Back in the day I was in a few demonstrations, not that many. I was more of the school of shooting off my mouth in a bar. My thinking at the time was more along the line of the civil rights demonstrations in the south where the demonstrators were brutally beaten for all the nation to see and as a result public opinion was swayed and their cause was bolstered.
I could never logically connect how the cops busting our heads had anything to do with proving the war was wrong and thus ending it, but you know you have to do something.
So I was shocked when I saw on the news a demonstration, I think it was in Michigan, where suddenly a fusillade of bottles and rocks showered the police from the demonstrators. This was not how it was supposed to work. I did not approve. A few months later I was in Berkeley at this big demonstration, and again to my dismay the fusillade was launched. Again I disapproved. I left with the friend I had come with.
As we consumed beer after beer we were also consumed by what exactly was going on with the demonstration and eventually we had to venture out and see. It was all over, tear gas, some destruction, cops all over. Two of whom espied the two of us walking back and popped us into the back of a paddy wagon.
We were in the city jail over the weekend with a bunch of the other round ups. Most of them were just people like us, passers by who wondered why we were rounded up. I remember one guy though who had been tossing Molotov cocktails. He was sorely disappointed that when he tossed them the flame just dribbled down to the sidewalk. There had been an article in the Berkeley Barb just a week previous that advised mixing soap powder with the gasoline so that the gunk would stick, but apparently he had not read that issue. Well live and learn.
What happened was that there had been a tall guy with a mustache tossing fire bombs, and my friend was a tall guy with a mustache. Of course there were a lot of tall guys with mustaches in Berkeley and actually the cops had arrested pretty much any such guy they came across. They soon dropped charges against me but my friend had to go to trial and only escaped doing time through a hung jury.
In the early seventies there was a group of macho guys in the bar where I worked. They were not politically involved but they were against the war, and didn't mind too much getting into a fight. Now that I think of it they were mostly all Vietnam vets going to school on the GI bill. I wasn't in their group but I was pretty good friends with them. I don't remember offhand but something happened in the war that caused a wave of demonstrations across the nation,
They took to the streets, blocked traffic, did some looting, some vandalism. I was out there too, out of solidarity and all. I thought the demonstrations were just and I felt I had a duty to lend my body to the mass. I was still not quite on board with the looting and vandalizing, but blocking traffic, that didn't sound so bad, it was merely an inconvenience to the drivers and maybe they could spend their time stuck in traffic by meditating on the war and they would realize that it was wrong. Some kind of crap like that.
So anyway that was the experience I brought with me to the Black Lives Matter marches two months ago. I will take it from there after the weekend.
States that shut down early or late and/or opened up early or late, it doesn't seem to matter.
This is not true and nothing in that link backs it up. The facts about lockdowns are right there in any map or graph and if Beagles chooses to ignore them there is nothing further I can do about it. I have taken a vow not to yammer with Beagles and I shall not break it.
Friday, July 31, 2020
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Belief
We like to think of ourselves as rational beings who carefully weigh all the evidence before deciding whether or not to believe something, but it often doesn't work that way. When we receive new information that contradicts what we already believe, our first impulse is to reject it. If we subsequently hear the new information repeated enough times, we tend to believe it more and more until it eventually pushes our previous belief out of our minds. This is an intuitive thing that can be overcome if we try, but many people don't even try because they are more interested in feeling comfortable with their beliefs than in challenging them in search of objective truth. Some people don't even believe that objective truth exists. Those of us who do can't conclusively prove it, we believe in its existence because we find it easier than not believing in its existence. That's why a criminal charge needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There's no such thing as proving something beyond any doubt, but a line must be drawn somewhere or nothing would ever get done.
I know Uncle Ken was speaking hypothetically but, in the State of Michigan, it is already mandatory for a school bus driver, or any holder of a commercial driver's license for that matter, to be tested for alcohol and drugs soon after being involved in a traffic accident. They don't use a breathalyzer, they send you to a hospital or clinic where they test your blood for alcohol and your urine for drugs. They were also supposed to go around and do random testing from time to time, but I don't know if that program ever got off the ground. We were given a presentation on the subject when the law was first passed which, come to think about it, was a decade or two ago. I have never heard about that law being repealed or amended, but there are lots of things that have happened in the last few decades about which I have never heard.
COVID cases seems to be surging all over. States that shut down early or late and/or opened up early or late, it doesn't seem to matter. Looks like all bets are off.
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17nPYn?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
I know Uncle Ken was speaking hypothetically but, in the State of Michigan, it is already mandatory for a school bus driver, or any holder of a commercial driver's license for that matter, to be tested for alcohol and drugs soon after being involved in a traffic accident. They don't use a breathalyzer, they send you to a hospital or clinic where they test your blood for alcohol and your urine for drugs. They were also supposed to go around and do random testing from time to time, but I don't know if that program ever got off the ground. We were given a presentation on the subject when the law was first passed which, come to think about it, was a decade or two ago. I have never heard about that law being repealed or amended, but there are lots of things that have happened in the last few decades about which I have never heard.
COVID cases seems to be surging all over. States that shut down early or late and/or opened up early or late, it doesn't seem to matter. Looks like all bets are off.
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17nPYn?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
the bus driver's dilemma
This is probably beating a dead horse. But when we were discussing the McDonald case the ex-cop alluded to photographs that showed that the shooting was justified. He said a photo could show more than video which I found doubtful because a photo has less, not more, information, but I didn't say anything.
In the interest of fair play this morning I googled photographs of Laquan McDonald and came across this:
https://www.wbez.org/stories/city-records-show-detectives-used-video-to-craft-laquan-mcdonald-narrative/1398279d-23d5-4e3c-be0f-5834d9f07b35 It's just an item that shows how the cops were coached to give a different version of the story, So not only did the cops lie about it, but they were coached to do so by their higher-ups. I am just putting this in this morning because I had the link and did not want to lose it.
