looking for a silver lining

Looks like a done deal.  Late last night I heard that Lamar (many years ago when he was running for prez he took to calling himself Lamar! but I guess that was the exuberance of youth) had decided that there was no point in calling witnesses.  Kind of odd. he is retiring, has nothing to lose, could have gone out standing up for something. 

That leaves John Bolton standing out alone, like the cheese.  What is his game?  What was his game more like it.  If he was standing up for something he believed in why didn't he say something when it might have made a difference?  Did he want to keep his ties with the republican party?  That's gone.  All his old supporters are trashing him with vigor.  He will never work in this town again.  Was he concerned about sales of his book?  Trump has a hold on that and it will never see the light of day.  He was sort of, kind of, a little bit of, a hero for the dems because we are in total defeat over this and grasping at straws.  But now that he is ineffectual well, we never really liked him anyway.  Well as they like to say about friendship in DC, I hope he has a dog.

It's likely I am grasping at straws but I see a silver lining this snowy morning.  I pretty much knew that we were never going to toss him out of office.  What I was hoping for was a big todo that would result in a blow to the reps come election day.  A lot of folks aren't watching this very closely and just hearing that the Trumpists would not allow witnesses might strike them as unfair.  Then there is Dershowitz's absurd theory that the prez can do no wrong.  That might stick in some craws. 

Pretty slim hopes but linings are not very thick.

hoping i am wrong

Well he looks like a libertarian.  I like the hat.  Probably hss more charisma than Dumb and Dumber who they ran last time.  Anything to draw off the potential Trump vote in a purple state.

Right now, and this could change, but right now it looks like the Trumpists are going to be closing things up by the end of the week.  Moscow says he has the votes locked up and nobody is saying otherwise.  Bolton's book is stifled, and it doesn't look like he will be saying boo.  The Trumpists are saying so what if he tried to sell out his country,  Nothing to look at here.  The going theory among them is if Trump believes he is the chosen one then anything he does to give himself an edge in the election, is perfectly fine.

Well I can only hope that I am wrong

Vermin For President!

As this impeachment farce keeps grinding on, the Libertarians are starting to look good to me again.  They have already held a primary in New Hampshire, and it was won by a guy named Vermin Supreme.  I am not making this up!  That isn't the name he was born with, but he legally changed it to that some time ago.  Vermin has run for various offices in the past, on both the Democrat and Republican tickets, but I believe this is the first time he has won an election.  As our next president, Vermin promises to make us all brush our teeth and to give each and every one of us our very own pony.  I already brush my teeth, and I have no use for a pony, but at least he doesn't want to raise my taxes and take away my guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermin_Supreme

the shadow knows

I don't think either of the dawgs has as much interest in the proceedings of impeachment at I do, but there is nothing over the transom this morning and it helps me to keep what's going on in my mind to put it into writing and I feel that Beagles does not always get enough information to make a declaration so I consider this a favor for him.

The dems opening statements were calm and repetitive.  The nature of the charges against the prez are not that complicated and can easily be explained, and pretty well proved, within half an hour, and since people would be tuning in and out this seemed like a pretty good decision.  The problem was that it was pretty boring.  Who would listen to the whole thing?  When the reps made their opening statements I expected a lot of hooting and hollering like in the house, but I was strangely disappointed in that they were pretty calm.  Since they didn't want to touch the nuts and bolts of the charges with a ten foot pole, and since at that time they had their 51 votes in Moscow's breast pocket they just took to blasting the dems in general, current reps and sens, Obama, Hilary, Bill, the press, and whatever, mainly with a view of the watchful eye of their leader, hoping for a pat on their head.

And then along came John, 
Milk-mustached John
Strut-walking John
Straight-talking John
Along came enigmatic, book-writing, John.

And everything is different.  Previously the reps were adamant that Trump did not demand that Zalensky smear the Bidens before he would release money that congress had authorized.  It's hard to believe that anybody paying attention would not know at the drop of a hat that this was certainly what happened, but the reps had some convoluted theory that all evidence for that was second-hand and therefore worthless.  And then suddenly there was John's leaked manuscript.  Suddenly their tone shifted, now it became, well maybe Trump did try to strong arm Zalensky, but it was like no big deal, certainly not enough to impeach the prez, and towards the end, starring his tv lawyers, the drift became that impeachment itself was bad.  Regardless of whatever the prez has done it is bad to impeach him.  This was voiced most strongly by Starr who did not discuss his impeachment of Bill.

The deal now is should the senate call Bolton.  There appear to be three reps calling for it and murmuring from the crowd that may well indicate more.  Last night as I was retiring it seemed like almost a sure thing that there would be a fourth and Moscow would have to deal with the issue.  This morning it seems less so.

In the meantime today the sens will be submitting written questions to either the house or the Trump team.  Five minutes each, reps alternating with dems.  Kind of hohum stuff, but the shadow of strut-walking, straight-talking, John will hang over the proceedings.

I shall keep you posted.

bolton and biden

The reps seemed to have the whole thing well in hand.  Those four votes to allow witnesses were a distant mirage, and things looked like they might be wrapped up and had a bow tied on top and handed to Trump by the end of the week.  They only bothered with two hours of opening statements on Saturday.

And then up popped John Bolton.  Suddenly it was leaked to the New York Times that in his forthcoming book it would be revealed that he had heard Trump himself say that he was holding back aid to Ukraine for the quid pro quo of Yalensky announcing that he was starting an investigation into the Bidens. 

Well how did this happen?  And why now?  Bolton had been playing this coy game that he would testify if the senate (not the house of reps) subpoenaed him.  It was kind of curious that he was only willing to testify at the senate's call.  As a private citizen he could just give an interview to any reporter at any time,  Indeed as a patriotic citizen who had information that could clear or implicate the prez, did it not behoove him to do so?

So far it is not known where the leak came from.  The only place the manuscript has been is to the national security council, some obscure arm of the white house, which if you have been an employee of the white house you have to run your manuscript by.  Not likely that somebody there would have leaked it,  Bolton himself seems more likely, certainly it puts him in the spotlight with his book about to come out.  On the other hand it makes him a black sheep in the eyes of the reps, and he certainly has no future with the dems. 

It looks like Romney and Collins will vote for witnesses.  Murkowski and Alexander are two more likelies.  It could happen.

But some reps are saying if they call Bolton they have to call Hunter, and maybe Joe because what the fuck.  The dems are resisting that because they are not involved in the charges against the prez,. But I say, so what, if it's a chip to get Bolton let's do it.  Biden doesn't want to do it because he is sure to get slimed, but so what.  No reps are going to like him anyway and it's a badge of honor among the dems.  He also is prone to gaffs, but I say what of it?  Take one for the team. 

It all may come to nothing, but it's a ray of hope in a long winter where we are not even into feb yet.

I notice the reps have begun saying so what.  So he sold out his county's interests to have a political opponent smeared, that's just business as usual, nothing impeachable here.  But Trump doesn't like that.  The only thing he likes is that he is perfect in every way.

So we shall see what we shall see.


I have like three hundred CDs.  I get new ones rarely at like booksales, so I play the same ones over and over and sometimes I think I am in a rut and sometimes i think I hear deeper things every time around.

"I'm Smarter Than Saran Wrap."

That's what my daughter said one day when she was having trouble getting a new roll started.  She's the one who dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the computer age.  The ones I used in the paper mill weren't PCs, they were computerized control systems for our machines.  I didn't get into PCs until 2000, when my daughter gave me her old laptop and suggested I could use it to write my stories.  I went online about a year later so that I could self publish my stories.  I set up my own website with the help of a software program that I downloaded from a CD.  Of course nobody visited my site because nobody knew it existed, so I got into social networking to advertise my site.  It was still a struggle to get people to visit my site because they would rather stay where they were and let the world come to them, so then I started writing directly onto those sites, which was more fun anyway because it was interactive.

I decided early on that there was no way I could keep up with all the new advances in digital technology.  The best I could do was learn the things for which I had a use as I needed to.  It took me a long time to learn what I needed to play CDs in my new truck, but I think I've finally got it figured out.  The salesman told me that I could plug a portable player into my radio's USB port, which was only partly true.  The players I found on Amazon do indeed plug into a USB, but only as a power source, you still need to use an auxiliary cable and an auxiliary input jack to get the sound to the speakers.  These players are based on the old Sony Walkman technology, they don't have their own speakers, but you can plug them into earphones or any other type of speaker that has an auxiliary input jack.  The reason I want one of those is because they are compact and resistant to jostling.  I could just put a boombox on the seat next to me, but I think it might skip when I hit a bump or go sliding away when I turned a corner.  Also, by plugging into my radio speakers, I should be able to adjust the volume while driving.

My owners manual says there are lots of devices that work through my USB, but a portable CD player is not one of them.  If I was a young kid just starting out, I might put all my music on an MP3 or something like that, but I already have a bunch of CDs that I have accumulated over the years.  I've also got some cassette tapes and vinyl records.  I've heard that vinyl is making a comeback, and I still have a cassette player, but I don't have a lot of time to sit around the house listening to music.  By playing music while driving I get to do two things at once.  How cool is that?

