We Are Not Afraid!

We conservatives are not afraid of people who are different than us, we just don't like them. It's like Roger Woofy said about cats. Roger was a beagle dog who lived in Taiwan, and he was a regular contributor to the site I was frequenting at that time. I lost track of him when the site went out of business. Too bad, he was a brilliant writer for a dog. Actually, he would have been a brilliant writer for a human, if he had been a human, but he was in fact a dog. Well, he didn't exactly write those posts himself because he was unable to type on the keyboard with those Beagle paws of his. Roger would dictate his posts to one of his daddies, who would then type it for him. Roger lived with his two human daddies, one of which was Irish and one of which was Taiwanese. I always wondered why he had two daddies and no mommy, but those were the days of "Don't ask, don't tell", so I didn't ask and Roger didn't tell. For all I know they might have been just good friends. 

Although Roger was a big city apartment dweller, he was the proud descendent of brave hunting dogs, and he tried his best to live up to his legacy. He was always telling us what a brave hunting dog he was, even though there was nothing to hunt in his downtown neighborhood. He did get tangled up with a domestic rabbit once, and got in trouble for it. Roger claimed that it wasn't his fault because the rabbit's daddy should have had better sense than to bring a rabbit to a dog park.

Roger lived in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, which is pretty pet friendly for a big city, and he was able to accompany his daddies almost every place they went. One night they were all hanging out in their favorite bar when somebody brought in a "stupid cat". (Roger's words, not mine.) We got to see a photo of Roger perched on a tall barstool looking nervous, while the cat was looking up at him from the floor with mild curiosity. Roger insisted that he was not afraid of cats, he just didn't like them. He didn't jump up on that barstool because he was afraid, he was a brave hunting dog after all, he just wanted to get as far as possible from that cat because he didn't like cats and wanted nothing to do with this one. That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

Sorry about that mistake I made about the Muslims, I think I got them mixed up with the Mongols. I realized my mistake while thinking about the issue this morning and resolved to fix it this evening, which I did. Also, there certainly were renegade Christian sects in existence during the time of the Crusades, but they were called "heretics" in those days. I think the name "Protestant" came into common usage during the time of Martin Luther. Although the Hussites may be considered Protestants, I don't think they were called that at the time, but I could be wrong about that. By today's standards, the Hussites would be considered terrorists, as would the Crusaders and the Muslims of the time. The difference is that the Hussites and the Crusaders went out of business a long time ago, and the Muslims are still at it. 

speak softly and carry a big rep

When I was speaking of the crusaders killing prots I was thinking of the Albigensians and Cathars in southern France.  I suppose they predate the Hussites and Martin's boys, but they were Christian and anti-pope and that qualifies as prots in my book.  I don't know why Beagles says Muslims weren't invented yet because that was who they were principally killing.  The thrust of my argument was that they weren't that different from Isis, and although I guess we can call them nuts in a way, it is not the same way as we call these mass murderers nuts

You don't do research on how to implement anti-gun legislation, everybody knows how to do that.  The reps opposed it because they were afraid of what it might reveal (and rightly so because even they must know, the more guns floating around, the more people killed.).  But now that the research has not been done they can stand up and say gosh nobody knows that because there has been no research on it.

I too miss the Obaman prosody in comparison to the Trumpian rant, as T S Eliot said about that Shakespearean rag, so elegant, so intelligent.  Way before he was prez I heard him on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (Saturdays at 10AM, does either dog listen to it?  If not, I think they should give it a shot), and he was hilarious.  Instead of calling the other guy a name and claiming it was fake news and tossing in an unearned brag, he would consider the thing, give both sides of the issue and say why he was for his side.  I don't know when we last had a prez like that.  Maybe Kennedy, they say he had a way with words, he did crack a pretty good joke from time to time.

I don't get much out of the reputation economy article either.  It seemed like just common sense.  The reason you work to establish a good reputation (I once borrowed five bucks from Old Dog.  Believe me it did not leave his wallet easily, and I knew that if it wasn't promptly repaid there would be a metaphorical knuckle sandwich to my rep so it was crisp in his hand the following Friday and if I had go borrow another fiver sometime in the future there would be no problem).  The reason we labor to establish a good reputation (outside of doing good just for its own sake) is so that people will know they can trust us and our lives will be easier.  It may be more easily identifiable now that we have cyber space, but I don't see anything new.  What is this dark side Old Dog speaks darkly of.

I've seen that stuff about liberals and conservative psychology before.  I pretty much agree but the fact that it is clearly written by liberals and generally casts aspersions on conservatives makes it a little suspect in my eyes.  I personally think conservatives are more fearful.  They like simpler ideas because they fear complicated ones, and they generally fear people who they perceive as not like them.  Not that i am a liberal casting aspersions on conservatives, just calling it like I see it.

The Crusaders Were Nuts Too

Although they certainly didn't slaughter any Protestants, since they had not been invented yet, the Crusaders were known to massacre their fellow Christians on occasion, I suppose for practice. It was a long trip to the Holy Land, and they had to do something to keep in shape so they could properly deal with the infidels when they finally got there. In his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" Edward Gibbon asserted that the Crusades were the best thing that ever happened to Europe because they got rid of a lot of violent people, leaving their homeland in the hands of farmers and tradesmen.

I did so read that article on the defunding of gun violence research. It was not clear to me, however, exactly what kinds of research had been going on. I speculated that it might have been more directed towards anti gun legislation than it was towards examining the criminal mind. I didn't know that for sure, but I figured that might have been the reason for defunding the program, since Republicans were in control of Congress at the time. I also read Old Dog's link about the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. While I found it interesting, I would be more interested in a study of the psychological difference between mass murderers and nice guys like us. I found the article on the Reputation Economy less interesting because it seemed to pertain mostly to businessmen and white collar workers, neither of which I have ever been.

The Second Amendment, like a lot of the Constitution, is vague and imprecise, providing job security for generations of judges and lawyers. There was some speculation, when Obama was first elected, that he would try to make ammunition either unavailable or unaffordable. This led to a lot of over buying and hoarding of the stuff, to the point that certain types of ammo were getting hard to find. For some reason the most scarce of them all was .22 caliber rim fire, a round that is not commonly used in combat or personal defense. I have read articles in the past, however, that said the .22 comes highly recommended for wilderness survival situations and post apocalyptic scenarios. Maybe the paranoid types were worried about losing more than their gun rights.

Pass the ammunition

They could be compared with the crusaders, some of the slaughtering of prots was done under the crusader flag,...

Okay, I give up.  What the hell are "prots," Uncle Ken?  It would help if you provided  definitions for those fake words you like to toss about.  For a minute I thought you may have meant "Protestants" but they woudn't show up for another couple of hundred years, and not in that location.

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New topics, eh?  Last week Obama spoke for an hour at a sports analytics conference held at MIT.  It was supposed to be secret, with no recordings, but you know how it is these days.  It wasn't a speech per se, but responses to questions asked by a pair of moderators dealing with data and analytics.  I was amazed at his answers and his ability to speak at length, off the cuff with no canned response; it is impossible to visualize Trump in the same scenario.  You can read a summary here and listen to a poor quality audio recording if you wish.  I never appreciated how smart the guy really is.  Listening to an hour of Obama is much easier than listening to two minutes of Trump, in my opinion.

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Although I've seen it mentioned only a few times, the idea of the "reputation economy" seems to be gaining a little steam.  I was first aware of it in a novel by Cory Doctorow, an author I've mentioned before, titled Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from more than ten years ago.  But the Chinese are really getting into it now, with all their data acquisition and use of AI.  If your "score" is higher you can rent nicer apartments and get better loans.  Some aspects of the reputation economy are mentioned here and further information can be found in the usual places.  There are dark sides, too, and a recent episode of the cable series Black Mirror gives a glimpse of the ramifications of a reputation economy; it is called Nosedive.

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There has been plenty of yapping about the differences between liberals and conservatives and now the shrinks have weighed in with this article.

Here's a dilemma for the liberals and/or gun control fanatics: what do you do when you find out your pension plan has investments in firearm companies?

Finally, I've been thinking about the Second Amendment.  Not a word is mentioned about ammunition.  If you can't restrict the weapons you can still restrict the ammo, don't you think?

solving our problems the easy way

It's not enough to be a muslim to be an alright guy in the ISIS book.  Certainly you have to be a sunni, but you need to be more than that, you have to be of a particular fundamentalist sect, you have to be basically with them, because if you aren't then you are against them and if you are against  them you are certainly not the right kind of muslim.  Unlike Al Qaeda which was happy just piling up the body count, ISIS actually took and held land, which makes them a bit more rational as far as having a goal.  They could be compared with the crusaders, some of the slaughtering of prots was done under the crusader flag, and who can forget the glorious fourth crusade that sacked Constantinople?  I think crusaders were promised a forgiveness of their sins which is not unlike all those virgins awaiting anyone who dies in a hadj.  I don't think their minds work any differently than ours.  And what do you mean we, you gun nut scum.  (just an illustration, not an insult)

I sent a link, though I forgot to insert it as a link to make for easy clicking, so I thought Beagles would have read up on the ban on research into gun violence, before he posted, but I guess we can wait.  I see that not reading the article has not stopped him from questioning the motives of any possible study.

