I remember the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism", but I didn't remember who said it or about whom it was said. Speaking of old sayings, remember the "silent majority"? I think it was Richard Nixon who coined that phrase, and I think he was talking about all the regular people who weren't making a public spectacle of themselves protesting the Vietnam War. That one still crops up occasionally. Some of the people who voted or Trump considered themselves to be part of the silent majority. As it turned out, they weren't the majority, and they certainly weren't silent, but they won anyway
I haven't heard anything about the Tea Party lately, but I think they are alive and well, they just don't call themselves that anymore. The Freedom Caucus and the Liberty Caucus seem to be spun off from the Tea Party, don't they? I didn't know they had so many other caucuses in Congress. Could the three of us become a caucus, or do you have to be in Congress to do that? Never mind, I'd rather be a member of an institute than a caucus. I don't know why, it just sounds better to me.
I have long wondered, if all the regular people would get together, could they take their country back, or is it too late for that? Maybe that's what many of the Trump voters thought they were doing, although Trump is certainly not a regular person. I have heard it said that people are just tired of politicians and will vote for anybody who claims that he isn't one. The thing is, as soon as the guy gets elected, he becomes a politician. So what has been gained?
Friday, March 31, 2017
As we circle the drain
...so maybe Trump and his pal Putin are neo-monarchists.
That's as good a description I've heard so far, Mr. Beagles. Well done. The preponderance of family and billionaire pals in the White House has the aura of imperial rule, ignoring tradition. It is our good fortune that, thus far, they have been quite inept and have not gotten away with much. But I doubt that they'll give up and instead will refine their game until their agenda comes to pass. What that agenda is, I don't know or have a clue. Or maybe they will fail, but due to their unpresidented efforts will pave the way for a future leader of much more terrifying potential. The guy (or gal) after Trump may be much worse unless Congress starts showing some true grit.
Which may be happening, given the recent efforts of the House Freedom Caucus, that small group of conservative Republicans, not to be confused with the House Liberty Caucus, also a small group of conservative (and libertarian) Republicans. Anyhow, they are strange bedfellows for the House Democrats.
Caucuses are funny animals; they remind me of the cliques in high school. There are hundreds of congressional caucuses, covering all sorts of special interests. But they have no power in themselves, no budgets, no staffs, and it may be that anyone can join if they really push for membership. Wikipedia has a comprehensive listing, and I wonder what the House Wire and Wire Products Caucus hopes to accomplish and how often it meets. One group I've never heard of is the Blue Dog Coalition whose members are conservative Democrats. I find the canine reference refreshing.
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Dungarees Old Dog? Like in bib overalls?
Yes, indeed, Uncle Ken. They were the preferred work clothing, along with steel-toed work boots, for one of my previous jobs, the place that made stone countertops and such.
As I said, very comfy and the utilitarian value is a big plus, with plenty of pockets and loops for tools. Because there is no belt, freedom of movement is enhanced without fear of the dreaded "plumber's crack."
I had to refresh my memory on the term dungarees, something I haven't heard in a long time. The variations of denim are more complex than I thought but I finally learned about twill.
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It's been often said that "where there's smoke, there's fire" but no mention is made of a deliberate smokescreen, which is where I think we're at but maybe the FBI can get to the bottom of it. It should be easy for them as part of the ongoing investigation into money laundering by certain Russians who happen to live in (surprise!) Trump Tower. All they have to do is ask an individual to come in for an "interview" and answer a few questions. We know what happens when you lie at one of those interviews; you go to jail. Lying to the FBI often causes harsher sentences than any actual crime; ask Martha Stewart. I expect someone to fold, soon, and it will all come tumbling down.
That's as good a description I've heard so far, Mr. Beagles. Well done. The preponderance of family and billionaire pals in the White House has the aura of imperial rule, ignoring tradition. It is our good fortune that, thus far, they have been quite inept and have not gotten away with much. But I doubt that they'll give up and instead will refine their game until their agenda comes to pass. What that agenda is, I don't know or have a clue. Or maybe they will fail, but due to their unpresidented efforts will pave the way for a future leader of much more terrifying potential. The guy (or gal) after Trump may be much worse unless Congress starts showing some true grit.
Which may be happening, given the recent efforts of the House Freedom Caucus, that small group of conservative Republicans, not to be confused with the House Liberty Caucus, also a small group of conservative (and libertarian) Republicans. Anyhow, they are strange bedfellows for the House Democrats.
Caucuses are funny animals; they remind me of the cliques in high school. There are hundreds of congressional caucuses, covering all sorts of special interests. But they have no power in themselves, no budgets, no staffs, and it may be that anyone can join if they really push for membership. Wikipedia has a comprehensive listing, and I wonder what the House Wire and Wire Products Caucus hopes to accomplish and how often it meets. One group I've never heard of is the Blue Dog Coalition whose members are conservative Democrats. I find the canine reference refreshing.
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Dungarees Old Dog? Like in bib overalls?
Yes, indeed, Uncle Ken. They were the preferred work clothing, along with steel-toed work boots, for one of my previous jobs, the place that made stone countertops and such.
As I said, very comfy and the utilitarian value is a big plus, with plenty of pockets and loops for tools. Because there is no belt, freedom of movement is enhanced without fear of the dreaded "plumber's crack."
I had to refresh my memory on the term dungarees, something I haven't heard in a long time. The variations of denim are more complex than I thought but I finally learned about twill.
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It's been often said that "where there's smoke, there's fire" but no mention is made of a deliberate smokescreen, which is where I think we're at but maybe the FBI can get to the bottom of it. It should be easy for them as part of the ongoing investigation into money laundering by certain Russians who happen to live in (surprise!) Trump Tower. All they have to do is ask an individual to come in for an "interview" and answer a few questions. We know what happens when you lie at one of those interviews; you go to jail. Lying to the FBI often causes harsher sentences than any actual crime; ask Martha Stewart. I expect someone to fold, soon, and it will all come tumbling down.
radiclibs and reactionaries
I was glued to my CNN again last night. A NY Times report about the two guys who broke Nunes into the white house, Flynn asking for immunity, Spicer saying he ain't going to say nothing about nothing, What a tangled web, still no smoking gun, but an awful lot of smoke with no other explanation and the perp is clamming up.
My guess is that the Russkies hated the big girl, and had nothing special for Dump except they like to spread chaos in the USA. Both Putin and Dump hate the press, well press that doesn't fawn over them, so they have that in common. Some of Dump's people were cozy with the Russkies so why don't the two play a little footsie? As Beagles points out Dump has no ideology, so the only thing the Dumpists believe in is him, so anything that would give him an edge is perfectly allowable.
You don't remember radiclib? How about the nattering nabobs of negativism? Imagine Agnew, who probably had an IQ in the single digits, thundering those lines while Safire chortled and rubbed his hands together, politics become poetry, Ah those were the days. Kilpatrick, that was another conservative who also wrote a column about language, He was a little more stuffy than Safire, and of course I hated the politics of both of them, but what a joy to read people writing about language, No columns like that anymore. I blame the internet. Reading a crisp newspaper in the morning is a lot more inducive to appreciation of language than peering at a screen nine or ten times a day. That's another thing that's wrong these days. We used to get our news digested and contemplated in the morning, again on the evening news, and once again at ten. Anymore we get snatches anytime in the day, and we tend not to read them closely because there will be newer news in five or ten minutes.
I think Dump is properly labelled a populist. He rails against the current structure and appeals to the common man. Kind of sounds like us radiclibs back in our day doesn't it? Now that I think about it we thought that the establishment deserved to be torn down and we thought the press was against us.
Well there were differences which I can go into in detail upon request, but the similarity is closer than i would like it to be.
Dump doesn't really fit into that left/right thing. He could go to either side depending on what he thinks will work or what his whim is on a particular day. So far he is on the right because that is simpler and closer to the common man. Right now he is getting pricked by the FC and threatening to go to the dems, but I don't think they will deal with him. I hope they don't. I have often wondered what would have happened if Dump had run as a dem and been successful. Would the dems have kowtowed to him the way the reps have? I'd like to think not, but I am not entirely sure.
I don't hear the term reactionary lately. It used to he an epithet that the left hurled at the right. (The left was never as good at hurling epithets as the right, witness the sad decline of the word liberal.) The term was originally coined when that left/right thing was first formed by the French, and it meant somebody who wanted to bring back the king. In that sense it sounds like Dump who would like to be the new king. Think of that wolf's den of his loins as princes and princess. Brrrr.
My guess is that the Russkies hated the big girl, and had nothing special for Dump except they like to spread chaos in the USA. Both Putin and Dump hate the press, well press that doesn't fawn over them, so they have that in common. Some of Dump's people were cozy with the Russkies so why don't the two play a little footsie? As Beagles points out Dump has no ideology, so the only thing the Dumpists believe in is him, so anything that would give him an edge is perfectly allowable.
You don't remember radiclib? How about the nattering nabobs of negativism? Imagine Agnew, who probably had an IQ in the single digits, thundering those lines while Safire chortled and rubbed his hands together, politics become poetry, Ah those were the days. Kilpatrick, that was another conservative who also wrote a column about language, He was a little more stuffy than Safire, and of course I hated the politics of both of them, but what a joy to read people writing about language, No columns like that anymore. I blame the internet. Reading a crisp newspaper in the morning is a lot more inducive to appreciation of language than peering at a screen nine or ten times a day. That's another thing that's wrong these days. We used to get our news digested and contemplated in the morning, again on the evening news, and once again at ten. Anymore we get snatches anytime in the day, and we tend not to read them closely because there will be newer news in five or ten minutes.
I think Dump is properly labelled a populist. He rails against the current structure and appeals to the common man. Kind of sounds like us radiclibs back in our day doesn't it? Now that I think about it we thought that the establishment deserved to be torn down and we thought the press was against us.
Well there were differences which I can go into in detail upon request, but the similarity is closer than i would like it to be.
Dump doesn't really fit into that left/right thing. He could go to either side depending on what he thinks will work or what his whim is on a particular day. So far he is on the right because that is simpler and closer to the common man. Right now he is getting pricked by the FC and threatening to go to the dems, but I don't think they will deal with him. I hope they don't. I have often wondered what would have happened if Dump had run as a dem and been successful. Would the dems have kowtowed to him the way the reps have? I'd like to think not, but I am not entirely sure.
I don't hear the term reactionary lately. It used to he an epithet that the left hurled at the right. (The left was never as good at hurling epithets as the right, witness the sad decline of the word liberal.) The term was originally coined when that left/right thing was first formed by the French, and it meant somebody who wanted to bring back the king. In that sense it sounds like Dump who would like to be the new king. Think of that wolf's den of his loins as princes and princess. Brrrr.
Thursday, March 30, 2017
The Fox in the Hen House
I looked up your Devin Nunes, and he seems to be the classic case of the fox that's been hired to guard the hen house. He's supposed to be investigating this Trump-Russian thing, and it looks like he's up to his eyeballs in it himself. Maybe they need somebody to investigate the investigator.
I don't remember the term "radiclibs", but I can pretty much figure out what it means, or at least used to mean. I was calling myself a reactionary back in those days, but I got tired of explaining what it means every time I said it. The guys at the paper mill used to call everybody who wasn't a "big suck" a "radical", and I couldn't make them understand that, when the radicals are in power, the opposition people are more properly called "reactionaries".
I'm not sure that any of those old fashioned political labels are relevant today. What do you call somebody like Trump? Okay, I know there are lots of things we could call him, but none of them seem to fit the old definitions of a liberal or a conservative. His proposals are not popular with any of the Democrats and half of the Republicans. I guess you could all him a reactionary, but that would be an insult to all the other reactionaries. Maybe that's his true mission, to give the reactionaries a bad name. If that's the case, then he must be some kind of communist, except that he's paling around with the Russians, and they renounced communism decades ago. Well, the Russians were monarchists before they were communists, so maybe Trump and his pal Putin are neo-monarchists. That's the best I can come up with right now, but maybe I'll think of something else later.
I don't remember the term "radiclibs", but I can pretty much figure out what it means, or at least used to mean. I was calling myself a reactionary back in those days, but I got tired of explaining what it means every time I said it. The guys at the paper mill used to call everybody who wasn't a "big suck" a "radical", and I couldn't make them understand that, when the radicals are in power, the opposition people are more properly called "reactionaries".
I'm not sure that any of those old fashioned political labels are relevant today. What do you call somebody like Trump? Okay, I know there are lots of things we could call him, but none of them seem to fit the old definitions of a liberal or a conservative. His proposals are not popular with any of the Democrats and half of the Republicans. I guess you could all him a reactionary, but that would be an insult to all the other reactionaries. Maybe that's his true mission, to give the reactionaries a bad name. If that's the case, then he must be some kind of communist, except that he's paling around with the Russians, and they renounced communism decades ago. Well, the Russians were monarchists before they were communists, so maybe Trump and his pal Putin are neo-monarchists. That's the best I can come up with right now, but maybe I'll think of something else later.
who remembers the radiclibs?
I believe Dump is being prosecuted by the proper authorities. I believe they are shitting and deserve to remain on the pot. The FBI is doing whatever it is supposed to be doing, well we think, they never seem to want to tell us anything. Did they ever finish looking into the big girl's emails? Will they tell us when they are? The senate just launched their investigation with nice sounding preambles and the rep and the dem pledging their troths. Of course that is the way the house started theirs but now it is in shambles. It is pretty obvious that the White House has reached into it and made Nunes their man and now he is the kidney stone in the urethra of the house investigation.
Note how I said White House instead of Dump. Well nobody thinks Dump does anything other than tweet. play golf, and issue commands with no details, so people use White House to designate who is actually doing things, except that doesn't include everybody, there are all these fellow travelers that aren't officially members of the White House so the term Trumpland is gaining use. Has that eerie aura of fantasy.
Before I left Champaign in the middle eighties there had been some big hullabaloo about building a clean coal plant in Mattoon, but it never happened. Thirty years later it is still not happening. Seems like I heard NPR talking about one that was actually built a couple days ago but that one wasn't working either. The impression I get is that they maybe could get one to work but it would cost a gazillion dollars. It's kind of like vapor ware to delude those coal miners that they can leave the cash register at the 711 and get back down in the mines except that even if it did work it would just be machines going down there.
I'm with you on socialized medicine Beagles. I hear it whispered in the heartland, but as yet I hear not a murmur in Washington.
You know sometimes I throw in these parable and riddles because I am pumped up by Mr Coffee and my fingers are flying across the keyboard and I just let if flow, and sometimes it's just to see if anybody is reading what I have written. I have dropped that middle class/democracy thing for a lack of interest and ok, it is a little vague and stuffy, but I am trying to keep the Cain and Abel thing alive because I think it speaks to something more primal. Let's see, the FC is the polecat-ferret that is unleashed by that ruby red element of the electorate who are the hunters.
I used to read Slate, but I lost interest when they started listing their articles several times. Their site is divided into several areas and each one lists the same damn articles. What is with that? It must be some kind of well, thing, because i notice that one of my favorite sites, The Hill has recently started to do the same thing. Like its sister Salon it is a little heavy on the celeb side, and its kind of heavy on the radiclib side.
I had to look that up to make sure I had it right, maybe it was libradic, but there was friendly old wiki setting me straight and giving me a little historical note that it was coined by Spiro Agnew well more likely it was coined by his writers who chief among them was William Safire, who I didn't like his politics but he used to have this column on written English which I used to enjoy. In fact there used to be several columns around on things like was it ok to use hopefully as a stand in for one would hope. I miss those columns. The scent of chalk dust, the chummy bemusement, the tweedy diction, I miss them.
Oh radiclib. How come the right doesn't use it anymore? I think because it used to be bad to be radical, but anymore it is spot on, very hip among the coolest rightists, kick out the jams, let's burn this sucker down. They certainly don't want to associate that word with liberals who are squishy and verbose and are standing in the doorways and blocking the halls.
Dungarees Old Dog? Like in bib overalls? They were quite hip in my youth, but I never picked up the habit. I like turnips though. They don't seem to be too hip right now though. They are tucked into a little bin at Jewel jostled by the different varieties of kale and the 'ruglias, and the rabes, and the whatnot. When I take them up to the clerk half the time I am asked what are those.
Note how I said White House instead of Dump. Well nobody thinks Dump does anything other than tweet. play golf, and issue commands with no details, so people use White House to designate who is actually doing things, except that doesn't include everybody, there are all these fellow travelers that aren't officially members of the White House so the term Trumpland is gaining use. Has that eerie aura of fantasy.