I like folk and classical music, which I can sometimes get on PBN radio when they're not playing modern crap or talking.  With CDs I can play what I want when I want with no commercials, no pledging, and no other stuff that I don't want to hear.  I'm not one of those people who plays the radio or TV all day for background noise, if I'm not listening to it, I turn it off.

carbon vs silicon

When I fired up my IBM PC jr in 1982 I had to have the DOS disk inserted.  After it was sufficiently awake if I wanted to run my state-of-the-art Lotus 123 I had to take out the DOS disk and put in my Lotus 123 disk to create a spreadsheet, and if I wanted to save that spreadsheet I had to take out the Lotus 123 disk and put in my data disk and save it there.  Hard drives came out about 1986 and what an advance they were.  There were still floppies, the big 5 1/4 gave way to the hard plastic ones that were easier to carry around, and I think there was something even smaller just before the whole species went obsolete, now I think it is all thumb drives.  There was the CD which you could write data to and read from, but anymore it is for music, or in its more powerful form, the DVD, for music, but both those forms are fading now and I think streaming is the new thing.  My current computer is from the days just before Windows 10.  It's still performing well, but I dread its demise and having to walk into the Best Buy and look at all the new-fangled machines, and hear the clerk respond to my queries with a mumbled "Okay Boomer." 

What kind of CDs does Beagles listen to when he drives over the river and through the woods?


The big test for AI is the Turing test,  You start up a chat which might be with a human or a robot (I am using computer and robot interchangeably), and if after five minutes you can't tell if it's a robot or a human and it's a robot, then it has passed the Turing test.  So far no robot has.  They can whip us in chess and even in a language based thing like Jeopardy, but they can't touch the guy on the next barstool in mundane conversation.

Some of us, me included, would like to think that they never will.  We would like to think that there is something special about our reasoning and even more so, our music and our art.  When listening to music or looking at art, if we knew it was by a machine it would not be that interesting to us, we like to think we can perceive some kind of connection between the observer and the artist.  The thing about carbon vs silicon is not so much that the silicon can rise to the level of the carbon as it is that this takes the carbon down to the level of the silicon, the machine, are we nothing more than glorified toasters?

The Conscious Machine

The more they learn about artificial intelligence, the more it seems to appear that it is not so different from human and other animal intelligence.  It is no longer doubtful that they will eventually come up with a machine that is as smart or even smarter than we are, it's only a matter of time.  The one thing we have that the machines might never have is consciousness, but it's hard to say because we still don't know a lot about the nature of our own consciousness.  It's like Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am, but I'm not so sure about the rest of you guys.", or words to that effect.

We assume that others are conscious, but we don't really know that for a fact.  We tend to project our consciousness into other entities because they seem to behave as if they were conscious.  We talk to our pets and even our machines because it helps us to relate to them.  The pets seem to respond to this in their own way, and even the machines are starting to act like sentient beings, if only because their creators deliberately design them to appear that way.  There is a difference, however, between acting conscious and really being conscious.  Or is there?  A machine can be programmed to say that it's conscious when it's not.  If we had a conscious machine, couldn't it also be programmed to deny that it's conscious?  For all we know, the line may have already been crossed and we just don't know it yet.

When we first learned about computers at the paper mill, if you pulled the plug on one you had to reload its personality when you started it back up.  Nowadays its memory is preserved during a power outage and, when you start the machine back up, it just starts where it left off.  Any unsaved data might be lost, but the machine does not totally lose its mind.  With my first computer, I had to load it before I could use it the first time, but every one since then has come right out of the box pre-loaded.  How cool is that?

When I bought my new pickup, I told the guy that I didn't want any of that fancy pantsy stuff like GPS and voice recognition, mostly to save money, but also because I thought I would never use it.  The one thing I did want was a CD player, but they no longer come with one of those.  It has taken me awhile, but I finally found out that I can plug a portable unit into my sound system, or at least I could if it had an old fashioned auxiliary input jack.   Some models come with them, but mine did not, so now I have to see if I can get one installed after the fact.  And so it goes.

carbon or silicon?

One of the guys on that Radiolab program had a concern similar to some of those guys at the paper mill.  Do we really need so many computers in a car, why do we have them?  Because they do a better job than carbon units, another guy blithely answered.  Well they probably do, carbon units are certainly prone to errors.  Statistically we are better off with computers doing our driving.  The one poor victim of a zapped bit is way outnumbered by the others whose wrong move was countermanded by the silicon unit.

But still there is something that sticks in the craw.  If I am driving too fast because I am reckless and perhaps showing off for my sweetie and I lose control and crash into a tree.  Well that is my fault, the cracked skull is on me.  (Sweetie escaped without injury.  No sweeties were harmed in this example).  But if I am a reasonable man driving at a reasonable speed and through no fault of mine (act of god?) some obscure bit in my car's computer gets zapped by a gamma ray from some obscure nova in some obscure galaxy, why that is just unfair.  That is like dying for no reason.  That is dying in vain.
But of course most of us die in vain.  I am hoping to do the same myself in some comfy hospice unit rather than on some cold and bloody battlefield.

But I am getting off the issue here.  If I was driving the 1962 Corvair of my youth that gamma ray could have smashed anywhere into my Unsafe At Any Speed vehicle and it wouldn't have changed anything.  It was the computer's fault.  Well not exactly, it was the fault of some high muckety-muck, perhaps the nephew of the guy at the paper mill, who decided to fill the car with computers and did not have the sense to require redundancy in important functions like stepping on the gas. 

Still a little off the subject, which is will they enslave us.  Not that we haven't enslaved our own kind through most of history, but people prefer to be enslaved by their own people, or at least by people rather than some gizmo.  I don't want the toaster to tell me how to insert the bread.

Like immigrants computers started doing the low-level jobs that no human wanted to do anyway, but increasingly they are doing higher and higher level things, they are examining contracts for lawyers and reading MRI's for doctors,  They are even winning our quiz shows.

And you know they are not deep thinkers like us, they just turn their bits on and off mechanically, they don't soar through landscapes of reason like we do.  Or do we?  Maybe all this higher reasoning is nothing but the firing of neurons of which we have way more than computers have bits.  When we are doing our deep thinking, reaching into our subconscious and all maybe we are just as mechanical as our silicon units.

Pulling the Plug

At the paper mill, back in the 1980s, I was on a committee that was exploring options to upgrade our process controls, since we were unable to get parts for them anymore.  The managers on the team wanted to get a computerized system because they said that was the wave of the future.  Most of us on the team were unfamiliar with computers at the time and were a little superstitious about them, fearing that they would take over our lives and enslave us all like we had seen in the movies.  We were assured that computers were safe to use as long as they were kept in their place.  If one of them ever got out of control, we were advised to just pull the plug, and that would teach it a lesson.  You might lose all your data, your machines might shut down, but at least you would still be alive and relatively free.

When I bought my new pickup last fall, I wasn't happy about all the electronics that had been added since I bought my last truck in 2004.  I thought that stuff is all fine as long as it works, but what do you do when it glitches on you?  I guess the answer is, you drive it or have it towed to the repair shop.  The good news is that it works most of the time, and it isn't so bad once you get used to it.  The only serious problem I've had so far was when I couldn't lower the tailgate one day.  There is no mechanical way to do this, you have to push a button to make it release electronically.  I thought it might be frozen and, when the weather warmed up later in the day, it did indeed work for me, but it didn't the next time.  I eventually figured out that the tailgate will not open unless the automatic transmission is in "park".

If that's the worst thing that happens with this truck, I'll be a happy trucker, but now Uncle Ken has given me something else to worry about, a machine runaway.  I had the gas pedal stick on another truck of mine decades ago, and all I did was turn off the key and steer to the shoulder of the road.  The power brakes didn't work with the engine off so, after I had almost coasted to a stop, I set the parking brake.  It just occurred to me that might not work with this truck because my parking brake is activated with the push of a button, and there is no mechanical way to set it by hand.  I should be able to shut the engine down with the key, since I don't have remote or push button start like some vehicles do.  But what if I can't?

bit flipping

Exercising in the gym is really, really, boring.  The huffing and puffing, I can put up with that, but watching the clock and thinking thirty minutes more, it seems like I've already been there for an hour walking fast to nowhere on that treadmill, it's so deadly boring.  I tried listening to CDs but they weren't strong enough to keep my mind away from what I was doing and how much longer I would have to be doing it.  I tried NPR but the show on at that time is not big on hard news and there is a lot of soft stuff like musicians and actors. 

But there is a show on NPR that I really like.  It's called Radiolab and it's kind of scientific, kind of sociological, thing.  Generally they pick some subject we think we know pretty well and then they dig into it and come up with all these unexpected conclusions.  I recently discovered a podcast app on my superphone and now I can listen to reruns of the show and the time on the treadmill just flies by.

Since there is nothing over the transom this morning I thought I would recap the podcast that I was listening to last afternoon as I power walked 2.24 miles to nowhere on the treadmill.

Some years ago there was an election in Belgium and a socialist candidate in a moderate district won way too many votes, more votes in fact than there were voters in the district.  What the fuck?  They couldn't figure out what was wrong, but when they consulted some IT people and said that the overage was 4096, they realized straightaway that that was two to the thirteenth.  Clearly the thirteenth bit had somehow been zapped, but how?  They checked the hardware and the software and found nothing.  Then somebody wondered if it was cosmic rays. 

