Social Credit

This is one of those things that I stumbled across on Wiki one day while looking up something else:
During the Great Depression, there was something going around in Canada called the Social Credit Movement. It started out as somebody's economic theory, then progressed into a grass roots movement, and eventually became a political party. It ultimately broke apart because of internal ideological differences and, I suppose, because the depression came to an end. It was thought to be pretty radical at the time, but would not seem so if it was introduced today.

The idea is that everybody contributes value to the economy by being a consumer. Of course some people contribute more than that, but everybody is a consumer, if nothing else. When the consumers don't have any money, for whatever reason, they can't buy anything, and the economy goes to hell. Historically, consumers got their money by working for a living, but now jobs were scarce, many companies had failed, and start up capital for entrepreneurs was hard to come by. If some way could be found to get money into people's hands, the downward spiral might be reversed. One way might be to think of consumers as shareholders and pay them all a dividend, somehow calculated from the total value of the economy as a whole.......Whoops, it just now occurred to me that the economy as a whole was going backwards at the time, so there would have been nothing from which to pay dividends. A company that is losing money can't pay dividends to its shareholders, now can it. Oh well, it was just a theory.

The more I think about it, though, social credit might be an idea whose time has come. There is lots of money floating around nowadays, we just need to find some way to flow it into the hands of the general public. It seems like they don't want to pay us to work anymore, so maybe they should to pay us not to work. Of course, if they paid us too much not to work, then it might be hard to get people to  go back to work if the ever needed us again. What they need to do is guarantee everybody a certain minimum income whether they work or not. Any money people manage to make on their own should be theirs to keep and should not diminish their regular guaranteed income. That way, ambitious people would not be held back, and lazy or otherwise disadvantaged people could still keep their heads above water.

One reason that social credit failed in Canada was that nobody could figure out how to pay for it, but I've got that one covered. As it is now, the Federal Reserve creates new money out of nothing and gives it to the banks. Why not give it directly to the people? Most of it will end up in the banks sooner or later anyway, but the people will get to use it first. It is said that the government can't give you anything without first taking it away from someone else but, in this case, it's new money that has never been in someone else's possession. Sounds like one of those win-win things, doesn't it?

Money talks

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to view old episodes of Life is Worth Living, the Bishop Sheen program, you had to have access to some archive hidden the basement of some church somewhere.  But thanks to YouTube we can see those old shows and listen to his earlier radio programs anytime, at our leisure.  But I wonder, was radio ever considered an opiate of the masses, and if not, why not?  Old radio programs required you to sit down, listen, and pay attention; they weren't background noise.

Those old radio programs, at least some of them, hold up quite well compared to current television fare,  Many years ago I received a gift of a bunch of CDs from a company called Old Time Radio which had dozens of programs and they were great to listen to, and very engaging.  Many of those old programs are probably on YouTube now, as more and more old recordings are discovered and uploaded, if you're interested in that sort of thing.  I often get the sense that the more things change the more they stay the same, a lot of old wine in new bottles.

But television isn't television anymore, with programs only available at specific times and provided by a small number of networks.  If you missed last night's episode of Bonanza, well, tough shit; maybe you can see it in a rerun.  That model changed with the advent of VCRs and time shifting, giving the viewer an option to do other things rather than stay home to see a particular program at a specific time.  It's even better (or worse) now; you don't have to record anything because it's all online, part of the expanding ocean of viewable content.

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If television was the opiate of the masses, then the internet must be the methamphetamine of the masses.  How can we make any sense out of the stupendous amount of information available, much of which is unreliable and lacking context?  The expression "going viral" is apt, certain ideas spread quickly and relentlessly like a pandemic and are no more than unsubstantiated rumors.  You've probably seen (or read) The Ox Bow Incident; that's what comes to mind.

Maybe someday there will be a filter that screens out the misinformation so we don't get so worked up about nothing, but I'm not so sure it wouldn't be hacked.

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Okay, Uncle Ken, exactly what do you mean by "income inequality?"  I hope you don't mean that everyone gets paid the same regardless of their job or occupation; that's just goofy.  If you mean that pay should be equal for everyone with the same job title, well, I'm not sure if that's fair, either.  Suppose you and I have the same job title and responsibilities and get paid the same.  But you are doing a much better job than I am; shouldn't you get paid more?  Then there are other subjective factors which are difficult to measure.  Sure, you're outperforming me, but the other folks in the shop like me better because you're a cranky old fart who doesn't get along with anyone.  Then there's the fact that the boss is your uncle, so now we're back to square one.  How do we factor everything to make a fair and equitable pay structure?

Or does income inequality mean that some sectors are grossly overpaid while others are underpaid?  That's a tough nut to crack, and you have to follow the money.  If some paper pusher, or athlete, or entertainer, gets paid millions it's only because it's worth it to whoever or whatever is paying the bills.  Then there is the factor of real versus perceived value to society.  Teachers, farmers, fast food workers, and just about anybody else are more valuable to society, in my opinion, than any celebrity or athlete I can think of.

But that's not completely fair, either.  Sure, some barely literate college dropout is earning millions of dollars playing with a ball, but he's spending a lot of money, too.  Those big houses, fancy cars, and extravagant lifestyles keep a lot of people working.  Besides, a lot of careers are short-lived.  They make big money for a short period of time and then it's over.  Celebrities, too, have a short shelf life, some not short enough.  I don't like it, but I can't begrudge anyone making it while they can.

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Mr. Beagles mentioned the ridiculous CEO salaries, and I agree.  In the US, at least, they are insane.  European CEO salaries are much lower and I'm not sure why; they seem to be doing at least a good a job as their US counterparts, if not more so.  What really grinds my gears is that, after running a company into the ground, a departing CEO sails away on the golden parachute.  There's been a lot of that lately, but maybe executive salaries are based on perception and not performance, all part of the rigged system.

hawks and doves

So, not much interest in income equality?  Not much interest in if the government should do something about it?  Beagles has a strong libertarian streak in him, but I think he split from Ron Paul on isolationism.  Whatever happened to hawks vs doves?  That used to be the big issue back when I was declaiming about color tvs.  I remember some tour bus full of Japanese came down Telegraph Avenue when I was in Berkeley and they had some kind of rest stop and one of the guys ran up to me and with the two or three English words he knew asked me if I was a hawk or a dove.  I was a proud dove of course and that settled, he got back on the bus and the world went on,  Hawk and dove continued to be a thing throughout the proxy wars of the cold war, then had a resurgence during the Iraq invasion, but has now dwindled down to almost nothing.

There is still a hubbub about terrorism.  CNN and the network nightly news were abuzz about that guy at Ohio State, was he a terrorist?  Clearly he was some lone nut, the kind we have had forever, but what if he was some operative?  What would that mean?  Would it mean we dropped another bomb on ISIS, take that you crumb bums.  I'm pretty sure we are bombing them.  There is that Mosul thing with the Kurds and Shiite militias, and some regular army Iraqis I think,,and there are Irani and Turk forces in the vicinity, and some American advisers,  And I think we do bombing sorties on their behalf.  There was some talk about boots on the ground early in the republican primary, but it failed to become as popular as kicking immigrants in the balls, and then nothing was as important as Trump, and that's where we are today and nobody is talking doves vs hawks anymore.

I suspect a strong libertarian steak in Old Dog as well.  Individual responsibility sounds like something that they like, as opposed to say, some government agency telling us how to behave.  I didn't learn much in college, and my grades showed it, but I do remember, probably in some lit class becoming aware of this essay by Orwell about Dickens.  I have read a little Dickens and found him rather slow and oh, melodramatic, but not in a good way, moralistic in the sense of good guys vs bad guys, which is something I don't care for much,.  But I guess that was Orwell's point.  I believe he was still a commie or at least a fellow traveler when he wrote this.  Dickens never really attacked the institutions of society.  If good people ran the institutions everything would be hunky dory,  The problem was with the people.  His mission as a novelist was to make people more moral.  Orwell and his ilk were like fuck that, the problem was the institutions.  Change the institutions and you would change the people.

The commies changed the institutions, but that didn't change the people and now communism is gone.  On the other hand none of the novelists or Bishop Sheen or anybody has had any success in changing the people from good to bad either..

This started out about economic inequality, but I haven't done any of the research I should have done, and well, I wander.

TV used to be the opiate of the masses and now it is the internet, which I posit is much stronger because people carry it around in their pockets nowadays.  Also it took a lot of people to put on a tv show, and hence some cooperation and responsibility, whereas now the work of Macedonian teens, cutting and pasting various articles to make a new article and putting it out to get as many clicks as possible because they get paid, looks just the same on the screen as a respected journal such as this one.

The Opiate of the Masses

One of the first TV shows that I remember featured Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. My parents liked him because they said he was a terrific public speaker and made a lot of sense, in spite of the fact that he was a Catholic. I don't remember much of his material, but I do remember the one time when he said that Karl Marx had gotten it wrong when he claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses. "The truth is that television is the opiate of the masses." The audience enthusiastically responded in agreement, apparently missing the irony of the fact that Sheen himself was making this statement on his own prime time weekly television show.