Before I left Champaign in the middle eighties there had been some big hullabaloo about building a clean coal plant in Mattoon, but it never happened. Thirty years later it is still not happening. Seems like I heard NPR talking about one that was actually built a couple days ago but that one wasn't working either. The impression I get is that they maybe could get one to work but it would cost a gazillion dollars. It's kind of like vapor ware to delude those coal miners that they can leave the cash register at the 711 and get back down in the mines except that even if it did work it would just be machines going down there.
I'm with you on socialized medicine Beagles. I hear it whispered in the heartland, but as yet I hear not a murmur in Washington.
You know sometimes I throw in these parable and riddles because I am pumped up by Mr Coffee and my fingers are flying across the keyboard and I just let if flow, and sometimes it's just to see if anybody is reading what I have written. I have dropped that middle class/democracy thing for a lack of interest and ok, it is a little vague and stuffy, but I am trying to keep the Cain and Abel thing alive because I think it speaks to something more primal. Let's see, the FC is the polecat-ferret that is unleashed by that ruby red element of the electorate who are the hunters.
I used to read Slate, but I lost interest when they started listing their articles several times. Their site is divided into several areas and each one lists the same damn articles. What is with that? It must be some kind of well, thing, because i notice that one of my favorite sites, The Hill has recently started to do the same thing. Like its sister Salon it is a little heavy on the celeb side, and its kind of heavy on the radiclib side.
I had to look that up to make sure I had it right, maybe it was libradic, but there was friendly old wiki setting me straight and giving me a little historical note that it was coined by Spiro Agnew well more likely it was coined by his writers who chief among them was William Safire, who I didn't like his politics but he used to have this column on written English which I used to enjoy. In fact there used to be several columns around on things like was it ok to use hopefully as a stand in for one would hope. I miss those columns. The scent of chalk dust, the chummy bemusement, the tweedy diction, I miss them.
Oh radiclib. How come the right doesn't use it anymore? I think because it used to be bad to be radical, but anymore it is spot on, very hip among the coolest rightists, kick out the jams, let's burn this sucker down. They certainly don't want to associate that word with liberals who are squishy and verbose and are standing in the doorways and blocking the halls.
Dungarees Old Dog? Like in bib overalls? They were quite hip in my youth, but I never picked up the habit. I like turnips though. They don't seem to be too hip right now though. They are tucked into a little bin at Jewel jostled by the different varieties of kale and the 'ruglias, and the rabes, and the whatnot. When I take them up to the clerk half the time I am asked what are those.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Clean Coal and Dirty Politicians
Okay I get it, you guys don't like Trump. I don't like him either, nor do a lot of other people. So what are we arguing about? I didn't like the Clintons either, but I always wondered why they kept being accused of so many bad things, none of which have ever been proven. If somebody has any real evidence, why don't they turn it over to the proper authorities so that prosecution may ensue? Well, I guess you could say that Blow Job Bill was prosecuted, but he was not convicted, so that should be the end of it. Same thing with Trump, all those alligators should either shit or get off the pot.
The term "clean coal" has been around for awhile, I don't think Trump invented it. What it means is that there is technology available that can dramatically reduce the carbon emissions from burning coal. Although it will never be pure as the driven snow, coal can be made a lot cleaner than it has been. I don't know if any of this technology has ever been installed in the real world, or if it's just something they talk about but will never do, like so many other things.
I have said right along that health insurance is part of the problem, not part of the solution. If they really want to make health care more affordable, they should just by-pass the insurance companies and do something different. If they don't want to give us all free health care, then they should have government owned hospitals and clinics for the poor people, like the Cook County Hospital that you guys have. Most rural counties don't have the tax base to support something like that, so either the state or federal government would have to do it. They already have places like that for veterans and Native Americans, so maybe they could just add a few wings onto each one and not have to build from scratch.
The term "clean coal" has been around for awhile, I don't think Trump invented it. What it means is that there is technology available that can dramatically reduce the carbon emissions from burning coal. Although it will never be pure as the driven snow, coal can be made a lot cleaner than it has been. I don't know if any of this technology has ever been installed in the real world, or if it's just something they talk about but will never do, like so many other things.
I have said right along that health insurance is part of the problem, not part of the solution. If they really want to make health care more affordable, they should just by-pass the insurance companies and do something different. If they don't want to give us all free health care, then they should have government owned hospitals and clinics for the poor people, like the Cook County Hospital that you guys have. Most rural counties don't have the tax base to support something like that, so either the state or federal government would have to do it. They already have places like that for veterans and Native Americans, so maybe they could just add a few wings onto each one and not have to build from scratch.
Whence the Resistance?
Hey, I think I just invented a new word! A techspert is a technology expert.....Get It? Do you think it should be spelled "techspert" or "texpert"?
There is nothing new under the sun, Mr. Beagles; both terms are already in use, according to the Urban Dictionary. The reference to the Beatles' "I am the Walrus" was amusing, though.
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But the Cain vs Abel thing is alive like never before with the wild hunters of the freedom caucus despoiling the nicely grown corn rows of, well of the dealster.
Okay, you're losing me, Uncle Ken. Although Mr. Beagles has stated that you "speaketh in parables," I think you're starting to speak in riddles. Is the House Freedom caucus a group of wild hunters or the sharp-toothed polecat/ferret crawling up the rectum of the body politic? Comparing Trump to a kidney stone is appropriate, I suppose, and although very painful I don't think they are fatal. Having had kidney stones myself, I wouldn't wish them on anyone.
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Despite the drop in approval ratings, #45 seems to be continually winning the game that he is playing. A recent article in Slate sheds a little light on his game: Stop Saying Donald Trump Is Mentally Ill. The article states that he is an artist of sorts, able to bend reality to his own goals. But that goal is an expression of evil, "So here is a definition for our time: Radical evil is the manipulation of others’ perception of reality in order to increasingly concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few."
Regardless of earlier references to turnip trucks and dusty overalls, others share my concerns about the "party first" mentality in another article, also in Slate: "Where Are the Good Republicans?" And yes, I own a pair of overalls; damn comfy to work in.
Both articles are worth a read and help clarify current circumstances, I think. But I wonder why it's
taking so long for a measured response against all of the rumored malfeasance. Money laundering, interference by foreign governments, nepotism, and god knows what else should be sufficient for intense scrutiny (and prosecution) by law enforcement, don't you think? What are they waiting for? Government accountability and transparency have flown out the window. Trump claimed during his campaign that other nations were "laughing at us" because of our trade deals. Now they are laughing even harder, for completely different reasons.
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The regime continues to churn out terms of a distinctly Orwellian nature. Fake news, alternative facts, and now "clean coal." What the hell is clean coal supposed to be? Even coal industry officials realize that the days of big coal are over. But maybe with the repeal of EPA regulations there is hope for more blackening skies.
Where is a meteor when you need one?
There is nothing new under the sun, Mr. Beagles; both terms are already in use, according to the Urban Dictionary. The reference to the Beatles' "I am the Walrus" was amusing, though.
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But the Cain vs Abel thing is alive like never before with the wild hunters of the freedom caucus despoiling the nicely grown corn rows of, well of the dealster.
Okay, you're losing me, Uncle Ken. Although Mr. Beagles has stated that you "speaketh in parables," I think you're starting to speak in riddles. Is the House Freedom caucus a group of wild hunters or the sharp-toothed polecat/ferret crawling up the rectum of the body politic? Comparing Trump to a kidney stone is appropriate, I suppose, and although very painful I don't think they are fatal. Having had kidney stones myself, I wouldn't wish them on anyone.
-----
Despite the drop in approval ratings, #45 seems to be continually winning the game that he is playing. A recent article in Slate sheds a little light on his game: Stop Saying Donald Trump Is Mentally Ill. The article states that he is an artist of sorts, able to bend reality to his own goals. But that goal is an expression of evil, "So here is a definition for our time: Radical evil is the manipulation of others’ perception of reality in order to increasingly concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few."
Regardless of earlier references to turnip trucks and dusty overalls, others share my concerns about the "party first" mentality in another article, also in Slate: "Where Are the Good Republicans?" And yes, I own a pair of overalls; damn comfy to work in.
Both articles are worth a read and help clarify current circumstances, I think. But I wonder why it's
taking so long for a measured response against all of the rumored malfeasance. Money laundering, interference by foreign governments, nepotism, and god knows what else should be sufficient for intense scrutiny (and prosecution) by law enforcement, don't you think? What are they waiting for? Government accountability and transparency have flown out the window. Trump claimed during his campaign that other nations were "laughing at us" because of our trade deals. Now they are laughing even harder, for completely different reasons.
-----
The regime continues to churn out terms of a distinctly Orwellian nature. Fake news, alternative facts, and now "clean coal." What the hell is clean coal supposed to be? Even coal industry officials realize that the days of big coal are over. But maybe with the repeal of EPA regulations there is hope for more blackening skies.
Where is a meteor when you need one?
the polecat-ferret is rounding third
I read that story years ago, pretty good story. Mostly I liked the poem about Sredni Vashtar. See there's a metaphor. The kid is stuck in this nanny state where he thinks he is over regulated and his guardian thinks she knows more than him and he is fed up with this shit, so he unleashes Sredni Vashtar, much as his country cousins pulled the lever for Dump.
After twenty-four hours I don't totally remember what I typed the morning before. Oh here it is, I was referring to Sredni in reference to the FC. Well polecat-ferrets they are, but in relation to Dump they are establishment, they have sort of an ideology, mainly they don't believe in compromising and they would rather be right than president. Not that any of them would ever be president (but that is what I said about Dump isn't it?). Now that I think about it they are more like the stoics. It won't bother them if the country goes down in flames as long as their voting record is pristine.;
I think socialized medicine was mostly a pejorative term invented by its enemies. Well when was socialism ever a popular thing in these United States (briefly around the turn of the century, but outside of giving us the eight hour day and some martyrs it pretty much went down in flames)? Nowadays they add a European style to it, to make it European style socialized medicine, what decent American would go for something like that?
Now that I think about it Beagles would go for that. Not with the name, but with everybody getting care free except for having to pay their taxes. Well you know it is common speak to refer to the previous health care system as a mess, and to Obamacare, and to Trumpcare. Now there are rumors of a Trumpcare 2.0 which sounds like vaporware,but even so it will be a mess. When will the American people look around at all the dough the insurance companies are hoovering (for the Economist readers among us) out of health care and think hey, maybe we can toss them into the dustbin?
Romneycare was Massachusetts, though it's easy to confuse the state with the Connecticut, they are both tucked into that squinched up part of the country, but Massachusetts is harder to spell (though that second c in Connecticut (Who calls it Connect -icut?) is tricky), and Massachusetts has a baseball team.
Not that Beagles watches a lot of baseball. Non sports fans say why do you want to waste two or three hours watching a game when you can just see the results on the evening news? But the thing about baseball (and other sports too, but none of them are as contemplative as baseball) is that you are watching it in real time, you are watching the wave of quantum physics collapse into the point. Nobody knows if the batter is going to swing, if that high hard grounder headed for the glove of the shortstop and hence to the gloves of the second and first basemen for the game ending double play, or if it might hit that innocent little clod of dirt and skip under the shortstop's glove and into the outfield while the weak hitting utility infielder who had somehow advanced to third scurries home inducing a panicked throw from the outfield that goes over the catcher's head allowing the guy on second to dance home with the winning run and the home team wins and the crowd goes wild.
It was almost like that watching CNN Monday night, this was happening, then that. And as an old guy I sometimes get confused by long and rambling stories and I worry that maybe it is my weakening mind so I was pleased to hear the pundits, as one, reveal that Nunes's (can I call him Devin (sounds like a made up Hollywood name doesn't it?)) story didn't make any sense.
And even as I am writing this that woman in England is signing the papers that begin to set that merry old country adrift from Europe. That dark and rolling sea, Those unwashed masses amenable to reason no more. Or maybe they were never amenable to reason they only went along with what we said because they thought maybe we knew what we were doing, but now they don't think that way anymore and are going to unleash their polecat-ferret on us smart folks.
After twenty-four hours I don't totally remember what I typed the morning before. Oh here it is, I was referring to Sredni in reference to the FC. Well polecat-ferrets they are, but in relation to Dump they are establishment, they have sort of an ideology, mainly they don't believe in compromising and they would rather be right than president. Not that any of them would ever be president (but that is what I said about Dump isn't it?). Now that I think about it they are more like the stoics. It won't bother them if the country goes down in flames as long as their voting record is pristine.;
I think socialized medicine was mostly a pejorative term invented by its enemies. Well when was socialism ever a popular thing in these United States (briefly around the turn of the century, but outside of giving us the eight hour day and some martyrs it pretty much went down in flames)? Nowadays they add a European style to it, to make it European style socialized medicine, what decent American would go for something like that?
Now that I think about it Beagles would go for that. Not with the name, but with everybody getting care free except for having to pay their taxes. Well you know it is common speak to refer to the previous health care system as a mess, and to Obamacare, and to Trumpcare. Now there are rumors of a Trumpcare 2.0 which sounds like vaporware,but even so it will be a mess. When will the American people look around at all the dough the insurance companies are hoovering (for the Economist readers among us) out of health care and think hey, maybe we can toss them into the dustbin?
Romneycare was Massachusetts, though it's easy to confuse the state with the Connecticut, they are both tucked into that squinched up part of the country, but Massachusetts is harder to spell (though that second c in Connecticut (Who calls it Connect -icut?) is tricky), and Massachusetts has a baseball team.
Not that Beagles watches a lot of baseball. Non sports fans say why do you want to waste two or three hours watching a game when you can just see the results on the evening news? But the thing about baseball (and other sports too, but none of them are as contemplative as baseball) is that you are watching it in real time, you are watching the wave of quantum physics collapse into the point. Nobody knows if the batter is going to swing, if that high hard grounder headed for the glove of the shortstop and hence to the gloves of the second and first basemen for the game ending double play, or if it might hit that innocent little clod of dirt and skip under the shortstop's glove and into the outfield while the weak hitting utility infielder who had somehow advanced to third scurries home inducing a panicked throw from the outfield that goes over the catcher's head allowing the guy on second to dance home with the winning run and the home team wins and the crowd goes wild.
It was almost like that watching CNN Monday night, this was happening, then that. And as an old guy I sometimes get confused by long and rambling stories and I worry that maybe it is my weakening mind so I was pleased to hear the pundits, as one, reveal that Nunes's (can I call him Devin (sounds like a made up Hollywood name doesn't it?)) story didn't make any sense.
And even as I am writing this that woman in England is signing the papers that begin to set that merry old country adrift from Europe. That dark and rolling sea, Those unwashed masses amenable to reason no more. Or maybe they were never amenable to reason they only went along with what we said because they thought maybe we knew what we were doing, but now they don't think that way anymore and are going to unleash their polecat-ferret on us smart folks.
Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Uncle Ken Speaketh in Parables
I thought that Sredni Vashtar sounded like a Hindu goddess, so I figured that Wikipedia would have something on it. Come to find out, it's a famous story that I had never heard of. There's lots of famous things that I have never heard of and, if any of them are like that Sredni Vashtar story, I'm glad. What a bunch of creepo crap!
Now that you mention it, I do remember when they were calling it "Socialized Medicine", but I don't remember when was the last time I head it called that. I think it's the Brits who call their program "National Health Care", and I'm pretty sure that the Canadians call theirs "Medicare". I seem to remember Wikipedia grouping them all together under the heading of "Public Health Care", but that was some time ago so they may have changed it by now.
I didn't look up "when the big girl burned her fingers" because it sounded like an Uncle Ken original to me. I think it refers to when Hillary was First Lady, back in the 90s, and her husband put her in charge of a committee that was supposed to come up with some kind of socialized medicine and instead produced something very similar to Obama Care, but of course it wasn't called "Obama Care" because nobody had ever heard of Obama in those days. Come to think of it, that may have been the last time I heard the phrase "socialized medicine". Since then it has been called a lot of things, but socialized medicine is not one of them. Be that as it may, Hillary's plan went down like a submarine, only to resurface years later as Obama Care. I understand that, in between, there was something called "Romney Care", but that was just in one state, either Massachusetts or Connecticut, I forget which. I have heard that they've also got some kind of state health care plan in Hawaii, but I don't know what they call it.
I don't watch CNN, so I have no idea what Uncle Ken is talking about there, but it doesn't sound like anything I would be interested in, so I won't be looking that up any time soon.