He does provide an interesting analogy.  If cigarettes cause cancer, instead of banning, well actually heavily taxing, cigs, why not just solve cancer?  Why regulate guns when all we have to do is solve the problem of mental illness?  Why take that long way around the mountain when all you have to do is eliminate the mountain? 

For that matter why have an investigation when it might come to a conclusion you don't like?  Why not just kill the investigation?

But wait, why not follow the words of our dear leader, and just dash into any schoolhouse when we hear shooting?  We won't need to have some loony underpaid patronage character with a gun in the school, as a matter of fact, we won't even need no stinking gun, there's a solution that will please both the pro and anti gun nuts.  Thank you dear leader and we are all awaiting your morning tweets.

The Death Cult

I once heard ISIS described as "an apocalyptic death cult", and I think that pretty well sums it up. Last I heard ISIS had been defeated, but it won't be long before a similar organization rises up to take its place, if it hasn't already. Uncle Ken says that those Islamic terrorists are fighting for a cause. What cause? If it's to spread Islam throughout the land, then why do they kill more of their own people than they do ours? Then again, the Communists killed more of their own people than they did ours too. It seems like, if you want your people to take over the world, it would make more sense to encourage them to be fruitful and multiply than to slaughter them by the thousands. Like I said, though, what makes sense to you and me might not make sense to homicidal maniacs. I think the minds of people like that work differently than the minds of people like us.

I agree that's just speculation on my part, but there are smarter, more educated people than I, and they're being paid a lot more money than I ever was. I always assumed that somebody was doing scientific research on the subject, but now I am told that their funding was cut decades ago. I will reserve my judgement of that until I know more about it. Were they studying how to prevent gun violence, or were they studying how to pass more anti gun legislation? Some people might think that they are one in the same thing, but not necessarily. It's like all the studies that have been done about cancer. Somebody decided a long time ago that cigarettes cause cancer. Well, maybe they do, but did anybody think to study how cancer might be eradicated once and for all like they did with smallpox? Cigarettes couldn't cause cancer if there was no cancer. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but you get my point. If somebody goes into a study with an anti gun bias, he is likely to believe that the easiest way to prevent gun violence is to prevent guns, and not be motivated to look any further for alternate solutions. I'm not saying that's what happened with those particular studies, but if it was, then I can see why the pro gun people would want them de-funded.

Uncle Ken wants to move on to other topics. So how bout them Russians? Thirteen Russians and three Russian corporations have been indicted for fraud and identity theft. The problem is that all of those indictees are presently in Russia and are not likely to come here any time soon, so there will  be no trials, just accusations. So what else is new?

to new topics

There's a big difference between Islamic school take overs and the lone gunmen.  The terrorists have a cause.  It's kind of stupid because when did some terrorist activity ever advance any cause, and I am thinking never, but they seem to think it will,

I wonder about that notoriety thing.  It's just speculation.  I think there is a variety of wacko reasons and there is nothing we can learn by cataloging them.  Arm teachers if you like.  I imagine it will be something like a school by school decision, and I wager the first shot from the teachers' gun will be at some student by accident or drunk or angry way before any lone gunman gets shot.

ICE isn't stopping people on the street and asking for their IDs.  I think the only place that sort of thing happened was in Arizona under Sheriff Joe who is now running in the primary for McCain's seat.  There is another crazy named Kelli Ward in that race and somebody who is not crazy but  is sort of pretending she is because this is Arizona after all.

There was some kerfuffle once and all us state workers had to bring in birth certificates and I believe we also had to do a criminal background thing.

Just now on NPR an interview with the gov of Tennessee.  Remarkable about how people are still talking about ways to solve the problem,  What they are really trying to do is come up with something that they can back that will win them votes in the next election, which is maybe not so bad, because isn't that what democracy is all about?  An interesting matter was brought up.  Since the 90s there has been a ban on congress spending any money to do research on the subject.  Why hasn't this gotten more publicity?  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/04/gun-violence-research-has-been-shut-down-for-20-years/?utm_term=.4bc42fddd01d

You know who is getting a lot of publicity, Wayne Pierre. and his new young woman sidekick with fire in her eyes.  Here are a couple demons that my ilk loves to demonize, but as Beagles has pointed out, and I am inclined to agree, they are more of a sideshow.  The money they give to pols is a pittance against the Koch brothers.  They give money to pro gun guys who come from pro gun districts and would be pro gun regardless of the NRA.

It's a new weekend Gentlemen and hopefully we can move on to fresher topics.

Out of Control

I don't think that internet content can be controlled, although they do control what people download to their own devices. Every once in a while you hear about somebody getting busted for having child pornography on their computer. I assume that they get that stuff off the internet, but I've never heard of anybody getting busted for putting something like that on the internet. I haven't heard about this lately, but some time ago, Islamic terrorists were filming beheadings and other atrocities and putting them on the internet. I brought the subject up on the site I was frequenting at the time, asking why the authorities didn't just trace those posts to their sources and arrest the perpetrators. I was told that it can't be done. Apparently there is software that can make it appear that the post came from somewhere else. They can post something in Afghanistan and make it appear to have originated in Nebraska.

Are they now randomly stopping people on the streets of Chicago and demanding to see proof of citizenship? My brother in law moved to Arizona some years ago, and he had to send back to Cheboygan to get copies of his whole family's birth certificates. He said that "every time you turn around here" somebody wants to see your birth certificate. I don't know if he meant law enforcement or just people like potential employers. I had to show mine when I signed up for Social Security and I had a hard time finding it. I was about to send back to Illinois for a copy when I remembered where I had put it years previous. When I was looking for work after the paper mill closed, I had a folder containing my resume and other stuff an employer might ask to see, including my Social Security card, which I had already replaced. The whole folder had been stuck in a drawer under some other stuff and forgotten.

I'm starting to like the idea of arming the teachers, not all of them, you would only need a few of them in each school. They should undergo some kind of training, and you might have to give them a pay raise for increased responsibility and skills, but it would be cheaper than paying full time security guards to stand around with nothing else to do.

Slight Sunday

Unlike many previous school shootings, the recent event in Florida has legs and slight changes are developing.  After more than a week it's still a hot topic and the NRA is finally feeling some heat with the loss of some corporate affiliations.  Stripping the NRA of its political power would be a good thing and maybe the articulate students from Florida will lead the way.  They're doing a nice job, so far.

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The role of social media has certainly changed in the last few years.  It used to be a swell idea, letting folks get in touch with their like-minded fellows and establish new social communities but the law of unintended consequences is biting society in the ass.  I don't think anyone anticipated how easily Facebook and Twitter could be manipulated, flooding their members with the phony messages of the dreaded bots.  My understanding is that the bots began as a commercial venture to boost the ratings in restaurant reviews; they proved successful and then they grew, moving into the political arena.  But just as you can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, should there be a penalty for intentional false information posted on social media, or any postings by automated bots?

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With immigration being another hot topic these days, I've realized that I have no proof of US citizenship on my person in case ICE ever stops me on the street.  No passport and no copy of my birth certificate, both of which are considered valid proofs of citizenship.  I don't think any other forms of ID will satisfy ICE in case I get hauled in with a bunch of suspicious characters.  I'm not worried yet but it's something I should keep.in mind lest I get deported.  Where they would want to send me, I don't know.

That's Part of the Problem

"My personal fave, banning the weapons, I am for it whether we have school shootings or not.  I just think it is a good idea." - Uncle Ken

 Our local TV news (NBC) is pretty balanced, they try to show both sides of any contentious issue, including this one. In listening to the arguments, I have recently begun to suspect that both the pro and anti gun people have been using the Florida shooting to advance their agendas. It seems to me that it should be the other way around. Whether we ban the guns or arm the teachers, or both, it should be for the purpose of solving the problem, not to advance the long standing agendas of the special interest groups. Although we may never completely stop the killings, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I seem to remember Uncle Ken saying once that we may never eliminate other crimes like armed robbery either, but that doesn't mean we should disband the police forces and give the criminals free reign, or words to that effect. 