TV was still pretty new in those days, but I remember seeing scenes in the news of Third World slum neighborhoods with a TV antenna on the roof of every shack. That's not so common nowadays, I suppose they all have cable by now. In my early days in Cheboygan (this was in the late 60s), I knew several families that didn't have indoor plumbing in their houses, but they all had a color TV set. They way it was explained to me was that a TV set is much cheaper than a rural water and septic system. Maybe so but, to my way of thinking, TV is a luxury while running water is a necessity, but that's just me.

Most of the violators I talked to came from poor rural backgrounds like that. They themselves had good jobs at the paper mill, but old habits die hard, and they still thought of themselves as poor people. I doubt that a word like "ideology" would be in their vocabulary, not because they were uneducated, but because it was the kind of uppity word that poor people would never use. To my knowledge, there has never been a violators' organization that held meetings and elected officers. I've never seen a letter of theirs in the newspaper or any sportsmen's magazine. There are websites for everything nowadays, so there might be one for violators, but I have not heard of one. For some time now, sportsmen have been lamenting the fact that young people are not taking up the tradition nearly as fast as the old timers are dying off. This has motivated sportsmen's groups and our DNR to conduct programs designed to lure more young people into hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities. I have not heard of any such efforts being made by the violator community but, like I said, I don't get around much anymore.

It's true that Michigan has a lot of hunting seasons but, in my lifetime, small game has gotten pretty scarce. I doubt that this is attributable to hunting pressure, since deer hunting has always been more popular in Michigan than all the small game species put together. Some say it's due to an increase in the natural predator population. Nobody traps anymore, and hawks, owls, and eagles have been protected for a long time now.

Wild hogs are starting to show up in parts of Michigan, and efforts are being made to suppress them. I don't think these are just farm pigs gone wild, they would never survive a typical northern winter. The species you hear most about is the Russian boar, raised on game farms for the shooting preserve trade. Michigan has passed legislation banning those kinds of hogs from the state but, last I heard, it was being challenged in the courts, like everything else nowadays.

Very bare minimum

Until recently, the term poaching was only used in the context of a method of cooking eggs.  City living can do that to you, not giving much thought to hunting and fishing.  Are the violators a big problem, or more of a nuisance?  I looked at some of Michigan's licensing protocols on the DNR site and thought they were very reasonable.  If I was an avid hunter there is enough small game available year round, with no bag limit, to keep me satisfied although feral swine would be a challenge.  They're scary and I don't know if they'd be good to eat but it would be nice to really bring home the bacon.

violaters and color tvs

I found a copy of the Reader with that article on economic equality vs diversity in it,  It's an interview with Walter Benn Michaels who wrote a book, The Trouble with Diversity.  And this just over the transom on BBC on NPR an article about how some characters in Macedonia make money by making up fake news, the kind of stuff the Breitbarts and Drudges pick up and put on their sites and then Trump and the Trumpists quote as if it had the same validity as an article in the New York Times, which of course they despise,

Oh it's all too much.  Back to the Beaglestonian.


Old Dog seems to be endorsing diversity, but doesn't like it when they lower standards,  I think he is talking here about getting women into combat and the fire department by making the tests less strenuous so that their lack of heft doesn't disqualify them,  Fair enough, if the standards aren't put there just to keep them out.

I'm not sure about birds of a feather flocking together.  If it means like going to concerts with their kind of music, fine, but if it means they all live in the crumby part of town because that's the way they like it, when in fact they are kept out of the nice side of town for economic or, well, racist reasons, not so fine.

From my sub experience the pre Ks are already beginning to segregate themselves by sex which gets more pronounced up until seventh or eighth grade by which time they are standing on opposite sides of the crepe paper festooned gym wondering if they dare to cross the floor, and wondering where all the cooties went.  Maybe it's just me but I find social groups less segregated by sex now than I did in my younger days, and I think it's a good thing because the conversation is more interesting.  Put a bunch of guys together and once the subject of sports comes up that is all that will be talked about the rest of the evening, likewise, from my limited perspective, food for women,


I had never heard of these violators before.  I could see where some guy might bag a deer or two extra when he thought the regulators weren't watching, but I had no idea they had their own ideology. Do they have their own organizations, or is it just a letter to the editor of sportsman magazines? Surely they have their own websites.  At first they sounded to me like commies, but the more I think about it the more I think they sound like Trumpists

At one extreme of economic equality you have one person owning everything, at the other extreme you have everybody owning the exact same amount.  I don't think anybody likes the former, unless that one person is them and what are the odds?  The latter sounds nice, shouldn't we share and share alike?  But probably impractical because of human nature.  So I guess it's a matter of where the line should be between those two points.  During my revolutionary days I used to proudly proclaim that nobody should own a color tv until all the hungry are fed.  Sounded good to me, especially since I didn't watch any tv in those days, but I can see where it would go as a political slogan.  Who wants to vote for a guy who is against color tv?

I don't know where I would want to put that line.  I guess as close to equality as it could get before human nature blew it kerflooey.  Maybe back to where it was when we were kids, back when Joe Sixpack could make a good enough income working hard enough, maybe give that a little scooch to help out the blacks who weren't given a fair shake back in the day.  Should the government actively try to deal with inequality?  I think so.

Violators

That's what they call them around here, in most other places they are called poachers. I don't know how many of them are left, but I used to know people who claimed to be violators when I worked at the paper mill. I always suspected that a lot of that violator talk was just talk, kind of like the people who used to pretend to be hoodlums or hippies when they really weren't. It's a whole nother subculture, with a history that dates back to the Middle Ages in Europe. Robin Hood and his Merry Men were certainly violators, always bragging about how they were living off of the king's deer. Since we don't have kings in this country, it would seem to be outdated, but they have just replaced the king with "the man". They believe that the fish and game should belong to the people, which they do in a way but, in America, the people are supposed to be represented by the government. The streets also belong to the people, but we still need traffic cops or all those people would be constantly crashing into each other. The violators don't like traffic cops either.

The opposite of a violator is a sportsman. From the violator's point of view, a sportsman is a rich playboy who hunts and fishes because he has more time and money than he knows what to do with. It's okay that he comes up here and spends money, but he shouldn't try to tell the local yokels what to do. After all, the sportsman can afford to buy any kind of food he desires, while the poor violator needs to hunt and fish to feed his starving family. While there was some truth to this back in the days of the Great Depression, the modern poor people buy their food with government assistance, and seem to have enough money left over to frequent the casinos, which used to be the exclusive domain of the rich. Economic inequality sure ain't what it used to be.

We had an old saying among the Libertarians, or maybe it was the Birchers, I forget. "We believe the government should guarantee equality of opportunities, not equality of outcomes", or something like that. I'm not sure about the opportunity part, because rich people are always going to have more opportunities than poor people, but I'm pretty sure that equality of outcomes is not desirable, if indeed it is even possible. If the CEO made the same money as the janitor, why would anybody want to be a CEO? That said, I'm not sure how they justify those ridiculous CEO salaries. Sure, they should make more than the janitor, but millions more? If I was a CEO making even one million dollars a year, I would work for just one year and then retire for life. I have worked as a janitor, among other things, but never as a CEO. Too bad, I could have used all that extra time after my early retirement to do more hunting and fishing.

Growing up takes a lifetime

Perhaps individual responsibility is one of those things that can't be instilled in children, but it can be learned.  This topic was lightly touched upon during the most recent seminar when I mentioned to Uncle Ken that, by the time a child enters school, a lot of his/her behavior has already been established.  Not a fact-based proven theory but just a gut feeling that well behaved children come from more positive home environments than their unruly peers.  I posited that children learn a lot by mimicry; they copy their parent's behavior.  If mom & dad are constantly arguing, then maybe junior will think that conflict is normal and acceptable behavior and will have problems adjusting to the structured environment of the classroom.

We learn from our parents,our social institutions, our peers, and what I will generously refer to as "outside influences," stuff we learn from various forms of media.  The problem with media-based influences is that they lack direct social context.  I was asked by my parents, plenty of times, "Who put that idea into your head?"  "I dunno, Dad, I read it someplace."  We copy stuff, sometimes because it looks cool, maybe a little dangerous and different, and likely to piss off our parents in the effort to establish our own identities.  This is not new and has been going on for centuries; it's the way we are.

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My grandmother had a copy of one of those old McGuffy's Readers, maybe for the third or fourth grade.  Being in the seventh or eighth grade myself, I thought it would be an easy read.  Not so.  That book was tough, much more difficult and complex than I had anticipated.  Old school textbooks are like that, much more advanced that their modern counterparts.  It's like the current educational system is designed to swiftly run the students through the process rather than teach them anything.  Again, a theory not based on rigorous study, but recent college graduates don't strike me as being very smart or well educated.  But they have that piece of paper that says they have an education, which I suppose they do, of sorts.