Now that you mention it, I do remember when they were calling it "Socialized Medicine", but I don't remember when was the last time I head it called that. I think it's the Brits who call their program "National Health Care", and I'm pretty sure that the Canadians call theirs "Medicare". I seem to remember Wikipedia grouping them all together under the heading of "Public Health Care", but that was some time ago so they may have changed it by now.
I didn't look up "when the big girl burned her fingers" because it sounded like an Uncle Ken original to me. I think it refers to when Hillary was First Lady, back in the 90s, and her husband put her in charge of a committee that was supposed to come up with some kind of socialized medicine and instead produced something very similar to Obama Care, but of course it wasn't called "Obama Care" because nobody had ever heard of Obama in those days. Come to think of it, that may have been the last time I heard the phrase "socialized medicine". Since then it has been called a lot of things, but socialized medicine is not one of them. Be that as it may, Hillary's plan went down like a submarine, only to resurface years later as Obama Care. I understand that, in between, there was something called "Romney Care", but that was just in one state, either Massachusetts or Connecticut, I forget which. I have heard that they've also got some kind of state health care plan in Hawaii, but I don't know what they call it.
I don't watch CNN, so I have no idea what Uncle Ken is talking about there, but it doesn't sound like anything I would be interested in, so I won't be looking that up any time soon.
Sredni Vashstar the beautiful
When I was a janitor at Herrin hospital one of the rooms I cleaned was sort of a doctors' meeting room. It had one of those flip blackboards and I would write SOCIALIZE MEDICINE NOW!!! on the other side, imagining that in one of their cigar smoking, brandy snifting meetings the presenter would run out of room on his side of the board and would flip it over and suddenly cigars would fall from mouths and expensive brandy would be spilt on the floor. More work for me I suppose the next time I had go clean up the room, but hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Socialized medicine is what Beagles is speaking of with everybody paying for it with their taxes, though strangely he does not use that name. Something like that was maybe what my hero LBJ was pushing towards before he got involved in that unfortunate war. Nobody did a damn thing since then until the big girl burned her fingers, and then along came Obamacare which was pushed down the throat of the republicans who tried to kill it at every turn because they hate the democrats and government. But Obama did more than spout at rallies and bluster and it came to be, but it is generally believed that it was a factor in the reps taking all in the last election.
I've long scoffed at Beagles' worship of gridlock, but in this time with the reps having all the power i will gladly embrace it. In the best of all my possible worlds Dump would be a kidney stone in the urethra of the republican party (I can't remember if I've used that phrase before in these ivied halls, but even if I have I enjoy saying it again) and so he has become, a mighty kidney stone indeed.
Yar, that freedom caucus. Have you ever seen any of them interviewed? Flecks of spit fly from their slavering jaws. Like Sredni Vashtar their thoughts are red thoughts and their death are white. Their enemies (and everybody is their enemies) call for peace, but they give them death. Freedom caucus the beautiful. The dealster threatened that he would fuck with them in their primaries but the mail from home was running like 99 to 1 for no compromise. Maybe these guys are an even bigger kidney stone than Dump, and they will be around until districting reform happens, which will be never. Freedom caucus (The Beautiful) I salute you.
The "party first" nonsense must cease Proclaims the Old Dog, sounding like somebody who is dusting off his dungarees as the turnip truck pulls away. And indeed Dump has been heard muttering about playing nice with the dems. My beloved pundit panels bring up the subject during a lull in the discussion and then everybody laughs. The only kind of deal that Dump likes is when he screws the other guy, and dim though the dems may be from time to time they are not going to be stupid enough to fall for that. Who would? Oh that's right, the republicans.
So did anybody else catch the Devin Nunes (Devin Nunes? Reince Priebus? Who writes the names for these guys?) show on CNN last night? Kindly Uncle Wolf had Nunes over for a chat, and surprisingly for the mild mannered chap showed a little tooth. Am I missing something I wondered from my arm chair. Nothing this guy says makes any sense. When the interview was over attention returned to the panel and they said as one, that didn't make any sense.
At some point they presented a scenario where Dump summoned Nunes to the white house to present him with a cock and bull story that would somehow exonerate Dump from his wire-tapppping shtick, so that he could announce it at the white house, when was that, sometime before repeal died maybe a week ago. The evidence for CNNs story was circumstantial, but this is a story where Nunes is cruising with his aides in the dead of night, gets a mysterious phone call and leaves his aides behind cruising off in an uber into the night and isn't heard from again until he presents the cock and bull story from the White House and declines to say who let him in there and the White House guys say they never saw him. As they say you can't make up shit like this.
So this leaves the middle class/democracy thing kind of a dead issue, the dawgs never seemed to crazy about it anyway. But the Cain vs Abel thing is alive like never before with the wild hunters of the freedom caucus despoiling the nicely grown corn rows of, well of the dealster. The dystopia looks a little better in my eyes with the kidney stone firmly lodged and the white toothed freedom caucus (FC) charging up from the rectum.
Socialized medicine is what Beagles is speaking of with everybody paying for it with their taxes, though strangely he does not use that name. Something like that was maybe what my hero LBJ was pushing towards before he got involved in that unfortunate war. Nobody did a damn thing since then until the big girl burned her fingers, and then along came Obamacare which was pushed down the throat of the republicans who tried to kill it at every turn because they hate the democrats and government. But Obama did more than spout at rallies and bluster and it came to be, but it is generally believed that it was a factor in the reps taking all in the last election.
I've long scoffed at Beagles' worship of gridlock, but in this time with the reps having all the power i will gladly embrace it. In the best of all my possible worlds Dump would be a kidney stone in the urethra of the republican party (I can't remember if I've used that phrase before in these ivied halls, but even if I have I enjoy saying it again) and so he has become, a mighty kidney stone indeed.
Yar, that freedom caucus. Have you ever seen any of them interviewed? Flecks of spit fly from their slavering jaws. Like Sredni Vashtar their thoughts are red thoughts and their death are white. Their enemies (and everybody is their enemies) call for peace, but they give them death. Freedom caucus the beautiful. The dealster threatened that he would fuck with them in their primaries but the mail from home was running like 99 to 1 for no compromise. Maybe these guys are an even bigger kidney stone than Dump, and they will be around until districting reform happens, which will be never. Freedom caucus (The Beautiful) I salute you.
The "party first" nonsense must cease Proclaims the Old Dog, sounding like somebody who is dusting off his dungarees as the turnip truck pulls away. And indeed Dump has been heard muttering about playing nice with the dems. My beloved pundit panels bring up the subject during a lull in the discussion and then everybody laughs. The only kind of deal that Dump likes is when he screws the other guy, and dim though the dems may be from time to time they are not going to be stupid enough to fall for that. Who would? Oh that's right, the republicans.
So did anybody else catch the Devin Nunes (Devin Nunes? Reince Priebus? Who writes the names for these guys?) show on CNN last night? Kindly Uncle Wolf had Nunes over for a chat, and surprisingly for the mild mannered chap showed a little tooth. Am I missing something I wondered from my arm chair. Nothing this guy says makes any sense. When the interview was over attention returned to the panel and they said as one, that didn't make any sense.
At some point they presented a scenario where Dump summoned Nunes to the white house to present him with a cock and bull story that would somehow exonerate Dump from his wire-tapppping shtick, so that he could announce it at the white house, when was that, sometime before repeal died maybe a week ago. The evidence for CNNs story was circumstantial, but this is a story where Nunes is cruising with his aides in the dead of night, gets a mysterious phone call and leaves his aides behind cruising off in an uber into the night and isn't heard from again until he presents the cock and bull story from the White House and declines to say who let him in there and the White House guys say they never saw him. As they say you can't make up shit like this.
So this leaves the middle class/democracy thing kind of a dead issue, the dawgs never seemed to crazy about it anyway. But the Cain vs Abel thing is alive like never before with the wild hunters of the freedom caucus despoiling the nicely grown corn rows of, well of the dealster. The dystopia looks a little better in my eyes with the kidney stone firmly lodged and the white toothed freedom caucus (FC) charging up from the rectum.
Monday, March 27, 2017
No is Good
They've been talking about a national health care plan since at least the 1960s. I think that most people back then expected it to mean we would all get free health care, something like what they have in Canada. Of course it wouldn't really be free, we would be paying for it either with our taxes or through inflation of the money supply, but there would be no charge to the customer at the time of service. Well, that never happened. First there was Medicare, then Medicaid, then a whole bunch of other programs, and the price of health care has just kept going higher and higher with each new program. A couple decades after Medicare was passed, the part the customer pays was more than the whole bill used to be before Medicare came along. Similarly, health care costs have risen since Obama Care was passed, and they would have risen even higher if Trump Care had passed. I don't know what the next proposal will look like, but you can be sure that health care costs will increase as a result of it.
The best we can hope for is government gridlock because anything they pass is bound to make matters worse. I figured that we wouldn't get gridlock until the next election in 2018, but it looks like we've got it already. It seems there is a group in Congress called "The Freedom Caucus" that opposed Trump Care for different reasons than the Democrats opposed it. That's okay, a "no" vote is still a "no" vote regardless of its motivation. Yay gridlock!
I checked on the CD, and it seems that I only lost about five of my own photos, plus whatever ones of my relatives that I had copied from Face Book. The last photos on the disk are of our creeping phlox in bloom, which usually happens in April, so it must have been about a year ago that I upgraded to Windows 7. Funny, I thought it was longer ago than that, but apparently not. Anyway, those lost photos are probably still on my old computer, they just didn't make it to the CD. I still have my old machine, and I may take it to a techspert someday and see if anything can be done with it. Hey, I think I just invented a new word! A techspert is a technology expert.....Get It? Do you think it should be spelled "techspert" or "texpert"?
The best we can hope for is government gridlock because anything they pass is bound to make matters worse. I figured that we wouldn't get gridlock until the next election in 2018, but it looks like we've got it already. It seems there is a group in Congress called "The Freedom Caucus" that opposed Trump Care for different reasons than the Democrats opposed it. That's okay, a "no" vote is still a "no" vote regardless of its motivation. Yay gridlock!
I checked on the CD, and it seems that I only lost about five of my own photos, plus whatever ones of my relatives that I had copied from Face Book. The last photos on the disk are of our creeping phlox in bloom, which usually happens in April, so it must have been about a year ago that I upgraded to Windows 7. Funny, I thought it was longer ago than that, but apparently not. Anyway, those lost photos are probably still on my old computer, they just didn't make it to the CD. I still have my old machine, and I may take it to a techspert someday and see if anything can be done with it. Hey, I think I just invented a new word! A techspert is a technology expert.....Get It? Do you think it should be spelled "techspert" or "texpert"?
Recovery not impossible
The legislative process continues to confound me. It doesn't break my heart to see the efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, fail; it's a sign that the current regime is not a steamroller that can crush all opposition. But why toss out the whole thing, isn't it better than what we had before, i.e., nothing? Despite the volume of rhetoric being spewed I don't recall any specific issues with the ACA being addressed, it's like it is being opposed on general principles, out of spite.
Matter of fact, I just took a peek at the ACA, in all of it's 900+ page PDF goodness, but didn't get past the first dozen pages which list all of the sections, sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections contained therein. It's scarily complex; I doubt there is a single person in Washington who has read and understood the whole thing. And I don't understand why the Repubs don't propose legislation to change the bits and pieces they have a problem with rather than kill the whole thing. Am I missing something obvious? They have a wild hair up their ass about this and they should have bigger fish to fry, I think. The "party first" nonsense must cease, and the fact that the legislation was pulled is a healthy sign.
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Then there's the business with the First Daughter, Ivanka, being given an office in the West Wing, along with security clearances, and her hubby being given more responsibilities. What's up with that? I can understand needing Ivanka to keep a leash on daddy, if that's possible; he needs the solace that only a (hot) daughter can provide, but her hubby? Does he have any qualifications besides being a budding real estate magnate? Something is fishy, the whole regime is too much of an amateur hour of nepotism and I expect some legislation to prevent this kind of thing would already be in place..
Haven't heard much about the Russian connections lately, although I've read rumors that Flynn is going to flip and some of the other players (Manafort, et al.) are willing to testify before that House Committee that was questioning Comey a while back (has it only been two weeks?). I think a lot of deals will be cut and the whole Russian business will either slowly fade away or quickly disappear in the interest of "national security," the catch-all term to cover up a lot of activity, legal or otherwise. Maybe there are forces that have already decided that the American public can't handle the truth. A lot of Russian figures have been meeting untimely deaths lately, too many to be a coincidence?
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Despite this ongoing national tragedy, the wheels of government are still turning. The mail is getting delivered, social security checks are going out, and if it weren't for the goofiness in the White House we could assume it's still business as usual, international relations be damned. My impression is that the global community is gazing upon our plight with sadness. Even if other countries had major problems with our government they usually liked the American people themselves., or so I've read. If there is an international boycott of Coca Cola, Levis, and Disney movies we'll know we're in real trouble.
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Accidentally deleted files can be recovered, Mr. Beagles. A few years back I had a serious system failure and I lost hundreds of image files; I don't know exactly what happened, but they were gone. I stumbled across a utility that was supposed to recover them, and by golly!, it worked. As long as the disc sectors weren't overwritten you should be able to get them back. I used WinZip Pro, and it worked a treat, got everything back. The downside is that it cost $30/year (I think) but it has other goodies that made it a good investment for me; no problems since using it. There may be some free programs available that do the same thing, you'll have to check and see.
Matter of fact, I just took a peek at the ACA, in all of it's 900+ page PDF goodness, but didn't get past the first dozen pages which list all of the sections, sub-sections, and sub-sub-sections contained therein. It's scarily complex; I doubt there is a single person in Washington who has read and understood the whole thing. And I don't understand why the Repubs don't propose legislation to change the bits and pieces they have a problem with rather than kill the whole thing. Am I missing something obvious? They have a wild hair up their ass about this and they should have bigger fish to fry, I think. The "party first" nonsense must cease, and the fact that the legislation was pulled is a healthy sign.
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Then there's the business with the First Daughter, Ivanka, being given an office in the West Wing, along with security clearances, and her hubby being given more responsibilities. What's up with that? I can understand needing Ivanka to keep a leash on daddy, if that's possible; he needs the solace that only a (hot) daughter can provide, but her hubby? Does he have any qualifications besides being a budding real estate magnate? Something is fishy, the whole regime is too much of an amateur hour of nepotism and I expect some legislation to prevent this kind of thing would already be in place..
Haven't heard much about the Russian connections lately, although I've read rumors that Flynn is going to flip and some of the other players (Manafort, et al.) are willing to testify before that House Committee that was questioning Comey a while back (has it only been two weeks?). I think a lot of deals will be cut and the whole Russian business will either slowly fade away or quickly disappear in the interest of "national security," the catch-all term to cover up a lot of activity, legal or otherwise. Maybe there are forces that have already decided that the American public can't handle the truth. A lot of Russian figures have been meeting untimely deaths lately, too many to be a coincidence?
-----
Despite this ongoing national tragedy, the wheels of government are still turning. The mail is getting delivered, social security checks are going out, and if it weren't for the goofiness in the White House we could assume it's still business as usual, international relations be damned. My impression is that the global community is gazing upon our plight with sadness. Even if other countries had major problems with our government they usually liked the American people themselves., or so I've read. If there is an international boycott of Coca Cola, Levis, and Disney movies we'll know we're in real trouble.
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Accidentally deleted files can be recovered, Mr. Beagles. A few years back I had a serious system failure and I lost hundreds of image files; I don't know exactly what happened, but they were gone. I stumbled across a utility that was supposed to recover them, and by golly!, it worked. As long as the disc sectors weren't overwritten you should be able to get them back. I used WinZip Pro, and it worked a treat, got everything back. The downside is that it cost $30/year (I think) but it has other goodies that made it a good investment for me; no problems since using it. There may be some free programs available that do the same thing, you'll have to check and see.
the dark and rolling sea
One of the reasons the reps fought Obamacare so hard was that they knew once people had it they would like it, and then how would they take it away? And lo that came to pass, but the reps were as wild men in the forests with their call of Repeal Obamacare and when they won the house and the senate and the presidency they rushed towards the precipice like so many demented lemmings. And lo they discovered that the people who elected them liked Obamacare (Well they liked the part where they got things, they just hated the part where they had to pay for it, but it has been ever thus), so they had to do some fancy stepping with some halfass program which pleased not the handful of moderate democrats nor the rabid reps of the ruby red districts. Any idiot could tell that they didn't have the votes to make this work. But of course they didn't have just any idiot leading them, they had Donald J Trump who they had once reviled as raving lunatic but have late grown accustomed to calling Sir.