Since we are never going to agree about gun control, I have been trying to identify other facets of the problem that might have been overlooked. People frequently refer to these incidents as "senseless", which they certainly are to our sensibilities, but maybe the perpetrators have different sensibilities than we do. Their actions might be perfectly logical to their way of thinking. Since most of them end up dead, usually by their own hand, what do they hope to gain? One thing that comes to mind is notoriety. It would seem that a dead man has no use for notoriety, but that's to our way of thinking. Maybe these guys are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the thrill of feeling important for one fleeting moment before the lights go out. 

Another thing is that they might feel so overwhelmed by their problems, real or imaginary, that they would rather see the world come to an end than continue on the way it has been. It's kind of like the apocalyptic fantasies that have preoccupied people for thousands of years. The world is beyond redemption, so it needs to be destroyed. "Computer, the Enterprise has been over run by hostile aliens. Initiate self destruct sequence." 

I don't see a lot of difference between those lone gunmen and the Islamic terrorists. They both are doing the same thing for the same reason, to force others to do things their way, or to die trying.

no solution

When I looked at Old Dog's link I noticed that things like the Chechen's attacking a Russian school, or Isis attacking that school in Pakistan. I don't think these are the same things, they were done by an armed force and they were done for political reasons.  It seems to me that mass murders by one or two people are a distinctly American phenomenon.  Not entirely American, I am thinking of that Swedish guy who killed all those kids, but even he had some loopy Nazi notion.  The distinctive thing about American killings are that they are done for no apparent reason

I guess we could lump in things like Las Vegas and Aurora they were both done for no apparent reason by one guy.  Seems like the guy in Bath had sort of a reason, though not much of one.  You know there are things like measles and either you have it or you don't, and then there are things like autism where you can have more or less of it and people will disagree on who has it, and there is no real test like viruses in the bloodstream that will reveal it.  I think these mass shootings are like that.

I meant those medical experiments on the condemned to be more like on the common cold or some medical thing, maybe they could try some psychological thing because what the hell, but I doubt that they are going to find anything like the reason people do this and then apply it as a solution to stop them.

Nothing will stop them just like nothing will stop terrorism or traffic accidents or winter.  If we arm our schools to the teeth, guys with guns will get in, if we lock up all the nuts we can find, some will get out and there are new ones born or made every minute, if we stop selling auto and semi guns there are still plenty (though less) out there for nuts to get ahold of.  I doubt that after this long national soul-searching we will implement much of anything.  And woe to the backers of any plan that gets implemented when their plan does not work.

My personal fave, banning the weapons, I am for it whether we have school shootings or not.  I just think it is a good idea.

Maybe Monday we will be on another subject, or maybe there will be another school shooting over the weekend.

The Mad Bomber of Bath

I went to Old Dog's link last night, and I can see what he meant by putting this thing in perspective. The incidents are listed in order of the most deaths, and the 1927 bombing in Bath, Michigan is number four. I was surprised to see how many other countries have experienced incidents like this over the years, since much of the media frenzy about the subject implies that the US is the only one. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the total number of killings per capita for each country. Not that it's a contest or anything like that, of course one death is too many but, like Old Dog said, it should be put in perspective.

I clicked on the Bath incident because it was the closest one to home, and also because it was the oldest. I wanted to see what something like that looked like with the mass media, the social media, and the ARs factored out of the equation. One thing it had in common with the more recent events was that the target was a mass gathering of people. The guy had a specific grudge against the school system because he was a member of the local school board and felt that the other members weren't paying enough attention to him. The Bath schools, previously a collection of one room schoolhouses, had recently been consolidated, putting all the kids in one building. This made it easier to effect mass casualties, which is probably why he chose that particular target. Minutes earlier, the guy had blown up his own house and associated farm buildings, probably because the mortgage was about to be foreclosed. Some time before that, he had murdered his wife, who was dying of tuberculosis. Suffice it to say, he had more than one thing on his mind when he planned all this. That's another thing this one had in common with the more recent incidents, extensive planning. Most of these guys are not acting impulsively, they have given this thing a lot of thought. It has occurred to me that it might not be correct to call somebody like that mentally ill, at least not in the legal sense. Anybody who can put such an elaborate plan together, and then carry it out, certainly must know what he's doing.

Uncle Ken advanced the idea of conducting medical experiments on mass murderers who are captured alive. That's kind of what I was getting at when I said something could be learned from them. At first I thought of dissecting their brains, but there are less invasive ways of getting information like that nowadays. I understand they have equipment that can virtually scan a brain all kinds of ways without harming the subject.

strident movements

I do indeed remember the Mickey Mouse Club.  The whole neighborhood gang would disappear from the alley and dash into their front rooms in front of their brand new tvs.  I was thinking it was 5:00, but wiki tells me it was 4:00.  As Old Dog, my Ten Cat younger brother, says we were a few years older than him, so after awhile it became awfully corny, but then there was the development of Annette Funicello.

Girls were like a mysterious minor annoyment.  Some were prettier than others.  Annette was very pretty, but it wasn't a big deal until she began developing breasts.  Breasts, what a concept, and not long after that our annoying classmates of the opposite sex began doing the same thing.  And the whole world changed.

With the development of our classmates, we no longer needed our Annette fix and the Mickey Mouse Club drifted away.  I don't recall that I ever saw any of Annette's beach movies.  Although she looked fine in her bikini she was just too squeaky clean.


I didn't see in Old Dog's article where the US came in 4th in school massacres.  Seems to me we should be in 1st place, but I guess there are different ways to measure them.  I wrote earlier about the groundhog effect, but this one seems to carry more weight than previous ones.  I am not getting my full political fix because every time I tune into CNN, or even Fox, there are those earnest, tear-stained kids.  They had a little tete a tete with the Donald last afternoon, and I hate to say it, because I hate so say anything civil about the guy, but he was pretty civil.

I don't expect any gun control to pass and I don't think we are going to pay for armed guards at our schools, or fancy mental hospitals and there are no miracle cures, so this will continue.  We'll never eliminate drug addiction or terrorism or school shootings, the best we can do is try to keep the body count low.

My dems plan to ride this movement to victory like they plan on riding Me Too to victory.  I'm not too proud of my party for that because well, both movements make me uncomfortable.  They are too strident.  Their speakers are too loud and too weepy.  They are convinced they are in the right and therefore they must succeed.  I agree with the former but not the latter. 

When you are in the right to compromise is not just a tactical mistake, it is bad, it is like a sin.  It's the kind of thing I decry from the republicans and I don't like to see it in my party.


Despite being a good liberal I was a little soft on capital punishment.  If I liked a candidate for other reasons I didn't mind if he was for capital punishment.  I was like Old Dog, if the guy was never getting out why keep him alive.  My mind was changed when half the people on the Illinois death row were either innocent or didn't get fair trials.  But just for the sake of argument I would prefer medical experimentation to harvesting organs.  I'd be a little nice about it, I'd let it be consensual and there would be a reward, not freedom, but nicer quarters, something like that.

Spare parts, cheap

Couldn't agree more with Galileo, kind of strange to think of finding it in a Disney cartoon.  Anymore aren't they all about princesses?

Yes, it certainly seems that way, and part of the mission of corporate greed to license more characters.  But back in the day, the Disney product was quite different.  I'm about three years younger than you guys, so the arrival of the Mickey Mouse Club on TV may not have made much of an impression on you but it hit all my buttons.  It was on five days a week, with each day featuring a different theme, kind of a variety show for kids.  There were cartoons, of course, but also featurettes of a nearly educational nature.  Movie shorts were popular in those days and Disney made some fine, nearly legitimate documentaries.  We've all heard of lemmings jumping off a cliff, but that was a total fabrication by Disney; lemmings don't jump off cliffs but it was accepted as fact.

I remember the introduction of Ludwig Von Drake, a professorial character who was part of a series of educational cartoons, and I think Jiminy Cricket was his sidekick.  A lot of kids learned to spell encyclopedia when Jiminy sang e-n-c, y-c, l-o, p-e-d-i-a! to a jaunty tune.

Wernher Von Braun appeared in a number of  features, discussing space travel and the world of "tomorrow."  There were a couple of odd features about nuclear power and the atomic bomb, but such topics were viewed differently back in the 50s.s

Despite Uncle Walt being an antisemitic FBI stooge, he provided entertainment with a broader appeal than that of the current Disney corporate moguls.  He had some far reaching ideas, such as EPCOT, which fell by the wayside upon his death.  It's too bad, and now we are stuck with a lot of princess movies.

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Mr. Beagles was correct about the lack of a federal ID card for firearms. I was thinking of the FOID, the firearm owner's identification card, which is unique to Illinois to the best of my knowledge.  The FOID is required for firearm ownership and is issued after a background check by the state police.  There is nothing instant about it; it is supposed to take about thirty days to get but current backlogs have pushed it back to about fifty days.  The weird thing is that once you have the card you can buy firearms and they do not need to be registered on the state level but local ordinances may vary.