Here's a thing. Consider you are a school bus driver and one of your fellow drivers has a crash and whiskey bottles are found under the bus driver seat but the school board decides not to give him a breathalyzer test, and in fact proclaims that it will never give one of its drivers such a test. As a sober driver yourself this is likely to piss you off because now the general public will think you are all a bunch of drunks. Since you don't drink and drive you don't want to be tarred by this brush, so you would be all for giving all bus drivers who have accidents a breathalyzer test.
But wait. You get together with your fellow drivers and one of them opines that the guy was framed, and that these breathalyzer tests, sometimes they give a false positive. Well shit, what if you had a fender bender and the test returned a false positive? You would be up shit's creek. So maybe when the issue came up at the next school bus driver's meeting you would be against giving breathalyzer tests after accidents.
In the interest of fair play this morning I googled photographs of Laquan McDonald and came across this:
https://www.wbez.org/stories/city-records-show-detectives-used-video-to-craft-laquan-mcdonald-narrative/1398279d-23d5-4e3c-be0f-5834d9f07b35 It's just an item that shows how the cops were coached to give a different version of the story, So not only did the cops lie about it, but they were coached to do so by their higher-ups. I am just putting this in this morning because I had the link and did not want to lose it.
Here's a thing. Consider you are a school bus driver and one of your fellow drivers has a crash and whiskey bottles are found under the bus driver seat but the school board decides not to give him a breathalyzer test, and in fact proclaims that it will never give one of its drivers such a test. As a sober driver yourself this is likely to piss you off because now the general public will think you are all a bunch of drunks. Since you don't drink and drive you don't want to be tarred by this brush, so you would be all for giving all bus drivers who have accidents a breathalyzer test.
But wait. You get together with your fellow drivers and one of them opines that the guy was framed, and that these breathalyzer tests, sometimes they give a false positive. Well shit, what if you had a fender bender and the test returned a false positive? You would be up shit's creek. So maybe when the issue came up at the next school bus driver's meeting you would be against giving breathalyzer tests after accidents.
I Concur
I watched the video several times and looked to Wiki for the details. In this case, I agree completely with Uncle Ken's version of the story. Let the record show that this agreement is a one time only thing and sets no precedent for future discussions.
On a lighter note, I have formulated a theory about why Cheboygan is still experiencing Empty Shelf Syndrome and Chicago is not. I think that most of our consumer goods are being diverted to the big cities to ensure that their stores don't run out of stuff for the looters to steal. Well, it's only a theory.
On a lighter note, I have formulated a theory about why Cheboygan is still experiencing Empty Shelf Syndrome and Chicago is not. I think that most of our consumer goods are being diverted to the big cities to ensure that their stores don't run out of stuff for the looters to steal. Well, it's only a theory.
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
go to the videotape
After hanging my show Monday afternoon I felt like I should celebrate so I went out to this little Italian restaurant a block or two from where I live. I was there with one of my neighbors who is a retired cop. Well you don't often get to talk to cops so I took advantage of the opportunity. I've known this guy a few years and I like him. He is a former seminarian, and seems fairly liberal. I had him pegged as a guy who just wants to do good.
I brought up the subject of Catanzara, because this has long been a piece of the puzzle that I didn't know what to do with. How could over 50 percent of cops vote to make this guy the head of their union? He didn't like Catanzara at all, didn't much care for the forces that put him in power, but didn't have much of an answer for why the majority of cops voted for him.
The subject of Laquan McDonald came up, and he said that the cop, Jason Van Dyke, was defending himself and was justified because McDonald was lunging at him while Van Dyke was pinned against his car. That went against everything I had seen or heard, but I have to admit that I had not looked at it all that closely, so I just acknowledged what he said without agreeing with it and ate the rest of my pizza and drank the rest of my beer and we parted on good terms.
The next day I googled for the video, maybe I had missed something. It's short and it's at night, but there it is, McDonald lurching with knife in his hand, a line of cops maybe thirty feet from him, far from lunging range and he not lunging at all, and suddenly shots ring our from the left and he crumples and dies. As plain as the nose on your face. I invite my Beaglestonian brothers to google for it and tell me what they think.
Not releasing that video in a timely manner is the reason that Rahm is not the mayor today. The story at the time was that Rahm was covering up for a bad deed by the cops that would tarnish his reputation. But the story the ex-cop believed was that the video was held back because it showed that the cop was innocent and Rahm was holding it back to tarnish the cop. See if the cop is innocent and the video shows it that turns everything around.
Before I finished my beer and pizza, I asked the ex-cop if he knew of any cases where the cops were in the wrong about a shooting, and he had to think awhile and then came up with some anecdote from his days as a cop that didn't have much to do with anything.
How can it be that cops are always in the right? It just doesn't sound reasonable, it is against the laws of statistics.
But if it's true that cops are immaculate, then there is no reason to have police review boards, to allow people to file complaints against the cops, to keep records of cops' behavior. There is no reason to worry about police brutality because it never happens. The police should just keep on doing what they are doing and everybody else should just keep their nose out of police business and hand over that paycheck without asking any questions.
It kind of goes back to that Objective Reality thing that I harp on. If we both agree that I have a tree in my backyard then we can discuss whether it is a pretty tree or an ugly tree. But if we can't agree that there is a tree at all then we have nothing to talk about.
I brought up the subject of Catanzara, because this has long been a piece of the puzzle that I didn't know what to do with. How could over 50 percent of cops vote to make this guy the head of their union? He didn't like Catanzara at all, didn't much care for the forces that put him in power, but didn't have much of an answer for why the majority of cops voted for him.
The subject of Laquan McDonald came up, and he said that the cop, Jason Van Dyke, was defending himself and was justified because McDonald was lunging at him while Van Dyke was pinned against his car. That went against everything I had seen or heard, but I have to admit that I had not looked at it all that closely, so I just acknowledged what he said without agreeing with it and ate the rest of my pizza and drank the rest of my beer and we parted on good terms.