And now that they are laid low like a pack of beaten hounds mewling and growling at each other, and now that the smoke is cleared it has become clear that Obamacare is not in a death spiral, that many people like it and it's better on the budget than any of the rep alternatives, oh and it helps out a lot of people.
I know a lot of people who have Obamacare and they pay for it uncomplaining, well a little, but the alternative is to have no insurance and wait in the ER for subpar care at exorbitant prices. As for the poor who get credits so that they don't pay much, the part the gummint has to cover is less this way than if they were crowding the ERs.
But here's something I don't like. A lot of my ilk has been posting loudly on fb that the reason the reps hate Obamacare is because Obama is black and the reps are racists. I don't think it's true. They hated Bill and the big girl as much as they hated Obama. My ilk tosses around the charge of racism way too much. It makes them feel morally smug. It's easier to dismiss a person with an epitaph than to try to reason with them, but that's not the way a good liberal should behave.
I don't know if I can make a case here about the middle class and democracy. Well here's something. Now that we have the return of the gilded age (on steroids) we do have all those money men pulling the strings of the reps, which my side deplores because it is so undemocratic, but I'm not that worried, well about that, because Dump bucked the big money all the way to the nomination and the big girl outspent him 2 to 1. The electorate is a dark and rolling sea and who knows what is going on in its wild heart.
How about that Cain and Abel thing? Turning the spear into the plow to grub in the dirt for a more or less steady income maybe under the lash of the overseer, but maybe if you are a little cleverer you are the overseer. Well it's been a long and bumpy road to our shiny cities, but we still dream of the hunt even if the closest we get is scratching off a lottery ticket. And maybe that dark and rolling electorate is thinking of the hunt, tossing aside logic and lore to pull the lever for Dump and take us on a wild ride just because.
The dystopia, well here we are. Makes a good movie doesn't it?
And now that they are laid low like a pack of beaten hounds mewling and growling at each other, and now that the smoke is cleared it has become clear that Obamacare is not in a death spiral, that many people like it and it's better on the budget than any of the rep alternatives, oh and it helps out a lot of people.
I know a lot of people who have Obamacare and they pay for it uncomplaining, well a little, but the alternative is to have no insurance and wait in the ER for subpar care at exorbitant prices. As for the poor who get credits so that they don't pay much, the part the gummint has to cover is less this way than if they were crowding the ERs.
But here's something I don't like. A lot of my ilk has been posting loudly on fb that the reason the reps hate Obamacare is because Obama is black and the reps are racists. I don't think it's true. They hated Bill and the big girl as much as they hated Obama. My ilk tosses around the charge of racism way too much. It makes them feel morally smug. It's easier to dismiss a person with an epitaph than to try to reason with them, but that's not the way a good liberal should behave.
I don't know if I can make a case here about the middle class and democracy. Well here's something. Now that we have the return of the gilded age (on steroids) we do have all those money men pulling the strings of the reps, which my side deplores because it is so undemocratic, but I'm not that worried, well about that, because Dump bucked the big money all the way to the nomination and the big girl outspent him 2 to 1. The electorate is a dark and rolling sea and who knows what is going on in its wild heart.
How about that Cain and Abel thing? Turning the spear into the plow to grub in the dirt for a more or less steady income maybe under the lash of the overseer, but maybe if you are a little cleverer you are the overseer. Well it's been a long and bumpy road to our shiny cities, but we still dream of the hunt even if the closest we get is scratching off a lottery ticket. And maybe that dark and rolling electorate is thinking of the hunt, tossing aside logic and lore to pull the lever for Dump and take us on a wild ride just because.
The dystopia, well here we are. Makes a good movie doesn't it?
Friday, March 24, 2017
Trump Care Goes Down
I think that the Republicans would have a better chance of repealing Obama Care if they didn't try to replace it with something worse. I understand that Rand Paul tried to tell that to Trump, but he didn't listen. Of course the people who are now getting their health insurance for free would like to keep it that way, it's the people who are being forced to pay for it that want to see Obama Care repealed, but they certainly don't want to see it replaced it with something that will cost them even more. Like I said before, just give it to everybody for free and nobody will complain about it.
I'm pretty sure that the Brits had some kind of elections in 1649, otherwise King Charles wouldn't have gotten everybody mad at him when he dissolved Parliament. Okay, the House of Lords was, and still is, appointed by the King or Queen, but I think the House of Commons has always been elected by the people. Well, maybe not all the people, it was probably just the rich landowners who got to vote in those days, but that still qualifies as an election. I don't know if the French had an elected legislature before their revolution, but they certainly had one afterwards. I think it was called he Council of Deputies or something like that.
I think that Cheboygan has its share of drugs and drunks. Well it always had its share of drunks, and I suppose the drugs have been around for a long time. I don't get around much anymore, so all I know about it is what I read in the paper or see on the TV news.
Remember I told you guys that I kept getting this false message telling me that I had files waiting to be burned to disk? Well it turns out it wasn't a false message. Whether I copy and paste or burn a photo to a disk, it doesn't really go on the disk, it just goes on a list of items that are ready to be burned to the disk. To really burn it to the disk I have to right click on the item, bringing up a drop down list of options, one of which is "burn to disk". The way I discovered this was I removed the disk, deleted the files on the list, reinserted the disk, and there were no files on it. Now I suspect that all the pictures I thought I had saved in Windows 7 aren't really on a disk either. I'll have to check on that this weekend.
Remember I also told you guys about how a lot of my text on this blog and some of my text on Gmail was getting underlined in red like it does when you misspell a word? Well that problem seems to have gone away by itself. Since you guys weren't experiencing it, maybe it was because Google hadn't learned to get along with my new browser, and now it has.
I'm pretty sure that the Brits had some kind of elections in 1649, otherwise King Charles wouldn't have gotten everybody mad at him when he dissolved Parliament. Okay, the House of Lords was, and still is, appointed by the King or Queen, but I think the House of Commons has always been elected by the people. Well, maybe not all the people, it was probably just the rich landowners who got to vote in those days, but that still qualifies as an election. I don't know if the French had an elected legislature before their revolution, but they certainly had one afterwards. I think it was called he Council of Deputies or something like that.
I think that Cheboygan has its share of drugs and drunks. Well it always had its share of drunks, and I suppose the drugs have been around for a long time. I don't get around much anymore, so all I know about it is what I read in the paper or see on the TV news.
Remember I told you guys that I kept getting this false message telling me that I had files waiting to be burned to disk? Well it turns out it wasn't a false message. Whether I copy and paste or burn a photo to a disk, it doesn't really go on the disk, it just goes on a list of items that are ready to be burned to the disk. To really burn it to the disk I have to right click on the item, bringing up a drop down list of options, one of which is "burn to disk". The way I discovered this was I removed the disk, deleted the files on the list, reinserted the disk, and there were no files on it. Now I suspect that all the pictures I thought I had saved in Windows 7 aren't really on a disk either. I'll have to check on that this weekend.
Remember I also told you guys about how a lot of my text on this blog and some of my text on Gmail was getting underlined in red like it does when you misspell a word? Well that problem seems to have gone away by itself. Since you guys weren't experiencing it, maybe it was because Google hadn't learned to get along with my new browser, and now it has.
Those Republicans
ObamaCare, the greatest curse to ravage the land and the republicans win the prez, the senate, and the house, and they can't get get rid of it. Har! Did I say Har!? I meant to say HAR!!!
The excellent panelists of CNN can't hardly keep a straight face. Myself I am not trying.
The excellent panelists of CNN can't hardly keep a straight face. Myself I am not trying.
city air makes free
City air makes free, that was the Go west young man, go west of the middle ages. After the fall of the Roman Empire and the Muslims taking over Spain and Africa and most of the mideast and the Mediterranean Sea northern Europe hunkered down into those tiny little self sufficient feudal states. But there were certain things the feudal lord couldn't raise in his little hunk of heaven, like armor for his knights so they could attack his fellow lords, so trade started coming back, and there came the cities. I think the local lord had nominal control of the city, but he kept his hands off because, well I'm not sure, maybe because he would just muck it up, and if he left it alone they could tax it and make a pretty penny.
Of course the city people got to keep what wasn't taxed, and I guess the money in their pockets gave them some power. But you know, even with those rich cities you still had kings, The English killed their king in 1649, but they didn't have their first elections until 1708. The French had their revolution shortly after ours and they didn't have their first elections until 1848. Of course a lot happened in between, most notably Napoleon.
I seem to remember something about how the USA having elections inspired other countries to do the same, which I rather dismissed because it sounded so, you know USA! USA! USA! But maybe there is some truth in it. Why did we choose it? We could have had any kind of government. There is that story about George Washington turning down the kingship but there must be more to the story than that, Seems like they should have covered that in school when they were washing our brains, but maybe I wasn't paying attention that day.
Information about the growth of income equality is just a click away but I have done plenty of clicking already this morning. When I was proposing my dystopia I used the word tech powered. by which I mean all those nifty weapons. No matter how badly the super rich are outnumbered in their citadels their Sharper Image toys will keep the hordes at bay.
Could the reason that life expectancy is lower in Appalachia than in Bangladesh be because of all the bad habits like meth and heroin that are running rampant among rural white people? I lived in Herrin a town of 10,000 in Southern Illinois for a couple years and I hear things are pretty bad down there. What does Beagles know of the goings on in Cheboygan?
I've kind of rushed through this whole thing because I want to be able to pay full attention to the battle to bomb Obamacare. All the wise pundits are saying this will never happen, but then all the wise pundits told us Dumbo never had a chance. What a tangled web of factions this is turning out to be. Now I hear that the Koch brothers have set up a fund to counter Dump's threat against those who vote against his bill. I guess it's his bill, but I am pretty sure that if it fails it will be Ryan's bill. I wonder if these legislators who are scared shitless of Dump ever think that in a couple years he may well be a reviled character among their constituents.
Okay then, I see by the clock on the wall that it is time for the first tweet. Let the games begin.
Of course the city people got to keep what wasn't taxed, and I guess the money in their pockets gave them some power. But you know, even with those rich cities you still had kings, The English killed their king in 1649, but they didn't have their first elections until 1708. The French had their revolution shortly after ours and they didn't have their first elections until 1848. Of course a lot happened in between, most notably Napoleon.
I seem to remember something about how the USA having elections inspired other countries to do the same, which I rather dismissed because it sounded so, you know USA! USA! USA! But maybe there is some truth in it. Why did we choose it? We could have had any kind of government. There is that story about George Washington turning down the kingship but there must be more to the story than that, Seems like they should have covered that in school when they were washing our brains, but maybe I wasn't paying attention that day.
Information about the growth of income equality is just a click away but I have done plenty of clicking already this morning. When I was proposing my dystopia I used the word tech powered. by which I mean all those nifty weapons. No matter how badly the super rich are outnumbered in their citadels their Sharper Image toys will keep the hordes at bay.
Could the reason that life expectancy is lower in Appalachia than in Bangladesh be because of all the bad habits like meth and heroin that are running rampant among rural white people? I lived in Herrin a town of 10,000 in Southern Illinois for a couple years and I hear things are pretty bad down there. What does Beagles know of the goings on in Cheboygan?
I've kind of rushed through this whole thing because I want to be able to pay full attention to the battle to bomb Obamacare. All the wise pundits are saying this will never happen, but then all the wise pundits told us Dumbo never had a chance. What a tangled web of factions this is turning out to be. Now I hear that the Koch brothers have set up a fund to counter Dump's threat against those who vote against his bill. I guess it's his bill, but I am pretty sure that if it fails it will be Ryan's bill. I wonder if these legislators who are scared shitless of Dump ever think that in a couple years he may well be a reviled character among their constituents.
Okay then, I see by the clock on the wall that it is time for the first tweet. Let the games begin.
Thursday, March 23, 2017
It's All About Money
I seem to remember learning in school that the increased use of money had a lot to do with breaking up the old feudal system. Employment opportunities were limited in those days, you could either be a soldier, a tenant farmer, or a cleric. In each case, you have nothing to trade for your room and board except your personal loyalty to some powerful leader. Money gives you bargaining power, and it's portable.
Probably the first people to make extensive use of money were the shopkeepers and tradesmen, closely followed by the money lenders, who evolved into bankers. Christians were not supposed to lend money for interest to other Christians, so the Jews became the money lenders by default. I'm not sure when money began to convey political power, maybe it always did. Governments have always issued money to pay for their wars. In the Middle Ages, governments were fragmented and land became the repository of wealth. As governments coalesced out of the chaos of feudalism, money must have started to edge out real estate as the medium of exchange.
I'm not sure how democracy plays into this, but rich people generally have more political power than poor people. It seems natural then, that the more the money is spread around, the more the political power would be diffused among the populace. There is a lot of talk nowadays about the way money seems to be re concentrating itself into the hands of fewer and fewer people, but I'm not so sure about that. Yeah the rich are getting richer, but are the poor getting poorer? Even if the average poor person is poorer than his predecessors, if there are more poor people, then their total combined wealth might outweigh the total combined wealth of the rich people because there are so few of them. Similarly, the political power of the poor might grow to the point of eclipsing the political power of the rich, if the poor people could ever get organized and all vote the same way. Lots of luck with that one!
Probably the first people to make extensive use of money were the shopkeepers and tradesmen, closely followed by the money lenders, who evolved into bankers. Christians were not supposed to lend money for interest to other Christians, so the Jews became the money lenders by default. I'm not sure when money began to convey political power, maybe it always did. Governments have always issued money to pay for their wars. In the Middle Ages, governments were fragmented and land became the repository of wealth. As governments coalesced out of the chaos of feudalism, money must have started to edge out real estate as the medium of exchange.
I'm not sure how democracy plays into this, but rich people generally have more political power than poor people. It seems natural then, that the more the money is spread around, the more the political power would be diffused among the populace. There is a lot of talk nowadays about the way money seems to be re concentrating itself into the hands of fewer and fewer people, but I'm not so sure about that. Yeah the rich are getting richer, but are the poor getting poorer? Even if the average poor person is poorer than his predecessors, if there are more poor people, then their total combined wealth might outweigh the total combined wealth of the rich people because there are so few of them. Similarly, the political power of the poor might grow to the point of eclipsing the political power of the rich, if the poor people could ever get organized and all vote the same way. Lots of luck with that one!
Optical illusions
I don't see how changing to a parliamentary system would be an improvement for us. Would Old Dog care to elaborate on that assertion?
If both houses of congress agree on one of their own as the president, we would be assured of someone who has more than a passing familiarity with the procedures of government, unlike out current Commander in Chief. We may not end up with the best guy, but we wouldn't be stuck with the worst guy, either. Also, in many parliaments, the leader can be thrown out on his ear, at any time, if there are enough supporters for a "no confidence" vote; no impeachment process required. That's my understanding, as of today, but I am sure there should more to it.
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But now what is the next new thing? It all seems a bit amorphous but I do fear we are moving towards a tech powered ruling class and everybody else back at the stage of medieval peasants.
You may be close to the mark, Uncle Ken. We are starting to feel some of the pain of the unintended consequences of increased production. Better factories require fewer workers (but more expensive machines) but there is no mechanism in place to provide for those displaced workers. Not just factories; some office workers can be replaced by better computers with AI. Aren't there some robot bartenders already? Maybe some of them can be trained for new occupations, but every year countless thousands of fresh-faced, highly educated young people enter the work face, and then what? If you are a corporate bigwig, taking a long term view of your company, are you going to hire the more easily trained young guy or the old fart who may be retiring in a few years? These are tough questions, with no answers that I can see.
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Lately I've been seeing an old word used in a new way: optics. I used to think of lenses and Isaac Newton peering at a prism, but now optics has a new meaning: (typically in a political context) the way in which an event or course of action is perceived by the public. "The issue itself is secondary to the optics of the Democrats opposing this administration in a high-profile way."
The heavy reliance on optics goes a long way to explain the distorted view of objective reality that is held by many these days, don'cha think?
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The discussion of the middle class reminded me of an article in The Atlantic from a few weeks ago, and I was meaning to bring it up: Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta?
I thought the article lacked real meat, but this statement caught my eye: "And life expectancy in much of Appalachia is below life expectancy in Bangladesh." Yikes!
I remain skeptical, but the United States falls well below other western nations in life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and other measurements of a successful and prosperous nation. We're not doing as well as we think we are; still got a damn good military, though.