The individual states hold the upper hand when it comes to firearm regulation and they are all over the place.  I don't expect any federal legislation to come easily.  Each state makes its own laws, and there is little consistency regarding issues like open carry, concealed carry, castle doctrine, stand your ground, or minimum age for ownership.  It's confusing, but once again Wikipedia comes to the rescue with this web page: state gun laws

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...what do they get out of being part of The Institute?

I like it as a sounding board, a place where questions can be asked about unresolved issues without all the noise of current media.  The excursions down memory lane, along with our different backgrounds and experiences, provide a context which keep me honest in my thinking.  I doubt if I can slip anything past you guys.

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With all the hubbub about the latest classroom shooting it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it's a new or uniquely American phenomenon.  Such is not the case; they go back a long while, in many countries.  The US places #4 when it comes to classroom death toll, with more than forty fatalities at an event in Michigan, way back in 1927.  This article helps put matters in perspective, such as it is: school fatalities

What is revealing is the fate of most of the perpetrators: suicide.  If you want to kill yourself, why take so many innocent victims with you?

I'm not a fan of capital punishment, but I don't see the point of life sentences either, with no hope of rehabilitation.  Little or nothing has been learned from the likes of Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy, or guys like that.  How about this, strip them for parts?  There is a shortage of organ donors and you tell them "Congratulations!  Parts of you will live long and fulfilling lives, and we thank you for your contribution to society! Enjoy your last meal."  Maybe it could be a deterrent.  Facing a life sentence of hard time is one thing but knowing you will distributed piecemeal is another thing entirely.

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I didn't want to bring up anything about politics but this is interesting.  Since Trump's inauguration, 37 legislative seats on the state level have changed from Republican to Democrat.  This is not a good year for the GOP.

bric a brac

I don't care too much about concealed carry.  Well I think people who are packing heat are a bit off, but the street corner shootouts I expected don't seem to be happening.  Nothing much has happened.  Crime hasn't gone down because the miscreants fear their well-armed neighbors, nor are the well-armed neighbors blasting each other over petty disputes. 

It would be nice to do something to keep guns out of the hands or our local gangbangers.  They shoot each other and innocent bystanders at appalling rates, and then there are those toddlers playing with their uncle's gun.  The city and the state try to regulate gun sales but the stores in Indiana are selling them like hotcakes, so it would have to be some federal thing, which will never happen.

Has anybody noticed that there has never been an urban school massacre, just suburban and rural?  Who knows what to make of that.

I don't know where Beagles is getting those numbers.  Here is my certificate and Old Dog is just a bit northwest of me.  Where is Beagles' red dot?

I'm sure Old Dog has seen those Youtubes of artists painting in fast motion, this was just my version of that.  By the way my watercolor class has a show up there now. Perhaps on one of the warmer days that are surely ahead of us he could drop by for a seminar.  It has been awhile.

I don't see us confiscating autos and semi-autos, but if we ban them the resulting supply will slowly dwindle and they will be harder to get.

How do we use pigeons as biometers?  And why bother, don't we have plenty of great apes with humongous brains to test?  You wonder if pigeons roosting on some tall office building wish they were on some windswept cliff in a green wilderness.  Maybe for a spell, but then they spot that squashed Twinkie on the sidewalk far below and they are swooping down thinking the city is the place for me!

Couldn't agree more with Galileo, kind of strange to think of finding it in a Disney cartoon.  Anymore aren't they all about princesses?  But you know it was a great moment forward when somebody thought, let's order the letters, a then b then c... (Any old order would do just as well, I wonder how we got the current order) and then order all the a's by their second letter, and then the third and so on.  Couldn't have a dictionary without that because you would never be able to find a word and would never know when one was left out. 

On the other hand the Chinese with their writing system don't have an alphabet, worse, they have several, and they seem to be doing alright.

Gun Laws - Existing and Proposed

You don't need a federal ID to buy a gun, but you do need one to become a gun dealer. Private sales between individuals are generally not regulated, which is a loophole that needs to be closed. There is probably a rule that says you can only sell so many guns a year before you have to become a licensed dealer, but I don't know what it is. In Michigan you used to need a special permit to buy a handgun, but I think that has been subsumed by the concealed carry permit. Concealed carry permits used to be restricted to people who needed one for a good reason, but now they need a good reason to deny you one. Technically, you don't need a permit to carry an unconcealed gun in Michigan but, if you try it in a public place, they will likely cite you for "brandishing a firearm", or disturbing the peace. Handgun owners generally find it easier to just get the concealed carry permit and be done with it, but there were some people a while back who were trying to test the open carry law. I don't know what became of that, haven't heard anything about it lately.

Concealed carry applicants must take a course and pass a test, but I understand that it's not difficult. Young hunters also need to take a course and pass a test before they can buy their first hunting license. I don't know if that also applies to old guys who decide to take up hunting later in life. When they first passed that law, it said that you needed it if you born after a certain date, so some of us were grandfathered in.

Other than that, the only thing you need to buy a gun from a licensed dealer is an "instant" background check. It's not exactly instant but, unless their computer is down, it only takes a few minutes. First you have to fill out a form that says you are not a convicted felon, drug addict, or mental patient. The computer check is just to make sure you are telling the truth. The problem with that is that your mental health information is protected by privacy laws, so the only thing they can really check is your police record. That's another loophole that needs to be closed, in my opinion.

Michigan and some other states are currently considering legislation that is modeled on a law that California passed some time ago. What this would do is enable the police or anybody who knows you to get a court order temporarily confiscating all your guns if you are having mental health issues that might make you a danger to yourself or others. You can recover your guns only if you can prove that you're all better now which, I suppose, would require a doctor's testimony. They are saying that, if Florida had such a law in place, it would have prevented the latest mass shooting there. It seems the shooter had mental health issues that his own mother had reported to the police because she was worried about him. The police came and talked to him more than once, but they had no legal power to confiscate his guns because he hadn't done anything yet.

Some European countries require hunters to carry liability insurance, which is really cheap because claims are so rare. As far as I know, that just applies to hunters, but it wouldn't be much of a stretch to extend the rule to all gun owners.

I didn't bother to get a certificate for that political quiz, I just wrote down my numbers. My 0.5 on the economic scale puts me just right of center, and my -2.92 on the social scale puts me about a third of the way into libertarian territory. Funny thing, I don't remember any questions pertaining to gun control, but a certain  amount of memory loss is normal at my age.

Talk is cheap

Those animated GIFs are pretty slick, Uncle Ken.  It looks like you either have a camera mounted for that exclusive function or an incredible memory for camera placement.  Either way the results are impressive and I'm only a little bit jealous.

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There have been a few times when I've been locked out of a site because my computer wasn't recognized, and I think it had to do with my infrequent system maintenance.  Cleaning up the browser history and wiping out the cookies is the usual cause.  Some sites have locked me out because too much time has elapsed since my last visit but I can regain access because I have all my login and password info written down a piece of paper.

Could an automatic software update be the cause?  I understand that Windows 10 is notorious for such shenanigans, but that bit about access from Alto, Michigan is strange indeed.  It's quite a distance from Beaglesonia and I have no idea what that's all about.

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I'll join Uncle Ken in banning automatic and semi-automatic weapons; I don't see any justification in their ownership.  But that's a tough genie to put back in the bottle unless you're willing to go house to house to confiscate them.  Never happen, but you could ban sales or transfer of ownership for those already in private hands.

It's just too damn easy to buy firearms in the US, all you need is a proper federal ID card which I understand is not very difficult to acquire.  There should be other requirements, such as classroom courses regarding safety and maintenance with a written test, target practice at a range, also tested, and something new I thought of: insurance.  If you own a car you must have insurance, so why not the same with guns?  Insurance for Mr. Beagles' muzzle-loader would be pretty cheap but his neighbor with the AR-15 would pay through the nose.  This scheme will do nothing about illegal firearms, but most of the recent shootings have been done by previously upright citizens with legal weapons.  Make it too expensive to own such weapons and maybe things will change and we can go back to sticks and stones to settle our grudges if talking it over doesn't work.  This is a half-baked notion that is not fully realized and needs more work, I know.  Would sanctioning the NRA as a threat to public welfare be possible?  They spend a lot of money in Washington and without that dough a lot of the elected officials would change their tunes and start doing something.

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I can't tell where Mr. Beagles sits on that political compass.  Can he provide a link to his certificate?  I'm guessing he's in the bottom half, close to the center between left and right but still in the libertarian camp.