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Diversity has become a modern trigger word, used to promote all sorts of agenda.  But I don't think that it should be rigidly enforced, only respected and acknowledged, and we should all have the same opportunities regardless of our gender, race, age, or whatever.  Lowering qualifications to accommodate specific groups is counter productive and does no good; the chain is only as strong as the weakest link, right?  I should be given the opportunity to try out for the fire department, but it is foolish for me to think that I could make the squad.

And if you even hint that some groups prefer the company of their own kind you will be labeled a racist, sexist,or some other type of bad person, which I think is nonsense.  Preferring one thing does not automatically exclude other things, but some folks think it does.

When a group of kids are in the playground, aren't the boys and girls playing in their own groups, with little overlap?  No, I don't hang around playgrounds but I have a good memory and that's what I recall.  Same thing with family gatherings, like Thanksgiving, where it usually ends up with the men in the TV room watching football and bullshitting while the ladies are in the kitchen, discussing more meaningful issues.  There is some overlap, of course, with the younger family members breaking off into their own like-minded groups.

Maybe there isn't really a glass ceiling, and that it's just that the boys want to play with the other boys, lest those icky girls give them cooties.

economic inequality

I am interested in people who are against hunting regulations.  Is it that they disagree with the number of deer allowed to be taken and the extent of the hunting season or are they against regulations period?  Anyway my point is that being against all regulations, is stupid.  You can choose to be against certain ones, but to be against all of them is crazy.

Haven't heard anything more about Dumbo's idea for eliminating two regs before you can put a new one in place.  He recently has claimed that he lost because three million illegal voters voted against him.  No proof, no citation, no nothing, none of that is needed in the post truth world. You guys haven't noticed I'm sure, because you don't obsessively watch it like I do, but even now when one of the Trumpists are being interviewed and asked something like what about all those business connections running afoul of national interests, they reply how about that Hilary.  They know how to be against something, but not how to be for something.

Public schools where all kids are expected to attend are only like a hundred and change years old.  Back in the day they had those McGuffy readers which were pretty Christian, but then so was the country back then, or at least it gave it lip service.There was no religion in my subbing days.  There was a push for diversity and for ecology, but no distinct political indoctrination.  General things like fair play and courtesy were encouraged, but those are the sort of things that you need whenever you get a bunch of people together.  Individual responsibility is a vague term, and I don't know how you would teach that.  Do any of my colleagues want to expand on the concept so I would be surer of what they mean?

I came across an interesting article in The Reader yesterday.  What the guy was saying was that the liberals are making a mistake by concentrating on diversity and letting economic equality slide, and is that why they lost that working class white vote and the election.  The idea being like women breaking the glass ceiling and becoming CEOs and this being applauded, while what we (liberals) should really be concerned about is the obscene salaries CEOs get vis a vis the saps who scrape the gum from the marble floors of their lavishly appointed restrooms.

Well is economic inequality an evil?  Is it something we should try to narrow or something we should shrug off as just something that happens?  A certain economic inequality is to be expected, but is there a point when it becomes a problem?  I'll leave that for discussion while I do my internet research on who that article was written on and economic equality during recent history.

People Who Cared

What really happened to hunting and fishing was that people who cared about it worked to preserve it. The European tradition for centuries was that only the nobility were allowed to hunt and, to a lesser degree, fish. I know more about how this changed in Germany than I do about the rest of Europe, but it was probably similar. After World War II, Germany was trying to become more democratic, so hunting was opened up to the common people. Since Germans had pretty well written the book on conservation, they knew they couldn't just let everybody do what they wanted or there would soon be nothing left, so they implemented some regulations. To get a hunting license, you had to demonstrate that you were a responsible person who cared about the sport. You had to take some classes and be interviewed by a board of local senior sportsmen.

The American tradition was somewhat different, but the goals are the same, to preserve the sport for future generations. No attempt was made to regulate hunting or fishing until around the beginning of the 20th Century because it was generally believed that it wasn't necessary, and it was not clear who should have jurisdiction. The people who called for regulation were the sportsmen themselves, and they mostly paid for it themselves. It was by no means unanimous, and there are people who resist it to this day, but it's way better than it used to be.

In my part of the country, during the 1980s, there was a big jurisdictional dispute about it between the State of Michigan and some Indian tribes. It went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Indians prevailed. Lots of people were upset about it, believing that the Indians would kill everything off, but that's not what happened. The tribes now regulate their own people and work cooperatively with the state and local authorities. They have demonstrated that they care at least as much about it as the White folks, and nobody begrudges them their privileges anymore. 

I don't know if the schools are the proper place to teach individual responsibility. Ideally, the parents should do it, but many parents cannot because their parents never taught it to them. I don't know whether or not this is a modern development. We had decent upbringing, but I'm not so sure that everybody else did in those days. One way or another somebody needs to do it, somebody who cares.

individual responsibility, is it worth the bother?

I think what Old Dog is saying in his first segment is that things are complicated.  We are not all marching to the same drummer, we don't agree on what are the biggest problems and we don't agree on the way to solve it and we have our own agendas and interests to push. We will always have criminals, poor people, druggies, terrorism, and vapid and annoying celebrities.  It was quite the vogue some years ago to appoint czars and declare war on this and that.  A little embarrassing to recall now like that pair of bellbottoms with the flowers on them.  Who can forget Gerald Ford's War on Inflation, which was fought, I believe, by everybody wearing a WIN (Whip Inflation Now!!!)  button on their lapel.  I wonder what you could get for one on ebay today.  If you could get a bundle wouldn't that be an indication of failure of that campaign?

Individual responsibility sounds nice, it's hard to argue that if people would give up their individual responsibility then we would all awaken to a brighter day.  But where would we be instilling this individual responsibility?  The schools I assume.  When I was on the road to becoming a teacher, the idea of teaching kids to read and write and do arithmetic sounded pretty cool.  The idea of molding them into good citizens, not so much.


The Russkies were our friends in WW II, only in the sense of the enemy of my enemies is my friend, a temporary affair, though it did make for some good movies, and those surviving clips of our guys and theirs completing some pincer movement against the krauts, and our guys were handing out cigs and candy bars and they were doing their crazy Cossack dances and much bourbon and vodka was passed around I am sure.  Good times,  They did bear the brunt of the war, but they didn't do it for their American buddies, they did it because the krauts intent was to wipe them from the face of the earth.  And when they rebounded across the border it was to, well, conquer territory.


My Trumpist nephew, after cracking Let's make Thanksgiving great again, upon his arrival, for the most part kept his trap shut.  Well, he was with his girlfriend, we men always behave better with womenfolk around.  It's 6 AM here downtown.  It's dark out there but I assume there are lines of people lying in wait for the doors to be open and to rush off with their hoverboards and big screen tvs.  Let's wrap it all up in Mistletoe and let the games begin.

Bird Day blather

"I guess what started me on this track was Old Dog's statement about everything the government does being a failure."

Huh.  I don't think I said that but it may have been inferred by the examples I used.  The government does do many things right, too numerous to mention, but they are invisible to us and we seldom take notice.  It's the things that go wrong that grab our attention.  We can't, and shouldn't, fail to address such social issues as poverty, drugs, crime, and terrorism but I think the many Wars on This, That, and The Other Thing are nothing more than PR hype and never get around to underlying causes.

Trouble is, those underlying causes are devilishly difficult to nail down and we don't know who to believe or trust.  If the causes were simple we would have arrived at simple answers long ago and all would be right with the world.  Historically, Americans (meaning folks in the U.S. of A.) have been independent, often stubborn, and perhaps a bit greedy with an overblown sense of entitlement, tempered with a belief in fair play and core values of liberty and equality for all.  Inability to maintain  those qualities in good balance might be at the root of many underlying causes of social problems.  There is more to it than that oversimplification but it will have to do for now.

But I don't think there has been enough of an emphasis on individual responsibility, a value difficult to instill and a topic of much previous discussion.  Another can of worms, and lacking the narrative skills demonstrated in the tales of Joe's Bait Shop I'll have to let that one go, too.

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I can't stop thinking about the irony of the post WW2 era.  About 75 years ago our biggest foes were Germany and Japan and now they're among our best buds.  And among our best pals at the time, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China are now our most formidable foes.  Go figure.  Maybe foes is too strong a term and antagonists would be better; I don't think they are really enemies.  China has too much of an economic stake in global affairs and Russia is, well, Russia.  I don't think they've gotten over the fact that their role in WW2 has not been properly acknowledged or respected.  Growing up in the US you'd think that we single-handedly defeated the Axis and that is not the case.  They paid a terrible price and if they stopped at their border in the Great Patriotic War we'd be driving German cars today (I make joke).