If both houses of congress agree on one of their own as the president, we would be assured of someone who has more than a passing familiarity with the procedures of government, unlike out current Commander in Chief. We may not end up with the best guy, but we wouldn't be stuck with the worst guy, either. Also, in many parliaments, the leader can be thrown out on his ear, at any time, if there are enough supporters for a "no confidence" vote; no impeachment process required. That's my understanding, as of today, but I am sure there should more to it.
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But now what is the next new thing? It all seems a bit amorphous but I do fear we are moving towards a tech powered ruling class and everybody else back at the stage of medieval peasants.
You may be close to the mark, Uncle Ken. We are starting to feel some of the pain of the unintended consequences of increased production. Better factories require fewer workers (but more expensive machines) but there is no mechanism in place to provide for those displaced workers. Not just factories; some office workers can be replaced by better computers with AI. Aren't there some robot bartenders already? Maybe some of them can be trained for new occupations, but every year countless thousands of fresh-faced, highly educated young people enter the work face, and then what? If you are a corporate bigwig, taking a long term view of your company, are you going to hire the more easily trained young guy or the old fart who may be retiring in a few years? These are tough questions, with no answers that I can see.
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Lately I've been seeing an old word used in a new way: optics. I used to think of lenses and Isaac Newton peering at a prism, but now optics has a new meaning: (typically in a political context) the way in which an event or course of action is perceived by the public. "The issue itself is secondary to the optics of the Democrats opposing this administration in a high-profile way."
The heavy reliance on optics goes a long way to explain the distorted view of objective reality that is held by many these days, don'cha think?
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The discussion of the middle class reminded me of an article in The Atlantic from a few weeks ago, and I was meaning to bring it up: Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta?
I thought the article lacked real meat, but this statement caught my eye: "And life expectancy in much of Appalachia is below life expectancy in Bangladesh." Yikes!
I remain skeptical, but the United States falls well below other western nations in life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and other measurements of a successful and prosperous nation. We're not doing as well as we think we are; still got a damn good military, though.
submitted for your consideration (cough)
During the cold war matters were often framed as democracy vs communism and I always thought that was a little screwy, shouldn't it be capitalism vs communism, or democracy vs dictatorship or totalitarianism? Couldn't you have communism and democracy? Certainly in theory, and some of them pretended to have elections, but not in practice. Some of those nordic countries that are almost socialist do have pretty robust democratic systems. And certainly you can have capitalism without democracy.
Communist countries don't have a middle class, as a matter of fact they look down on them, call them bourgeoisie with a sneer, But I do think they have a system where most of the people are pretty well off. Not well off by our standards, but all of these countries were pretty poor to begin with so I think everybody is close to equal, I don't think they have a sizable underclass like we do. I guess that's all a little open to debate, they do tend to have better health care and education than economically equivalent countries that aren't communist.
When I was talking about the compatibility of middle class and democracy I was thinking of that book I was reading about peasant uprisings in the middle ages, and how there was a very rough democracy going on in that if the duke pushed the peasants too far he was liable to find his head on a pike. If we look at Europe in the middle ages we see a few nobles and priests and a great mass of peasants and no trace of democracy. If we look at them today they are mostly middle class and they have democracy up the ass. Democratic republic or parliamentary system or whatever you want to call it, you know what I mean, people get to vote and their vote matters.
So what happened in the meantime, did democracy lead to the middle class because people voted for stuff to help the general populace, or did the people begin to do well financially and with that power pressured the government to give them the vote? That was the discussion I wanted to bring to the table of The Institute. I don't have a particular point I want to argue about this, I just wanted to hear what the opinions of the dawgs was on this question. Which by the way is not unrelated to hunters and farmers discussion. The hunters have a democracy and the farmers don't, though they probably have longer, if more boring, lives. Though if we follow the peasants far enough we do get to those nice middle class Europeans who have democracy again.
You know in the past we have had a progression of governments and nations from hunter gathering to city states to countries like Sumeria and Egypt to the Roman Empire to the middle ages to nation states to the industrial revolution and then communism seemed like it might be the next new thing, but then it wasn't. But now what is the next new thing? It all seems a bit amorphous but I do fear we are moving towards a tech powered ruling class and everybody else back at the stage of medieval peasants.
There is certainly a nationalist movement going on now. What strikes me as odd is that they are all cheering each other on, but once they are all my country right or wrong won't they end up fighting each other?
I submit these issues for the consideration of The Institute. Imagine that I am saying these in the voice of Rod Serling, then taking a heavy drag on my cig and coughing lightly as the camera pans away.
Communist countries don't have a middle class, as a matter of fact they look down on them, call them bourgeoisie with a sneer, But I do think they have a system where most of the people are pretty well off. Not well off by our standards, but all of these countries were pretty poor to begin with so I think everybody is close to equal, I don't think they have a sizable underclass like we do. I guess that's all a little open to debate, they do tend to have better health care and education than economically equivalent countries that aren't communist.
When I was talking about the compatibility of middle class and democracy I was thinking of that book I was reading about peasant uprisings in the middle ages, and how there was a very rough democracy going on in that if the duke pushed the peasants too far he was liable to find his head on a pike. If we look at Europe in the middle ages we see a few nobles and priests and a great mass of peasants and no trace of democracy. If we look at them today they are mostly middle class and they have democracy up the ass. Democratic republic or parliamentary system or whatever you want to call it, you know what I mean, people get to vote and their vote matters.
So what happened in the meantime, did democracy lead to the middle class because people voted for stuff to help the general populace, or did the people begin to do well financially and with that power pressured the government to give them the vote? That was the discussion I wanted to bring to the table of The Institute. I don't have a particular point I want to argue about this, I just wanted to hear what the opinions of the dawgs was on this question. Which by the way is not unrelated to hunters and farmers discussion. The hunters have a democracy and the farmers don't, though they probably have longer, if more boring, lives. Though if we follow the peasants far enough we do get to those nice middle class Europeans who have democracy again.
You know in the past we have had a progression of governments and nations from hunter gathering to city states to countries like Sumeria and Egypt to the Roman Empire to the middle ages to nation states to the industrial revolution and then communism seemed like it might be the next new thing, but then it wasn't. But now what is the next new thing? It all seems a bit amorphous but I do fear we are moving towards a tech powered ruling class and everybody else back at the stage of medieval peasants.
There is certainly a nationalist movement going on now. What strikes me as odd is that they are all cheering each other on, but once they are all my country right or wrong won't they end up fighting each other?
I submit these issues for the consideration of The Institute. Imagine that I am saying these in the voice of Rod Serling, then taking a heavy drag on my cig and coughing lightly as the camera pans away.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Any Way You Slice It
We could argue all night whether the U.S is a democracy or a republic. The truth is we are a democratic republic, democratic because we vote for our leaders, and republic because we have a system of written laws that are supposed to be binding on everybody, including our leaders. Monarchies have laws too, but their laws expire when the monarch does and have to re enacted by the next monarch if they are to remain in effect, whereas our laws continue to be in effect until they are repealed by the legislature or overturned by the courts. If our president has more power than he is supposed to have, it's because Congress and the courts have given it to him. Then there are the constitutional monarchies like the U.K. They don't have a written constitution like we do, but all their legal traditions and court established precedents constitute their constitution.
I think the primary difference between a parliamentary system and ours is that the people elect representatives to Parliament, and then the members of Parliament elect a prime minister who is approximately like our president. I have not heard of any system that elects a chief executive the way we do, with an electoral college. Come to think of it, I don't think any country elects their chief executive by direct poplar vote either, but I might be wrong about that. I don't see how changing to a parliamentary system would be an improvement for us. Would Old Dog care to elaborate on that assertion?
I don't know that having a strong middle class is essential for a democratic republic to function, but I don't know that it isn't either. Would Uncle Ken care to elaborate on that assertion?
I read somewhere that sliced bread did not become popular when it was first invented because sliced bread tends to dry out faster than bread in a whole loaf. It wasn't till some years later, when somebody invented the airtight cellophane wrapper, that sliced bread gained popular acceptance. Nowadays it's all plastic bags, but I seem to remember seeing bread wrapped in cellophane when I was a kid.
I looked up that pure rye bread recipe, and Old Dog is right, it's not something I want to get into. I don't like the really dark ryes as much as I do the lighter varieties anyway. I make mine with one part rye to two parts wheat, and that seems about right to me.
As far as I know, woodchucks are herbivores, but even herbivores snack on animal protein occasionally. Similarly, many carnivores eat a little plant material from time to time.
I think the primary difference between a parliamentary system and ours is that the people elect representatives to Parliament, and then the members of Parliament elect a prime minister who is approximately like our president. I have not heard of any system that elects a chief executive the way we do, with an electoral college. Come to think of it, I don't think any country elects their chief executive by direct poplar vote either, but I might be wrong about that. I don't see how changing to a parliamentary system would be an improvement for us. Would Old Dog care to elaborate on that assertion?
I don't know that having a strong middle class is essential for a democratic republic to function, but I don't know that it isn't either. Would Uncle Ken care to elaborate on that assertion?
I read somewhere that sliced bread did not become popular when it was first invented because sliced bread tends to dry out faster than bread in a whole loaf. It wasn't till some years later, when somebody invented the airtight cellophane wrapper, that sliced bread gained popular acceptance. Nowadays it's all plastic bags, but I seem to remember seeing bread wrapped in cellophane when I was a kid.
I looked up that pure rye bread recipe, and Old Dog is right, it's not something I want to get into. I don't like the really dark ryes as much as I do the lighter varieties anyway. I make mine with one part rye to two parts wheat, and that seems about right to me.
As far as I know, woodchucks are herbivores, but even herbivores snack on animal protein occasionally. Similarly, many carnivores eat a little plant material from time to time.
Not the greatest thing
These days in the western world we have a pretty sizable middle class, we also by and large have democracies. Do you think the two are related?
Oooh...that looks like a trick question, an attempt to lure gullible mopes like myself down a rabbit hole. Hello, Bugs!
I'll not speculate on the vitality of the middle class in these United States, but I think the defining factor of a middle class is the success of free markets and capitalism and let it go at that. The United States is a republic, as are most other nations except the absolute or constitutional monarchies. With some exceptions, the democratic process is a part of all nation's governments at the local if not national level. Plenty of interesting info is found on Wikipedia in the article titled List of countries by system of government
Which got me thinking that maybe it's time to retire our current system. The Executive/Legislative/Judicial system has worked well for many years, but the powers of the president have grown too much and we're witnessing what happens when a goofball is in charge. I doubt that a character like Trump would hold the highest office if he had to be chosen under a parliamentary system. He wouldn't have been elected dog catcher in the first place, much less Congress. Changing to a parliamentary system will never happen, though. We're too stubborn.
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I'm getting too skeptical in my old age, thinking about that hearing the other day.
“I’ve seen nothing on the NSA side that we engaged in any such activity, nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity,” Rogers said.
But what if heard something, and was told to engage in some activity; is he still telling the truth, without really being truthful? Lawyers love to parse these kinds of statements. It's like when the accused person responds that it's "Outrageous! It's ridiculous!" Yes, it is but that is not a denial, is it?
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Good old sliced bread! I've always taken it for granted and never understood Mom's use of the expression "Greatest thing since sliced bread!" But sliced bread didn't arrive until 1928 when she was a child, so maybe that was the first technological marvel she witnessed in her lifetime. Sliced bread caused an increase in consumption because, although the slices were thinner, folks ate more at a time and ate it more frequently. There was also a rise in jam consumption, with the rise of other spreadable goodies, no doubt, with the pinnacle being aerosol cheese (the greatest thing since...).
Getting back to home made bread, I saw a recipe recently on Instructables that may interest Mr. Beagles. I don't expect him to attempt the multi-day effort, but there were a few baking tips that may be useful. Besides steaming and misting, there was information about lowering the temperature while baking. Perhaps the elusive crust is in sight, and here it is: www.instructables.com/id/Pure-Rye-Bread
Oooh...that looks like a trick question, an attempt to lure gullible mopes like myself down a rabbit hole. Hello, Bugs!
I'll not speculate on the vitality of the middle class in these United States, but I think the defining factor of a middle class is the success of free markets and capitalism and let it go at that. The United States is a republic, as are most other nations except the absolute or constitutional monarchies. With some exceptions, the democratic process is a part of all nation's governments at the local if not national level. Plenty of interesting info is found on Wikipedia in the article titled List of countries by system of government
Which got me thinking that maybe it's time to retire our current system. The Executive/Legislative/Judicial system has worked well for many years, but the powers of the president have grown too much and we're witnessing what happens when a goofball is in charge. I doubt that a character like Trump would hold the highest office if he had to be chosen under a parliamentary system. He wouldn't have been elected dog catcher in the first place, much less Congress. Changing to a parliamentary system will never happen, though. We're too stubborn.
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I'm getting too skeptical in my old age, thinking about that hearing the other day.
“I’ve seen nothing on the NSA side that we engaged in any such activity, nor that anyone ever asked us to engage in such activity,” Rogers said.
But what if heard something, and was told to engage in some activity; is he still telling the truth, without really being truthful? Lawyers love to parse these kinds of statements. It's like when the accused person responds that it's "Outrageous! It's ridiculous!" Yes, it is but that is not a denial, is it?
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Good old sliced bread! I've always taken it for granted and never understood Mom's use of the expression "Greatest thing since sliced bread!" But sliced bread didn't arrive until 1928 when she was a child, so maybe that was the first technological marvel she witnessed in her lifetime. Sliced bread caused an increase in consumption because, although the slices were thinner, folks ate more at a time and ate it more frequently. There was also a rise in jam consumption, with the rise of other spreadable goodies, no doubt, with the pinnacle being aerosol cheese (the greatest thing since...).
Getting back to home made bread, I saw a recipe recently on Instructables that may interest Mr. Beagles. I don't expect him to attempt the multi-day effort, but there were a few baking tips that may be useful. Besides steaming and misting, there was information about lowering the temperature while baking. Perhaps the elusive crust is in sight, and here it is: www.instructables.com/id/Pure-Rye-Bread
chapulines
So are woodchucks (I think woodchuck is a peppier name than ground hog which has slothful implications) vegetarians? Oh I guess animals aren't vegetarians, they are herbivores, probably a stout fellow, like the woodchuck is an omnivore, he looks like a critter who eats bugs too.
A week from today we are showing a movie in our meeting room, Beginning of the End, in which giant grasshoppers wend their way from Champaign to Chicago where they try to get at the scientist and his pretty young girl friend in the Wrigley Building, Amazing with all the things a herd of giant grasshoppers can do that they should decide that they want to eat humans. I'm pretty sure regular grasshoppers are herbivores, but these guys have been feeding on radioactive tomatoes grown at the university of Illinois and I guess like Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit can do strange things to your circumstances.
Anyway if giant grasshoppers can eat people why can't we eat regular grasshoppers? Well we can and we do, just not us Americans. Every now and then there will be some item on the local news where people are eating bugs and some responsible scientist type guy will say how nutritious they are and how this could revolutionize our food chain, but nothing ever seems to come of it. But I did find this at the google machine. I think we can put out a sack or two of these at our movie. https://www.amazon.com/Chapulines-grasshoppers-Gourmet-insects-Chipotle/dp/B018WOSXEK I'll inform the Institute as to how it goes over.
Goes to ground, I like that phrase. Remember how Bugs had that cozy little den underground? Must be nice to have a place to call your own,
I've read somewhere that in the most primitive societies the leader is not supported by the tribe. He has to hunt and gather like everybody else. One wonders how that transition first occurred where some guy got supported by the rest of the tribe, surely a landmark step in our journey from animal skins to new blue jeans. I reckon part of it was a kind of extortion where the leader dropped in for supper and the diners didn't want to say anything lest they get last dibs on the mammoth carcass, and the other part was bribes inviting the leader over for supper in hopes of favors.
I guess there were some benefits to grubbing in the ground while the king and the priests lounged large. Those guys still needed the grubbers to do the grubbing so they had to keep them alive and working, and there were probably a lot more grubbers than royalty and holy men so they had to worry about uprisings.
I've been reading a book lately about peasant uprisings during the middle ages, seems like they happened pretty often. They were put down pretty brutally, but it made the upper classes edgy so they trod a little more lightly on the backs of the grubbers.
These days in the western world we have a pretty sizable middle class, we also by and large have democracies. Do you think the two are related?