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Last week there was some discussion of pigeons and here's a new twist, using pigeons as biomonitors.  Pigeons can be used to test for urban pollution and diseases, kind of like canaries in the coal mine.  Hey, why not?

And going back even further when Uncle Ken was discussing math, I found the Oscar nominated animation by Disney from 1959, Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land.  It's on YouTube but I neglected to copy the link, sorry.  I remember seeing it, way back when, and it kindled a bit of curiosity in me about math and numbers.  It closes with a profound quote from Galileo, "Mathematics is the alphabet with which god has written the universe."  Nice.

welcome back Beagles

I don't see where the numbers were on that quiz diagram, but if Beagles was halfway down (equidistant between the bottom and the middle) that would put him equal on the libertarian scale with Old Dog and myself.  I wonder if Beagles can post the link to his diagram.

I'll stand by what I said about the shootings relating to the movie Groundhog Day,  We have been here before and we'll be here again.  I don't know that we'll get anything out of capturing him alive.  We have the Colorado guy and the guy who shot that Arizona congresswoman and we haven't learned anything from either of them.  The first school shooter was strangely enough a girl.  The only thing they got out of her was "I hate Mondays," which I hear made a pretty good song title, but not much that was useful.  When somebody does something horrific like this current guy everybody thinks there is some complicated discernible mechanism in his brain that they can decode and prevent and stop the shootings.  There is not.  There is only I hate Mondays. 

Myself I would ban all automatic and semi automatic weapons.  The shootings will still go on, but with the guns harder to get fewer people will get killed, like people still get killed wearing seat belts, but fewer than if they didn't.  Their only use seems to be delighting slavering fools at gun ranges so it's a small price to pay to keep more people alive.

But that will never happen.  Right now we have the children's crusade which is very telegenic, they are so very earnest, how can you stop earnest young folk who know they are in the right?  Easily. 

This just in on the radio some guy who has been talking to that Colorado movie shooter from some years ago.  Did he find out why the guy really did it?  Not really.  Did he find anything that will prevent future shootings?  Not really.

Ken's animated gifs Testing out that link thing.  It worked, and you can give it kind of a title rather than that address.  After every painting session I take a photo of what I have done, and I've found a site (Giphy) where I can feed the images and come out with an animated gif which shows all the steps for a second, kind of cool I think, have a look if you have the time to waste.

Interesting note that Beagles makes about The Institute saving his marriage.  Myself I enjoy the writing, but it wouldn't be any fun if nobody at all was reading it.  And hell, I like to hear what other people have to say.

Beagles is Still Here

I'm still in business, just couldn't think of anything to say lately. I took that political quiz last night and I was going to write about it, but I didn't. I was surprised at how close to the center they put me, only 0.5 on the economic scale. I was deeper into libertarian territory on the social scale, -2.92, which is still less than half. Old age and association with my esteemed colleagues must have mellowed me out over the years.

I wanted to write about that Florida shooting but, like Old Dog, I couldn't think of anything to say that hasn't already been said. I read something interesting the other night on the internet news. What is unusual about the latest atrocity is that the perpetrator was captured alive and intact. Most of those guys end up either being killed by the police or themselves, with the vast majority being suicides. I suppose it's almost impossible to analyze somebody after they've blown their brains out, but there is some hope that they will be able to get some information out of this guy. I understand that his lawyer is trying to trade a guilty plea for his client being spared the death penalty. If that's the case, maybe they could make his continued cooperation part of the deal. I know that everybody is mad at him right now but, if they can look beyond that, maybe he could help them figure out exactly what is wrong with people like him.

About those links: First you select the URL by dragging your curser across it. Than you copy it, which is done with a right click with Windows 10. Then you click on the "Link" icon at the top of the page. A form will appear that asks you where you want the link to take you. Paste your copied URL in that space, then click "OK". The URL should now be blue. If you click on it, it will either take you to the site, or a box will appear under it, and you can click on that. Be careful, though, not to click on the part that says "change", just click on the main body of the box.

What do I get out of participating in the Institute? Well, for one thing, it probably saved my marriage. My hypothetical wife just hates most of the stuff we talk about. I'm the kind of guy who needs to communicate, and everything I post here is one more thing that I won't have to bother my hypothetical wife with. I suppose I could get out more and talk to other people, but who's got time for that?

all alone on Monday morning

Apparently Beagles was premature in announcing that he was back in business.  One has to assume that he is still in disfavor with the google people, or more accurately with the AI of google.  I don't  know if he ever got to talk to a human being.  I haven't seen him on fb either so I don't know where he is, a carbon unit in the pretty far north warming his hands over the burning carcass of his computer, maybe with a blanket to punctuate smoke signals since that may be his only means of communication these days.

Well, it's hard.  I still think Mike Royko was the best of the columnists, but back in the day when I could count on him Monday through Friday I noticed every now and then there was a klunker, not very clever or original.  Years later I used to send emails to a Sun-Times columnist,  I was a little thrilled that he wrote back to me, but his comments became increasingly curt and I realized that he probably got like a hundred of emails every morning and he was just trying to get through them so he could get to the next day's column,  Anyway the subject of Royko came up and I mentioned how I was surprised that every now and then a klunker appeared in his place on the second page of the newspaper, and I think I heard a sigh in his reply, it's just to hard to serve up something sparkling five days a week, fifty or so weeks of the year.

And indeed it is.  It is much easier if I have something to respond to, something to pick a few things out of and then blather them over, turn a phrase or two, get a post of a respectable length, hit the update button and got on with my day.  Sometimes I say with a sigh, I don't know why I bother.

Except there I am in the morning, fresh and clean from my shower, my well-fed pets sprawling contently, a freshly brewed cuppa in my hand, what else would I do?  I wish more people were reading it.  I read a couple newspapers, some magazines, website stuff, watch hours of cable tv.  It would be so nice to see one of those cynical pundits adjust his specs and begin a pronouncement, "Uncle Ken, of the well-regarded Beaglesonian Institute put the matter very clearly when he said, blah blah blah." 

But it's just fun to write, it's fun to be a witness to the passage between the mind and the fingers, a little more studied than talking because you can't just blurt something out, it has to get to your fingers so there is time to consider, but mostly there is all that stuff that is already down on paper, so to speak.  You have to take that into account.

Well I am finishing my second cup of coffee and this post has grown to acceptable length, so I'll just leave the dawgs this morning with a question, what do they get out of being part of The Institute?

Beagles is Back in Business

I didn't have time to phone Google today, but I was able to log in normally tonight. They sent me a couple of notices that somebody tried to access my account from Alto, Michigan, but the time stamps indicated that it was me both times. I sent them a reply explaining what it looked like from my end and that they can't send me a verification code by text message because I don't own any kind of mobile device. I gave them my regular telephone number in case they ever want to contact me again, but I don't know if it did any good because I don't know if a real live person will ever read my reply. Funny how upsetting it is to me when my computer doesn't work properly because I didn't even have a computer 20 years ago, and that didn't bother me at all.

Da Quiz

Last night shortly before turning in I got a fb post from Beagles. 

Google is not allowing me to log into Blogger or my email account. They say that they don't recognize my computer and want to send me a verification code by text message, but I don't have a cell phone. I am going to have to phone them and try to talk to live person. Maybe tomorrow.

I wished him luck and told him maybe we could do some kind of workaround using one of our cellphone numbers or he could send me his post through fb messenger and I could post it for him.  In the meantime we will just have to wait and see.  Since his gmail is gone our only source of information will be through fb, though I assume he can read the blog,

There are indeed signs in the city telling people not to feed the birds.  When my sister and I are having lunch outdoors there are always birds looking on hungrily and I indulge them with some crumbs even though my sister says that when the gendarmes haul me off she won't be going my bail.

But I expect they have better things to do, and sure enough I read an article last year where the cops said they had better things to do and maybe they would give you a warning, but that would be it, unless you gave them some lip or they didn't like the cut of your jib and then it would be a nightstick massage.  They didn't actually say that last part, but I wanted to make the whole thing more colorful.

There used to be a pigeon man.  He had a little newstand at LaSalle and Division, and though customers were lucky to get a grunt out of him, he loved pigeons and they loved him.  He would stand out there with arms outstretched and the birds would line his arms like Francis of Assisi.  Later he moved to Lincoln Square and then one day he got run over and killed.  There were a few articles in the paper about it, a beloved character even if he didn't like people.

When I worked at what is now the Thompson Center birds used to get in, generally little birds and the kindly state workers would leave out popcorn or whatever for them.  Then one day a pigeon flew in and he seemed quite at home pecking at the floor like it was a sidewalk.  There were several attempts to trap him and get him out, and I think one of them finally succeeded.  There was also some talk of poisoning him.  We had a secretary at the time who I did not like at all and she was all for poisoning him, after all, she argued there were plenty of pigeons outside.  Plenty of people outside too, I said, why don't we poison you?  Humph, she replied.