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I thought the election was over, but I guess not.  Efforts are being made (and money raised) for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  I don't know what those folks hope to accomplish and I don't think anything good can come out of it.  But as strange and disruptive this past election has been, it pales next to the assassination in Dallas a little more than 53 years ago, an event which gets less and less news coverage as the years go by.  And we're still not completely sure of what really happened, at least I'm not.  That "magic bullet" has always bothered me, and I think some records of the event are still sealed.

That's the trouble with tin-foil hats, you can't get tin-foil anymore, it's all aluminum now which doesn't work nearly as well.  Maybe lead foil is worth a look.

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Yes, the Old Dog has been missing seminars lately, probably shifting to a bi-weekly schedule.  No particular reason except that I haven't been doing much lately and don't feel I have much to contribute, which is a self-defeating attitude, I know, and maybe my presence alone is enough (another joke).  Drinking has lost much of it's allure, as I used to drink way too much, way too frequently, and it might have caught up to me.  But that shouldn't prevent me from hoisting a few, knowing that I am in such august company.  I think it makes me a better person, something I should pursue more assiduously.

the kids of Joe's Bait Shop

You know there is a difference between a metaphor and a story.  A metaphor is usually just a quick thing, we don't worry about the guy you giving the fish to having maybe an allergy to fish, or how the fish feel about the whole thing.  I imagine they would rather sacrifice one of their own, even every day, than have that guy learn how to fish and catch eight or nine of them a day, maybe sell them and make enough money to buy a boat, then a fleet of boats, and fish the damn river dry so that nobody drops by Joe's Bait Shop anymore, So that Joe has to close up the shop and can't send his kids to college to get a lot of knowledge so they all end up becoming working white class and vote for Trump so see where it all ends up.

Reminds me of a story I read, I don't remember where.  It seems like there was some cove in New England, and like three families controlled the fishing there.  I don't remember how, I think they had some dubious contract with the local government.  Seems like they shared it nicely and because in a sense it was their cove they were careful not to overfish and everything was hunky dory.

But not for the guys hanging around the docks, probably steps away from Joe's Bait Shop, who were thinking hey, we live on the shores of the cove just like those fatcat three families, how come we can't fish there?  So they went to the feds, or whatever the next higher level of government was, because that's the way democracy works isn't it?  And the feds, or whoever they were, said by gum that ain't right and made it so that everybody could fish in the cove.

So everybody did, and soon there were no fish in the cove, and well, you know how that affected Joe's Bait Shop and Joe's progeny.  The moral of the story from the guy who wrote the book, whose name I can't recall, was when people own stuff they take care of it, but when everybody owns it, it's the same as nobody owning it, and they don't take care of it and it goes to shit.

Good and well enough, I supposed, setting aside the book to take a puff of my cigar and a sip of brandy in my dusty book-lined study, but what about those other guys?  Didn't they have a right  to fish the cove?  Should we just give everything to fatcats so that they will take care of it?

Oh I don't think so.  On the other hand we can't depend on those guys around the cove to voluntarily take good care of it.  So we need regulations.

Dumbo's latest pronouncement is that he is going to pass some kind of law where before you make a new regulation you have to eliminate two other regulations, so that after awhile we will only have half as many regulations and a little after that a quarter then an eighth, and eventually one, and then we won't be able to make any more regulations because there won't be two to eliminate, and won't  that be great?  No, it will be terrible because all our coves will be empty, and Joe's Bait Shop will be closed and his kids won't even be asking for a fish, because there will be no more fish.  

My nephew, who is a Trumpist and will likely ruin Thanksgiving today at my sister's true blue house by chanting "Make America Great Again." buys houses, fixes them up, and sells them.  And hates regulations because he has to fix up houses just so to pass inspection.  But what about the tools he uses to fix up the houses?  If they didn't have to pass inspection they would be crappy and wouldn't work, and if houses didn't have an inspection to pass they would be crappy and nobody would want to buy one.  So there you go, and there you are.

Old Dog, who has been missing seminars lately, complains sometimes that these posts wander all over the place, and to this I want to reply:  Yes they do Old Dog, yes they do.

Joe's Bait Shop

Ken's mention of Joes Bait Shop reminds me of an old Chinese proverb: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. Teach a man how to fish and he will be a regular customer at your bait and tackle shop for the rest of his life."

See, if you give a man a fish, it's like throwing money at a problem. Tomorrow, when he is hungry again, he will expect you to give him another fish. Giving fish away might make you feel good when you have caught more fish than you care to clean that day, but not so good when you have only caught enough fish that day to feed your own family. Then one day you come home with no fish at all (it happens to the best of us) and the guy still expects you to give him a fish. When you tell him that you have no fish to give, he accuses you of being a racist and throws a brick through your window. Will this make you want to give him any more fish? So then you offer to teach the guy how to fish for himself. He has no money, so you buy him a cheap rod and reel to get him started. Then you take him out to your favorite fishing spot and show him how it's done. The next time you go fishing at your favorite spot, you find that this guy and about 20 of his friends have gotten there ahead of you and you can't get near the water yourself. When they finally leave, there are no fish left to catch because those guys have cleaned out the hole.

Okay, let's bring in the government. One way they could help is by stocking more fish in the river so there are enough for everybody. Another way they could help is to establish more public fishing sites on the river so there's room for everybody. Both of these options cost money, which is okay, that's why we pay taxes, but that's not what they do. What they do is conduct a study, which uses up all the money in the fishing budget for the year. They might come back next year and do another study, or they might decide to fence the river off so that nobody can fish. Then your protégé and his pals file a lawsuit claiming discrimination, and the court rules that they have the right to fish there and you don't. So then you and your buddies get together and file another lawsuit, and so it goes. That's what I mean by throwing money at the problem.

Although this is a hypothetical example, it's not totally fictitious, it's actually a composite of a several real scenarios that have happened in Cheboygan County over the years.

We are going to my grand daughter's for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, so I probably won't post anything. Back on Friday.

the circle of altruism

I'm thinking about  the circle of altruism this morning,  Take a guy who only thinks of himself, doesn't give a damn about anybody else.  Nobody likes this guy.  Let's widen the circle a bit,  How about a guy who is nice to his family but fuck everybody else, like the mobsters who are devoted to their families.  Some people think better of them because of how nice they are to their children and all, but myself I have never seen that as much of a virtue, being as how I am not in their family.

Let's widen the circle again and here we find a guy who is nice to himself and his family and his friends and his neighbors.  Kind of like the average Joe I think, a nice guy if you are his friend or his neighbor, maybe not so much if you aren't, but then you rather expect if you met him or moved into his neighborhood , you would probably be included in his circle.  A pretty nice guy I think, but nobody special.

But what if we widen the circle further still to where now he is nice to people he doesn't even know, people in his city, his state, his country.  Most everybody likes this guy.  He's a patriot, he is a booster, he's the guy most of our politicians pretend to be and probably some of them even are.  But a few cracks are beginning to show, some people within his city, state, or country don't like others in the same area, and don't like to see them treated nicely, maybe the blacks think he shouldn't treat the whites so nicely, or the whites think he shouldn't treat the blacks so nicely, likewise the rich and the poor.

How about if we widen the circle to include everybody?  Most people are not so crazy about this guy.  They may give him lip service as a wonderful humanitarian, but most of the people in his country see him as a bit of a traitor.  If there is some conflict between his country and another country, they don't want to see him weighing which country is more in the right or in the wrong, they want him to be for his country.  Period.

Consider the early days of the unions, those black days of six or seven day weeks and twelve or more hours a day for crappy pay and if you didn't like it get your ass off the work bench, we can replace you just like that,  That's pretty downtrodden.  The workers were downtrodden together, but that togetherness was their strength.  If they all stuck together they had strength.  They struggled at great personal loss for the cause and in the end they got us the eight hour day and the five day week and pretty good pay.  The big thinkers of unionism, the proto Marxists, believed in solidarity and equality and they thought this was what the struggle was really about.

The workers however thought it was more about the eight hour day and five day week, and as for solidarity they thought of the people in the workplace who were mostly white protestants.  This was certainly true of the miners of West Virginia, that now ruby red state, less so the guys in the stockyards who worked with immigrants, and there were probably some places where blacks were included.  Not many though, mostly the blacks, and sometimes immigrants, were brought in as strikebreakers, so there's kind of a nasty race side to unionism.

And anymore there is that selfish side, where they mostly want to let only their family and neighbors into the union and fuck everybody else.  I was on jury duty a couple years ago and during lunch hour I got to talking to this union guy.  There was some big job coming up and there was a dispute about how much of the work would go to the union and he was all fired up about that, and I was all like, though I didn't say it, why should I give a fuck?  You know he was talking about something that would be an advantage for him but not necessarily anybody else, but he was talking in terms of this was a union issue, and hence it had a moral strength to it, that Norma Rae stuff, but I didn't see Electrical Workers #188 as anything more than a special interest group.

Like Beagles in his Soap Opera analogy, I have gotten off on a bit of a tangent.  I am still thinking of the election and what I meant to connect it to was how we liberals believe in equality for everybody, and we think it is a good message, looks nice on a banner that everybody should want  to march under, but a lot of people, those guys from Joe's Bait Shop, don't necessarily like the idea of equality for everybody, they want stuff for themselves and fuck everybody else.