It was a thing.  There have been problems with spacecraft having their computers zapped a lot when they venture outside the earth's magnetic field where cosmic rays abound.  Cars are run by computers.  When you step on the gas you are not stepping on the gas, you are activating a computer which then steps on the gas.  When they first started putting computers in cars there were instances of cars suddenly accelerating and there was no way the driver could slow it down because the car was listening to the computer and the computer was zapped. They finally solved that one by putting in three computers and if one computer was zapped it was overruled by the two computers that weren't.

As computers advance they become smaller and the bits that they run on use less power and are like a thousand times more susceptible to being zapped.  This is especial;ly a problem for superphones.  Just looked it up on the internet and yep, it is a big thing.

cars, citizens, Cubs, nothing is as good as it used to be

I stand as accused of having only a skin deep love of automobiles.  I knew there were hemis and that had something to do with the shape of the piston and it was a great advance in getting more power from an engine and that there were like 409's  and 327's, but that was it.  I loved customized cars, they seemed to take you out of the reality of ordinary cars.  Every now and then you would spot an exotic Kaiser, now there was the car of the future.  But then they disappeared. 

The late 50's and early 60's was a period of wretched excess in car design, but I've always preferred excess to nondescript.  There may be a major scene in a movie where somebody is falling and love or getting killed, but if a 57 DeSoto rumbles down the street in the background I will completely forget the plot. 

We have been in a long trough of nondescript cars and I don't even know the names of the manufacturers or the models, and they are mostly all some shade of grey or brown and I have no interest at all.  When somebody gives me a ride somewhere and afterwards we go to the parking lot I have no idea when we have reached our car.  They all look alike.


Of course Trump will be acquitted.  No strings need to be pulled and no deals need to be made, nor hoops be extended for jumps through.  Moscow has the senate locked up like a drum which is hard not to do with republican support for Trump at 90 percent only a few reps dare to make a peep.  What dems are hoping is to raise a ruckus that will get the attention of that thin scrim of folks who pulled the lever for Trump but are not head and heels in love with him and may decide that selling the country down the river is more important than supreme court judges and bashing nonwhite people.

The hope now is that witnesses might do the trick, especially the mysterious Bolton (who I still suspect may be a trap), but right now it looks like that is not going to happen.  I didn't watch it closely yesterday, I think it was opening statements.  The dems looked pretty good to me, doing more or less what I had hoped, calmly laying out the facts.  Which may not amount to a hill of beans in this cockamamie world where few people are watching and many people care not at all for facts or reason.

The constitution is very vague on the mechanism of impeachment.  It was clearly put in to check a prez that is running amok, which is clearly what we have here, but the mechanism is undefined.  There is talk of precedents, but there is no reason it has to be done the same way every time, and those who are quoting precedents are just picking some things from former trials and ignoring other things.  If Nixon had only known that he could just stonewall everything and get away with it.  But then he couldn't really.  Citizens wouldn't stand for it.  Citizens were different then.


Feb 11 is pitchers and catchers, the boys of summer.  I hate the Ricketts.  I hate what they have done to Wrigleyville.  I hate the whole thing where if you don't win the world series your whole season is a flop and heads have to roll and the losers get blamed for not trying and the sportswriters rant with long lists of heads.  I hate what has become of the team that could lose a hundred games a season but when you went out to the ballpark and they happened to win that day the whole crowd was cheering like we had just won the world series.  I will watch the games and root root root for the Cubbies, but all that other crap that happens between the last out and before the first pitch of the next game, I care not a whit.

The beat goes on

When I was an adolescent I loved cars.

A lot of us did and you may have mentioned it before but I get the impression that your love stopped at the surface.  If a car looked cool that's all you needed, am I right?  That's fine and there's nothing wrong with that but that sounds like an infatuation to me and not a true love.  Go beyond the surface and you enter the realm of the gearhead where you learn the mysteries of the carburetor, the distributor, the different weights of oil, and all that other good stuff.  Oh, that green goo was most likely Prestone Anti-Freeze; that was the only green fluid that I recall.  We used water in the summertime and drained it in the fall when we added the anti-freeze; now it's called coolant and comes in different colors.  Modern cars are amazingly complex but there is still room for the backyard mechanic to work on a few things, or at least troubleshoot some issues.  There are little gizmos you can plug into the diagnostic port that will tell you what the fault codes are and will save you money if you have to take it to the mechanic.  And there's always YouTube and Google to solve the tough problems.

I always liked fiddling with my cars and fixing the little things that went wrong; the trick was knowing when to pass it on to the professionals.  It's embarrassing when a car doesn't start simply because it's out of gas, but don't ask me how I came by this knowledge.

-----

So, the impeachment process is moving along and my prediction is that Trump, like Johnson and Clinton before him, will be acquitted.  I don't know how it will happen but strings will be pulled, deals will be made, and hoops will be jumped through.  Business as usual, in other words.

I find it amusing that the parties on both sides of the aisle often invoke the Founding Fathers in their sanctimonious interpretations of the Constitution.  Despite the noble intentions this country was founded by a lot of scoundrels and criminals, including slave owners, willing to do anything to get their way.  Treaties were meant to be broken, and the Revolutionary War was also a proxy war between England and France with the assistance of a lot of mercenaries.  Americans have always meant well but have also been slightly crazy, thinking only of themselves and to hell with anyone else.  This pattern has prevailed for more than two hundred years now and is not likely to change.

-----

It's now almost gone but there were a few inches of snow on the ground in my neighborhood and the temperature has been below freezing.  It's taken long enough but winter is finally here, past the middle of January.  In a few weeks the pitchers and catchers will begin Spring Training, so that should put a smile on Uncle Ken's face.

day one, the hearings

I just said that the problem with those girls' car that long ago Texas afternoon was that it wouldn't start to make the story simpler.  Actually it was green goo was coming out of the undercarriage.  I got down on my hands and knees and sure enough there was green goo, and I believe my reaction was to shrug my shoulders and they went on to find a manlier man.  But let's say that it was s problem with the car not starting, actually I knew a little about that because I had owned a car that had trouble starting.  It was some kind of electrical leak, to use a technical term, What I did was whenever I drove it anywhere I would disconnect the battery, and then reconnect it when I wanted to start The Beast again. 

But anyway the point that I am going to get to is that I know very little about cars, especially what goes on under the hood, and frankly don't care very much,  The best thing I could do for those girls was say I didn't know.  It would be a waste of both our times for me to go into some long-winded ignorant rant about it, that could only make things worse.  Similarly with Beagles's demonstrated lack of knowledge and curiosity about the Mideast it would be best for us all if he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away when the subject came up.  Similarly I expect that his knowledge of, and curiosity about, Vietnam, the war and the country, is sparse.  It may seem curious that I use the word curious, but the thing is if Beagles had any curiosity about these issues he could learn about them.


So here we are on the morning of impeachment.  No witnesses, no documents, no nothing, just the way Moscow wants it.  I hear that Romney and the girls made some deal where at some point after the first four days of speeches a vote on whether or not to call witnesses may be held, but even then they would need one more vote which nobody sees where that is going to come from and republicans of conscious are made of the softest of tissue paper, so likely nothing going on there.

Each side will get 24 hours to present their cases, in 12 hour sessions that will not begin till around noon so that much of America will be sleeping while the important issues of the day will be debated.  Well not debated, there will be no interaction between the sides, just 24 hours of dems followed by 24 hours of Trumps.  And really who can blame America when we will just be hearing the same stuff we have been hearing for weeks?  If I were the dems I would keep it simple.  The case against Trump can be presented in ten minutes, make it an hour with all the trimmings.  /I would just be repeating that hour on the hour to let it sink in deeply.  The Trumps have a sharp lawyer or two and then a bunch of tv lawyers and just lately he have added Machine Gunner Coatless Joe Jordan and his Firebrands from the House of Reps, so expect a circus from the Trumps, and they better give him a good one because they know he will be watching every second of it,

Declaring Victory

I don't remember our government declaring victory in Vietnam, I remember them slinking away with their tail between their legs like a whipped puppy, leaving their allies twisting in the wind.  I guess the only domino that fell was Vietnam itself, plus Cambodia and Laos if you count them as separate countries.  I suppose they could get out of the Middle East the same way, but that would be a little more complicated since their allies and enemies keep changing places.  For instance, I doubted Uncle Ken's assertion that Soleimani took the good guys' side against ISIS, but it seems that he did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qasem_Soleimani#Cultural_depictions_and_legacy

The only Mideast country really worth saving is Israel, and I have previously proposed that they evacuate all the Jews and give them a new promised land in the U.S.  They could avoid having the Israeli Jews trying to take over our country by setting them up with their own sovereign state in the desert Southwest.  There is a lot of unoccupied federal land there, so nobody would have to be displaced.  Alternatively, they could circle the wagons around Israel and let the Muslims kill each other off.  Call these two options half baked plans if you will, but at least they are plans, which is more than our government seems to have in the region.