I hate those online quizzes, but Old Dog's seemed a little more dignified than what Star Wars character would you be, so I took it.  I expected I would be more leftist and more authoritarian than Old Dog, but it turned out that I was almost in the same spot as him, actually just a tad less authoritarian and less lefty. 

https://www.politicalcompass.org/certificate?pname=Uncle+Ken&ec=-5.25&soc=-6.31.  Here is Old Dog:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/certificate?pname=Old+Dog&ec=-6.25&soc=-4.82, and we will be waiting on Beagles.  How do you do that thing to turn a link blue again?  I can't find it in the archives.

Happy weekend everybody and I hope Beagles and Google come to an agreement before Monday.

excuse me

Just parking the location of my certificate so that it will be there in the morning for my post.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/certificate?pname=Uncle+Ken&ec=-5.25&soc=-6.31

Hell hath no fury

How can you push a button improperly?

Ah, therein lies the rub.  Before hit the "print" button there are many other buttons to push and settings to be made.  Paper weight (in grams per square meter) must be specified, paper surface, i.e. glossy, must be specified, size of course, and a few others I have forgotten.  Even if all those parameters are correct you may inadvertently choose the wrong paper tray (source) which may have a different paper stock  Oh, there's also the option of single-sided or duplex (two sided), and if it's duplex, is it head to head or head to foor?  Maybe the document needs to be collated and stapled or finished in some other way.  Those machines have amazing capabilities and an equally amazing number of ways that things can go wrong.  I've seen more problems with the automatic document feeders than the printers themselves but I don't know if that qualifies as a paper jam.

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It seems that every neighborhood had a pigeon fancier, at least back in the fifties.  There were a lot of coach houses in my area, most of which were converted to two-car garages, but a couple also included pigeon lofts.  I never understood the appeal but there have been stranger hobbies.  Many of the movies I've seen show New York City as being a hotbed of pigeon racing, with a pigeon coop on nearly every flat roof in the poorer parts of town.  I think Mike Tyson used to raise pigeons, and I'm not about to argue with him about his choice of hobbies.  Anyhow, there are a lot of signs in Chicago stating that it's illegal to feed the pigeons but that law is seldom enforced, and it's usually old folks that are dumping big bags of bird feed in the parks.  As soon as they show up the birds start flocking; they must have agreed on a specific meal time.

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There's not much to say about the recent school shooting that hasn't been said before, regrettably.  One new twist that I've seen is in the Twitterverse.  There is a lady who is a writer for the Jimmy Kimmel show that is responding to tweets by the politicians when they blather their "prayers and heartfelt wishes."  She's been responding with the amounts of money they've received from the NRA.  Burn!

And slowly but surely, the Republicans are losing the female vote and this fall's elections will be a big game changer.

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Although we tend to think in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, there is another way to look at it.  I found an online test that determines where you stand on the "political compass."  There are four quadrants, split along the axes of right/left and authoritarian/libertarian.  This page will explain it a bit and provide a link to the test: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/13/take-the-test-to-see-which-pol.html

I took the test and each question has only four choices: strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree.  There is no option for the wishy-washy.  As I took the test I was thinking that the results would indicate that I was really a right wing loon, but I was wrong.  I am firmly in the "left/libertarian" quadrant, to the right of Noam Chomsky but to the left of Bernie Sanders.  You can even get a certificate, in pdf format, for later printing.  My certificate can be viewed here, but it takes a little time to load: https://www.politicalcompass.org/certificate?pname=Old+Dog&ec=-6.25&soc=-4.82

Probably a pointless exercise, but I thought it was a fun thing to do.

groundhog day just two days after groundhog day

It's been pretty quiet up north lately.  My whole morning ritual of start the coffee, shower, feed the cats, pour myself a cup, fire up the computer and see what has come over the transom while I have been fast asleep, thrum my thumbs in front of the keyboard while coffee fills my humongous (as I tell the cats) great ape brain. formulate a response, and let her rip.  But this morning there is nothing to respond to. 

The morning after a school shooting, the 18th such morning in the 35 days of this year that have so far elapsed.  Of course this one is probably the worst, so far, but still that is a lot of shootings.  I just now did a bit of internet research and I have to say my side has loaded up on this a bit.  Some of them are suicides and some of them are stray bullets that didn't hit anybody.  Here's a better statistic 439 shot since Sandy Hook in 2012, but then only 121 of them died.  On the other hand this is only school shootings, there are all those other mass shootings. 

Groundhog day was just a few days ago.  It used to just mean how many more weeks of winter but since that movie it has come to mean anything that happens over and over again.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday punted on questions about whether policymakers should take a stand on mental health and gun control, saying that "there's a time" to have such conversations.

"There's a time to continue to have these conversations about how through law enforcement, how through mental illness funding that we make sure that people are safe," Scott said at a news conference in Parkland, Fla. 

Scott's comments came hours after a gunman opened fire on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, leaving 17 people dead. 

Scott, a Republican, has an "A+" rating from the National Rifle Association's Political Victory Fund.

How many times have we heard this?  When is the time to have these conversations?

Remember those bump stocks, good for nothing but making a big bang and shooting fish (people) in a barrel?  After Las Vegas it was not the time to have a conversation about them and the last I heard they were selling like hotcakes.

Ah these anti automatic weapons posts just write themselves/

the obsolescent and useless male

I was going to say that Old Dog didn't experience as many paper jams at Kinko's as we did in our little state office because they had professional people operating them, but then I remember his disdain for the young 'uns operating the machines, and really it wasn't a matter of knowing how to use the machine to perform a simple copy.  How can you push a button improperly? 

The scourge is letting off Joshua Rothman awfully easy about that decimal mistake.  I know I would never get such leniency here at the Institute. There is a letter to the editor section of the New Yorker and since they are taking this week off there is yet time to dash one off, the phrase, as seen in a post on The Beaglesonian Institute would do well to promote our little font of wisdom.

Did I read correctly that Beagles is eschewing his portion of social security?  In the interest of the deficit is he willing to tell the gummint to stop sending him his direct deposits?  He certainly doesn't speak for me, or I expect Old Dog, or basically all old Americans.  A lower birthrate is certainly better for the world, in specific cases like Japan it is not so hot, but that's because they won't let any new people in.

I think it was sometime before we evolved into those majestic slime molds that we discovered sex, and amoebas aside, have done very well with that invention, evolving to meet the needs of the environment until we became the hairless apes we are today.  If the regular guy marbled crayfish hasn't been taking over the world, it's hard to see how a cloned variant could be doing the job. Perhaps the derby-domed folks at BBC, could not help but oh, exaggerate a wee bit.  And indeed extensive internet research (clicking the link within the link) reveals that taking over the world may be a bit of an exaggeration (perhaps they have been listening to Beagles who is always alarmed at non-white and gay people taking over the world), and that it is all marbled crayfish that are having great success in Madagascar of which the cloning variety is just a variant on.

And mutant, really, aren't we all mutants of something else?  Sex has always been more varied in the lower orders as we mammals like to think of them, but one wonders.  This is a pretty major change.  I guess as soon as she achieves maturity, having whole chromosomes in her eggs begins to reproduce her clones with no help from anybody else.

Women, you know, they don't say so, but sometimes you get the impression that they would be happier without us.  And now that I think about it, they say it all the time.  I don't suppose there is any disputing that we are bigger assholes than they are.  We males have never been all that worried about their taking over, because they would need a few of us just to keep the species going, and though most of us would be gone, there was a small chance that we, individually, might be the ones kept busy keeping the species going, and it seemed like it was worth the chance.

There are several species between us and crayfish, but if this ever hits the hairless apes they won't even need us to keep the species going.  Just saying. 


Pigeons huh?  When I came back to Chicago from Texas dead broke and was living in my parents' attic there was a guy on the block who kept pigeons.  His roof was full of them and the neighbors hated him.

It Was Pigeons

My dad raised pigeons right up till they moved to Palos. We did raise a brood of bantam chickens once from one mother hen. They had the run of the yard, which was a mistake, because they all mysteriously disappeared one day. I seem to remember some ducks too, but that was also a one shot deal. Central Steel must have bought the old house in 1966 because my parents were already in their new place when I came home on leave in June of that year. The store was closed some time in the 1950s and we turned it into a rec room, which might be why the house seemed big to Dory. I don't remember anybody having "Dory" as either a first of last name.