Well that's not the whole thing. I think that whole they thing of Beagles comes into play here.  We liberals have an agenda (see above) and government is our tool to promote it and hence we are often the they who are telling people what to do, which the people being told are not so crazy about.

Maybe more on this later, right now the morning is growing late.  I did want to say one more thing, about that phrase of money being thrown at problems which is thrown around all the time.  Basically what is about is people don't want money thrown at problems they aren't interested in, but people love money being thrown at problems they are interested in.

Life Is Like a Soap Opera

We are accustomed to hearing stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning, life is good and everybody is happy. In the middle, a problem arises, and the problem is resolved at the end, leaving everybody happy again. That is, unless the story is a tragedy, in which case the problem just gets worse and worse and somebody dies at the end. Real life is a little different.  Everybody starts out unhappy, which is why little babies cry a lot. Life generally gets better as we grow older, until we pass a certain point, and then it's all downhill from there. It's not a steady downhill slide though, there are peaks and valleys along the way, which fosters the illusion that things are improving for awhile. This illusion keeps us going and gets us through the next downturn because we believe it's only temporary. Eventually, there are no more peaks to get us through the valleys, and then we die. In a manner of speaking, then, life is a tragedy but, in another manner of speaking, life is like a soap opera. Each day is but another episode in the continuing saga. We know that the show will be cancelled someday, but we can't worry about that because we need to focus our energy on the problem at hand. We know that, as soon as one problem is resolved, another one will jump up to take its place. No use worrying about that either, we have to just keep putting one foot ahead of another until they pull the plug on us.

I guess I got off on a tangent there. The point I was trying to make is that, whatever happens, it's not the end of the world, unless it really is the end of the world, in which case there is nothing we can do about it anyway. Presidents come and presidents go, but we're still here for now and, when we are no longer here, we won't care who is president.

I guess what started me on this track was Old Dog's statement about everything the government does being a failure. I used to say that too, until Uncle Ken set me straight on it some time ago. Just because there are still poor people after 50 years of fighting poverty is no reason to quit fighting poverty. Governments have been fighting crime much longer than that, and the fact that there is still crime in the world doesn't mean they failed, it just means that they're not done yet. Would there be less crime if they shut down all the police forces? Not bloody likely!

That said, I do agree with Old Dog that just throwing money at a problem is not likely to solve it. There needs to be a plan, and everybody involved needs to follow the plan because no plan will work if people don't do it. If they do it and it still doesn't work, then we need to change plan, but we won't know that we need to change the plan if nobody follows the plan. So how do we get everybody to follow the plan? If I knew that, then I would be running for president.

Gnawing away

My observation that the Democrats screwed the pooch was not an accusation but an opinion.  What's done is done, but they should have done better.  I think they overestimated their strengths in some states and didn't consider the nuances of the electoral college.

Applying logic to what was essentially a visceral campaign is futile.  How did more than 40% of the women vote for Trump?  How did nearly 30% of Hispanic voters go for Trump, considering all that talk about the Mexicans?  Maybe the Trump supporters were all Cubans and Puerto Ricans, who knows?  I haven't yet read anything about which way Bernie's folks voted, or if they even made a difference.  As it stands, both parties are in flux and we will be in our graves before this election is truly understood.

I see good things, eventually, but only after many political slug fests. There will be some good leadership, currently unknown, that will rise up out of this feculent mess.  Or not, place your bets.
 
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Taxes would be more tolerable if I had a sense that I was receiving something of value in return and the tax monies were spent wisely, which is not the case.  I don't think anyone really knows where the money is or where it should be; funds seem to be shuffled between various budgets and appropriations with no agency having enough money to do their job properly, or so it seems to me.  And a lot of problems can't be solved by simply throwing money at them.  The War on Poverty?  Fail.  The War on Drugs?  Fail.  The War on Terrorism?  Failing.  Our goals may have the noblest of intentions but the means have seldom been successful, and why is that, what have we been doing wrong?  We always talk a good game but seem to lack the will to follow through to a definitive conclusion or to admit failure.

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And speaking of failure, I see that Mr. Fart has settled the lawsuit against Chump University for 25 million bucks.  He got off cheap, but I think there are still a few lawsuits and investigations waiting in the wings.  One can only hope.

I don't know what to make of the presumptive First Lady's plan to remain in New York City with the young Barron, only to appear at the White House as necessary.  She says it's to keep the lad in his current school, but kids change schools all the time when Daddy gets a new job.

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Argentina may still be solvent due to China's heavy investments in South America with many new trade agreements.  This is something the new administration should keep an eye on, before they build any damn walls.

voting against them

I hate following links, but as long as Beagles went there I followed him to that cult of Hillary thing, and the guy made his case by quoting ten people, mostly celebs who tend to be histrionic anyway.  Anybody can quote ten people to prove anything they care to.  Everybody I know voted for Clinton and I don't remember any of them having stars in their eyes.  The most favorable comment about her was that she wasn't so bad, actually that was me, and the Clintonites I ran into generally told me yes she was (that bad) but they were voting for her anyway.  I guess that makes me a member of the Clinton cult.  Those pantsuits were kind of cute, like pajamas.

At the beginning her voice grated on me, but I got used to it, and surprisingly the amber asshole didn't bother me much either, his voice is just like the big fucking asshole you run into in barrooms from time to time, just part of the ambiance, like the jukebox or the flapping jaws of the geezers.  You know whose voice does get on my nerves?  That Trump campaign manager Kewpie Doll Konway.  We can expect to hear her voice a lot in the next four years.

Total number of Americans eligible to vote	218,959,000
Total number of Americans registered to vote	146,311,000
Total number of Americans who voted in the 2012 Presidential election	129,235,000

These are the numbers I got from the google machine.  This is the 2012 election, but it is probably close.  It looks like about 30 percent of eligible voters aren't registered.  It  also looks like when they speak of that 55 percent  turnout they are talking about eligible rather than registered voters.  A little surprising to me with all the get out the vote campaigns, you almost have to go out of your way not to register, so maybe those guys don't want to register because they want them to.

I make fun of Beagles talking about they all the time, but it seems maybe that was a factor in this election.  Don't you think to Joe Sixpack it looked like the big girl was who they wanted you to vote for and AA was who they didn't want you to vote for.


As a partisan, and apparently a member of the Big Girl Cult, I take umbrage at Old Dog's accusation of screwing the pooch.  We voted against Dumbo.  How are we more to blame than those who didn't vote at all, or those who voted for Dumbo?  But this is an unattractive post election period.  I was hoping to be sitting back with my cats on my lap chuckling over the reps sniping at each other, but instead I am watching the dems do it.  It's not pretty.


At the House of Chin bar where I worked and the Esquire Lounge where I was a regular sometimes everybody was having such a good time, including the owner, that after last call they would turn down the lights and the beer was free, and those were the best beers of the evening.

No Free Lunch

I agree that spending without taxing is just as bad as taxing and spending. The whole economic system is a house of cards. Logically it shouldn't work, but it does, at least for now. The national debt will never be paid off, they just keep borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. If Peter ever stops lending, the whole thing will come crashing down, but Peter shows no sign of stopping lending. Cities and corporations go into default and, as soon as the dust settles, people are lining up to lend them more money. The only nation state that I have heard of going into default is Argentina, but Argentina is still there, so somebody must be still lending it money. Several European countries have been tottering on the brink of bankruptcy for years. They want the EU to bail them out, but they don't want the EU to tell them how to run their economies. I don't know the current status of that, I haven't heard much about it lately. I think that's one of the reasons the Brits voted to quit the EU, but I haven't heard anything about that lately either.

It's funny how something can be all over the news for months, and then you don't hear anything more about it. I was hoping that would happen with this election thing once it was a done deal, but I don't see any sign of that fading away. It seems we will be subjected to coverage of this election until we start being subjected to coverage of the next election.

I imagine that people don't vote, or even register, for a number of reasons. One of my colleagues at the paper mill said he didn't vote because they want him to vote, and that anybody who votes is a big suck. I finally gave up trying to change his mind, figuring that, if he did vote, he would probably vote the wrong way anyway. It's true that my vote isn't worth much, but it would be worth even less if more people voted.

I read Old Dog's link about the Hillary cult. I suppose it's true as far as it goes, but I think there are lots of Trump cultists too. Obama had his cult followers as well, but there was also an anti-Obama cult that was at least as virulent. The same might be said for Reagan, JFK, and FDR. I don't remember either of the Bushes or Bill Clinton having cult followers, but I wasn't paying that much attention to it in those days. I think people attach too much importance to the presidency anyway. I mean, they all put on their pants one leg at a time, but I don't know how Hillary puts on those pants suits.

Getting back to the free lunch theory: From what I have heard, the people who are getting their health insurance for free like Obama Care. The people who are paying for it, not so much. So why don't they give it to everybody for free?