I am no auto mechanic, but I do know some basic trouble shooting skills.  There are a number of reasons that a car might not start.  If you turn the key and nothing happens, the battery might be dead.  If you jump it with another battery and you still get nothing, the problem is electrical.  If the battery cranks the engine but the engine doesn't fire, it might not be getting gas, or it still might be electrical.  If it fires intermittently but doesn't run, it might be the carburetor.  Okay, as Uncle Ken pointed out, cars no longer have carburetors, but chain saws, lawn mowers, and hydraulic wood splitters still do.  If you back a pickup truck into a hydraulic wood splitter, damaging the carburetor in the process, you will need to have it replaced, which will put the machine out of commission for months because the only small engine repair shop in town is really busy this time of year...…..Or so I've been told.  What replaced the carburetors in cars are fuel injectors.  I have no experience with them not working, but I'm pretty sure you can't adjust them with a dime like you could the old carburetors.

a decisive victory

When I was an adolescent I loved cars.  I spent evenings hanging in front of Talman's at 55th and Kedzie, smoking cigs and trying to look tough along with my three or four nerd buddies, and watching the cars go by, I could name them all, year, make and model.

But I was pretty ignorant of what went on under the hood.  It was all so complicated, this thing connected to that thing and I don't know it never floated my boat.  I knew they had carburetors. which I think helped mix the air with the gasoline, pretty sure they were near the top of the engine, but I have no idea what they looked like,  They had a cool name though, exotic yet kind of an action word.  Guys were supposed to know about engines, it was a manly thing.  I remember some women in Texas running up to me because they had a car that wouldn't start and because I was a guy they thought I would know.  I think I told them that maybe it was their carburetor, because that was what men who didn't know anything about cars would say because at least we knew what carburetors were, or what they were called, and who knows, maybe it was what was wrong.  I don't think cars have had carburetors for years, not sure what replaced them or why or when that was and really don't care much.  Anymore you can just say it's probably the computer.

This long shaggy dog talk of carburetors is a long way of saying if your car is not running there is no point in asking me how to get it running.  And if you want intelligent discussion about what to do with the middle east don't talk to somebody who doesn't know a sunni from a shia, and is militantly not interested in learning anything more.  The subject has indeed been around since out childhoods and how Beagles has managed to learn so little about it is beyond ,me.

The news media has its ear to the ground, they are all competing with each other to give us what they think we are interested in, if we are not interested in some subject they will drop it like a hot potato.  They don't shove things down our throats that we are not interested in.  Perhaps there are things that you are not personally interested in but plenty of other people are.  I just spent on whole post patiently explaining why Bin Laden is a much bigger deal than the Quds guy, but Beagles, true to his life plan of not ever learning anything, has apparently not heard a word, and then in a truly Trumpian way instead if refuting anything I said, he just blames the press for the whole thing.  

The best way to win an endless war it to declare victory and pull out.  It worked very well in Vietnam.  No dominoes fell, and we don't have Vietnamese battleships cruising off California aiming to invade, I don't know, Hollywood,  I believe it would work as well in the mideast where the real battle is between sunni and shia and our guys are being killed because they are in the middle of it.  You don't see any of our guys getting killed by a roadside bomb on I-57 by Kankakee.  The only times they get killed is driving down some highway deep in the mideast, sent there by guys who don't know a sunni from a shia, and don't want to know because they both look the same dead.

Which is basically Beagles' preferred method of winning a decisive victory, kill all the guys he doesn't like, then kill all the guys that are pissed off about that, then kill all the guys who are pissed off about killing the guys who were pissed off and so on until you've basically killed everybody.  Declaring a decisive victory and pulling out is easier, cheaper, and more humane. 

Endless Wars

"They all look alike to you because you don't know any better.  Your ignorance of the mideast is profound and astonishing.  I know I have spent a lot of my morning hours explaining it to you, but it has all been for naught.  You know very little and you are not interested in learning more.  I used to kind of enjoy explaining things to you and dismantling your arguments.  Much of what you say is false and even the arguments, you make from those falsities do not logically follow.  There is no point in me addressing them and I won't bother today." - Uncle Ken - 1/8/20

Okay, I was mistaken. Uncle Ken didn't want to stop talking about the Middle East forever, just for that one day.  Like I said, a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age.  Uncle Ken was right when he said that I know very little about the Middle East and am not interested in learning more.  The subject has been in the news, off and on, since I was a little kid, and I already know more about it than I ever wanted to.  I will concede, however, that the difference between Bin Laden and that other guy is that everybody knew Bin Laden's name, and most of us never heard of that Iranian general until he was dead.  The main reason for that is the news media shoved Bin Laden down our throats for years and, for some reason, they chose not to do that with the Iranian guy.

We have talked in the past about World War II being the last "good" war.  The difference between a good war and a bad war is a good war is one that we decisively win in a reasonable amount of time.  I have speculated in the past about why our government chooses not to win wars anymore, but I have no proof so there's no point in flogging that dead horse.  When Trump had that general killed, it awoke a glimmer of hope in me that they were actually trying to win this one, but a few days later it was back to business as usual.  The proper way to end an endless war is to win it decisively.  If I, in my "profound and astonishing" ignorance, know that, I'm sure that all those highly educated muck-a-mucks know it too.  If they don't do it, it's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to.

here is the difference

When did we agree not to disagree about the Mideast?  I don't think I attended that meeting.  When did we ever agree to disagree about anything?  I read that Pompeo has been after that Quds guy for some time, and that the current cloud of flies buzzing about the yellow coif are very hawkish on Iran, but that thing about a mood was just speculation on my part.  It just didn't seem like the sort of thing that Trump would do and that's why I speculated that he was in a mood.

After 911 I didn't favor going into Afghanistan, but the mood in the country was so strong that it was understandable.  At first we were making great strides it seemed.  There were photos in the paper of our guys riding horses in the mountains allied with those cool Afghan fighters.  We toppled the Taliban government with surprising ease, and I was rather proud of these guys, I didn't know we had such a good army.  We replaced him with the leader of the Northern Alliance we'd allied with in the overthrow.  He was a murderous thug but then so were all the other guys leading the various tribes.  But we did not get Bin Laden, he slipped right through our fingers.

I've told the story before about the guy who used to fix the pinball machines at House of Chin.  What he actually did was set them up so that they'd work while he finished off his free beer and got out the door, but once he was safely out they would break down again.  That is what we should have done in Afghanistan.  But the neocons, who would later bathe in the glory of the Iraq war, were in ascendancy, and they wanted to make this reform and that reform and there were plenty of guys running around with sacks of money, some of our guys, some of theirs.  We ended up putting in a series of corrupt guys who the Afghans in the street hated as much as the Taliban, only now they hated the US too because we were helping to keep that party in power.  We're still doing that today.  One of Trump's promises, like building the wall and having the Mexicans pay for it was to get us out of forever wars, and neither of them has come to anything.

It seemed ti me when I voted for Obama that he would get us out of Afghanistan.  He didn't.  He turned out to much more hawkish than I had thought he would be, that was a disappoint to me.

The president is not allowed to kill willy-nilly anybody he chooses   But there are all kinds of war power acts and whatnot, and Obama and his lawyers patched together something and it was all legal.  We had been hunting Bin Laden for years, every American knew his name.  Myself I thought it was stupid, the guy was washed-up, why bother?  But the crowd loved it.

Bin Laden was a major villain in the American eyes for years.  Nobody in America ever heard of the Quds guy until after he was killed. When Obama killed Osama we had the whole story, the reasoning, the legality, the little movie in the basement.  With the Quds guy we have nothing, the only legality is that imminent danger thing, and it's been proven there was no imminent danger.  For reasoning there have been four or five mutually exclusive reasons given.  And now they have just plain stopped talking about it all.

That's the difference.

What's the Difference?

I thought we weren't going to discuss the Middle East anymore, but that's okay, better than that impeachment thing, which I was tired of a long time ago.  I don't know whether or not Trump was "in a mood", it's hard to tell with him, but I would be interested in learning Uncle Ken's source of that information.

I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, but I don't remember Uncle Ken or any of his ilk complaining when Obama ordered the slaying of Osama Bin Laden because it might start a war with the Taliban.  I know we haven't been in a declared war since World War II, but what do you call it when people are shooting at each other?  Iran has been sponsoring terrorism in the Middle East for decades, and U.S. response has been limited to engaging their proxies, at least until now.  Like I said, I don't know what Trump was thinking at the time, but I believe he did the right thing, whether deliberately or accidently.

the articles have landed

The Articles have landed.

All in Moscow's hands now.  Seems to me that the odds are he will run a tight ship from beginning to end.  There will be no witnesses allowed at the beginning of the ceremonies.  The excuse for that is that there will be time to discuss that during the process, but the truth is that time will be never.

There's still a slim chance four members of the party of Trump will raise a ruckus.  More likely it will be Trump Hisself, backed by the Trumpiest of the senators who will want to bring Hunter, the whistle blower, maybe Schiff, into the docket, because what the fuck.

Actually I don't see much harm in that except for the whistleblower.  The whole idea of a whistleblower is that you can speak up about evildoing without getting your head knocked off, and now they are trying to knock his head off.  And everything he has said has been corroborated so what does he have new to say?

I think if there was any real dirt on Hunter we would have seen it by now, and Schiff has done everything out in the open, so go ahead, put him in the docket.

But it will look kind of bad if just the reps get to call witnesses, might be enough to get four reps to allow the dems to call some witnesses.  I still think Bolton could be a trap.  Man of principle or man out to sell a book?  Only four weak kneed reps or time will tell.