The article that Old Dog linked us to said that the declining birthrate was a bad thing, but I seem to remember reading that opinion someplace else previously. The theory is that less people leads to reduced economic activity. Smaller families generally have more disposable income, so that should mitigate the effect somewhat, in my opinion. Another thing they are worried about is that there will be less people working and paying Social Security tax to support the retirement of all us Baby Boomers. I have been hearing reports of Social Security going bankrupt since I first started paying into it, and I never thought I would see a dime of that money. I have gotten more than my share back by now so, as far as I'm concerned, they can pull the plug anytime.

I suppose that fixing the Cheboygan County roads is not the same thing as winning a war or educating kids. The reason I brought that up was that they had a plan with specific goals and a timetable to accomplish them, while neither the military nor the schools seem to. Uncle Ken would know more about the schools than I do but, at least with the military, I can tell you that, if you don't know where you're going or when you plan to get there, you will probably end up arriving late somewhere else. I don't blame the soldiers for this. Our government sends them into a country with no specific mission other than to go out on patrol, get ambushed, and then defend yourself as best you can. What kind of way is that to win a war?

Of course I thought of "The Jam on Gerry's Rock" when the article mentioned log jams. I understand that they don't float logs down rivers much anymore and, when they do, they break up log jams with dynamite. Seems like a better way, safer and more effective as well.

Those mutant ninja crayfish are pretty scary but, since they are all clones of each other, their lack of genetic diversity might eventually prove their undoing. Meanwhile, I hope they're good to eat.

The obsolescent male

Uncle Ken may have forgotten that I used to work at FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) where they had copiers in abundance, some small, some large.  The biggest was a beast by Xerox, must have been fifteen feet long.  I don't know if it was the quality of paper used or the skill of the operators but paper jams weren't that common, as I recall.  When they did occur they were usually easily unjammed.

But Uncle Ken struck gold with that link; it had something for everybody.  For us Chicago types, the reference to the dropping crime rate was amusing.  I forgot for a moment that Mr. Beagles worked at a paper mill, but did he catch the reference to log jams, a la "Jam on Gerry's Rock?"

And yours truly enjoyed the "knotty details" of the article but I found, what I consider, a glaring error.  Did you guys see anything wrong with this?: But our images cannot be off by more than eighty-five microns”—a third of a thousandth of an inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.”

I regret to say that it jumped out at me, but 85 microns is more than three-thousandths of an inch, which is more than ten times a "third of a thousandth."  I double-checked my math and used an online source to verify and, yep, a big error indeed.  Being the generous sort, I will attribute it to a misplaced decimal point, happens all the time.

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Birth rate is tricky.  Too high, people starve and resources are strained.  Too low, the society can become destabilized.  I recall a figure of more than two (but less than three) children per family for an ideal birth rate for a stable population.

If so, Western countries are facing a big problem.  Sperm counts have fallen 50% over the last forty years.  South America, Asia, and Africa have not shown such declines but the studies for those areas are inconclusive.

The cause of this decline has not been determined with any certitude but I wonder if it has anything to do with the way food has been produced in the West since WWII.  The use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and preservatives has been rampant and maybe it takes a generation or two before the effects manifest themselves.  There won't be any easy answers for this problem.

It's not just human males that are facing fertility anomalies.  There is a mutant crayfish, an invasive species, running amok in Europe.  They are all females, and their young are born as fertilized females; no males required.  I don't think there are any males at all in this species, which is very weird for a life form more advanced than an amoeba.  You can read more about this critter here: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-43032061
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A while back we were talking about Bitcoin, and I mentioned the massive amount of electricity that is required.  Iceland is facing that problem now.  Some data mining companies want to move there but are being denied; electrical requirements will exceed capacity and they may run out of juice.  It's a funny world we are living in, but not funny "ha ha."

funding the non military part of the country

I was on the stationary bike in the gym yesterday, and a guy came in and sat on the bike next to me.  "Let's race," I offered, which is rare because in general nobody in the gym talks to each other.  But then we fell into conversation and it turned out that we were both from Gage Park.  He was five years younger than me and lived at 52nd and Sacramento which is about a mile from where I grew up so it didn't seem like we'd have much in common, but then I remembered Bednar's butcher shop. 

Maybe the shop was gone by then because he didn't remember it, but he did remember Old Man Bednar who had a big old house and kept chickens and other animals.  He was wondering when Central Steel and Wire bought up the place.  His name was Dory if that means anything.

What struck me about the paper jam article, was on the one hand you had the sure digital stuff, the circuit boards with their little programs and the metal stuff, and on the other hand you had the analog organic stuff, the paper, which had once been alive, or at any rate was made of something that once was alive, so no two sheets of paper, like snowflakes, were alike.

I don't know if Beagles or Old Dawg ever worked in an office but copy machines are big fucking deals.  The smooth running of, in my case the state, depended on the smooth running of those little rollers and a paper jam put an immediate stop to that.  The machine was pretty helpful, there were all kinds of codes that led to different parts of the machine you could open up to see where paper residue might be residing.  And the article was right about it being a torture chamber for paper, what was left of the paper wasn't pretty, like a mad dog had had its way with it.

Polls and studies one of my pet peeves.  There are rules for these things you know, ways to make them more or less accurate.  But nobody pays any attention to that.  They just grab the polls and studies that back up their viewpoint and sweep the others into their bottom drawers.  If you had a little rudimentary knowledge of how the poll or study was conducted you would be able to gauge how accurate that might be.  I once wrote to a couple of columnists who had different sides of an issue, both buttressing their arguments with study results but no details, about how important the details were they both responded that they didn't want to bore their readers.

As far as I know everybody still thinks that a reduction in the birth rate is a good thing, who now thinks it is a bad thing?

I don't think explaining to me what tanks the army is going to buy would make me any more eager to give the army more money, and I don't think me explaining the good work of social programs would make the republicans any more eager to fund them.  The republicans get all pious when they are out of power about the deficit, but what they really mean is that they want to cut government social programs and the taxes that rich people pay to fund them, but they love to throw money at the army.  They are also big on privatizing army services so maybe the best thing to do is consider the whole rest of the country a support system for the army, 

Generally the people who join the army come from the lower classes which get the most of the social services that the republicans hate funding, but if they looked at it as providing cannon and parade fodder maybe they'd be more eager to fund them.

Staying Ahead of the Machine

I just read Uncle Ken's link about paper jams. I know from my own paper mill experience that paper making and paper processing machines move really fast. I forget how many feet per minute, but it's really fast. If you wait until a problem manifests itself, it's too late. You've got to be proactive instead of reactive. It's like my grandson told me when he was teaching me about the internet, "You've got to stay ahead of the machine." I knew a guy at the mill who had the reputation of being a really good machine tender. I saw him once awaken from a sound sleep, walk over to the control panel, make an adjustment, and go right back to sleep. I asked him about it later and he told me that he had developed a sixth sense over the years. He could tell something was wrong by a subtle change in the sound and vibration of his machine, even when asleep. You can't learn a skill like that from a book.

I'm not sure if something like that could help you with sex, but it might. I read Old Dog's link about sex last night, and found that interesting too. The thing about any kind of poll or survey, especially one about sex, is that you have no way of knowing if the respondents are telling the truth. I don't think the fact that their anonymity is guaranteed matters all that much. Some people have been habitual liars for so long that I don't think they even know the difference anymore. I have long suspected that about half of everything you read, or hear, or see on television is not true. The trouble is that you don't know which half. Nevertheless, if people didn't conduct all those polls and surveys, we wouldn't know anything at all about what other people are thinking or doing. You can't go by what your friends and family tell you because they might not be representative of the population at large and, of course, they can lie as well as the next person. Let us assume, then, for the sake of discussion, that the people in the study were being as honest as anybody, which means that there is probably some truth in the study's findings.

Okay, so people are doing it less than they used to. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It would be nice if we could assume that less quantity automatically leads to better quality but, of course, we cannot assume any such thing. I think that both the quantity and the quality of sex in the 60s and 70s was better than in out parents' generation, just going by the way our parents talked about it, or rather didn't talk about it. Then again, some of the guys I knew who talked about it the most back in the day, subsequently were proven to not know what they were talking about. So go figure.

One thing that struck me was that the authors of the article seemed to think that the reduction in the birth rate was a bad thing. Back in our day, all the experts were saying that the world was getting overcrowded and that, if we didn't start having fewer kids, we were in for trouble down the road. Well, we're down the road now, and people are having fewer kids, but now they're saying that's a problem. Go figure some more.