I remember North Dakota as being a pretty bleak place, and that was in October. I can only imagine that it would be far bleaker in January. I took Highway 2 because that was the most direct route on my road map. I didn't see any interstates going my way, but that was a long time ago.

Fringed elements

The low voter turnout took me by surprise but shouldn't have, considering the low approval ratings of both candidates.  55 percent voted, but that's only counting the registered voters, isn't it?  There are about seventy million people who are eligible to vote that haven't registered, which is more than the vote totals of either candidate.  I can understand not voting because the candidates suck but I can't understand the reason for not registering.  Could it simply be the fear of being called for jury duty?   Potential jurors used to be selected from the pool of registered voters but, in Illinois at least, that pool has been expanded to include people that have a driver's license.

But I'm not going to blame any non-voters for this election's results.  It's all on the Democrats and it will be interesting to see how they accept the responsibility for screwing the pooch, and if they can recover, lest we end up with a one-party system.

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Sadly, there were no hot babes in Duke's Place, fringed or otherwise.  All the ladies were with their significant others, but it was a week night so maybe things heated up on the weekends.  I liked the place, and the bartender was from Chicago, or spent time here, or read about it.  Anyhow, when it was time to close they locked the door, but I was able to enjoy another round or three before I made my way back to the motel; still had a lot of riding to do the next few days.  I suppose Duke's Place is long gone, but not forgotten.

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Mr. Beagles asked what was so terrible about Hillary, so here is a little something I found amusing, if a bit one-sided: https://reason.com/archives/2016/11/20/america-called-bullshit-on-saint-hillary

hanging out at the car wash

I guess just because Obama never  took a single gun or made a single move towards gun control, that doesn't  mean he, or  his would-be successor who has done likewise. would not filch Old Betsy from the loving arms of Beagles.  In my memory I can't recall a time when anybody ever wanted to confiscate hunting rifles, but no matter, if one cannot toss and turn in bed ears cocked for the sound of jack boots kicking in one's door to wrest Old Betsy away, then life is scarce living.

I suppose a democrat is more likely than a republican to raise taxes, and both Saint Ronnie and that wascally W gave out  tax cuts, but the two of them spent as boldly as any democrat, they just ballooned the national debt. Which you notice none of  the republicans piss and moan about anymore.  Indications, which of course mean nothing, are that Dumbo wants to keep the parts of Obama Care that people like and do away with the parts that pay for it that nobody likes,

But like I said, who knows?  Dumbo has ruined politics for me.  I used to hang on every move or word, like watching a baseball game.  Will there be a bunt, a steal, a hit and run?   Now the game is played in a thick fog, only that glowing orange head visible and everybody else wreathed in fog murmuring like a Greek chorus in another language.


Since one never knows when one might be in Devil's Lake North Dakota, my ears perked up at the mention of Duke's Place.  Probably by now they must have a craft beer or two on tap, and North Dakota women, well I don't know, I expect they wear fringe. I like fringe, but I guess it doesn't matter, in a dozen years of the Ten Cat I haven't had many interactions with hot babes.  Sometimes one will wander over to the geezer corner of the bar, but then Old Dog does most of the talking because he is the silver tongued ladies man.

But alas the google machine and google maps show no indication of Duke's Place,  There is a Duke's Carwash.  Maybe you could buy a sixer at the package store and hang out by the curb and watch the fringed hot babes strut by, but I don't know, isn't it like winter there every day except the Fourth of July?


I don't know about the wishy washers as people who are more in the center of the left of the dems and the right of the reps.  I think they are mostly ignorant of anything going on, not that many dems and reps aren't also ignorant, but they don't have to worry about who to vote for because they already know.

I had to go to the google machine to find this out, because nobody seems to be talking about it too much but voter turnout was at a 20 year low with only 55 percent voting,  Just like I didn't know any Trump voters, I don't think I know anybody who doesn't vote.  Who are these people?

Highway 2 revisited

Mr. Beagles may have been joking about the Smith and Wesson stock, but he nevertheless nailed it.  On election day, their stock was at 28.45; that following Friday it was at 21.24.  It's slowly making it's way back up and now stands at 24.13.  If I had any investments I would be seeking his advice.

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I still like the idea of more than two viable political parties, the key word being "viable."  Both the Libertarian and Green parties are too much on the fringe and may never gain mainstream acceptance.  The Old Dog continues the ancient sighs.

Maybe things will be different for the next election extravaganza.  Both the Dems and Repubs seem in flux, with a lot of scurrying and realignment going on.  The political process is becoming a whole new game, and the rules are not yet clear.  Since my powers of prognostication have proven weak I might as well kick back and enjoy the show.

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Here's something I lifted from another site and it seems appropriate:

The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.” Webster’s is simpler: “government by the worst people.”

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Although I haven't read everything on the Institute's page, I managed to find and read most of the old posts on the Ipernity site, home of Mr. Beagles' musings.  Very enjoyable stuff, particularly the tales of dog training in the old railroad yards.

I also liked the story of the journey from Alaska in the old Ford.  Once you mentioned Glasgow and Minot I knew you were on US Hwy 2, running along the northern border.  I took that route once in the mid-80s on the way west to a bike rally in Missoula, always preferring the two-lane blacktop.  Never had a bad experience and met a lot of friendly folk during chow breaks at the local cafes.  Plenty of good bars, too; if you ever happen to be in Devil's Lake,  North Dakota, check out Duke's Place.  Interstates suck unless you're in a big hurry to get someplace, and chances to discover something new are few and far between.

Where Did the Wishy-Washers Go?

I don't think that Old Dog was among us when last we discussed this, so here's a little review:

There are three political factions in this country, the right wing nuts, the left wing nuts, and the wishy-washers in the middle. I don't know if they are evenly divided, but I'm pretty sure that none of these three groups ever constitutes a majority. The right and left wing nuts usually vote the same way, so any election is decided by which way the wishy-washers roll.....Any questions?....Good, let's proceed.

So what happened to the wishy-washers this time? Since the vote was divided pretty evenly, they either had to split down the middle or just not vote. It's hard to imagine any wishy-washers voting for Trump, which is why I expected Hillary to win. Some of the left wing nuts voted for Bernie in the primaries, but I think they cast their lot with Hillary after she got the nomination. On the Republican side, the right wing nuts were split between Trump and Cruz, and I think the Cruzers cast their lot with Trump after he got the nomination. This still leaves the wishy-washers unaccounted for. Somebody should do a poll on this, if they haven't already.

The thing about third parties is that most people won't vote for them because they can't win. Of course the reason they can't win is that most people won't vote for them. So there you have it. The Libertarians have been around since the 1970s, and I think the Greens have been too, but Ken is right when he puts them on the fringes. The Libertarians are usually categorized as right wing nuts, although the Libertarians deny this and say that they are in a class of their own. The Greens are thought of as left wing nuts, and they seem to wear the label proudly. There are other third parties, but they seldom get on the ballot in all the states. This time there was a guy in Utah who ran as an independent, and was only on the ballot in Utah. He made a respectable showing, I seem to remember around 40%, but Utah still went Republican.

As for what's wrong with Hillary, I didn't care about those stupid emails. It wasn't illegal at the time she did it, and other government officials were also doing it, which I guess is why they made it illegal. None of those other allegations were ever proven in a court of law, so I didn't care about them either. All I needed to know about Hillary was that she wanted to raise my taxes and take away my guns. Well, she must have, seeing as she's a Democrat. I also read somewhere that she liked Obama and planned to continue most of his programs if she got elected. She certainly must like Obama Care, since she kind of invented it herself back when her husband was in the White House. Of course it wasn't called "Obama Care" back then. I don't think they called it anything because it never got off the ground, but it looked a lot like the Obama Care that we have today.

third party shmird party

Yeah I noticed that odd little cookie message also,  Shined it on like I do all those internet messages.

So what was so terrible about Hilary?  The private email server?  I think that uproar about classified papers was way overblown.  Most of the stuff that gets classified it's somebody covering their ass and not secret government information the release of which will topple the empire or get a few double agents killed.  And probably the other side knows about them anyway with their own double agents, and hasn't  it become obvious that everything is hackable these days anyway?  That Clinton charity, I didn't like that much.  I don't know why it got less press than the classified docs.  But still, a little lining of pockets is not that unusual.

But  maybe it is the character flaws, the way she lied about everything and then when she was found out she made another lie.  And that entitlement thing.  Maybe it was because she was around so long, but that seems a weak argument to me.  Experience is good,  Fresh faced naivety is not.  The idealism of youth is pretty, but it's not a good thing when you are running the country.

And here is Old Dog sighing that ancient sigh of if we only had a third party, and yet this time we had four.  Of course the other two were on the edges and Old Dog is talking about somebody in the middle.  Who was more in the middle than the big girl, to the left of the clowns in the debate, to the right of Bernie?  And the fact is that voters of both sides don't like anybody in the middle.  The reps call them RINOs and drum them out of the party every chance they get.  Just say one word in favor of (gasp) moderation or compromise, and you are out on your ear.  The dems are not quite as intolerant as that, they allow moderates if they look like winners, but they generally find them boring.

