they don't make em like they used to.

You call that a truck, now here is a truck.  No CD player but surely a radio, surely an ashtray conveniently located, no air conditioning but windows that roll down with cool handles.  How do the windows roll down in the new truck? 

This is 1949, Beagles would likely have been just beginning Kindergarten at Sawyer School, see how much better trucks looked in those days?  Note the handsome well-shaped nose, the headlights prominently mounted on the fenders which denote the powerful wheels.  The grill could use a little more flair in my humble opinion, but all in all a handsome citizen of the road. 

That new guy, note how the headlights are squashed to the ends of the grill and bisected to lose whatever prominence they might have had.  It was a sad day in 1958 when the automakers all together put in double headlights so that they were no longer the eyes of the car.  Look at that brash grinning grill on the 2019.  If it were wearing a baseball cap, it would have been put on backwards. Bah!


I get confused by things like single payer and medicaid for all and the various terms the candidates give for their ever changing plans and just call the whole thing socialized medicine for short.  Would Beagles refuse his monthly check if it was call Socialist security?

The reason we have those gargantuan insurance companies in the USA is because during WW II, wages were frozen.  Workers were scant and since companies could not raise their wages to attract them they offered medical insurance and that's how medical insurance came to be provided by employers.   I guess it didn't work out too badly at first, most people had jobs and medical care wasn't so godawful expensive, but these days it is a mess.  If we hadn't made that move in WW II we might have come to a sensible healthcare system like most of the world has, but anymore the insurance companies are titans squashing any chance at reform.


I was never comfortable with our shenanigans in the mideast, backing opposing factions because they were on our side against ISIS, but suddenly pulling out in a fit of pique, knowing that Istanbul has a fine Trump Tower, doesn't seem like good diplomacy.  The GOP senators seem to be in high dudgeon, but by the time Moscow Mitch does anything the Kurds will be gone, gone, gone, solid gone.

Did anybody besides me find it shocking that hardly a rep sen can be found who thinks that dealing with a foreign nation for a personal gain is a bad practice?