agreed to the U.N. resolutions about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but the Palestinians never did. In 1948, one minute after the British mandate expired, Israel acted unilaterally, but still expressed hope that a deal could be cut with the Palestinians at some future time. Since then the Palestinians and their allies have attacked Israel multiple times and Israel has fought back, usually winning or at least breaking even. Is this what you mean by "playing cowboys and Indians"? What would you rather have them do, surrender?

Are you saying that none of the recent gun buyers are buying their first guns? From whence did you get that information? All I know is what I saw an TV and read in magazines, but it seems logical that, no matter how many guns someone owns, one of them had to be his first gun. As for the classes, they are required by law in Michigan for concealed carry permits, and for young hunters buying their first hunting license. Again from TV and magazines, I have heard that lots of women have been buying their first guns these days, and they have classes especially for them. Not that they aren't welcome in the regular classes, but women seem more comfortable learning among other women, or so I have been told.

the gay nineties

I've been reading about the anarchists and commies and revolutionists of the 1890s.  They had mixed feelings about unions.  Some of them were aristocrats and thought that the working man was a sweating brute, and it was up to the intelligentsia to lead the revolution.

Some were all for unions because they thought they would lead the revolution, and others thought that they would make a deal along the way and having gotten what they wanted they would drop out of the revolution, which turned out to be what happened. 

Did you ever read about the labor unrest of the 1890s in America?  It's quite a story with quite a cast of characters.  At times it seemed like they might win.  They were strong in the big cities, but no so strong elsewhere and not that many people lived in big cities back then.  But all the fat cats hated them and they had the police and the thugs that their money could buy, and likewise the politicians, and the populace outside of the cities thought they were unamerican, and they were always fighting with each other over points that now seem obscure, and then the mainstream parties took some of their more moderate ideas and then they were gone and it's almost like they never existed.

I think there are still some lefties in the unions.  Were there any lefties in your mill union?  But mostly the rank and file have the idea that they got theirs and fuck everybody else.  I think they still general vote democrat, except for the free loaders, but they don't like their democrats to be very radical.

A global union would never get off the ground for a million reasons, the first of which is how could they agree on a wage, and like I've said again and again people would rather be oppressed by their own people than by some strangers. 

What about the invasion of Iraq seemed like a good idea at the time?  That they were building weapons of mass destruction?  That Saddam was a bad man and it was the duty of the world's policemen to topple him?  You don't remember the neocons?  That little cabal around Dirty Dick, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, and the boys?  The guys who loved democracy so much that they thought that we should spread it around the world, starting in the middle east at the point of a gun?  You didn't notice this going on as the drums of war were beating ever stronger?

I think arguments can be made against Israel, particularly their playing cowboys and Indians with their Palestinians.

Those guys being interviewed at the gun stores are gun nuts and they are just mouthing the propaganda of the NRA (which I know you are not a member of, just a fellow traveler), and I'm sure the gun they are buying is not that first one, and dollar to donuts they are not going to spend their money or their time on any kind of Goddamn classes.

Republican debate tonight and I am excited.  Everybody is looking for the big boys, Trump and Cruz to swing at each other, and Rubio is likely to be doing some fancy tapping with those boots that everybody is making fun of, and oh of his height too, even though at 5' 10" he is about average height, the other guys are taller.  I think Bush is 6' 3" and he'll try to sound forceful but end up mumbling.  I don't know why Carson is bothering to show up, but I think the longer he's in the better his books sell.  And Kasich will be wondering why can't we all be friends like everybody in his paradise of Ohio is.  An extra beer and maybe some popcorn and staying up till gosh, way past ten, for Ken.

"Workers of the World, Arise!"

I have mixed feelings about unions after having been in one for 23 years. Our local at the paper mill wasn't very effective, mostly because we spent more energy arguing amongst ourselves than we did arguing with management. After working briefly in the same plant without a union, however, I can testify that the old saying is true: "Any union is better than no union." There are probably lots of reasons for the decline in the union movement in America, not the least of which is that most of the manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. A job without a union isn't much fun, but a union without a job is worthless. You know I'm not a fan of anything global, but now that we have a global economy, maybe what we need is a global labor union. Since I never could get 200 paper mill employees to agree on anything, I  certainly have no idea how to get all the workers in the world to agree on anything, so somebody with more savoir faire than me needs to get working on that right away. I understand that they already have labor unions in Red China, so that might be a good place to start. Of course their unions are controlled by their government, but so are their corporations. Unions, governments, and corporations are only as good as the people in them, so it seems that all we've got to do is get their people to shape up and everything else should fall into place.