A week from today we are showing a movie in our meeting room, Beginning of the End, in which giant grasshoppers wend their way from Champaign to Chicago where they try to get at the scientist and his pretty young girl friend in the Wrigley Building, Amazing with all the things a herd of giant grasshoppers can do that they should decide that they want to eat humans. I'm pretty sure regular grasshoppers are herbivores, but these guys have been feeding on radioactive tomatoes grown at the university of Illinois and I guess like Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit can do strange things to your circumstances.
Anyway if giant grasshoppers can eat people why can't we eat regular grasshoppers? Well we can and we do, just not us Americans. Every now and then there will be some item on the local news where people are eating bugs and some responsible scientist type guy will say how nutritious they are and how this could revolutionize our food chain, but nothing ever seems to come of it. But I did find this at the google machine. I think we can put out a sack or two of these at our movie. https://www.amazon.com/Chapulines-grasshoppers-Gourmet-insects-Chipotle/dp/B018WOSXEK I'll inform the Institute as to how it goes over.
Goes to ground, I like that phrase. Remember how Bugs had that cozy little den underground? Must be nice to have a place to call your own,
I've read somewhere that in the most primitive societies the leader is not supported by the tribe. He has to hunt and gather like everybody else. One wonders how that transition first occurred where some guy got supported by the rest of the tribe, surely a landmark step in our journey from animal skins to new blue jeans. I reckon part of it was a kind of extortion where the leader dropped in for supper and the diners didn't want to say anything lest they get last dibs on the mammoth carcass, and the other part was bribes inviting the leader over for supper in hopes of favors.
I guess there were some benefits to grubbing in the ground while the king and the priests lounged large. Those guys still needed the grubbers to do the grubbing so they had to keep them alive and working, and there were probably a lot more grubbers than royalty and holy men so they had to worry about uprisings.
I've been reading a book lately about peasant uprisings during the middle ages, seems like they happened pretty often. They were put down pretty brutally, but it made the upper classes edgy so they trod a little more lightly on the backs of the grubbers.
These days in the western world we have a pretty sizable middle class, we also by and large have democracies. Do you think the two are related?
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Hogging the Ground
I don't think that groundhogs really hog the ground. We had one hanging around here a summer or two ago, and all I ever saw him do was eat grass. I suppose, if we had a garden, he would have eaten that too, but we didn't, so we just let him be. For awhile it looked like he was sizing our woodpile up for a long winter's nap, but he must have gone someplace else because I never came across him while I was using up the wood that winter. Maybe they are called groundhogs because they get really fat before they go to ground for the winter. Hard to imagine them getting so fat eating just grass, so they must eat other things to pork up for the season. As far as chucking wood, I don't think they do that at all, so I have no idea why they might be called woodchucks. I'll have to look that up sometime.
You know who does hog the ground? People, that's who. A lot of animals are territorial, but humans have carried territoriality to the extreme. I suppose that started when they gave up their nomadic lifestyle and settled down in one place. I agree with Uncle Ken that roaming wild and free sounds like more fun than grubbing in the dirt with the boss man constantly hollering at you to grub faster. I think the reason people made the transition was that grubbing in the dirt was more productive. The trouble with being more productive is, that as soon as you start to stockpile anything, somebody tries to take it away from you. Then you have to start building walls and raising armies. Then you have to produce even more food to feed the wall builders and the soldiers. Somebody has to organize all that, which gives rise to another class of non-productive people that need to be fed, and so the pork barrel was invented.
Everyone knows that, the more you feed the wildlife, the more of them you will have bellying up to the trough. Nowadays, when people get a hankering to roam wild and free, there isn't enough land to accommodate them all at once, so they have to take turns. They work indoors all year so they can afford to take a few weeks off to "See the U.S.A in their Chevrolet". Remember that one? Sounds like more fun than being born on a pile of shit, or even a pirate ship for that matter.
You know who does hog the ground? People, that's who. A lot of animals are territorial, but humans have carried territoriality to the extreme. I suppose that started when they gave up their nomadic lifestyle and settled down in one place. I agree with Uncle Ken that roaming wild and free sounds like more fun than grubbing in the dirt with the boss man constantly hollering at you to grub faster. I think the reason people made the transition was that grubbing in the dirt was more productive. The trouble with being more productive is, that as soon as you start to stockpile anything, somebody tries to take it away from you. Then you have to start building walls and raising armies. Then you have to produce even more food to feed the wall builders and the soldiers. Somebody has to organize all that, which gives rise to another class of non-productive people that need to be fed, and so the pork barrel was invented.
Everyone knows that, the more you feed the wildlife, the more of them you will have bellying up to the trough. Nowadays, when people get a hankering to roam wild and free, there isn't enough land to accommodate them all at once, so they have to take turns. They work indoors all year so they can afford to take a few weeks off to "See the U.S.A in their Chevrolet". Remember that one? Sounds like more fun than being born on a pile of shit, or even a pirate ship for that matter.
sedentary agriculture, sliced bread or just bread?
Same critter huh, ground hog and woodchuck? It leaves unanswered what is chucking wood and is this the sort of activity the woodchuck indulges in . Well not exactly since the tongue twister thing with that if avers that the woodchuck does not chuck wood. Well of course not since it is really a ground hog and what it does pretty much all day is hog ground so there is little time in its busy day for the chucking of wood.
Did you ever do this one? Hold your tongue and say "I was born on a pirate ship." The resulting mumble will sound to your friends who put you up to it, and who are giggling and nudging each other with their elbows, like "I was born on a pile of shit." This trope had a surge of popularity at Tonti Elementary School in the fifties, but I am not sure how far it penetrated the outside world. Anyway the next time you are at a cocktail party that is sagging you could bring this up and become the life of the party and leave with the hottest babe there. Pretty sure that's what would happen.
I'm sure that whoever wrote down the Cain and Abel story had no intention of making any social commentary. I'm pretty sure at that point in our development sedentary agriculture was looked upon as as great a development as sliced bread, which hadn't happened yet but surely visionaries were anticipating it. I think it took a few thousand years, likely with the arrival of the industrial revolution with all its smoke and child labor, for people to begin to think that maybe this whole civilization thing was a wrong turn.
I mean once we were warriors. Myself, as a peacenik I am no fan of warriors, especially the way the word is thrown around so casually lately, a warrior for quiet prayer, a warrior for a tax on soda pop, a warrior for peace. But then it's hardly expected as I am the pale product of civilization that arose from sedentary agriculture. But one of the dawgs lives in a swamp and the other has a motorcycle and I thought they would have something to say about our transition from the sport and egality of the hunter to the drudgery and authoritarianism of the ground grubber.
But no, they are more interested in the popup ads on their digital devices and the shape of their Ritz crackers. I guess this is what sedentary agriculture has done to us all, a faint and fleeting feeling of a summer morn when the sun has broken through the clouds revealing a woodchuck hogging the ground and for a fleeting second the thought of sharpening that stick and impaling the beast and roasting him over a wild and free flame crosses our minds before we make the turn to the McDonalds and our morning egg McMuffin.
And speaking of those oval Ritz's, it was hardly an objective critical observation on the part of Old Dog, it was a clear lament for days past, maybe like when the Greeks invented that Ptolemaic system with the concentric perfect spheres which gave way to the sun in the middle and then that awful Kepler who made the perfect circles into ellipses which is just a fancy word for ovals. Sure the spreading of sardines is easier, but at what cost?
My mistake on Cain and Abel. It is just hard to imagine a vegan as a murderer, but perhaps that has changed in these days of super kale.
I watched a lot of those hearings though my attention wavered because they kept saying the same things over and over, the dems as Old Dog reports trying to tar the reps with the tsarist brush and the reps outraged at the grievous evil that befell Flynn that great American. As the night wore on and panel after panel reviewed the events of the afternoon I have to say the CNNers became quite giggly and punch drunk and the last I saw they were all making fun of Sean Spicer, even the Trump guy.
Yar it's embarrassing enough us Americans having to put up with Dump, but it's even worse when some other world leader, some adult, drops by and we see the two side by side and compare.
Did you ever do this one? Hold your tongue and say "I was born on a pirate ship." The resulting mumble will sound to your friends who put you up to it, and who are giggling and nudging each other with their elbows, like "I was born on a pile of shit." This trope had a surge of popularity at Tonti Elementary School in the fifties, but I am not sure how far it penetrated the outside world. Anyway the next time you are at a cocktail party that is sagging you could bring this up and become the life of the party and leave with the hottest babe there. Pretty sure that's what would happen.
I'm sure that whoever wrote down the Cain and Abel story had no intention of making any social commentary. I'm pretty sure at that point in our development sedentary agriculture was looked upon as as great a development as sliced bread, which hadn't happened yet but surely visionaries were anticipating it. I think it took a few thousand years, likely with the arrival of the industrial revolution with all its smoke and child labor, for people to begin to think that maybe this whole civilization thing was a wrong turn.
I mean once we were warriors. Myself, as a peacenik I am no fan of warriors, especially the way the word is thrown around so casually lately, a warrior for quiet prayer, a warrior for a tax on soda pop, a warrior for peace. But then it's hardly expected as I am the pale product of civilization that arose from sedentary agriculture. But one of the dawgs lives in a swamp and the other has a motorcycle and I thought they would have something to say about our transition from the sport and egality of the hunter to the drudgery and authoritarianism of the ground grubber.
But no, they are more interested in the popup ads on their digital devices and the shape of their Ritz crackers. I guess this is what sedentary agriculture has done to us all, a faint and fleeting feeling of a summer morn when the sun has broken through the clouds revealing a woodchuck hogging the ground and for a fleeting second the thought of sharpening that stick and impaling the beast and roasting him over a wild and free flame crosses our minds before we make the turn to the McDonalds and our morning egg McMuffin.
And speaking of those oval Ritz's, it was hardly an objective critical observation on the part of Old Dog, it was a clear lament for days past, maybe like when the Greeks invented that Ptolemaic system with the concentric perfect spheres which gave way to the sun in the middle and then that awful Kepler who made the perfect circles into ellipses which is just a fancy word for ovals. Sure the spreading of sardines is easier, but at what cost?
My mistake on Cain and Abel. It is just hard to imagine a vegan as a murderer, but perhaps that has changed in these days of super kale.
I watched a lot of those hearings though my attention wavered because they kept saying the same things over and over, the dems as Old Dog reports trying to tar the reps with the tsarist brush and the reps outraged at the grievous evil that befell Flynn that great American. As the night wore on and panel after panel reviewed the events of the afternoon I have to say the CNNers became quite giggly and punch drunk and the last I saw they were all making fun of Sean Spicer, even the Trump guy.
Yar it's embarrassing enough us Americans having to put up with Dump, but it's even worse when some other world leader, some adult, drops by and we see the two side by side and compare.
Monday, March 20, 2017
You Are the Product
One thing I learned from my Dummies book is, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." What this means is that, when many cyber products are "free" and "ad free", it's because they can make more money "harvesting" data about you and selling it to other sites that do have ads. I knew that Google invented this technique some time ago, but I didn't know that there was money to be made just by selling the data instead of using it to target ads on your own site. Apparently there is nothing illegal or even unethical about this practice. It's not intrusive of your privacy because you are giving them this data voluntarily. You don't get any more ads, you just get different ads that are targeted to your personal interests. This explains why, when we were talking about guns on the Institute awhile back, we started seeing gun related ads when we went on Face Book.
I'm not sure why Windows 10 has the reputation of being "infested" with ads. The system contains a pop-up blocker that seems to prevent pop-up ads from appearing on web pages, but apparently doesn't block pop-ups on your own desktop display. These pop-ups seem to originate from internal programs (apps) and, if you can figure out where they're coming from, you can uninstall the program unless you really need it for something, which you usually don't. There is another feature called "notifications", which acts a little like pop-up ads. You can disable notifications, but many of them are useful, especially when you're new to the system. For instance, you get a notification when it's time to do a virus scan or when new Windows 10 updates are available for downloading. On the other hand, you also get periodic notifications from Cortana, trying to worm her way into your real life. (No good can come of that.) Notifications appear in their own sidebar and a brief pop-up notifies you that you that there is a notification waiting for you there. The pop-up disappears in a few seconds and you can call up the sidebar at your convenience, read whatever notifications it contains, and click "clear all", which makes them go away.
One particular notification still puzzles me: "You have items waiting to be burned to a disk." The only things I have ever burned to a disk are photos and, even after I have burned them, the notification still appears the next time I turn on my computer. I had the same thing in my Windows 7 OS, but not in my Vista. I never was able to make it go away in Windows 7, and maybe I won't be able to in Windows 10 either. It's no big deal, it disappears after a few seconds, but I still wonder about it.
Other than that, the Outlook Mail program has ads on it, but I have not been able to get that thing to work for me anyway, so I'm resigned to just using my Gmail account, which I already had. Gmail used to have ads on it, but not anymore. It has all the features that I will ever use, and then some.
"Woodchuck" is just another name for "groundhog". It is indeed a real animal, but it doesn't really predict the weather, that's just a myth. The Junior Woodchuck's Manual that Huey, Dewy, and Louie frequently consult is published by the Junior Woodchuck's organization, which is the Disney version of the Boy Scouts.
I read somewhere that the Cain and Abel myth is believed to symbolize the way sedentary agriculture displaced the nomadic herdsman economy. In Biblical times, though, there was still a lot of nomadic herding going on, so I don't know how accurate that interpretation could be.
I'm not sure why Windows 10 has the reputation of being "infested" with ads. The system contains a pop-up blocker that seems to prevent pop-up ads from appearing on web pages, but apparently doesn't block pop-ups on your own desktop display. These pop-ups seem to originate from internal programs (apps) and, if you can figure out where they're coming from, you can uninstall the program unless you really need it for something, which you usually don't. There is another feature called "notifications", which acts a little like pop-up ads. You can disable notifications, but many of them are useful, especially when you're new to the system. For instance, you get a notification when it's time to do a virus scan or when new Windows 10 updates are available for downloading. On the other hand, you also get periodic notifications from Cortana, trying to worm her way into your real life. (No good can come of that.) Notifications appear in their own sidebar and a brief pop-up notifies you that you that there is a notification waiting for you there. The pop-up disappears in a few seconds and you can call up the sidebar at your convenience, read whatever notifications it contains, and click "clear all", which makes them go away.
One particular notification still puzzles me: "You have items waiting to be burned to a disk." The only things I have ever burned to a disk are photos and, even after I have burned them, the notification still appears the next time I turn on my computer. I had the same thing in my Windows 7 OS, but not in my Vista. I never was able to make it go away in Windows 7, and maybe I won't be able to in Windows 10 either. It's no big deal, it disappears after a few seconds, but I still wonder about it.
Other than that, the Outlook Mail program has ads on it, but I have not been able to get that thing to work for me anyway, so I'm resigned to just using my Gmail account, which I already had. Gmail used to have ads on it, but not anymore. It has all the features that I will ever use, and then some.
"Woodchuck" is just another name for "groundhog". It is indeed a real animal, but it doesn't really predict the weather, that's just a myth. The Junior Woodchuck's Manual that Huey, Dewy, and Louie frequently consult is published by the Junior Woodchuck's organization, which is the Disney version of the Boy Scouts.
I read somewhere that the Cain and Abel myth is believed to symbolize the way sedentary agriculture displaced the nomadic herdsman economy. In Biblical times, though, there was still a lot of nomadic herding going on, so I don't know how accurate that interpretation could be.
The cookie crumbles
Well Old Dog brings up international banking mumbo jumbo. That is sort of like dividing by zero.
Not really. In this case, I used "mumbo jumbo" in the sense that it is confusing (to me) and that's one of the accepted definitions. International shipping isn't simply reserving a spot on the boat; brokers are involved, and I think they reserve space for a specified (and limited) period of time. There are also letters of credit, but I don't know what purpose they play.
Near as I can tell, shipping rates are determined by the Baltic Dry Index (bulk carriers) and HARPEX (usually manufactured goods and products), where the shipper has to gaze into his crystal ball and determine his needs for the next week, month, or even year. The law of supply and demand can throw his plans out the window; shipping isn't very profitable when you have less than a full load.
An ideal situation is when a ship arrives with a full load of cargo, gets unloaded, and then acquires a full load of a different cargo for a return trip or a voyage to a different destination. Oil tankers have a big problem in that they're empty for their return trips. The new super-cargo ships have a different problem in that not all ports can handle them, so their routes are limited. The Panama Canal was recently renovated for those ships and it's still a tight squeeze; the new locks are a little too short for optimal handling by their tugboat tenders, but that's a different story. Just what I needed, another rabbit hole.