It's now apparent that that Quds guy was killed just because Trump was in a mood.  There have been three of four different reasons for it given, and no real proof of any of them, and right now the administration is refusing to say anything at all about it.  Normally Trump prefers bluster to any concrete action and my guess is that somehow his latest group of cohorts talked him into it and now he is backing off, and most people are glad that there is no war (at the moment) and maybe Trump is getting some credit as showing restraint over this,

impeachment update/on the eve of battle!

How about this one?  The Russkies have been discovered to have been probing into the doings of Burisma (the Ukraine oil company) just lately, just about the time that Trump was delaying aid to Ukraine unless Zalensky announced to Time Magazine that he was initiating an investigation into Hunter Biden. Obama got lambasted because he was perceived to have been bowing to the Saudi King, Trump is almost openly colluding with the Ruskies and his people are all like this is no big deal. 


I have been reading articles at my political sites about Nancy's delaying tactic.  The usual conservatives are crowing that it was a failure because Moscow Mitch has this all locked up, but he would have had it all locked up even sooner without the tactic, so where was the loss?  There has been a movement among the Trumpier of the Trumpists of the Trumpist party to not even really have any hearings, to make a few itty bitty changes in the senate rules, and have a vote at the outset declaring Trump as innocent as a lamb, bang the gavel, and there is a done deal. 

At first Moscow was against that because well, it just seemed unseemly, why not take a little more time and go through the motions because he had the votes and the outcome was certain?  And Trump was against that because he wanted to have a big beautiful tv show.  But then up popped Bolton (what is his game?), and Moscow got nervous, and maybe Trump too, though I don't see that emotion in his makeup, and they both decided they wanted to bend the senate rules and dismiss the whole thing out of hand, but then, owing in part to that scalawag, Son O' Ron, it turns out they no longer had the votes for that skulduggery.

Nancy is handing over the articles today.  Meself I would like to see her rummage through her handbag and then say, "Oh my goodness, I must have left them in my other handbag, you gentlemen don't mind if I take a cab home and rummage through my handbag closet, and as long as I am there, powder my nose again?  Sit tight I'll be right back." 

The issue right now is witnesses.  The dems would like some provision for witnesses before the hearings begin, but Moscow says oh no, we'll take up that issue before the proceedings begin by which he means never, and he has the votes to ram that through.

Or he had the votes, anymore it is not so certain.  There is the scalawag, and those few republicans like Collins who raise dem hopes by sometimes acting like they might be moderates but always end up caving, only they might not cave, and there is Romney (what is his game?).  So maybe there will be witnesses after all.  Of course the reps could still just vote to hear only the witnesses they want, but that would look pretty bad, and maybe the scalawag and his ilk will not even allow that.

In the end, it is still highly unlikely that the dems will convince twenty Trumpists to come over to their side, but the electorate is the real jury on this whole affair.  Let the games begin.

Insufficient Data

I tried looking up the story about the disappearance of that family in Chicago.  Apparently a lot of people have disappeared in Chicago over the years.  It would help if I knew the specific year and the name of the family, but I don't.  I probably read about it in the Detroit Free Press, which we have never subscribed to, but copies were commonly found lying around in the break area at the paper mill, where I worked from 1967 to 1990.  I seem to remember that it was part of a larger article about problems that had been associated with I-94, of which there were many.  The lost family had been seen at a gas station or someplace near the Indiana line, and they had not shown up to claim their reservation at a downtown hotel, so it was assumed that they had taken the wrong exit off of I-94.  If I knew it was going to be on the test, I might have taken notes.

I do remember that, when I-94 was first opened to traffic, it was totally gridlocked in a matter of minutes and they had to shut it down for a few days to clear all the abandoned vehicles.  It was the widest multi-lane highway in the world at the time.  There were local lanes and express lanes and, if you got in the wrong lane, you could easily end up somewhere you didn't want to go.  It didn't help that most of the signs hadn't been installed yet on the day the highway was opened to traffic.  Years later, I was coming home on leave after basic training in a Greyhound bus and we were gridlocked right by the 51st Street exit.  I told the driver that I was closer to my destination now than I would be when we got to the terminal downtown, and asked if he could let me off right there.  He said that he wasn't supposed to make unscheduled stops but, since we already stopped, he didn't see any harm in opening the door to let in a little air.  I walked up the exit ramp to 51st Street, where I caught a CTA bus that took me home in short order.

I think that most of the "White flight" from Chicago in the 60s was primarily motivated by fear.  There was also an economic component to it in that, the longer they waited to sell, the less money they would get for their house, but I don't think many of them would have left town if they didn't believe that they would be risking their lives if they stayed in their old neighborhood.  Like I said, the perception of risk might have been exaggerated, but I don't think it was totally groundless.

The Mormons chose Utah because it was not part of the United States at the time.  Their leader had been murdered and they had endured a lot of persecution in the U.S., and they wanted to literally get out of the country.  When Utah was annexed after the Mexican-American War, the Mormons felt threatened by the reported approach of federal troops that had been sent there merely to establish a U.S. presence in the territory.  This misunderstanding resulted in the Mormon War, which probably could have been prevented by better communication.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War

this and that

What I meant was that taking over is a phrase used to justify keeping other people down.  Anytime they are trying to get ahead it is seen by the folks further up the ladder that they are trying to take over and thus kicking them down a rung or two is justified.  When German tanks rolled into Prague that was taking over,  It is not taking over when due to economic reasons one group leaves a neighborhood and another moves in.

Just to tidy up the murder was at 59th and Kedzie, and that thing with the boat just doesn't ring true to me.  Maybe Beagles could google it.


There is desert land in Israel, but it is certainly not all desert.  The Sinai Peninsula was all desert but you didn't see the Israelis settling there.  Deseret was available to the Mormons because nobody else wanted it because it was a desert, but I'm sure they would have rather lived in Californay where they could walk around plucking oranges out of trees.

There has been a lot of talk of the Deutsche Bank playing footsy with Trump with the Russkies int the thick of it, for the past couple years.  Nothing is going to make Irani protesters less popular in their own country than a favorable tweet from Trump.  Iranis protest a lot, but I don't think they are ever protesting because they love the USA.

I don't know what past bad behavior on the part of Hunter Old Dog is referring to.  There is a drug problem and I believe some cheating, but that's kind of ho hum.  There is no bad behavior on record about his dealings with that oil company which ok, he probably should not have been appointed to, but which is pretty common practice that the current administration has no grounds to complain about.  He is the overwhelming favorite of blacks and he is the only guy currently beating Trump in polls.  I think he is the front runner.  The expected fireworks tonight is to be between Warren and Sanders, but I don't know if their hearts are in it.

Kind of, But Not Exactly

Uncle Ken's description of Blacks taking over White neighborhoods was pretty much the way I remember it, except for a few details.  There was the perception that it was dangerous to go into a Black neighborhood.  I can't attest to the accuracy of that perception because I seldom went into a Black neighborhood.  The only incidence of head busting that I remember was the time a Black guy was attacked with a hammer while waiting for a bus, I believe it was on 63rd Street.  I think it was mentioned in the book, but I also remember it being reported in the news at the time.  I also remember, years after I had left Chicago, reading that a family of tourists including a dog, riding in a station wagon that was loaded with luggage and had a boat strapped to the roof, got off I-94 at the wrong exit in a Black neighborhood and was never heard from again.  No trace of the family, the car, the luggage, the boat, or the dog was ever found.  How's that for anecdotal evidence?

I think the Black neighborhoods were just as dangerous for the Blacks who lived there as they were for any White guy that might be passing through.  There were a bunch of Blacks who worked at the INTAG factory across the street from us.  Some of them used to shop at my father's store, for which he caught some flak because he was the only business owner on our block who welcomed their business.  On payday, they would deposit their signed paychecks with my dad, who would keep them safe until the men or their wives would come back in the daylight hours to shop.  They said that it was too dangerous to carry money home in their neighborhood after dark.

The book also talked about what we used to call "blockbusters".  A White real estate agent would buy a house on a White block and sell it to a Black Family.  This would motivate all the White families to sell their houses before their values went down, and any holdouts ended up having to sell out cheap.  The book also called MLK's effort to integrate Chicago a failure, and blamed White backlash and also the Black Power movement.  I understood the White backlash part, but the Black Power part puzzled me.  I thought they were all in it together, but apparently not.  Uncle Ken once talked about racial "hawks" and "doves", which clarified the issue for me.

In my opinion, gentrification is certainly a form of "taking over".  That may or may not be the gentrifiers' intent, but the results are the same.

taking over really explained

When we grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, black people had long been segregated into a small strip of State Street  roughly around 31st Street.  There were legal means to keep them there and there was also violence against any black person who tried to move out of Bronzeville.  Because they could only live in that small area and more were moving in every day it got awfully crowded, rents soared and they were paying way more for a small apartment than was being charged in the white districts.