The next day I googled for the video, maybe I had missed something. It's short and it's at night, but there it is, McDonald lurching with knife in his hand, a line of cops maybe thirty feet from him, far from lunging range and he not lunging at all, and suddenly shots ring our from the left and he crumples and dies. As plain as the nose on your face. I invite my Beaglestonian brothers to google for it and tell me what they think.
Not releasing that video in a timely manner is the reason that Rahm is not the mayor today. The story at the time was that Rahm was covering up for a bad deed by the cops that would tarnish his reputation. But the story the ex-cop believed was that the video was held back because it showed that the cop was innocent and Rahm was holding it back to tarnish the cop. See if the cop is innocent and the video shows it that turns everything around.
Before I finished my beer and pizza, I asked the ex-cop if he knew of any cases where the cops were in the wrong about a shooting, and he had to think awhile and then came up with some anecdote from his days as a cop that didn't have much to do with anything.
How can it be that cops are always in the right? It just doesn't sound reasonable, it is against the laws of statistics.
But if it's true that cops are immaculate, then there is no reason to have police review boards, to allow people to file complaints against the cops, to keep records of cops' behavior. There is no reason to worry about police brutality because it never happens. The police should just keep on doing what they are doing and everybody else should just keep their nose out of police business and hand over that paycheck without asking any questions.
It kind of goes back to that Objective Reality thing that I harp on. If we both agree that I have a tree in my backyard then we can discuss whether it is a pretty tree or an ugly tree. But if we can't agree that there is a tree at all then we have nothing to talk about.
Masking Up
I have read the recent postings of my esteemed colleagues, but I haven't responded because I don't know what to say about this stuff anymore. Here's some late breaking news from Beaglesonia:
All the stores in Cheboygan are now requiring masks, at least on paper. Some of them have posted disclaimers saying that they will assume that you have a medical excuse if they see you without a mask, but they're not going to ask you about it because it's none of their business. This is the closest thing to civil disobedience that we have going on at the moment. Walmart was passing out free disposable masks at the entrance for awhile, but now they are selling them for less than a dollar a piece, which is not bad considering that one mask is usually good for several trips to town. I guess you're supposed to throw them away after one use, and that makes sense for a worker who has to wear it for an eight hour shift, but we only spend an hour or so in one store, and seldom go into more than two stores in one shopping trip.
Speaking of shopping: A boy on my school bus once told me that he had been shopping with his dad over the weekend. I replied, "Guys don't shop, guys just go buy stuff, shopping is for girls." Yesterday in the Walmart I realized that this is no longer true. You can't just go buy stuff anymore, first you have to find it, and there is a good chance that you won't. It has been said, when a guy comes home from a fishing trip empty handed, "That's why they call it fishing instead of catching." Well now we can say the same thing about shopping, "That's why they call it shopping instead of buying."
All the stores in Cheboygan are now requiring masks, at least on paper. Some of them have posted disclaimers saying that they will assume that you have a medical excuse if they see you without a mask, but they're not going to ask you about it because it's none of their business. This is the closest thing to civil disobedience that we have going on at the moment. Walmart was passing out free disposable masks at the entrance for awhile, but now they are selling them for less than a dollar a piece, which is not bad considering that one mask is usually good for several trips to town. I guess you're supposed to throw them away after one use, and that makes sense for a worker who has to wear it for an eight hour shift, but we only spend an hour or so in one store, and seldom go into more than two stores in one shopping trip.
Speaking of shopping: A boy on my school bus once told me that he had been shopping with his dad over the weekend. I replied, "Guys don't shop, guys just go buy stuff, shopping is for girls." Yesterday in the Walmart I realized that this is no longer true. You can't just go buy stuff anymore, first you have to find it, and there is a good chance that you won't. It has been said, when a guy comes home from a fishing trip empty handed, "That's why they call it fishing instead of catching." Well now we can say the same thing about shopping, "That's why they call it shopping instead of buying."
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Still present
I'm not sure how it started but I've been slowly coming around to Mr. Beagles point of view regarding the dreaded Chinese. It's not because they are Communist though, I think they would be the same regardless of their political system because they are Chinese. Inscrutable fuckers, that's what they are, no getting around it. East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet. Some famous guy said that, maybe Kipling, and it's true.
Anyhow, the Chinese are getting into some deep shit lately but you don't read much about it in the mainstream media. I've gone to other sources and picked up a few things, such as a possible collapse of financial institutions, drought in some areas, major flooding in others, and possible food shortages. China is being stretched pretty thinly and their neighbors, Russia and India, are paying close attention. This is all interesting to me and it beats trying to make sense of our own domestic shit show.
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It doesn't bother me that the statues of Columbus are getting toppled. He was a rat bastard, not worthy of any adulation, and didn't discover shit. That's what I read online so it must be true.
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I'll close with a recent video, only a couple of minutes in length, with the words of George Carlin. Too cynical? Maybe, but appropriate none the less. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZZt4EAKSQ&feature=emb_logo
Anyhow, the Chinese are getting into some deep shit lately but you don't read much about it in the mainstream media. I've gone to other sources and picked up a few things, such as a possible collapse of financial institutions, drought in some areas, major flooding in others, and possible food shortages. China is being stretched pretty thinly and their neighbors, Russia and India, are paying close attention. This is all interesting to me and it beats trying to make sense of our own domestic shit show.
-----
It doesn't bother me that the statues of Columbus are getting toppled. He was a rat bastard, not worthy of any adulation, and didn't discover shit. That's what I read online so it must be true.
-----
I'll close with a recent video, only a couple of minutes in length, with the words of George Carlin. Too cynical? Maybe, but appropriate none the less. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZZt4EAKSQ&feature=emb_logo
Monday, July 27, 2020
omerta
Back to the Wabash Avenue bridge. You would think if you were shot and you were dying you would want to finger the culprit, likewise if your boyfriend was dying you would want to do the same. But it often happens that folks don't.