And then there is Colin Powell and candidates of that ilk who everybody likes, but once they put their toe in the waters, people don't like them so much.  What they liked best about them was that they didn't appear to want to be president.  Everybody likes somebody who doesn't want to be president, but once they do want to be president. not so much.. And all that is before the oppo research of the other candidates gets rolling.

The Cubs winning the series does not mean that all things can happen.  Pigs still can't fly.  And when pigs can fly it won't mean that the general public flocks to the Beaglestonian for enlightenment and peace and prosperity are just around the corner.

The Rise of Nationalism

I don't think that nation states were invented on purpose, I think they kind of evolved. Before there were nation states there were empires, before there were empires there were city states, and before there were city states there was tribal feudalism. The natural drift seems to be from small organizations to larger organizations although, when one of the larger organizations crashes, the drift can go the other way for awhile. When that happens, we consider it a step backwards, as in: "When the Roman Empire went down, Europe reverted to feudalism." I seem to remember learning something in school about the rise of nationalism, but I don't remember when that happened. I'm pretty sure, though, that it didn't happen suddenly all at once.

What happened in the U.S. doesn't exactly fit the model. Here there was a fragment of the British Empire that split off and went it's own way. There still was a British Empire, but 13 of its colonies had become sovereign states and immediately joined together to form a federal union. Britain continued to have an empire until after World War II, when they let all their other colonies go because they had become more trouble than they were worth. As the U.S. annexed territory it was starting to look like an empire, but then the territories became states one by one, and there was no one left to rule but each other. As I said in my last blog, most people think of he U.S. as a mighty nation, but it's not really, at least not according to Fred Sears' definition of a nation. Too bad old Fred isn't here now so we could ask him about it. If he's still alive he must be around a hundred years old, but some people are still reasonably sharp at that age.

I agree with Ken that fandom and patriotism are somewhat similar. I read somewhere that competitive sports originated as practice training for warfare.

I was just kidding about the Smith & Wesson stock. It did seem for awhile that, every time Obama made a speech about gun control, Smith & Wesson Stock went up, but that could have been just a coincidence. I made a similar joke about Obama being responsible for the two consecutive hard winters we had after he was elected the first time. I figured that, if people could blame W. Bush for Hurricane Katrina, why can't I blame Obama for those two hard winters? After all, he did promise to do something about global warming if he was elected. It occurred to me that might make a good bumper sticker: "Vote Republican - Bring back global warming", but I never followed up on it, and now it's too late.

I read that thing about the cookies, but I didn't pay it any mind. If there are any cookies attached to our blog, we didn't put them there, so it's not our responsibility to inform anybody about them.
  

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Any discussions of firearms and the (zombie) apocalypse are my fault, and I take complete responsibility.  Mr. Beagles mentioned, in passing, falling stock prices of Smith and Wesson so I went off on a bit of a tangent of a fact finding nature.  Knowing that Uncle Ken has no interest in such matters, his temporary absence provided a good opportunity for me to ask a few questions, you know, just in case.  I have no plans to equip an arsenal, but I find such things interesting as a thought experiment.  The government does it all the time, creating scenarios and figuring out how to cope with them.  Falling bean prices and the effect on septic tanks?  I bet they have a plan for that, ready to implement at a moment's notice.

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I'm getting the impression that public sentiment is divided into two factions, with alarmists on both sides blathering with great vigor.  Is there a third faction, representing the voice of reason, and who could they be?  This is an ideal opportunity for a viable third party, if only to resolve the many possible forthcoming conflicts.  Not all Republicans are extremely conservative, nor are all Democrats extremely liberal.  Some members of both parties are reasonable and willing to negotiate and compromise, but I can't name any at the moment.  But suppose they quit their parties and got together to form a new third party.  Think it would work?  Since the Cubs won the World Series I now believe anything is possible.

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Mr. Beagles mentioned a book about the formation of the individual states and how they got congressional approval with the assistance of some influence peddlers.  So, with the past election, have the influence peddlers changed?  Are some lobbyists fleeing Washington in shame and fear while new lobbyists are stepping up to the plate, or is it the same players just switching sides?

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ADDENDUM:

I just saw this when I posted today's bit.  Is this new and something we should be concerned about?

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back from circle city

Boy I leave you guys alone for about a week and the next thing I know you are talking about what kind of firearm you are going to use in the coming apocalypse,  I have read that the NRA is beginning to fret because it doesn't have that Ol' Ogre Obama to scare its fans with. And you know that while the number of guns sold has gone up over the last eight years the number the number of gun owners has declined because it's the same idiots buying more and more guns to pile up on the kitchen table because well, they are idiots.

I have said before that the idea of nations is a peculiar one, we have only had them for about five hundred years.  I can see where somebody would gladly lay down their lives or grudgingly pay their taxes to like their family, their clan, their neighborhood, their city, maybe even its suburbs, but after that it is all a bunch of strangers.  Why should I care if some Canadians stole a herd of cattle off some cowpoke in Idaho?  But I understand that most people do, witness the songs sung and the flags unfurled at out sporting events, which by the way I think that fandom is closely related to that patriotism that apparently holds us together.

Tough to hang together with a bunch of people who think that clown is an appropriate leader for the strongest nation in the world.  Less than half of them true, but almost half.  Just back from visiting my Hoosier pals in the moderately blue city of Indianapolis smack dab in ruby red Indiana.  When we weren't gallivanting about we were sitting in their front room in front of their big tv and watching CNN.  The woman of the house, Jeanne, named after that Hoosier rabble rouser, Eugene Debs, couldn't take it and went into the bedroom, the rest of us stared in fascination, The horror.  The horror,

And for all this nothing really has happened.  Dumbo claims to know who he wants to put in, but more likely he hasn't gotten around to thinking about it yet.  That amorphous cloud of his people blather on and on, pretty much making stuff up as they go, aping the style of their leader while all the time keeping an eye cocked over their shoulder lest they misstep and lose his favor, and the poor newsies let them blather on knowing that they are full of shit, because this is as close to the horse's mouth as they are going to get, and they have a show to put on.

Just over the transom, neither Cubs ace Lester or Hendricks won the Cy Young award???  Outrageous!!!.   Let me look a few posts back to see what big irons my comrades recommend for the coming apocalypse.

Affairs of State

I have a book called "How the States Got Their Shapes". If you ever have a question about why U.S. states' borders are where they are, I can look it up for you. As each state sought admission to the union, it's proposed border had to be approved by congress. Even in those days, congressmen were vulnerable to the influence peddlers. They usually started out with some kind of plan, and then amended it to suit whoever was peddling the most influence at the time.

The trouble with the English language is that many words have more than one definition, and the definition that is currently in popular usage isn't necessarily the original definition, if there ever was an original definition. For example, take these three words: country, nation, and state. According to my old high school history teacher, here are their "correct" definitions: A country is an area of land. A state is a country that has defined borders and a central government. A nation is a group of people that have a common language and cultural heritage. A state that contains a nation is a nation state. A nation doesn't necessarily need to live in a single state to be a nation. An example of a stateless nation would be the Kurds. The Jews were a stateless nation before 1948 when the modern state of Israel was formed, and all of the Jewish nation doesn't currently live in Israel. Although people commonly refer to the U.S. as a nation, it is actually a conglomeration of nations and fragments of nations living in 50 autonomous states that have surrendered part of their sovereignty to become a federal union of states.

The Native American Indians deserve their own paragraph. In the early years of our federal union, the various Indian tribes were considered to be sovereign nations under the law. I know of at least one treaty, I believe it was the Treaty of 1878, in which the sovereign nation status of the Indians was abolished, the intent being to assimilate them into the general population and make them U.S. citizens. That didn't work out so well, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1932 provided a mechanism for the various tribes to regain their sovereign nation status. I understand it's a tedious process, and some of our local Indians are still trying to make it work for them. Those that already have made it work for them now hold a dual citizenship, they are both U.S. citizens and citizens of their tribe or band. I read somewhere once that the federal government's legal description of them is "sovereign, dependent, internal nations". The "internal nations" part makes sense, but the terms "sovereign" and "dependent" are mutually exclusive. I think it would be more correct to call them "autonomous" than "sovereign", but nobody cares what I think.

A little dab'll do ya'

State, Republics, Commonwealths...it's amazing things have held together so well, for so long.  I can't remember if this stuff was taught in high school and I simply forgot.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I found out about a few states that didn't pass constitutional muster: Franklin, Deseret, and Sequoyah.  All very interesting and makes me wonder "what might have been."  These rabbit holes are very alluring and difficult to resist, another case of knowing less as you learn more.