In retrospect, the invasion of Iraq was probably a mistake, although it seemed like a good idea at the time. As it turned out, Bin Laden was eventually found hiding in plain sight in Pakistan, so maybe that's where we needed to put our boots on the ground all along. What you said about our efforts in Iraq helping Israel makes a lot of sense. I wish I could believe that our guys did that on purpose, but probably not. I don't know nothing about those neo-cons, but everybody should be pro Israel because they are the only good guys in the Middle East. I suppose that only hold true for other good guys, though, the bad guys would naturally be on the other side. What you said about those insurance companies switching sides makes a lot of sense too.

What you said about guns makes a lot less sense, at least to me. Some time ago, I saw on the TV news that lots of people were out there buying their first guns. This was on one of the regular channels, not FOX or MSNBC. They also said that most of them were taking classes so they would know which end of the gun the bullet comes out of, which has got to be a good thing. I also read in one of my hunting magazines that, for the first time in history, more people are buying guns for protection than for hunting. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. For some time there has been concern that the number of hunters has been declining although, last I heard, that trend was starting to turn the other way. I guess Obama shouldn't get all the credit for the increase in gun ownership, but he certainly hasn't hurt the cause any.

Speaking of Red China, have you heard about the big stock market crash they had last summer? It helped our own stock market at first because people were dumping their Chinese stocks and buying American stocks, but now all this money pouring into our country has caused the dollar to become too highly valued by the international money changers. That might sound like a good thing, but it's not because it makes our exports more expensive than our imports, or something like that. Anyway, the Chinese crises has caused ripples all over the world, and now everybody's stock markets are going down like submarines. Of course it will all level out eventually, and now might be a good time to buy stocks at bargain prices, if you're so inclined.

workers paradise lost, capitalist paradise regained

Of course i know the story about right to work laws.  The particular case before the supreme court right now has nothing to do with Michigan.  It is some renegade California teachers who want to be freeloaders so they can breathe the rarefied air of liberty and not have part of their fat wages, which they only have because union predecessors fought for them, spent to advance the socialist paradise.  I think this particular case is limited to public sector unions, but one assumes it will go down to all unions, and help the capitalists return to their paradise lost of 6 workdays a week, and 12 hour days, and child labor, and certainly no minimum wage.  As you can see, I have an opinion on that.

I guess you quit the libs when they didn't want to topple Hussein (Saddam, not Obama, who of course they have wanted to topple since day one).  I seem to recall that pop of Rand was against it, and some of the leftiest dems, and probably the official libertarian party, which I assume is the one you quit.  So seeing the result of that bold move of planting boots in the desert do you still think that was a good idea?

I do agree that libs and lefties have different kinds of doveness.  The lefties are more like all men are brothers and the libs are more like fuck everybody else, but the end result is the same.

I don't see where Israel is in any trouble at all these days.  All their enemies, who were ineffectual and mostly hot air when they were threats to Israel, are lining up to fight each other, so maybe that was the secret plan behind breaking Iraq, to get them all fighting each other and leaving Israel alone.  All the neocons were strongly pro Israel.

That thing about fighting a war for other ends than defeating the enemy reminds me of your theories where we get into wars with the purpose of losing them, I forget why, to bring shame to the state I think.  I always wondered where you got those outlandish theories.  Lately I have been reading a little bit about the Birchers which I remember you were one, and that was one of their chief tenets, that we (or rather the secret commisars among us) got us into these things so that we could lose them.  They were conspiracy theorists before conspiracy theories became cool.

The reps were able to block single player because they had the insurance companies on their side on that one.  Once single-payer was gone the insurance companies changed sides.

I don't think these guys who are rushing off to the emporium to buy their fifth or sixth gun are buying target or hunting rifles, I believe they are buying something beefier, something that looks cooler slung over the shoulder or strapped to the hip when they occupy some bird sanctuary in the middle of nowhere.

I don't think any of those gun nuts, except the young ones that are just coming of age, are buying their first guns.  The people who didn't have one before Obama still don't have any.

You are aware I assume that in recent polls about 55 percent think gun controls should be more strict, 10 percent less, and 30 kept as they are.  Which I realize doesn't mean that much because gun control nuts are concerned about other issues too whereas gun nuts are mostly just concerned about guns.

It's kind of a red herring to pin gun ownership on Obama because you guys have been filling your basements before he was elected and you will be filling them after he is gone.