It could be that the shooting was the result of some illegal act and the victims don't want to say anything because they are involved and don't want to have to admit that. Or perhaps the shooter is some very dangerous hombre and they don't think the police would be able to defend them if the word got out that they were snitches. Or maybe they are practicing omerta. They don't trust the police at all, they see them as the enemy and there is no way they are going to cooperate with them.
Six years ago Laquan McDonald was shot and killed. He was probably high or something and he had a knife and he wouldn't put it down. He hadn't stabbed anybody and the cops had him surrounded trying to get him to put it down and then this new cop showed up and shot him dead. Shot him sixteen times.
The shooter, Jason Van Dyke, was a bad apple, I think we can all agree on that. Well we can agree on it now, but it was a few years before the truth came out. The reason it took a few years to come out was because all of the twenty-something cops lied about what went down. The only reason it finally came out was because there was a video that showed that Laquan had never lunged at anybody which is what all twenty something cops said.
The mayor and his cronies were aware of the video but they found this or that reason not to allow the public to see it. But eventually it did get out. Van Dyke is facing heavy charges but most of the cops are skating.
Remember Omerta? It is often decried when like those folks on the Wabash Avenue bridge invoke it. But as you can see the cops practice it too. And this is going to make it all the more unlikely that Black victims are going to talk to the cops who they can see are united against them.
So here's the thing. Those Black Lives Matter folks, they have a just cause, they have a just reason for demonstrating.
Does that mean they have a right to cause that ruckus in the northwest, or to topple the Columbus statue here in Chicago? I don't think so. But more on that in a couple days.
It could be that the shooting was the result of some illegal act and the victims don't want to say anything because they are involved and don't want to have to admit that. Or perhaps the shooter is some very dangerous hombre and they don't think the police would be able to defend them if the word got out that they were snitches. Or maybe they are practicing omerta. They don't trust the police at all, they see them as the enemy and there is no way they are going to cooperate with them.
Six years ago Laquan McDonald was shot and killed. He was probably high or something and he had a knife and he wouldn't put it down. He hadn't stabbed anybody and the cops had him surrounded trying to get him to put it down and then this new cop showed up and shot him dead. Shot him sixteen times.
The shooter, Jason Van Dyke, was a bad apple, I think we can all agree on that. Well we can agree on it now, but it was a few years before the truth came out. The reason it took a few years to come out was because all of the twenty-something cops lied about what went down. The only reason it finally came out was because there was a video that showed that Laquan had never lunged at anybody which is what all twenty something cops said.
The mayor and his cronies were aware of the video but they found this or that reason not to allow the public to see it. But eventually it did get out. Van Dyke is facing heavy charges but most of the cops are skating.
Remember Omerta? It is often decried when like those folks on the Wabash Avenue bridge invoke it. But as you can see the cops practice it too. And this is going to make it all the more unlikely that Black victims are going to talk to the cops who they can see are united against them.
So here's the thing. Those Black Lives Matter folks, they have a just cause, they have a just reason for demonstrating.
Does that mean they have a right to cause that ruckus in the northwest, or to topple the Columbus statue here in Chicago? I don't think so. But more on that in a couple days.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Rickshaws?
There are rickshaws in Chicago? Some years ago I read that the Asian countries that still had rickshaws were trying to get rid of them. What did they do, sell them all to Chicago? Now I understand why Uncle Ken is worried that we are becoming a third world country.
I don't know what to think about all that violence in the cities. Some are comparing it to the '60s, but I don't remember the 60's as being this bad. There were incidents from time to time, but I don't remember them as all happening everywhere at once. Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I didn't watch hardly any television in those days, and of course there was no internet. It may be more than a coincidence that it's happening right in the middle of this corona thing. With many species, overcrowding leads to an increase in both aggression and disease. This is Mother Nature's way of telling them that it's time to disperse into new territories. If that's not possible, then the herd must be thinned to the level that the habitat will support.
Speaking of COVID, I heard on the TV news the other day that it's now the third leading cause of death in Florida, right behind heart disease and cancer. With all the publicity it's getting, one would think it's the number one leading cause of death worldwide. Then again, heart disease and cancer aren't contagious and maybe they've been around for so long that people don't notice them anymore. Maybe COVID will get that way eventually, receding into the background but never really going away. Speaking of which, whatever happened to AIDS? We hardly hear about it anymore, but I don't remember that a cure or vaccine was ever developed.
We are still experiencing Empty Shelf Syndrome in Cheboygan, although it's not nearly as bad as it was in the beginning, and different items are in short supply on different days. I found some yeast at the Save-A-Lot the other day, but it's that new fangled fast rising stuff that's supposed to rise twice as fast as ordinary yeast. It's probably fine once you get used to it.
I don't know what to think about all that violence in the cities. Some are comparing it to the '60s, but I don't remember the 60's as being this bad. There were incidents from time to time, but I don't remember them as all happening everywhere at once. Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I didn't watch hardly any television in those days, and of course there was no internet. It may be more than a coincidence that it's happening right in the middle of this corona thing. With many species, overcrowding leads to an increase in both aggression and disease. This is Mother Nature's way of telling them that it's time to disperse into new territories. If that's not possible, then the herd must be thinned to the level that the habitat will support.
Speaking of COVID, I heard on the TV news the other day that it's now the third leading cause of death in Florida, right behind heart disease and cancer. With all the publicity it's getting, one would think it's the number one leading cause of death worldwide. Then again, heart disease and cancer aren't contagious and maybe they've been around for so long that people don't notice them anymore. Maybe COVID will get that way eventually, receding into the background but never really going away. Speaking of which, whatever happened to AIDS? We hardly hear about it anymore, but I don't remember that a cure or vaccine was ever developed.