-----
Read a recent article from The Daily Beast, "The Liar-In-Chief & The Dangers of Post-Truth Politics," which should be right up Uncle Ken's alley. Here;s a snippet of the article:
But Trumpworld ultimately craves something much bigger from all this. They want the power that comes from destroying the media’s place in society.
Make no mistake: Their goal is to delegitimize media. If there’s no trust in media then there’s no objective broker of facts and then you’ve successfully destabilized the truth. You’ve created a climate where there are no agreed upon facts and no objective truth.
-----
Looks like someone skipped Sunday School when the story of Cain and Abel was being taught. Abel was the shepherd and Cain was the "tiller of the soil." God is no dummy; he was more pleased with Abel's sacrificial offering, and who wouldn't prefer a nice BBQ over a salad? I don't know if Cain was a strict vegetarian but for sure he was the first murderer. I wonder if the Bible-thumping proponents of capital punishment ever considered that God himself didn't support it; He just put a mark on Cain so he wouldn't be killed after he was sent out to wander as his punishment. The Bible never mentions where his potential assailants came from, though. The Lord truly works in mysterious ways.
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As well as complaining about oval Ritz's at the last seminar Old Dog was complaining about the lack of big topics lately so i am submitting this one?
Tut, tut, my good man. You should know by now that I never complain, but simply make critical observations. Oh, I bought a bag of Oreo Mini cookies today, and they, too, were made in Mexico. Scandalous!
-----
Anyone catch any of the Comey/Rogers hearing? I was expecting a lot of tap dancing and not the prolonged ballet I beheld. Such gentility, although a couple of the reps started to get a little worked up and their inner ham broke through. I thought they were all surprisingly goodnatured, considering the number of times "I'm not going to answer" was stated.
Although nothing new was revealed, I was amused at how some of the reps managed to paint the Trump regime with the big Russian brush, all on the record. Reps Heck and Swalwell did an especially fine job. The hearings must be an ongoing process, as next week former intel bigwig Clapper is due to show up. The show is just getting started, folks, and I can't wait to see the yammering in the Twitterverse.
-----
My antennae must be particularly well tuned these days. At the last seminar I think I mentioned to Uncle Ken that it would be cool if Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abe got together and compared notes about #45, and this past weekend they did, sort of. I was running some German language articles from Der Spiegel through Google Translate, and I found this:
Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, pleaded for an unrestricted international trade at the Cebit exhibition in Hanover. Both spoke on Sunday evening for a swift conclusion of the EU-Japan free trade agreement.
Without mentioning the new US government of Donald Trump, the heads of government resigned themselves from protectionist tendencies. "In times when we have to argue with many people about free trade, open borders, democratic values, it is a good sign that Japan and Germany do not argue about it, but rather shape the future for the benefit of the people," stressed Merkel.
The Moron of Mar-A-Lago should take note; this is what competent leaders act like, and I bet their approval ratings are higher than the 37% he now has. Maybe he'll tweet about it.
Not really. In this case, I used "mumbo jumbo" in the sense that it is confusing (to me) and that's one of the accepted definitions. International shipping isn't simply reserving a spot on the boat; brokers are involved, and I think they reserve space for a specified (and limited) period of time. There are also letters of credit, but I don't know what purpose they play.
Near as I can tell, shipping rates are determined by the Baltic Dry Index (bulk carriers) and HARPEX (usually manufactured goods and products), where the shipper has to gaze into his crystal ball and determine his needs for the next week, month, or even year. The law of supply and demand can throw his plans out the window; shipping isn't very profitable when you have less than a full load.
An ideal situation is when a ship arrives with a full load of cargo, gets unloaded, and then acquires a full load of a different cargo for a return trip or a voyage to a different destination. Oil tankers have a big problem in that they're empty for their return trips. The new super-cargo ships have a different problem in that not all ports can handle them, so their routes are limited. The Panama Canal was recently renovated for those ships and it's still a tight squeeze; the new locks are a little too short for optimal handling by their tugboat tenders, but that's a different story. Just what I needed, another rabbit hole.
-----
Read a recent article from The Daily Beast, "The Liar-In-Chief & The Dangers of Post-Truth Politics," which should be right up Uncle Ken's alley. Here;s a snippet of the article:
But Trumpworld ultimately craves something much bigger from all this. They want the power that comes from destroying the media’s place in society.
Make no mistake: Their goal is to delegitimize media. If there’s no trust in media then there’s no objective broker of facts and then you’ve successfully destabilized the truth. You’ve created a climate where there are no agreed upon facts and no objective truth.
-----
Looks like someone skipped Sunday School when the story of Cain and Abel was being taught. Abel was the shepherd and Cain was the "tiller of the soil." God is no dummy; he was more pleased with Abel's sacrificial offering, and who wouldn't prefer a nice BBQ over a salad? I don't know if Cain was a strict vegetarian but for sure he was the first murderer. I wonder if the Bible-thumping proponents of capital punishment ever considered that God himself didn't support it; He just put a mark on Cain so he wouldn't be killed after he was sent out to wander as his punishment. The Bible never mentions where his potential assailants came from, though. The Lord truly works in mysterious ways.
-----
As well as complaining about oval Ritz's at the last seminar Old Dog was complaining about the lack of big topics lately so i am submitting this one?
Tut, tut, my good man. You should know by now that I never complain, but simply make critical observations. Oh, I bought a bag of Oreo Mini cookies today, and they, too, were made in Mexico. Scandalous!
-----
Anyone catch any of the Comey/Rogers hearing? I was expecting a lot of tap dancing and not the prolonged ballet I beheld. Such gentility, although a couple of the reps started to get a little worked up and their inner ham broke through. I thought they were all surprisingly goodnatured, considering the number of times "I'm not going to answer" was stated.
Although nothing new was revealed, I was amused at how some of the reps managed to paint the Trump regime with the big Russian brush, all on the record. Reps Heck and Swalwell did an especially fine job. The hearings must be an ongoing process, as next week former intel bigwig Clapper is due to show up. The show is just getting started, folks, and I can't wait to see the yammering in the Twitterverse.
-----
My antennae must be particularly well tuned these days. At the last seminar I think I mentioned to Uncle Ken that it would be cool if Angela Merkel and Shinzo Abe got together and compared notes about #45, and this past weekend they did, sort of. I was running some German language articles from Der Spiegel through Google Translate, and I found this:
Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, pleaded for an unrestricted international trade at the Cebit exhibition in Hanover. Both spoke on Sunday evening for a swift conclusion of the EU-Japan free trade agreement.
Without mentioning the new US government of Donald Trump, the heads of government resigned themselves from protectionist tendencies. "In times when we have to argue with many people about free trade, open borders, democratic values, it is a good sign that Japan and Germany do not argue about it, but rather shape the future for the benefit of the people," stressed Merkel.
The Moron of Mar-A-Lago should take note; this is what competent leaders act like, and I bet their approval ratings are higher than the 37% he now has. Maybe he'll tweet about it.
boldly going forth and punching and romancing
I don't doubt what Old Dog is saying about shipping costs going down. I'm not saying I don't think it's true I am just wondering how excess capacity can be responsible because don't they still have to gas up those boats and crew them and load and unload them?. Maybe there is some kind of price war going on. Well Old Dog brings up international banking mumbo jumbo. That is sort of like dividing by zero. Once you allow that into the equation any result is possible.
I don't remember the woodchuck manual, Kind of odd that ducks would have a woodchuck manual, shouldn't theirs have been more like a wood duck manual? Even as I was writing that I was thinking I bet there actually is a wood duck, and sure enough there he was in wiki, and quite a snappily hued little fellow he is, and his mate is a little sharper than the actual girl duck I think. And what is it with woodchucks? And here I am astounded from my trip to wiki that none of the items in the list refer to an actual animal.
In fact most of the items have some Disney link, which makes me think maybe he originated the term, but no there is that how much wood thing, So did they just make up the woodchuck for that tongue twister? Did they have wood chucking in mind and just needed an animal to complete the phrase? And what's with the if? That implies that the woodchuck doesn't actually chuck any wood, and if it doesn't why is it called a woodchuck? I suppose he hangs out with the unicorns and mermaids who probably get tired of running into him at their cocktail parties and having him introduce for the hundredth time the fun fact that he doesn't actually chuck wood.
And when have you ever run into a fun fact that was any fun? And what is wood chucking anyway? It sounds like you are just tossing it from place to place, which why would you want to do that with wood. And what's the point of selling sea shells by the sea shore where anybody can just pick them up for free? But wait, wiki reports that there was an actual Sally upon whom the tongue twister is based, except that her name was Mary. And Peter Piper? Some authors have identified the subject of the rhyme as Pierre Poivre, an eighteenth‑century French horticulturalist and government administrator of Mauritius, who once investigated the Seychelles' potential for spice cultivation.
I am still holding out on Windows 10, but I am not surprised .to hear that it is infested with ads. My cheapo printer has somehow gotten into my operating system and keeps nagging me to download its latest updates.
I think Comey is going to say that there is no evidence that Obama wire-tapppped Dump and Dump is going to call him a liar and he'll continue to do so, well indefinitely. He had to sort of admit he was wrong about the Obama birth certificate thing and it left a bad taste in his mouth and he never wants to experience it again. I'll bet you could put him on his Mar-a-Largo throne on the beach (not far from Sally, who is actually Mary) and have him forbid the tide to rise, and even as water was lapping against his tiny-toed feet he would claim it was not and anybody who said otherwise was probably a member of the big girl's pizza and pederasty ring.
I've heard that Canute actually did the tide thing to show his retinue that he was merely mortal. Fat chance of Dump doing that/
That hound thing sounds awfully resource intensive to nab a rabbit or a fox. Maybe it is mostly for sport? Well hunting is exciting, growing grain not so much. At the risk of bringing up the good book didn't the good lord prefer Cain's bloody mess to Abel's healthy salad? I imagine the carnivores get the chicks. And since meat doesn't keep well he has to share it with his pals which makes him popular. The farmer can keep his grain indefinitely and doesn't have to share, but now that we have a commodity we have trade, and now that we have trade we have the smarter fellows taking advantage of the not so smart, so some guys dig in the ground all day while the others sit around and bullshit and come up with the things that give us well, civilization?
It's one of those things that's surely inevitable, but if we were some kind of Star Trek characters, ones who didn't believe in not interfering with the natives, though somehow that never keeps the Cap'n from messing with the messing with the local babes or punching out the citizenry, if we came across some primitive hunter folk and saw some of them messing with agriculture, should we punch out those guys and romance their women as well because what the hell?
As well as complaining about oval Ritz's at the last seminar Old Dog was complaining about the lack of big topics lately so i am submitting this one?
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Slow boats from China
I don't care if those coolies work for free, how can the fish companies afford all that shipping?
By coincidence, the topic of shipping costs was discussed at the recent seminar. I've forgotten the context, but I recall mentioning to Uncle Ken that what used to cost hundreds of dollars to ship a container to Brazil from China now costs $50. But that figure is wrong. In 2008 it cost $2000 to ship a 20 ft. container from China to Brazil and now it costs $50. Considering the amount of crap you can stuff in a 20.ft box (or the larger, more common 40 ft. box) I would say shipping costs are negligible.
These lower costs are attributed to an excess of shipping capacity. Older ships aren't being mothballed (some are still being financed) and newer, larger, and more fuel efficient, ships are being built. It's complex, tied into a lot of international banking mumbo-jumbo and the competition between shippers is fierce. One of the larger companies recently went bankrupt and the ships were kept at sea, unable to dock because the ports didn't think they'd get paid. Not a good thing for international trade, knowing your cargo is floating out there somewhere, unable to be delivered.
There is a good market for used shipping containers, though. According to what I saw on eBay there are good deals to be made. A used 40 ft. container costs about a thousand (and up) bucks. Some are sold as is, some are sold kitted out as homes, kitchens, refrigerated storage units, you name it. There's a whole new cottage industry developing around the use of those boxes; they're weatherproof and stronger than shit. A fella with the proper acreage could make some dandy additions with a cutting torch, once they were delivered on site.
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Speaking of the seminar, Uncle Ken had a book for me that he got from the "book exchange" nook in his laundry room. A fine book, indeed: the Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover. If Mr. Beagles hasn't heard of it he should take a peek; it's available on Amazon, almost 800 pages of useful information. Well, not useful to Uncle Ken which is why he was giving it away. It's like the Woodchuck Manual, as used by Huey, Dewey, and Louie, an amazing compendium of useful info for a discerning clientele. I had to take a pass on his offer, as it was the 3rd edition and I already have the 4th edition, which has about 100 more pages. Need to know the different Cement/Sand/Gravel ratios for various concrete applications? It's in there. Curious about how many tons of force are needed to punch a half-inch hole in quarter-inch structural steel? That's in there, too (11.8, BTW). It's the only book I have that describes Small Animal Artificial Respiration and CPR (Dogs & Cats), should I ever need it. Maybe Uncle Ken should have kept the book in case an emergency arises with his feline pals, god forbid.
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I read recently that Windows 10 now "infested with annoying ads." The ads are all for Microsoft products and apparently pop up in the most unlikely places. Is this true, Mr. Beagles? I imagine Win7 will cease to be supported in a few years, but I don't want to have to deal with needless ads and bloatware. It would be different if the OS was free, but it isn't.
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Except for the purported cameras in the microwave ovens I haven't read any good White House rumors lately. Tomorrow, the FBI guy, Comey, is supposed to give a press conference, maybe putting an end to all the wiretap nonsense once and for all. Should be fun, I don't think Trump can fire the guy if he doesn't like what he hears; he's stuck with him for quite a few more years (it's a 10 year term, if I recall correctly). I expect the implications to be yuuuge.
By coincidence, the topic of shipping costs was discussed at the recent seminar. I've forgotten the context, but I recall mentioning to Uncle Ken that what used to cost hundreds of dollars to ship a container to Brazil from China now costs $50. But that figure is wrong. In 2008 it cost $2000 to ship a 20 ft. container from China to Brazil and now it costs $50. Considering the amount of crap you can stuff in a 20.ft box (or the larger, more common 40 ft. box) I would say shipping costs are negligible.
These lower costs are attributed to an excess of shipping capacity. Older ships aren't being mothballed (some are still being financed) and newer, larger, and more fuel efficient, ships are being built. It's complex, tied into a lot of international banking mumbo-jumbo and the competition between shippers is fierce. One of the larger companies recently went bankrupt and the ships were kept at sea, unable to dock because the ports didn't think they'd get paid. Not a good thing for international trade, knowing your cargo is floating out there somewhere, unable to be delivered.
There is a good market for used shipping containers, though. According to what I saw on eBay there are good deals to be made. A used 40 ft. container costs about a thousand (and up) bucks. Some are sold as is, some are sold kitted out as homes, kitchens, refrigerated storage units, you name it. There's a whole new cottage industry developing around the use of those boxes; they're weatherproof and stronger than shit. A fella with the proper acreage could make some dandy additions with a cutting torch, once they were delivered on site.
-----
Speaking of the seminar, Uncle Ken had a book for me that he got from the "book exchange" nook in his laundry room. A fine book, indeed: the Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover. If Mr. Beagles hasn't heard of it he should take a peek; it's available on Amazon, almost 800 pages of useful information. Well, not useful to Uncle Ken which is why he was giving it away. It's like the Woodchuck Manual, as used by Huey, Dewey, and Louie, an amazing compendium of useful info for a discerning clientele. I had to take a pass on his offer, as it was the 3rd edition and I already have the 4th edition, which has about 100 more pages. Need to know the different Cement/Sand/Gravel ratios for various concrete applications? It's in there. Curious about how many tons of force are needed to punch a half-inch hole in quarter-inch structural steel? That's in there, too (11.8, BTW). It's the only book I have that describes Small Animal Artificial Respiration and CPR (Dogs & Cats), should I ever need it. Maybe Uncle Ken should have kept the book in case an emergency arises with his feline pals, god forbid.
-----
I read recently that Windows 10 now "infested with annoying ads." The ads are all for Microsoft products and apparently pop up in the most unlikely places. Is this true, Mr. Beagles? I imagine Win7 will cease to be supported in a few years, but I don't want to have to deal with needless ads and bloatware. It would be different if the OS was free, but it isn't.