We grew up in the aftermath of that in Gage Park.  There was a movement southward, they crossed Ashland, and now Damen, and now they were at the tracks just east of Western.  Not too long ago Beagles and I both read a book about those times written by a guy who used to be a preacher at Elsdon Methodist.  I believe this is where Beagles picked up the term taking over, (which by the way he failed to explain what he meant by it in his post titled Taking Over Explained)

That is the phrase that went around these days, they are taking over.  What happened was a black person would buy a house in a white area, and all the white people would flee,  They fled because their property values would go down, but also a lot of them just plain did not like Black people,  They didn't want to live near them, have to work next to them, or have them sitting next to their kid in school.  There was strong racism everywhere evidenced by the behavior of the locals when Martin Luther King marched through Marquette Park.

I remember as a teenager people saying to me that they would never let them take over Marquette Park, like if even a single black family had a picnic there it would be polluted and white folks would never go there.  Nowadays there are black people picnicking in Marquette Park, there are also white people, they get along as well as people do these days, but I reckon Beagles considers that this means that the black people have taken over. 

Rainbow Beach was another of those white bastions of our youth.  We had to go through maybe a couple miles of black neighborhoods to get there.  It was completely surrounded by black neighborhoods but blacks were not permitted to wet their toes there, because that would be seen as taking over and they would get their heads busted.  It was integrated some time ago and white people stopped going there, but recently the south shore has been gentrifying and whites have been moving into the area

Gentrification is going on all over the neighborhoods that are close to downtown.  Pilsen, Humboldt Park, Cabrini Green.  I guess the white people are taking over in those areas too.  They don't bust any heads they just pay a lot more for properties than the former occupants can afford.

Nowadays Gage Park is almost all Mexican, but the bungalows are as well-kept and the lawns as trim as they were when it was all white.


There was this bogus argument that went around in Gage Park when most people were racist and proud of it, that the blacks had their neighborhoods and the whites had theirs so that everything was even steven.  Blacks were not allowed in white neighborhoods which was only fair because whites were not allowed in black neighborhoods.  The fact was that white people were afraid to go into black neighborhoods because they feared blacks but white people who had business there didn't have a problem, whereas black people who ventured into white neighborhoods were likely to get their heads busted.  Because black people were mostly poor their neighborhoods were crappy and white people did not want to live there.  White neighborhoods were pretty nice but if a black person worked hard and made enough money he was not allowed to move into a white neighborhood.  There was nothing even about it.

What Beagles means by taking over is when people not as white as he want the same privileges that he has: work, school, residence, but he does not to give them that.  But that doesn't sound so good so he says taking over.  And that is what taking over really means.   


A ;lot of stuff on the Beaglestonian this morning.  Glad to see Old Dog contributing something,  but I don't have time to address everything today.

The Original Promised Land

The term "promised land" has often been used to describe any piece of real estate that promises to be a nice place to live.  The original Promised Land, however, was the Land of Canaan, which is the approximate location of the modern State of Israel.  The Biblical Book of Genesis might be considered "religious mumbo jumbo" to non-believers, but even many secular historians have relied on it as the next best thing to history.  Validated historical accounts of that time period are hard to come by, since almost all contemporary writings were a mixture of history, mythology, and creative story telling.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, tells of gods and mortals interbreeding to produce the Mesopotamian leadership, yet it's about all we've got to go by when we research the ancient history of the City of Ur, which is a real place in, what it today, Iraq.  Archaeological digs have uncovered eight or nine layers of civilization under the present site and, last I heard, they were still digging.

Genesis tells us that Abraham, who both Jews and Muslims claim as their founding father, was enticed by God to leave "Ur, in the land of the Chaldeans" with the promise that he would be led to "a land flowing with milk and honey".  Abraham and his entourage did go to, what is today, Israel, but they lived as "strangers in the land".  Much of the Middle East is indeed desert, but it might not have always been.  Some historians believe that the region was once more fertile and productive, but it was transformed into desert by overgrazing, with perhaps a little help from natural climate change.  Be that as it may, there are parts of the Middle East that support agriculture even unto this day.  The two that immediately come to mind are the Fertile Crescent and the Nile River Valley.  People have fought over these lands since forever, with the losers becoming wandering nomads, drifting from one water hole to the next, and occasionally seeking refuge from drought and famine in one of the better areas, usually with the consent of the locals, who were probably looking for cheap labor.  Abraham's descendants ended up in Egypt, where they spent a few centuries, eventually becoming vassals of the Pharaoh.  Along came Moses, who led the Hebrews (from an Egyptian word that means "wanderers") back to Abraham's Promised Land.  Yadda, yadda, yadda, Joshua fit de Battle of Jericho, and the rest is history.

Money still talks

When I hear talk of "The Promised Land" I start to think to myself, "Sez who?"  To whom, exactly, is anything being promised, and by whom?  Religious mumbo-jumbo begins to enter the picture, you've probably heard of some old promises but there have been some new ones, too.  I think the Mormons consider Utah their promised land, but they call it Deseret.  I could be wrong.  And why is it that the historic Promised Lands are in desert regions and not areas more amenable to agriculture and trade?

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The new year is starting off with a bang, isn't it?  The last thing that I expected was a movement in Iran to throw out their current leadership, with tweets of support from Trump.   One thing that hasn't gotten much airtime is that right around the time the decision was made to kill that general there was a report about a loan to Trump before his election.  The only bank that would loan him money, to the tune of a billion bucks, was Deutsche Bank and some folks didn't know why they would take such a risk, given Trump's banking record.  It turns out that the bank took no risk at all; the loan was backed up by a Russian Bank.  But since up is down, this story will probably go away.

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Can the US still be considered the good guys  in light of The Washington Post's story on The Afghanistan Papers?  Ignorance and deceit are not good foundations for a foreign policy that spans three presidencies.  And the other day there was a gleeful tweet that the Saudis paid the US a billion bucks for some kind of military protection.  The US has been "guns for hire" for a long time but now it's official.  No wonder the economy is humming.

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Forget Biden as a candidate; his son's past behavior will drag him down, and out.  The billionaires are spending money like drunken sailors and will be poorer for the experience.  There's a debate coming up soon so maybe somebody will break from the pack.  Who knows?

Taking Over Explained

When I lived in Chicago, there were certain neighborhoods that you didn't go into unless you had to and, when you had to, you conducted your business and got out, you didn't hang around the local malt shop and socialize with the locals.  Maybe it was a myth, but many people believed that those neighborhoods were dangerous because the people who lived there didn't like us any more than we liked them.  These neighborhoods had been taken over by the Blacks, and it was not considered safe for a White person to walk down the street.  I understand that, while I was in the army, there was a big ruckus about the Blacks taking over Rainbow Beach and Marquette Park.  I don't know how that turned out, but it was commonly believed that, once the Blacks had taken over these parks, they would become inaccessible to White people.  Uncle Ken has told us that it wasn't like that on the North Side, I wouldn't know about that.  Maybe the White folks on the South Side were just paranoid in those days.  Is it still like that now?

The moral of the farm story is that humans are territorial animals.  The lady who owned the property had opened it up to squatters, but had reserved the right to attach conditions to their occupancy.  My daughter had no problem with this until she planted the garden, which imbued her with a feeling of ownership, which she called upon God to validate.  People who believe in God commonly attribute natural phenomena, including human nature, to Him.  For many, it's just a figure of speech, like "Mother Nature", but I'm sure that some of them really believe that God wants them to do stuff that they feel compelled to do by of their own human nature.

We have discussed this truce thing in the past, although we used the term "cease fire".  I have asserted that, every time the good guys are winning in a conflict, the U.N. calls a cease fire.  Uncle Ken disputes this, saying that cease fires are called by mutual consent of the combatants.  Since Uncle Ken refuses to recognize a distinction between good guys and bad guys, it's not surprising that we wouldn't agree on the cease fire thing either.  One thing we might agree on is that a truce or cease fire is not the end of conflict, it just puts the conflict on hold for awhile.  The proper way to end a conflict is for somebody to win it decisively, once and for all, which will never happen as long as the losing side periodically gets a chance to rest up and regroup.

taking over

Beagles is forever talking about one group taking over from another, but never explains what he means by taking over, which makes me reluctant to speak on the matter.  I'm sure he remembers the beer wars in Chicago, when the Wasps made it illegal to drink beer in Chicago on a Sunday.  It wasn't so much that they were concerned with keeping the sabbath holy as it was they didn't like the new breed of furriners who liked to drink beer on Sunday.  There was a big todo, one or two people got killed, and I think they rescinded the law. 

The offending party was the German, probably the Czechs too because we are a beer-guzzling people, but we all looked alike to them, much as Mideast Muslims all look alike to Beagles.  I guess we won that war but I don't think we took over anything.  I don't remember us keeping Wasps out of our schools, or not hiring them, or keeping them from moving into our neighborhoods.  Those restrictions were what black people were, and still are, fighting for, and from previous correspondence I believe that Beagles believes that doing so is taking over, but that looks more like just wanting us to share as Beagles is planning to do when the Israelis drop in, so why doesn't he want to do that with the Blacks and Hispanics? 

I don't know how this relates to the farm story.  I don't know what it means to say that god gave the raccoons the woods because don't people go into the woods to shoot raccoons and their ilk all the time?  And I reckon the guy who owned the land had a right to say whether or not he wanted hunting, or shooting animals on his land.  What were your daughter and her beau wanting to do?  Take over?
 
Is Beagles endorsing the idea of never offering a truce to the other side when you are winning?  In that case all wars would be wars to the death, which sounds pretty stupid. 