We are still experiencing Empty Shelf Syndrome in Cheboygan, although it's not nearly as bad as it was in the beginning, and different items are in short supply on different days. I found some yeast at the Save-A-Lot the other day, but it's that new fangled fast rising stuff that's supposed to rise twice as fast as ordinary yeast. It's probably fine once you get used to it.
Friday, July 24, 2020
murder on the Wabash Ave bridge
What I had said was that the current president of the Chicago police union, John Catanzara, had said something to the effect that the Chicago cops were disenchanted with the way they were being treated and weren't working as hard. Nobody actually comes out and says anything as explicit as calling for a slow down. But yeah, it appears that is what is going on. Is it a contributing factor to what? I assume Beagles means our current soaring violence (crime is down but murders are way up),
Last Sunday morning I woke up at two and stumbled into the front room and holy shit, Wacker Drive from State Street up to where it curves behind the wall of downtown buildings was ablaze with blue lights. Stepping out to the balcony with my binoculars it looked like there was some kind of party going on, There were people on the streets, cars weaving, a bunch of those rickshaws lit up and blasting music. I guess the cops were breaking it up. Well shit I've seen that happen before, but not so late at night and with so many people. I went back to bed.
When I got up around five and walked onto the balcony there was a cop car at Michigan and Wacker and another on State, and they were blocking whatever 5 AM Sunday morning traffic there was. My neighbor was on his balcony too and he told me that there had been a shooting at 2:30, guy killed and his girlfriend wounded. I would probably still would have been awake, Did I hear the shots?
Well I don't remember. There are a lot of fireworks going on all night. How do you tell one from the other? A few days later discussing the matter with a neighbor who was a cop, he said due to the physics of a bullet leaving the muzzle faster than the speed of sound, you hear kind of a double bang. I will have to remember it.
Apparently these upper Wacker Drive parties have been going on for some time. I do recall hearing a lot of noise on weekend nights but I had never tried to pin down its source.
Actually there are not so many fireworks now as there were before the fourth of July, but roaring motorcycles and hot rods roam the streets from morning to deep into the night. It gives a aura of lawlessness to the stately downtown streets. Where are the cops? Well some are apparently calling in sick in silent protest, and the others have their hands full with all the shooting in the ghetto.
Most all the shooting that you read about happens in the ghetto. That downtown shooting was an outlier. They got to the guy before he died but he wouldn't say anything about who had shot him, and his girlfriend wasn't talking either.
Last Sunday morning I woke up at two and stumbled into the front room and holy shit, Wacker Drive from State Street up to where it curves behind the wall of downtown buildings was ablaze with blue lights. Stepping out to the balcony with my binoculars it looked like there was some kind of party going on, There were people on the streets, cars weaving, a bunch of those rickshaws lit up and blasting music. I guess the cops were breaking it up. Well shit I've seen that happen before, but not so late at night and with so many people. I went back to bed.
When I got up around five and walked onto the balcony there was a cop car at Michigan and Wacker and another on State, and they were blocking whatever 5 AM Sunday morning traffic there was. My neighbor was on his balcony too and he told me that there had been a shooting at 2:30, guy killed and his girlfriend wounded. I would probably still would have been awake, Did I hear the shots?
Well I don't remember. There are a lot of fireworks going on all night. How do you tell one from the other? A few days later discussing the matter with a neighbor who was a cop, he said due to the physics of a bullet leaving the muzzle faster than the speed of sound, you hear kind of a double bang. I will have to remember it.
Apparently these upper Wacker Drive parties have been going on for some time. I do recall hearing a lot of noise on weekend nights but I had never tried to pin down its source.
Actually there are not so many fireworks now as there were before the fourth of July, but roaring motorcycles and hot rods roam the streets from morning to deep into the night. It gives a aura of lawlessness to the stately downtown streets. Where are the cops? Well some are apparently calling in sick in silent protest, and the others have their hands full with all the shooting in the ghetto.
Most all the shooting that you read about happens in the ghetto. That downtown shooting was an outlier. They got to the guy before he died but he wouldn't say anything about who had shot him, and his girlfriend wasn't talking either.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
What's Going on in Chicago?
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB174x6i?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
I understand that it's not just in Chicago, it's in cities all over the country, but I know a couple of guys in Chicago and I don't know people in cities all over the country, so let's hear it from our men in the field. Uncle Ken recently reported that the Chicago police were threatening a "slowdown" in response to the prospect of having their funding reduced. Did that ever come to pass? If so, do you think it's a contributing factor?
Weeding is not nearly as much fun as planting and harvesting, but it needs to be done if you want anything substantial to harvest. I used to stay on top of the weeds early on, but tended to neglect them once the plants grew taller than the weeds. If I had it to do over again, I think I would plant less and weed more. In a good year we frequently harvested more than we could use and ended up giving most of it away anyway. We grew a lot of acorn squash in our first garden because we planted all the seeds that came in the packet. Somebody recommended it because it was easy to grow, which it was. We canned a whole bunch of it and ate it for years afterwards, never seeing the need to plant squash again. To this day we only eat squash once or twice a year when our neighbor gives us some, and we never buy it in the store. The moral of the story is: Better to plant stuff that you already like and learn to grow it than to plant stuff that's easy to grow and learn to like it.
I understand that it's not just in Chicago, it's in cities all over the country, but I know a couple of guys in Chicago and I don't know people in cities all over the country, so let's hear it from our men in the field. Uncle Ken recently reported that the Chicago police were threatening a "slowdown" in response to the prospect of having their funding reduced. Did that ever come to pass? If so, do you think it's a contributing factor?