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The presidential transition team is not having an easy time.  There are about 4,000 jobs that have to be filled, and I don't think they have a clue or know where to start.  Some of the early staff appointments don't bode well, especially that Bannon guy.  Nobody likes him except for the radical white extremists but turnover is so high that I don't expect him to last for long.  The big problem with Trump (See?  I said it!) is that he values and rewards loyalty above all else, with family being the only exception.  Loyalty is wonderful, but not at the expense of our nation's best interests.  Bannon is not what I would call a unifying force.  The divisiveness has gone far enough, with resistance already being organized against a guy who hasn't even taken office yet.

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Maybe Trump is starting to take things seriously.  I read about him changing his hairstyle to something that is less time consuming to maintain.  But with his ego, I'll believe it when I see it,

These United States

Many people think of our states as being subdivisions of the United States, but that's not true. Each of the original 13 colonies became a sovereign state after the American Revolution, then those 13 sovereign states joined together to form a federal union. Most of the other states that were added later were U.S. territories that applied for statehood, which kind of confuses the issue. If they hadn't become states they would still be territories, owned and operated by the union of the original 13 states. Texas and California are exceptions, they were never U.S. territories. They briefly became sovereign states after they seceded from Mexico, and then they joined the union. For this reason, some people believe that they should have the right to secede. It would be interesting to see what the courts think about that, and maybe we will someday. We already know what happens when we have a civil war over the issue, but I don't think any U.S. state has ever tried to secede by legal means. The U.S. Constitution is strangely silent on the issue. The whole U.S. Civil War could have been avoided if our constitution said that states either could or could not legally secede but, for some reason, it doesn't.

The constitution does say that any powers not delegated to the federal government belong to the states, which is probably why election laws vary from state to state. The U.S. Constitution prohibits the states from denying voting rights for specific reasons like race or gender but, other than that, the states are on their own. Remember when you had to be 21 to vote? Well, that only applied to federal elections, not state or local elections, although I think most states set their voting age at 21 as well. When the federal voting age was changed to 18, Michigan changed not only their state voting age, but their statutory age of majority to 18 as well. A few years later, the legal drinking age was pulled out of the package and returned to 21 by a state constitutional amendment. In Michigan, state constitutional amendments need to be approved by a direct vote of the people, and I voted against that one, but they passed it anyway.

The old 7.62 NATO round is still available, but there is also another 7.62, I believe it's the one for the old Russian AK47, and they are not interchangeable. The AK47 predates the old M-14, so you'd think they would both use the same ammunition, but they don't. My .308WIN is identical to the 7.62NATO, so you'd think they'd both have the same name, but they don't. Be that as it may, the modern M-16 and all it's military variants shoots a .223 bullet, so that should be the most available but, like I said, they are making ARs for the civilian market in a number of other calibers. If I was buying one, I'd want it in the .308 because then I could use it for deer hunting while I'm waiting for the shit to hit the fan. Then, if the shit never hits the fan in my lifetime, I won't have wasted my money on another gun that never gets used.

Ammunition will keep forever if it's kept dry, but it makes sense to use up your old stuff first.

Keep your powder dry

Until Mr. Beagles pointed it out I didn't consider the other offices on the absentee ballots.  What a mess!  If a state-wide or local election is close do they then do an actual count or do the candidates have to demand it?  It is my understanding that election laws vary from state to state so I am completely in the dark now.  There are a couple of states that split the electoral vote, which muddies the waters even further.  I wonder if election reform is even possible at this stage of the game.

I read that some of the sore losers on the west coast are talking about seceding from the union and joining Canada.  What is wrong with them?  This could just be more internet nonsense, quickly spread and quickly forgotten.  But it makes you think about the validity of modern media and how it is shaping ideas.  I think I'll have to withhold judgement on issues until I read about it in print, on actual pieces of paper.  I'm losing trust with television and supposedly reputable online news sources.

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There are online sources for 16g shotgun ammo, but it's almost twice as expensive per round as 12g.  I didn't expect such a rabbit hole in the world of firearms; too many choices if you ask me (and you didn't).  But as long as I'm playing make-believe with urban warfare or a zombie apocalypse, I'll go with whatever weapon has the cheapest and most readily available ammo.  No point in further research right now, but early indicators are that 7.62mm and 9mm rounds are good bets, along with the 12g shotgun rounds.  Equipment for reloading should also be considered, but that's a completely different train of thought.

Does ammo have a shelf life?  I thought that, if properly stored, it can last years.  I don't know what kind of inventory is required, but it seems to me that a few hundred rounds of each caliber should be sufficient, depending on what you're hunting, and a lot of target shooting is always a good idea.

Myths and Fantasies

I have heard that about the absentee ballots, but I don't know whether I believe it or not. There are a lot more offices on the ballot than the president you know, and some of those local races can be close at times, so it seems like they would have to count everything. Four years ago, one of our county road commissioners won by one vote (My vote!), although he died before he could assume the position. He only won after a recount, the first vote had him losing by five.

You know, I don't remember ever hearing of a recount that came out exactly the same as the regular vote, even before we got our optical scanners. First we fill out a paper ballot, than we feed it into the machine, where it is scanned and counted. Then the ballots go down into a collection box underneath. I think it's the best system they ever came up with, although I understand that all the states don't have it yet.

I agree that a shotgun is a better choice of weapon for urban warfare, but I would get a 12 gauge rather than a 16. One of the primary considerations is the availability of ammunition. Sixteen gauge shells are hard to find as it is, and the apocalypse hasn't even started yet. They make ARs in several calibers now, but the military .223 would probably be the one most available when the shit hits the fan. The trouble is that it's a piss poor deer cartridge. I don't know what was wrong with the 7.62mm NATO round, which is identical to the .308Win, or the old 30-06 for that matter. Both are excellent for deer, if you can find them with 180 grain bullets.

I haven't had to buy ammo for the last couple years because I stocked up the last time I found the kind I like. I wasn't worried about the shit hitting the fan, but .308Win ammo with 180 grain bullets was almost impossible to find anymore. I don't blame Obama for that, I think that all the new fangled designer bullets just crowded it off the shelves. I remember when there were only a half dozen deer cartridges that were popular around here and the stores kept them in good supply. Now you ask a youthful clerk for the old fashioned kind and he doesn't know what you're talking about. From what I've read, the ammo companies have been in an arms race for some time, each one trying to add a few more fps velocity than their competitors so they can jack up the price. I guess they are catering to the long range market, but most shots at deer in this area are within a hundred yards, so we don't need no stinking designer bullets.

I don't know how much of all this to attribute to apocalyptic fantasies and how much to blame on the fear that Obama wanted to put a big tax on guns and ammunition. I guess that fear wasn't totally groundless, but it never did materialize, So now will the hoarders start using up the ammo they have in storage, or will they just buy more and rotate their stock? That's another thing about which we will have to wait and see.

 

Be careful what you wish for

Quite an interesting week, and yet the sun still rises, as scheduled.  As events unfold I've learned a few new things, such as millions of votes are still uncounted, and will remain so.

Absentee ballots aren't counted unless they will make a difference in a state's final tally.  If the difference between candidates is 50,000 and there are 48,000 absentee ballots the votes won't be counted.  I don't know if early votes are counted in this group.  Quite a system, and according to the pundits, Hillary's numerical superiority is increasing and it doesn't make a lick of difference.  Electoral votes rule.

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And how about those pundits?  All that data, all those polls, and they still managed to get everything wrong, with very rare exceptions.  Perhaps their systems were rigged, and they tweaked things to get the results they wanted.   I don't recall any of them saying, "I don't know."  At least Gary Johnson admitted he "didn't know" when quizzed about Aleppo.

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I'm not going to worry about the fate of firearms manufacturers.  If their market collapses they can diversify their product portfolio; they have the tools and skills to make all kinds of precision mechanical devices in case the firearms market is saturated.  We could quit importing so much stuff from China if we are willing to pay more for superior products, but that's idle speculation.

An AR would not be on my firearms wishlist.  I have no need for such weapons as I do not anticipate urban warfare, but if I did need anything I would go for a trusty pump-action shotgun, and some kind of sidearm(s).  Instead of a 12g I think a 16g would be more than sufficient; smaller rounds means you can carry more of them.  I don't understand the law restricting barrel length; I think it depends whether or not there is a shoulder stock.  If there is no stock the weapon is considered a handgun and can have a shorter barrel.  It would still have to be registered though, but if it gets to the point where it is necessary for me to be armed to go about my business I may not bother with the paperwork.  Jail would be a safer place, but at that point there may not be any police.  Not a good scenario for me to contemplate.

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A lot of energy is being burned up pontificating on the events of last week, and I'm going to take the position of "wait and see."  As Mr. Beagles has stated, the president-elect is a loose cannon but we should not conclude that it means we are doomed to failure as a nation.  Hell, I may even start referring to him by name instead of Mr. Fart, simply out of respect for the office.  I still don't like the guy but I don't envy the challenges he is facing.  He got what he wanted and will suffer for it.