A subpoena issued by either branch of congress is proper.  All the subpoenas issued by the house were proper.  The Trumpists foiled them by sending them to the courts so it would take years before the case would be resolved.  The Senate, ruled by the Trumpists, would never issue a subpoena to anybody who might testify against Trump, which it's likely that Bolton knew when he offered to testify only from a senate subpoena.  Apparently it was just a way for him to promote his book without having to stick his neck out at all.

Living in My Promised Land

Uncle Ken has a point about the Promised Land.  I consider America to be my Promised Land, and would be willing to share it with the Jews as long as they behaved themselves and didn't try to take it over.  Last I heard, there were at least twice as many Jews in the U.S. as there were in Israel, so I didn't think that adding seven million more would hurt anything.  The thing I overlooked was that all Jews aren't create equal.  The Jews in America are American Jews, but the new Jews wouldn't be American Jews, they would be Israeli Jews, at least for the first generation, and I agree with Uncle Ken that they would likely try to take it over and make it their Promised Land just like they did with Israel, and like the Czechs and Poles did with the South Side of Chicago until the Blacks and Hispanics pushed them out and made it their Promised Land.  It's kind of like the story about my daughter and the raccoon.

My daughter once spent a couple years living like a Hippie on private land that was made into a communal farm by the owner.  Well, there wasn't a lot of actual farming done, but the residents called it "The Farm" because it used to be one before the current owner acquired it.  My daughter and her boyfriend raised a dozen chickens and planted a substantial garden, which was more farming than any of the other residents ever did.  As the garden crops approached maturity, they attracted the attention of a raccoon that started raiding at night.  My daughter and her boyfriend pitched a tent in the middle of the garden and took turns guarding it at night with a shotgun.  When the owner got wind of this, she told my daughter that she didn't allow hunting on her property.  My daughter explained that she wasn't hunting, she was protecting her garden from the raccoon.  The owner said, "You know, God gave this land to the raccoon as much as He gave it to us."  My daughter replied, "No, God gave the woods to the raccoon, He gave this garden to me."  (I don't think they ever shot the raccoon, but they made him feel unwelcome and he stopped coming around.)

Fancy Nancy's stalling tactic reminds me of something that I read in the Koran some time ago.  Mohammed instructed his followers to never agree to a truce with the "Infidels" when they were winning the battle.  The only thing a truce is good for is to allow the losing side to rest up, regroup, and live to fight another day.

I seem to remember that Bolton guy saying that he would be willing to testify if he was issued a proper subpoena.  I don't know why he insisted on that, but he did.  Has anybody who has testified in this case so far been subpoenaed?  

living in their promised land

People are people, some are good, some are not.  There are good and bad people in the USA and there are good and bad people in middle east and the proportions of each is approximately equal in both areas.  I say this in terms of goodness being measured in their observation of the golden rule.  Beagles' general definition of good and bad is how well they ally themselves with the USA, and by that they are not so good. 

A week or two ago I brought up the concept of our souls being in some sort of line waiting our turn to inhabit a body.  Since things are changeable here on earth the waiting soul does not know what body it will inhabit.  If Beagles' mom had had a headache as he was at the head of the line, he could well have been born in Iran, and he would likely hate America too and think that it was a moral cesspool and that there was nobody good there.


Christians can build a church wherever they please, but for Jews of antiquity there was only one temple and it was in Jerusalem.  They were pretty headstrong and the Romans didn't like that so they destroyed the temple and Jerusalem and the Jews were scattered through the world.  I think they were promised the land of Israel in the days of Moses.  Anyway they still considered Israel the promised land in their exile.  In the early days of Zionism a few other places were considered the promised land but their hearts belonged to Israel.

So if America was the promised land, as Beagles' revelation told him it was, they would want to come here, and they would want it to be a Jewish state, and other people could still live here but they would have to obey the rules they made, and if they wanted Beaglestonia they would take it, and there would be no mention of a fair price.


Nancy is playing a bad hand well.  When things are not going your way you welcome a disruption of any kind, and this was one.  It upset the big baby and made him more adamant about a circus trial, and by circus I don't mean a bad thing, but one with witnesses.  A few days ago it looked like there might be some dissenting rep sens, and with Bolton sticking his big pink toe into the waters it looked like she was having some success.  But now Moscow Mitch appears to have the senate locked up and Bolton isn't saying nothing, so for the nonce it appears that Nancy's gambit is not working out.  On the other hand the dems are no worse off than if they hadn't done it, so nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

Where's My Good Country?

If  Uncle Ken doesn't want to discuss the Middle East, that's fine with me.  It's nothing but a cesspool of human misery, second only to Africa, with Central America in third place.  There's only one more thing I want to know before we abandon the subject.  I challenged Uncle Ken to identify one good country in the Middle East besides Israel, and I'm still waiting for his response.

I don't think the Jews would be happy in Beaglesonia since they are used to living in the desert.  I have previously proposed that we give them some unoccupied federal land in the desert South West.  Being good businessmen, they will surely make it more productive like they did with Israel, and they might make it a good buffer zone between us and Mexico.  If, however, they would rather live in my neighborhood, I would be happy to see them move here.  They would never build a wall around me because I would not constantly lob mortar rounds and rockets at their territory.  The only thing is we would need to get rid of an equal number of current residents because we don't need our population to increase.  No problem, being good businessmen, the Jews would surely give them a fair price for their land.  The only reason the Jews didn't buy the Palestinians out was that they left in a huff, vowing to come back as conquerors some day.

I do remember saying something about not needing any more immigrants in this country, but that was in the context of Uncle Ken's statement that, without immigration, our population would be decreasing, which I would consider a good thing.  I have nothing against immigrants, I just don't want them replacing the children we never had.  Come to think of it, this is inconsistent with what I said about having no objection to legal immigration so, as the politicians say, that statement is no longer operable.

Last I heard, it wasn't Moscow Mitch who was holding up the impeachment process, it was Fancy Nancy refusing to deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  It's probably just a formality, but I don't think the Senate can legally start the trial until the articles are delivered.  I seem to remember Uncle Ken saying that this was a brilliant move on Fancy Nancy's part, and  I suppose it is, if her intent is to delay the process until election time.

too dumb to refute

They all look alike to you because you don't know any better.  Your ignorance of the mideast is profound and astonishing.  I know I have spent a lot of my morning hours explaining it to you, but it has all been for naught.  You know very little and you are not interested in learning more.  I used to kind of enjoy explaining things to you and dismantling your arguments.  Much of what you say is false and even the arguments, you make from those falsities do not logically follow.  There is no point in me addressing them and I won't bother today.

One thing.  You say it's only illegal immigration that you don't like, but maybe a couple weeks ago you said you didn't want any immigration because you didn't want to have less elbow room in the swamp.  If America is the promised land then that is where the Jews belong so maybe you are right that we should bring them here.  They could build a settlement on Beaglestonia and build a wall around you and then you would have some idea of how the Palestinians feel.

Saying impeachment is a scam does not make it so, especially if you are getting your information from the big baby who is the biggest liar to come down the pike since, since, well the biggest liar.  I would address your further thoughts but they are just wrong, which a little reading would reveal, but you are not interested in that.


If I seem out of sorts it's because I was under the cloud of war last night.  Those dozen missiles launched by Iran were ballistic which is pretty advanced and means they could put them wherever they wanted.  They could easily have killed a bunch of our guys, but they chose not to.  Well good for that,  That is their tit for our tat, and hopefully there will be no tat for their tit.  The latest tweet from the big baby sounds like that may be true, but of course he could change his mind on a dime.  There have been instances in the past where cooler heads have swayed him to a wiser course, but that only lasts for a little while and he soon reverts to form.  But, like the bully who dreads the bloody nose, the big baby has never really liked conflict whee the other guy is able to fight back, so maybe we do have a bit of peace for a bit, which is better than war.


What Bolton said was that he would obey a subpoena from the senate and now that Moscow Mitch has it locked up tight that is never going to happen, so that seems to be a bust.  Of course, as a private citizen he could spill whatever beans he has whenever he wants.  Methinks what he really wants is to sell a bunch of books.

They All Look Alike To Me

I have heard that there are different tribes or factions of Islam and that they all hate each other, but they are united in their hatred of us.  If ISIS is the sworn enemy of Iran, then how come they attacked Iraq, which is also a sworn enemy of Iran?  I seem to remember that Iraq and Iran fought a war with each other some time ago.  I don't remember who won, but it doesn't matter because they are both bad countries as far as I'm concerned.  If Uncle Ken thinks there are any good countries in the Middle East besides Israel, perhaps he could enlighten me by naming just one of them.

I was against Trump's abandonment of the Kurds, but it turned out that all the Turks wanted was a buffer zone between them and the Kurds because they both hate each other.  Sounds reasonable to me.

If things in the Middle East settled down a bit when Obama was president, it was probably because he liked the Muslims.  I used to think that he was a Muslim but, according to Wiki, he is not now, nor was he ever.  Be that as it may, he must have liked the Muslims because he made a speech about it that won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

You know what I think?  I think that God just made Israel for practice, and that America is the real Promised Land.  I didn't find that in the Bible, it just came to me once out of the clear blue sky.  I think that qualifies a revelation, or maybe it's just common sense.