Weeding is not nearly as much fun as planting and harvesting, but it needs to be done if you want anything substantial to harvest. I used to stay on top of the weeds early on, but tended to neglect them once the plants grew taller than the weeds. If I had it to do over again, I think I would plant less and weed more. In a good year we frequently harvested more than we could use and ended up giving most of it away anyway. We grew a lot of acorn squash in our first garden because we planted all the seeds that came in the packet. Somebody recommended it because it was easy to grow, which it was. We canned a whole bunch of it and ate it for years afterwards, never seeing the need to plant squash again. To this day we only eat squash once or twice a year when our neighbor gives us some, and we never buy it in the store. The moral of the story is: Better to plant stuff that you already like and learn to grow it than to plant stuff that's easy to grow and learn to like it.
gardens
Bungalows have a slender sidewalk from the back porch to the alley. It is less than a yard between it and the fence that you can lean over if you choose to talk to your neighbors. And that is where Mom grew tomatoes. She grew flowers around the yard also but I never had much interest in them. You know, they don't do anything. Tomatoes you can eat right off the vine and one summer Mom tied a little salt shaker to the fence and how cool was that?
They also attracted tomato caterpillars (tomato hornworms wiki calls them). My dour Czech grandpa, when he visited would pluck them from the vines, toss them to the sidewalk and take inordinate pleasure in squashing them on the sidewalk. Kind of disturbing, but a little cool in a young boy's eyes. I remember them as having green blood.
Well time passes and I grew up and went to school. In Herrin, doing my CO I tried to grow a sunflower outside my trailer but the landlord's daughter (the landlord's beautiful daughter) mowed it down. I finished my CO, went back to Champaign, tended bar, lived here and there and somewhere in the mid seventies I moved into an apartment next to a vacant lot, and something from twenty years ago next to the fence between bungalow neighbors was reborn in me, and I grew a garden.
It was pretty big, maybe twenty by thirty feet. I grew everything you can buy a seed for at the garden store. Lettuce. radishes, carrots, onions, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi. corn, tomatoes, and peppers. One summer I grew okra, but never knew how to cook it so I let it flower and it was very pretty.
The garden did well at the beginning of the season, but the deeper it got into summer the fiercer became the weeds, also the sun beating down on me when I pulled them, so somewhere around late July I just surrendered it and it became a jungle.
Which did not please the guy next door who owned the lot who stopped by late in the third year of my garden and said, "Son, you can have it for the rest of the year, but don't plant it again next year."
I had no yard in Texas, when I came back and lived in my parents' attic I didn't feel right in asking for a plot of land. When I moved to the apartment on LaSalle there was nothing like a yard.
A great attraction of Marina City was those big beautiful balconies. I moved in on Columbus Day 1992, and after the hauling was done I took a folding chair out on the balcony and admired my magnificent view, and thought about lining that whole area by the railing with pots.
They also attracted tomato caterpillars (tomato hornworms wiki calls them). My dour Czech grandpa, when he visited would pluck them from the vines, toss them to the sidewalk and take inordinate pleasure in squashing them on the sidewalk. Kind of disturbing, but a little cool in a young boy's eyes. I remember them as having green blood.
Well time passes and I grew up and went to school. In Herrin, doing my CO I tried to grow a sunflower outside my trailer but the landlord's daughter (the landlord's beautiful daughter) mowed it down. I finished my CO, went back to Champaign, tended bar, lived here and there and somewhere in the mid seventies I moved into an apartment next to a vacant lot, and something from twenty years ago next to the fence between bungalow neighbors was reborn in me, and I grew a garden.
It was pretty big, maybe twenty by thirty feet. I grew everything you can buy a seed for at the garden store. Lettuce. radishes, carrots, onions, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi. corn, tomatoes, and peppers. One summer I grew okra, but never knew how to cook it so I let it flower and it was very pretty.
The garden did well at the beginning of the season, but the deeper it got into summer the fiercer became the weeds, also the sun beating down on me when I pulled them, so somewhere around late July I just surrendered it and it became a jungle.
Which did not please the guy next door who owned the lot who stopped by late in the third year of my garden and said, "Son, you can have it for the rest of the year, but don't plant it again next year."
I had no yard in Texas, when I came back and lived in my parents' attic I didn't feel right in asking for a plot of land. When I moved to the apartment on LaSalle there was nothing like a yard.
A great attraction of Marina City was those big beautiful balconies. I moved in on Columbus Day 1992, and after the hauling was done I took a folding chair out on the balcony and admired my magnificent view, and thought about lining that whole area by the railing with pots.
It's a Jungle Out There
Soil acidity is easily remedied with lime, that's not what makes gardening in Beaglesonia difficult. Before you can plant anything, you first have to remove the trees and brush that's already there, including the stumps and roots. About half the land is too wet most of the time so, if I was serious about it, I would make raised beds and then fence the critters out. The higher ground that isn't too wet is mostly sand, which would require additions of black dirt and/or compost to make it fertile. All this requires more time and energy than I have available at my age.
I have cleared a couple acres of the wet stuff over the years, and now I have to mow it once a year during the summer to keep the brush from reclaiming it. The original plan was to turn it into a duck marsh. Ducks and geese do drop in for a visit in the spring, but that could be said about most of the lawns and fields in the area. I maintain a rye patch of about one third of an acre in front of my deer blind, which I mow, cultivate, and re-seed every August. I have been told that a former owner used to cut hay on this land, and can see where he did some grading and ditching but, since his passing, the jungle has reclaimed its own.
Nowadays I keep busy cutting trees for firewood and forest improvement, but it doesn't take much to keep me busy anymore.
I have cleared a couple acres of the wet stuff over the years, and now I have to mow it once a year during the summer to keep the brush from reclaiming it. The original plan was to turn it into a duck marsh. Ducks and geese do drop in for a visit in the spring, but that could be said about most of the lawns and fields in the area. I maintain a rye patch of about one third of an acre in front of my deer blind, which I mow, cultivate, and re-seed every August. I have been told that a former owner used to cut hay on this land, and can see where he did some grading and ditching but, since his passing, the jungle has reclaimed its own.
Nowadays I keep busy cutting trees for firewood and forest improvement, but it doesn't take much to keep me busy anymore.
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Present, for those taking attendance
I'll stand with Mr. Beagles when he told "Incle" Ken that "he would write when he had something new to say." I tried dropping a subtle hint about the status of the gardens of Beaglesonia, to no avail.