I don't think that just throwing more money at the schools or the military is going help make either one of them more effective. What's needed, and seems to be lacking, is some kind of cohesive plan. For as long as I can remember, our local road commission has been asking the people for more money so they can fix the roads, and the people always voted it down, until last time. What they did different was they made a prioritized list of the roads that were in the worst shape and promised that they would fix them in that order as the money became available. It's been a few years now and, as far as I know, they have kept their promise. Apparently, people are more likely to approve a tax for a specific purpose like that than they are to approve something general like "fix the roads" or "fix the schools". Of course, no plan will work if people don't implement it. They can't just talk about it, they have to actually do it. Lots of luck with that one!

courage

I hope Beagles is okay this chilly morning, Old Man Winter's last big blast, the final tilt of the arctic vortex, like the noir detective tipping his fedora to the hard-boiled tomato?  Probably not, but somewhere on the other side of feb, deep into March the nymph of spring is tossing in her pale green gown.  When  the lately considered Dan Rather stepped into the shoes of the master it was wondered what could he say to match and that's the way the world is, and he came up with courage.  Even then it was considered a little lame, but perhaps a good word for the empire of Beaglesonia as we approach the hump of feb and the downward trek that will take us to smooth green plain of spring.

It was indeed Paul Ryan who drove me to it, the rest of them are dimwits or lunatics or grifters, but  Paul Ryan, he seems like, he has the manner of, a reasonable man, and there he was lying his head off in that glib earnest manner of his.  And then Rand Paul, singing that sweet  honest tune about our foreign policy, sweeter and more honest than any of my beloved dems, what can I say, it pushed me over the edge.


I think PTSD and shell shock are the same thing.  Neither has any hard definition (indeed they are now ascribing PTSD to people who have had a rocky road even if they have never been to a battle field.), and they are both pretty understandable.  I think it is worse lately.  During the WWs when you were back from the front you could relax, but less so in Vietnam, and less than that in the middle east with all those ieds and car bombs. 

Not only are child pregnancies down but crime is way down from where it was forty years ago, and yet people still think it is getting worse, fed of course by the drumbeat of fear of the crime crazed illegal immigrants.  Good article in the New Yorker on that subject in the latest issue, and speaking of which there was a great article in that same issue about paper jams.  Paper jams?  Shit, I thought, surely they are running out of stuff to write about, but I paid good money for that issue and I was going to at least skim the first couple paragraphs and when I did I was enthralled.  I think it will especially intrigue Old Dog with his love of complicated knotty details, but Beagles might like it to and here it is: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist

The Sun-Times, Trib and Yahoo all predict above freezing temps by midweek.  Courage.

Fire away, Uncle Ken!

Friday morning did not yield the typical post from Uncle Ken, and it took me by surprise.  I don't recall him going off like that before, you could even call it a rant, and I don't know if it was because of a particular news item or the result of the cumulative Trumpian nonsense and at this point I am afraid to ask.  And in a very atypical fashion, there was a very early Saturday morning post, around 3am or so, where he kind of settled down a bit.  In any case, I'm not going to make anything of it and I'm glad he took the opportunity to vent.  We all need to do so once in a while, even as it seems futile to make sense of the current goings on, especially in Washington.

But I want to make it clear that I'm in almost complete agreement with Uncle Ken's righteous indignation, especially regarding military spending.   It's completely nuts and we have no business getting sucked into civil wars or local skirmishes.  Last century it was the Commies, now it's the terrorists, and I'm wondering if they are all straw men to bolster that military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.  The US sure seems to sell a lot weapons but as long as those sales improve the balance of payments and provide jobs not much is going to change.

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And then Uncle Ken's post got me thinking about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and how prevalent it is among the returning troops.  I don't think it's the same thing as shell shock but something that first occurred in Vietnam, where it was almost impossible to distinguish between enemy combatants and civilians.  In the Middle East you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys unless they are shooting at you, or so I've read, unlike fighting the Germans or Japanese in WWII.  The bad guys wore different uniforms, were easy to spot, and.the rules of engagement were easy to follow.

I don't know all the causes of modern PTSD but I suspect that the pointless nature of the fighting has a lot to do with it, along with horrific amount of collateral damage like women and children.  Maybe it's simply moral guilt, with the guys thinking they are fighting for something and then realizing they are fighting for nothing.  I haven't read about any flag waving from those guys returning from combat overseas but maybe it's not a newsworthy topic.  If Trump wants a military parade it should consist solely of wounded veterans and widows and orphans marching alongside empty caskets.  War is still hell.

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Recently I mentioned something about declining teen pregnancies, and what do you know, a recent article on the Politico site bears it out a bit:  https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/08/why-young-americans-having-less-sex-216953

There is either something in the air or the Institute members are really tuned in.  Or it's a coincidence, flip a coin.

guilty as charged

by Beagles.  I should spend less time watching cable tv and more time on the balcony enjoying a frosty IPA.

Too Much Television

It sounds like Uncle Ken has been watching too much television again. He should take a break from the tube and go outside and play in the snow. Lord knows you guys in Chicago have been getting enough of it lately. We haven't been getting nearly as much on our side of the Jet Stream, just day after day of bone chilling Arctic cold. If this keeps up, we might run out of firewood before we run out of winter and have to rely on the gas furnace to keep us warm. I'm not complaining, you understand, just saying.

the budget passes

Trump is like a child, he is so ignorant and self-centered, lives in such a fantasy world of military parades and sword dances that in a way he is not  responsible.  Pence is a cunning dunce waiting for the emperor to be slain so he can take the throne, despicable but a stock character in a Shakespeare play.  McConnell is a weasel, near the bottom of the animal kingdom, but nevertheless an animal in good standing.  I think maybe Paul Ryan is the worst.  It almost seems like he would know better with his aw shucks boy scour manner, but he can turn on the spiel with the drop of a Davy Crockett hat.

And there he was yesterday morning spieling for the army.  The budget had to be passed so that GI Joe could buy shoes for his kids.  The army is in poor shape, we are, sort of, in three wars, there are all these training accidents.  The army needs more money.  Remember when the reps were down on the public schools.  They were just no good they claimed and therefore we shouldn't be giving them any money.  The problem can't be solved by throwing money at it they claimed.  The army hasn't won a war since WW II and they aren't winning any now so the solution is to throw more money at them.

Okay, that last part is a little deceptive.  They haven't won any wars besides Desert Storm One, but they have been in a lot of crappy meaningless wars.  But we shouldn't even have been in those wars, so what do we need an army for?  And that money isn't going to buy GI Joe's kids shoes, it's going to buy weapon systems that may or may not work,but will work to transfer money into the pockets of that well-known complex.  And how about that hundred million that the armed forces, gosh, doesn't know what happened to it?  Does anybody doubt it ended up in the pockets of fat cats?  Will it be investigated?  Not by the party that runs everything now and is bankrolled by fat cats.

But this evening, right around supper time, clicking through channels, what was that sweet song?  There it was on CNN.  Ron Paul, that crazy fucker who I hate, I hate almost everything he does and says.  But I couldn't agree more when he talks about stupid wars.  Yes, the plain truth, that not even my hero Obama would speak.  Obama was way more of a hawk than I thought he would be.  What do we need this big army for?  We don't know which side we are on in the middle east, we really don't give a fuck what happens in Afghanistan, all our expensive fancy weapons don't mean shit to Kim Jong-un's goose stepping hordes and mildly attractive sister.  And the deficit, my god the deficit that the reps are always preaching about, how about those hot-air stalwarts in the freedom caucus, ballooned like never before.  Nobody can bust a budget like the reps in control of the gummint.

Our people are going jobless, hungry, homeless, attending crappy schools.  What kind of country is our money-sucking army defending?

That's My Line!

I'm sure that I've told this story before, but we never get tired of those old classics. I must have been four or five years old when my grandfather asked me if I was good for a nickel, which I indignantly denied. Then he asked me if I was good for a dime, which I also denied. When he upped the ante to a quarter, I cried out in frustration, "No Grandpa, I'm good for nothing!" It was spontaneous the first time, but Grandpa got such a kick out of it that he insisted on repeating the ritual for some time after that. Even though we had established that I was good for nothing, he always gave me the quarter anyway. I told my mother at some point that I was becoming a little uncomfortable with the game, but she said that I should continue to go along with it because it made Grandpa happy. My mom always said that we should be nice to old people because we don't know how long they will be with us. I don't remember how long we played this game, but Grandpa died when I was 11 or 12, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't that long.

I know that sex has been studied to death, but has anybody studied why people lie about it so much? Many of the people who contributed to the Kinsey Report must have been lying through their teeth because they reported some pretty bizarre and improbable behavior. I have long suspected that a lot of people don't distinguish between fantasy and reality, it's all the same to them. I guess it's technically not a lie if they believe it, but there is such a thing as lying to yourself. I have never understood why some people seek to escape reality when I have spent most of my life doing just the opposite, but I never claimed to be normal.