I have said before that I have nothing against legal immigration, it's the illegal immigration that I oppose, mostly because it's out of control, which is why the immigration laws were passed in the first place.

Like I said before, I don't like Trump's personality, but I do like some of the things he is trying to do.  I have always wished that the Republicans, or even the Democrats, had a candidate who was a nice guy with the same agenda as Trump, but they don't, so it's starting to look like Trump is the only choice available.  It seems that he was right all along about this impeachment thing being just a big scam.  Since they don't expect the Senate to convict, the Democrats are now trying to stall it off so that it's still up in the air come election time.  They never expected a Senate conviction, they just wanted to make Trump look bad, as if he needed any help with that.

how can you not know Shia from Sunni?

I think Beagles thinks we are at war with every country that acts badly towards us and that he personally doesn't like, but he is mistaken.  We have the war on terrorism which is just George Orwell's forever war with a slightly more reasonable sounding name.  One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and militias are put on and taken off that list according to our purposes.  Speaking of the war on terrorism it is largely the work of the guy we just killed that dealt ISIS a near fatal blow while the Iraqi Sunnis were running from battles and leaving their weapons behind.  Well also the Kurds, who we recently gave the back of our hands because Trump admires the Turkish dictator Erdogan, but then they are used to that.

During the Obama administration things had gotten pretty good.  They had stopped their nuclear program and were allowing inspections,  It wasn't like we were pals, they were only doing it so that we would lift the sanctions we put against them, and they were continuing their covert actions against our guys who were doing covert actions against them, but things were pretty calm and perhaps other agreements could be made.  Then Trump came ion and tore that up and has been beating up on them ever since.

The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS are all Sunnis and are all sworn enemies of Iran.  How do you not know this?  Even in your little dribble of news feed this has to have come through.  Talking to you about the mideast is like talking to a sixth grader who doesn't always read his Weekly Reader. 

The muslims of the mideast would like nothing better then for us to take the Israelis out of the mideast.  The Israelis would like nothing less.  Do the words Promised Land mean anything to a biblical scholar such as yourself?  And I thought you were against immigrants, although it has long been clear that what you are really against is Mexicans because they are not as white as you.

The idea that there are no good guys outside of Israel in the mideast is ludicrous.  I can't go on.


What to make of John Bolton's willingness to testify if the senate subpoenas him?  Why now?   He does have a book coming out and that is sure to spike sales, but I wonder if it's the current cloud of war.  There is nothing Bolton would like better than bombing Iran, so is this some kind of trap for the dems where he will say he heard nothing on that phone call and that will give Trump a PR boost that could encourage him to bomb harder?   Not likely I think because before Bolton spoke up things were going swimmingly for Trump and his party, and this has thrown a bit of a wrench into that.  Hats off to Nancy her strategy is working beyond even her expectations.  Also Bolton knows well now, if he didn't know before, how stupid and feckless Trump is, hardly the man to lead us into war.

I never liked Bolton and still don't, but I have to admit that he is man of principle.  Could he be doing the right thing by telling the truth at this point?  Doesn't seem likely, but time will tell.

Leading to War?

"Am I missing something or is this leading us directly to war?" - Uncle Ken

Uncle Ken is not the only one who is concerned that killing that general might lead to war with Iran.  Silly me, I thought we had been at war with Iran ever since they took those hostages back in 1979.  The more I think about it, though, I can understand why some people might be confused about this.  A traditional war is where two or more nation states engage in combat with each other, and we haven't had one of those since World War II.  I have heard what they do nowadays called  "proxy wars".  I think the phrase originated in the corporate world, but I don't understand how it works in that context.  The way it works in real life is like what happened in Korea and Vietnam.  The Korean War was really against the Red Chinese, and the Vietnam War was really against the Russians but, for some reason, they didn't want to admit that, so they pretended it was against these little puppet countries.  Iran has indeed been waging war against us since 1979, but I believe this is the first time we fought back directly against Iran.  Before this we fought with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and The Islamic State, which were probably just proxies for Iran, although it's possible that Iran is itself a proxy for something else, perhaps Russia.

Then there's Israel.  I remember when all those Islamic countries used to be mad at Israel but, at some point, they transferred their animosity to us, and you hardly ever hear about Israel anymore.  It just occurred to me that they might view Israel as a proxy for the United States, and maybe it is.  Maybe the bad guys got tired of fooling around with the puppet and decided to attack the puppet master.  If that be the case, maybe we could solve this whole thing by evacuating all the Jews from Israel and bringing them to the U.S., which already has more Jews in it than Israel.  Then we could bring our own troops home and give the Islamics free run in the Middle East.  They would still fight among themselves, but it wouldn't matter because no good guys would be in the line of fire.  

Mess O' Patamia

I don't think the English have much to be proud of as far as breakfast goes, bangers and mash and all that jazz.  Here's one.  What do the French call French fries?  Fries,  Actually frites, but frites is French for fries.

Mess 'O Patamia the Nat Lamp used to call it.  That was even before the Iraq war,  I think it was way back when we were trying to set up some kind of peace plan between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Now that the Palestinian's inept allies are broken and fighting each other the Israelis are moving into the West Bank with no constraints.

And we are now, well we were in Iraq, but after the big baby's latest adventure they are voting to kick us out, but now the big baby is threatening sanctions if they try, or maybe he is going to make them pay for a base we built there, and that's not likely to happen so maybe we will have to, I dunno, go in there and take their oil, that's something big baby has wanted to do for some time.

And now we are waiting for the Irani shoe to drop.  Could be anywhere, anytime, anyhow, and we just sit and wait with our current handful of troops very vulnerable.  So was this the plan dreamed up in Mar A Largo?  We'll just kill this general and then we'll see what happens?  Didn't any of those clowns ask, and then what?  Probably not, they were all too busy trying to nod their heads harder than the guy next to them.  Not that it mattered, the whole concept of what next is way beyond the big baby's comprehension.

Actually he does have sort of a plan, he has a list of 52 targets to hit after Iran hits him back.  Some of them cultural sites that would make it a war crime, but pshaw with war crimes, we are in a new era.  And of course we would have to hit them harder than they hit us which would have to be harder than we hit them in the first place.  Am I missing something or is this leading us directly to war?

War with Iran, war with Iraq, the Saudis and the Russkies couldn't be happier.  Oh and did I add that our brave troops will be led by the wise private Bone Spurs whose military prowess is the greatest anybody has ever seen.  Everybody says that.

The Continental Breakfast

I don't know the answer to Uncle Ken's other questions, but I do know about the continental breakfast.  Residents of the British Isles commonly refer to mainland Europe as "The Continent".  The Brits traditionally eat a big breakfast, while the Continentals traditionally eat a light breakfast.  When a hotel or motel offers its guests a continental breakfast, it means something like rolls and jam, just enough to tide you over until you can get to a real restaurant for what the Brits call "a proper fry up".

My point about the Roman New Year was that there is nothing magic about January 1st.  Historically, New Years has been celebrated on several other days before everybody settled down to January 1st.  The Romans used May 1st up till 222 BC because that was when their leaders, called "consuls" began their term of office.  It was changed later, first to March15, and ultimately to January 1.  That's the short version.  For the rest of the story, click on the link.

as the world turns

It's good to see that Beagles is looking things up, but I don't know why, having gone to all the effort,  he didn't just say why the Romans had May 1, as new year's day.

Back to the rotation of the earth,  The ancients knew that it took a certain amount of time after noontime until it would be noontime again and that it was the same amount every day.  I guess that they needed hour glasses to figure that out, but I think they invented them pretty early on, or water clocks, I remember reading about water clocks.  Mr Google says that the Egyptians divided the daytime into ten hours, one would guess because of that finger thing, then they added an hour on either side for dawn and dusk and that made twelve, and then gave nighttime twelve more.

The Romans picked that up and passed it on to to us.  Used to be that the twelve hours of daytime were shorter or longer than the twelve hours of nighttime depending on the time of year, but with advancing water clock technology they evened them out.  And then they divided the hour into sixty minutes borrowing from the Sumerians who used the base sixty, I am thinking because it can be divided evenly into two, three, four, and five.  You kind of wonder why they even bothered with minutes since it would be about two thousand years until trains were invented, but I suppose they still had to hard boil their eggs, and seconds, well maybe they wanted their eggs to come out just right.

Actually I suspect that minutes and especially seconds came from the astronomers of the day, and in fact minutes and seconds are the way a degree is divided.

AM and PM is kind of odd, I kind of like the military version of like 1630 hours, sounds so precise.  But why not 20 hours total, each one with 100 minutes of 100 seconds.  When the French were killing time between killing nobles to invent grams and meters why didn't they take up the measure of time? 

A month makes sense in that it is roughly full moon to full moon, but what of the seven day week?  Why not three weeks of ten days, or six of five?  I think we have the Jews to blame or credit with that with their seven days of creation though they may have borrowed from someone else for that. 

And just because I have a little time here, why do we call today 12/03/20 while on the continent they call it 03/12/20?  And why do we call it a continental breakfast when both America and Europe are continents?  And here's one, a friend informed me last night that she has heard that you should write it 12/03/2020 on a check because if you write 12/03/20 somebody could easily alter that to read 2015 or 2057.  It's not readily apparent how that would benefit anybody but you know, you can't be to careful these days