My YouTube viewing habits of late have been centered on farming, homesteads, gardening, small animal husbandry, stuff like that. I started by watching the bigger farms at work, the guys raising hundreds of acres of grain or operating major dairy facilities. Cool to watch but way too involved, requiring an unreasonable investment in land, equipment, and people to keep things running. Now I'm hooked on the little guys, folks who have dinky farms but also full time jobs. Raising ducks makes people happy, it appears.
And then I'm watching people growing fruit trees and shrubs from produce they get at the supermarket. Black walnuts, anyone? I think Mr. Beagles mentioned that the swampy soil in Beaglesonia is too acidic (tannins?) for certain crops but I forgot which ones. Would blueberries thrive?
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In case you think that the news media is too one-sided, do I have the site for you! Check out https://www.allsides.com/ for an interesting take on stories. You'll see at least three versions of any story, with sources from the left, center, and right. All biases are noted, so everyone will be happy or pissed off, in equal measure. This site has proven to be one of the better rabbit holes I've stumbled into.
My YouTube viewing habits of late have been centered on farming, homesteads, gardening, small animal husbandry, stuff like that. I started by watching the bigger farms at work, the guys raising hundreds of acres of grain or operating major dairy facilities. Cool to watch but way too involved, requiring an unreasonable investment in land, equipment, and people to keep things running. Now I'm hooked on the little guys, folks who have dinky farms but also full time jobs. Raising ducks makes people happy, it appears.
And then I'm watching people growing fruit trees and shrubs from produce they get at the supermarket. Black walnuts, anyone? I think Mr. Beagles mentioned that the swampy soil in Beaglesonia is too acidic (tannins?) for certain crops but I forgot which ones. Would blueberries thrive?
-----
In case you think that the news media is too one-sided, do I have the site for you! Check out https://www.allsides.com/ for an interesting take on stories. You'll see at least three versions of any story, with sources from the left, center, and right. All biases are noted, so everyone will be happy or pissed off, in equal measure. This site has proven to be one of the better rabbit holes I've stumbled into.
Monday, July 20, 2020
first jobs
I'm going to try starting on stories we can all relate to. I hope this is one.
My first job was at that grocery store on 54th and Kedzie, Beagles might remember it, it was a Certified store I believe. The big brother of a friend of mine, who was a little tetchy worked there and told me that I could come in that Monday after school. So I came in every afternoon after school until Friday which was payday. Two brothers ran the store and they were handing out cash to the staff, but not, it turns out, to young Uncle Ken. "What about me?" I asked and one of them replied, "What about you? I didn't hire you." And the other brother said, "I didn't either."
True enough, neither one had, I had assumed that my friend's brother had arranged that, but apparently he didn't. After a bit of hemming and hawing they gave me some money and told me not to come back. I was happy enough with that settlement.
My first summer job was at the State Lake theater which I can see right out my window this morning. Well I can see the building, the theater and the marquee are gone, The big deal was the movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. A big fucking deal let me tell you Skippy. Seats were reserved and we ushers showed people to their seats wearing red suitcoats, a cardboard dicky and a bowtie that snapped on somehow. It was pretty cool, after the main seating we just kind of hung around. We always made sure to duck back in the door when the scene with the scantily clad dancing girls came on, some of us memorized all the lines. When we got a chance we flirted with the candy girls who all seemed very hot at the time. Sometimes we went out to Grant Park and played softball.
I met people from the North side for the first time. I dunno, they just seemed more suave than my southwest side buddies (There were no black ushers, I would have remembered that at the time), well they had to navigate all those diagonal streets, and all those other streets that didn't even have numbers, so maybe that made them a little smoother.
Another summer job I had was packing bibles. It was in one of those big warehouses off Archer by the river just west of State. I think that Pope John had just been elected, and even though I was not catholic he seemed like a pretty good guy. His face was all over the new catholic bibles. I used to sit by the river and eat my lunch, a brown paper bag with sandwiches that tasted a little like the wax paper they were wrapped in. I grew to like that taste.
That summer was the last time I came back to Chicago. I had a few short jobs in Champaign but I didn't start my first real pay the rent job until the spring of 68.
This may explain those texts that Old Dog was getting from Trump a week or two ago.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/20/trump-massive-texting-program-suspended-372302
My first job was at that grocery store on 54th and Kedzie, Beagles might remember it, it was a Certified store I believe. The big brother of a friend of mine, who was a little tetchy worked there and told me that I could come in that Monday after school. So I came in every afternoon after school until Friday which was payday. Two brothers ran the store and they were handing out cash to the staff, but not, it turns out, to young Uncle Ken. "What about me?" I asked and one of them replied, "What about you? I didn't hire you." And the other brother said, "I didn't either."
True enough, neither one had, I had assumed that my friend's brother had arranged that, but apparently he didn't. After a bit of hemming and hawing they gave me some money and told me not to come back. I was happy enough with that settlement.
My first summer job was at the State Lake theater which I can see right out my window this morning. Well I can see the building, the theater and the marquee are gone, The big deal was the movie Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. A big fucking deal let me tell you Skippy. Seats were reserved and we ushers showed people to their seats wearing red suitcoats, a cardboard dicky and a bowtie that snapped on somehow. It was pretty cool, after the main seating we just kind of hung around. We always made sure to duck back in the door when the scene with the scantily clad dancing girls came on, some of us memorized all the lines. When we got a chance we flirted with the candy girls who all seemed very hot at the time. Sometimes we went out to Grant Park and played softball.
I met people from the North side for the first time. I dunno, they just seemed more suave than my southwest side buddies (There were no black ushers, I would have remembered that at the time), well they had to navigate all those diagonal streets, and all those other streets that didn't even have numbers, so maybe that made them a little smoother.