-----
Except for the purported cameras in the microwave ovens I haven't read any good White House rumors lately. Tomorrow, the FBI guy, Comey, is supposed to give a press conference, maybe putting an end to all the wiretap nonsense once and for all. Should be fun, I don't think Trump can fire the guy if he doesn't like what he hears; he's stuck with him for quite a few more years (it's a 10 year term, if I recall correctly). I expect the implications to be yuuuge.
Friday, March 17, 2017
Hunting with Hounds
There are two main categories of hunting hounds: treeing hounds and running hounds. While many hounds possess both skills, they are usually better at one or the other because they have been selectively bred for that purpose. Treeing hounds are used on raccoons, bears, and cougars because those animals will climb up a tree when they're tired of running. I have shot a few raccoons out of trees, but I didn't like it and gave it up early on. Foxes may "go to ground" when they're exhausted and, when they do, it is customary to declare the fox as the winner. Most states do not allow hunters to dig any animal out of its hole anyway. Cottontail rabbits may go to ground as well, but snowshoe hares do not. When hunting game that does not climb trees, the hunter tries to figure out where the animal is going next and set up an ambush.
Rabbits, hares, and foxes generally run in circles, not perfect circles but, if the hounds can stay on the track long enough, the game will eventually come round to approximately where it started from. If you see a rabbit run by and are unable to shoot it, you can wait for it to come round again, but don't expect it to run exactly the same track. Foxes run much bigger circles than rabbits and, by the time they make a second circle, you and the dogs will likely be exhausted yourselves and be ready to quit for the day. Some people believe that the hounds bring the game around in a circle on purpose, but I don't think so. These animals have well defined territories, and they are reluctant to break out of them. The hounds just go where the quarry goes. One exception is, late in the season, which ends March 31 in Michigan, the male rabbits might be cruising far from their home grounds looking for new girlfriends. When pursued, they will make a beeline back to their own turf, which might be up to a mile away. Other than that, you can hunt rabbits all day in a 40 acre parcel of land. Foxes range farther, maybe within a square mile. A coyote or bear chase can easily cover 20 miles without turning around. Coyote and bear hunters usually run in packs, with each hunter working out of his own pickup truck that is equipped with a CB radio. Whoever thinks he knows where the chase is heading radios the others so that somebody might get into a position for a shot. Those long chases are exciting, but not nearly as productive as a 40 acre rabbit hunt. And yes, rabbits are good to eat.
Old Dog is right about the relationship between predator and prey populations, at least that is the currently held opinion of the experts. In the old days it was believed that, if you exterminate the predators, you will have more prey animals to hunt, and some people still believe that. Any habitat will only support so many of a given species, it's called "carrying capacity". When this capacity is, exceeded, mortality increases and some animals relocate. Human hunting pressure is just another form of predation. When the game gets scarce, hunters hunt elsewhere or quit hunting altogether.
Rabbits and hares are notorious for their extreme population fluctuations. It usually takes them from seven to ten years to cycle back again, but not this time. I understand that this has happened all over the Lower Peninsula of Michigan but, for some reason, not in the Upper Peninsula. I don't think anybody is studying this or trying to fix it. There are more deer hunters than small game hunters in the state, and our DNR mostly caters to their interests.
There are no wild moose in the Lower Peninsula. I understand that there are a few in the Upper Peninsula, but not enough to allow any kind of hunting season. There is a substantial population of moose on Isle Royale, in northern Lake Superior. The whole island is a national park and no hunting is allowed. The park is maintained as a wilderness area and Nature is pretty much allowed to take her course. There are some wolves there too, which were not deliberately introduced. It is believed they crossed over from Canada when the lake was frozen over. The wolf population has recently declined, there are only few of them left, and the moose population is eating themselves out of house and home. After considerable discussion, the wildlife people have decided to continue their "hands off" policy, at least for now.
Crackers from Mexico? How about those "wild caught" Canadian fish that come from China? I understand that the fish are indeed caught in Canadian waters, flash frozen, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to North American markets. I don't care if those coolies work for free, how can the fish companies afford all that shipping? The system is rigged indeed!
Rabbits, hares, and foxes generally run in circles, not perfect circles but, if the hounds can stay on the track long enough, the game will eventually come round to approximately where it started from. If you see a rabbit run by and are unable to shoot it, you can wait for it to come round again, but don't expect it to run exactly the same track. Foxes run much bigger circles than rabbits and, by the time they make a second circle, you and the dogs will likely be exhausted yourselves and be ready to quit for the day. Some people believe that the hounds bring the game around in a circle on purpose, but I don't think so. These animals have well defined territories, and they are reluctant to break out of them. The hounds just go where the quarry goes. One exception is, late in the season, which ends March 31 in Michigan, the male rabbits might be cruising far from their home grounds looking for new girlfriends. When pursued, they will make a beeline back to their own turf, which might be up to a mile away. Other than that, you can hunt rabbits all day in a 40 acre parcel of land. Foxes range farther, maybe within a square mile. A coyote or bear chase can easily cover 20 miles without turning around. Coyote and bear hunters usually run in packs, with each hunter working out of his own pickup truck that is equipped with a CB radio. Whoever thinks he knows where the chase is heading radios the others so that somebody might get into a position for a shot. Those long chases are exciting, but not nearly as productive as a 40 acre rabbit hunt. And yes, rabbits are good to eat.
Old Dog is right about the relationship between predator and prey populations, at least that is the currently held opinion of the experts. In the old days it was believed that, if you exterminate the predators, you will have more prey animals to hunt, and some people still believe that. Any habitat will only support so many of a given species, it's called "carrying capacity". When this capacity is, exceeded, mortality increases and some animals relocate. Human hunting pressure is just another form of predation. When the game gets scarce, hunters hunt elsewhere or quit hunting altogether.
Rabbits and hares are notorious for their extreme population fluctuations. It usually takes them from seven to ten years to cycle back again, but not this time. I understand that this has happened all over the Lower Peninsula of Michigan but, for some reason, not in the Upper Peninsula. I don't think anybody is studying this or trying to fix it. There are more deer hunters than small game hunters in the state, and our DNR mostly caters to their interests.
There are no wild moose in the Lower Peninsula. I understand that there are a few in the Upper Peninsula, but not enough to allow any kind of hunting season. There is a substantial population of moose on Isle Royale, in northern Lake Superior. The whole island is a national park and no hunting is allowed. The park is maintained as a wilderness area and Nature is pretty much allowed to take her course. There are some wolves there too, which were not deliberately introduced. It is believed they crossed over from Canada when the lake was frozen over. The wolf population has recently declined, there are only few of them left, and the moose population is eating themselves out of house and home. After considerable discussion, the wildlife people have decided to continue their "hands off" policy, at least for now.
Crackers from Mexico? How about those "wild caught" Canadian fish that come from China? I understand that the fish are indeed caught in Canadian waters, flash frozen, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to North American markets. I don't care if those coolies work for free, how can the fish companies afford all that shipping? The system is rigged indeed!
Going crackers
Why did the population plummet? Hunting or destroyed habitat or something else?
Good questions. I always thought that the predator/prey relationship waxed and waned; more prey means more predators until there is so little prey that the number of predators drops off, at which point the prey increase and the cycle repeats.
But if neither foxes not hares have been in abundance since the 90s other factors must be in play. Other predators, perhaps? I was thinking of owls and wolves, but since hares breed like, uh, rabbits I think there should still be plenty of prey for the indigenous predators to feed upon. Destroyed habitat seems unlikely unless there has been industrial and residential development I'm not aware of. Have there been similar dropoffs in the number of deer, raccoon, skunk, birds, and other wildlife? I hope there isn't a long term effect of years of pesticide usage or other man-made pollutants.
Since Mr. Beagles lives in or near the swampy areas I was wondering if there is now, or has ever been, a noticeable moose population. Have the friends of Rocky been nibbling on your garden greens?
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Never having given much thought to the differences between rabbits and hares I had to consult the good folks at Wikipedia. A big difference, I was surprised to learn, but I suppose they are equally good eating; never et either myself. Because of the long ears and legs I was thinking that maybe Bugs Bunny is really a hare, but since he lives in a burrow he must be a rabbit.
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Just watched the live press conference on YouTube with Trump and Merkel. What can I say? One of the participants gave lengthy and thoughtful answers; can you guess which one? No matter, I eagerly await the pundits' analysis but I wonder why the Dumpster veered off into Obamacare. I guess they have reporters for fake news outlets in Germany, too. I thought I heard Trump proclaim a couple of times "I'm a traitor," but no, he said trader. I think that's what he meant.
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As I was recently enjoying some liver sausage and cheese on crackers I noticed that Ritz crackers are no longer round; they have a slightly oblong shape. When did this happen? Were they always oblong and I never noticed? The lack of radial symmetry is disturbing. I bet the bean counters changed the method of production to save a few thousandths of a cent on each cracker.
Damn! That's it! Even though the package still says Nabisco the company itself is owned by Mondelez and the crackers are now made in Mexico. Think about that one for a minute, we're importing Ritz crackers, an American classic, from Mexico. Damn NAFTA. What's going on, do we now ship wheat and other ingredients to Mexico so they can bake and package some lousy crackers to be imported to the US? The system is rigged.
Good questions. I always thought that the predator/prey relationship waxed and waned; more prey means more predators until there is so little prey that the number of predators drops off, at which point the prey increase and the cycle repeats.
But if neither foxes not hares have been in abundance since the 90s other factors must be in play. Other predators, perhaps? I was thinking of owls and wolves, but since hares breed like, uh, rabbits I think there should still be plenty of prey for the indigenous predators to feed upon. Destroyed habitat seems unlikely unless there has been industrial and residential development I'm not aware of. Have there been similar dropoffs in the number of deer, raccoon, skunk, birds, and other wildlife? I hope there isn't a long term effect of years of pesticide usage or other man-made pollutants.
Since Mr. Beagles lives in or near the swampy areas I was wondering if there is now, or has ever been, a noticeable moose population. Have the friends of Rocky been nibbling on your garden greens?
-----
Never having given much thought to the differences between rabbits and hares I had to consult the good folks at Wikipedia. A big difference, I was surprised to learn, but I suppose they are equally good eating; never et either myself. Because of the long ears and legs I was thinking that maybe Bugs Bunny is really a hare, but since he lives in a burrow he must be a rabbit.
-----
Just watched the live press conference on YouTube with Trump and Merkel. What can I say? One of the participants gave lengthy and thoughtful answers; can you guess which one? No matter, I eagerly await the pundits' analysis but I wonder why the Dumpster veered off into Obamacare. I guess they have reporters for fake news outlets in Germany, too. I thought I heard Trump proclaim a couple of times "I'm a traitor," but no, he said trader. I think that's what he meant.
-----
As I was recently enjoying some liver sausage and cheese on crackers I noticed that Ritz crackers are no longer round; they have a slightly oblong shape. When did this happen? Were they always oblong and I never noticed? The lack of radial symmetry is disturbing. I bet the bean counters changed the method of production to save a few thousandths of a cent on each cracker.
Damn! That's it! Even though the package still says Nabisco the company itself is owned by Mondelez and the crackers are now made in Mexico. Think about that one for a minute, we're importing Ritz crackers, an American classic, from Mexico. Damn NAFTA. What's going on, do we now ship wheat and other ingredients to Mexico so they can bake and package some lousy crackers to be imported to the US? The system is rigged.
violating Objective Reality
I don't think just listening to people, like the guy on the next bar stool, and taking what everybody says at equal value is a very good process. If you know the guys in the bar you can soon discover who takes what he says seriously and who is a big bullshitter. Myself I question what even my good friends tell me. I want to know where they heard it and why do they think it is true. A lot of people find this annoying but there it is. What good is a friend if you can't argue with him?
There is a certain hierarchy in the media. I guess the the networks and the big city newspapers are at the top, and then there is a greyer area of things like the Drudge report and Breitbart. I've gone to Breitbart a few times lately and was surprised to find it wasn't the nest of red hot lies I had expected. The extreme stuff wasn't all that extreme, and there were were some real stories in it. And beneath that I guess are talk radio and whatever the equivalent is in websites. They don't have big audiences and their audiences are eager to hear something wild and so they give it to them. Sometimes one of these wild stories gets picked up by something like Drudge or Breitbart. They are generally a bit careful with it, not claiming it to be true, but saying something like rumors are going around about such and such, then sometimes the top level of media picks it up in the form of Breitbart is reporting that there are rumors going around about such and such, and somebody picks it up and then another and maybe you see it two or three times and forget its scurrilous heritage and it becomes like unto something real. It's a problem.
And now I've nibbled on the edge of Dump's wire-tapppping thing so now I might as well go in whole hog. On the one hand it is a really scandalous charge (unlike how many attended his inauguration) to make against a former pres of the USA. But let's leave that aside for the nonce. It is also a totally baseless charge, the equivalent of wearing a red tie and telling everybody that it is blue, a slap in the face of, all together now, Objective Reality. And you know most everybody knows he is lying (because I assume that at this point even he knows it is not true), but at this point it is a charming peccadillo (How refreshing to hear a pol speaking his mind) to his fans, and if he just quietly harrumphed and said something like maybe I was a little off base there, the whole thing would blow away like the fluff of a dandelion. But he won't do it. He can't do it. You have to wonder what power he would have over good and evil if he wasn't crazy. But then if he wasn't crazy, he would never have become president.
I remember years ago, idling by the frozen foods in the supermarket and there was a sign that said rabbits, but it wasn't Bugs or some Easter critter in the bin, it was some ugly pink three lobed thing. Shocking. I look back at my kitties as I write this, such a fate will never befall you I assure them, though if I were to bring home a frozen rabbit and thaw it I am sure they would have no qualms about partaking of it.
So how did that work with the rabbits and the hounds (and foxes I guess)? I assume they brought it back alive or else you wouldn't need Old Betsy. Did they just corner it and then as it cowered amid snarling slavering beasts you ambled over and Elmer Fudded it? Did the dogs have to be trained not to tear the prey limb from limb before you could shoot it? Did you teach the dogs that, or did you get them already trained? I assume after this you ate the unfortunate bunny.
Why did the population plummet? Hunting or destroyed habitat or something else?
There is a certain hierarchy in the media. I guess the the networks and the big city newspapers are at the top, and then there is a greyer area of things like the Drudge report and Breitbart. I've gone to Breitbart a few times lately and was surprised to find it wasn't the nest of red hot lies I had expected. The extreme stuff wasn't all that extreme, and there were were some real stories in it. And beneath that I guess are talk radio and whatever the equivalent is in websites. They don't have big audiences and their audiences are eager to hear something wild and so they give it to them. Sometimes one of these wild stories gets picked up by something like Drudge or Breitbart. They are generally a bit careful with it, not claiming it to be true, but saying something like rumors are going around about such and such, then sometimes the top level of media picks it up in the form of Breitbart is reporting that there are rumors going around about such and such, and somebody picks it up and then another and maybe you see it two or three times and forget its scurrilous heritage and it becomes like unto something real. It's a problem.
And now I've nibbled on the edge of Dump's wire-tapppping thing so now I might as well go in whole hog. On the one hand it is a really scandalous charge (unlike how many attended his inauguration) to make against a former pres of the USA. But let's leave that aside for the nonce. It is also a totally baseless charge, the equivalent of wearing a red tie and telling everybody that it is blue, a slap in the face of, all together now, Objective Reality. And you know most everybody knows he is lying (because I assume that at this point even he knows it is not true), but at this point it is a charming peccadillo (How refreshing to hear a pol speaking his mind) to his fans, and if he just quietly harrumphed and said something like maybe I was a little off base there, the whole thing would blow away like the fluff of a dandelion. But he won't do it. He can't do it. You have to wonder what power he would have over good and evil if he wasn't crazy. But then if he wasn't crazy, he would never have become president.
I remember years ago, idling by the frozen foods in the supermarket and there was a sign that said rabbits, but it wasn't Bugs or some Easter critter in the bin, it was some ugly pink three lobed thing. Shocking. I look back at my kitties as I write this, such a fate will never befall you I assure them, though if I were to bring home a frozen rabbit and thaw it I am sure they would have no qualms about partaking of it.
So how did that work with the rabbits and the hounds (and foxes I guess)? I assume they brought it back alive or else you wouldn't need Old Betsy. Did they just corner it and then as it cowered amid snarling slavering beasts you ambled over and Elmer Fudded it? Did the dogs have to be trained not to tear the prey limb from limb before you could shoot it? Did you teach the dogs that, or did you get them already trained? I assume after this you ate the unfortunate bunny.
Why did the population plummet? Hunting or destroyed habitat or something else?
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