Another summer job I had was packing bibles. It was in one of those big warehouses off Archer by the river just west of State. I think that Pope John had just been elected, and even though I was not catholic he seemed like a pretty good guy. His face was all over the new catholic bibles. I used to sit by the river and eat my lunch, a brown paper bag with sandwiches that tasted a little like the wax paper they were wrapped in. I grew to like that taste.
That summer was the last time I came back to Chicago. I had a few short jobs in Champaign but I didn't start my first real pay the rent job until the spring of 68.
This may explain those texts that Old Dog was getting from Trump a week or two ago.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/20/trump-massive-texting-program-suspended-372302
Friday, July 17, 2020
A little less of Incle Ken in the ivied halls
It is unlike Beagles to miss two postings in a row, so I emailed him and he replied last night that he is ok he just got tired of saying the same things over and over and that he would write when he had something new to say.
Of course having nothing to say is not in my nature. All I have to do is sit down and maybe make a little small talk and then I am raring to go. Maybe too much, sometimes, full of fettle, I may rant a little to wildly. Sometimes I am not proud of how far I may go, especially in politics, but it's on my mind all the time, shouldn't I say what I am thinking?
Well I feel that way but I get the strong impression that others don't.
So here's the deal, instead of posting five days a week I am going to cut it down to three, and maybe less current politics, more like stories, things like your first job, or a big moment that changed your life, or your greatest adventure. And not so much this happened and then that happened, but how you felt about it. Or maybe what you would like the blog to be like.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. And now I am off to the balcony.
Of course having nothing to say is not in my nature. All I have to do is sit down and maybe make a little small talk and then I am raring to go. Maybe too much, sometimes, full of fettle, I may rant a little to wildly. Sometimes I am not proud of how far I may go, especially in politics, but it's on my mind all the time, shouldn't I say what I am thinking?
Well I feel that way but I get the strong impression that others don't.
So here's the deal, instead of posting five days a week I am going to cut it down to three, and maybe less current politics, more like stories, things like your first job, or a big moment that changed your life, or your greatest adventure. And not so much this happened and then that happened, but how you felt about it. Or maybe what you would like the blog to be like.
Let a thousand flowers bloom. And now I am off to the balcony.
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Prez's
Throughout my life I have liked to measure my lifetime by how many presidents I have lived under. Not as easy as it once was,
I now sometimes have to use a pencil and paper. I had a friend who was able to recite every president, I think it was one of those things in school like knowing the capital of each state, but somehow I avoided that. I was always envious of him for that though. When I was subbing most classrooms had a list of all the prez's of the US and I would try to memorize them while the kids were away. Never manage to nail it though, and who cares all that much because how many chicks is that going to impress?
The earliest prez's look all serious and stuffy, but then they start to look real when we get to those we lived under, they step from paintings to photos to tv clips, and some of them look odd, and then Trump. What is he doing there.
Who is to blame? In a way I don't blame the big baby himself, he is mindless, a force of nature, like a virus. The people who voted for him, that leering angry mob with all the misspelled signs you see on the tv? Well yes, but they seem a bit like a mindless force of nature also. The republican party? Hell yes. They invited this viper to their breast. The people in office have had some education and they should know better. Under the tea party they got into the habit of calling each other RINO's, and now anybody but the most hard-core Trumpist is a RINO.
When I watched the mob from my balcony one of my first thoughts was what about the corona, but that blip never arrived. After Tulsa again I looked for the blip and there was one though it was little ballyhooed. Well outdoors/indoors I figured. But now I see blips coming from things like opening up the beaches getting blips and that is certainly outdoors, so maybe it is the masks after all. Geez, such a small thing. You hear people bragging about willing to fight and die for their country, and they can't wear a mask for the time it takes to get in and out of the Walmart?
Due to my donating to Elizabeth just before she dropped out of the race I get emails from her most every day, but I have heard nothing from Trump. I don't know how Old Dog's phone number got into the hands of the forces of evil, but that happens. Shortly after I got my smartphone, some woman named Tara inquired somewhere about a mortgage and gave them my phone number, and four or five years later I get weekly notices of deals on mortgages.
Defunding the police sounds pretty cool when you are marching with your posse. but it really makes no sense. No dem is endorsing it, but then they aren't coming down hard against it either because they don't want to alienate possible voters. Practically speaking it is not going to happen, but maybe we can gnaw at the protections cops get in their union contracts.
Heatdome extending ten days into the future on my yahoo weather thing. Getting a little break from being by the lake, but still it will be getting to the mid eighties. Well, it's good for the tomatoes.
Hope all is good in the swamp. Not like Beagles to miss two consecutive posts.
I now sometimes have to use a pencil and paper. I had a friend who was able to recite every president, I think it was one of those things in school like knowing the capital of each state, but somehow I avoided that. I was always envious of him for that though. When I was subbing most classrooms had a list of all the prez's of the US and I would try to memorize them while the kids were away. Never manage to nail it though, and who cares all that much because how many chicks is that going to impress?
The earliest prez's look all serious and stuffy, but then they start to look real when we get to those we lived under, they step from paintings to photos to tv clips, and some of them look odd, and then Trump. What is he doing there.
Who is to blame? In a way I don't blame the big baby himself, he is mindless, a force of nature, like a virus. The people who voted for him, that leering angry mob with all the misspelled signs you see on the tv? Well yes, but they seem a bit like a mindless force of nature also. The republican party? Hell yes. They invited this viper to their breast. The people in office have had some education and they should know better. Under the tea party they got into the habit of calling each other RINO's, and now anybody but the most hard-core Trumpist is a RINO.
When I watched the mob from my balcony one of my first thoughts was what about the corona, but that blip never arrived. After Tulsa again I looked for the blip and there was one though it was little ballyhooed. Well outdoors/indoors I figured. But now I see blips coming from things like opening up the beaches getting blips and that is certainly outdoors, so maybe it is the masks after all. Geez, such a small thing. You hear people bragging about willing to fight and die for their country, and they can't wear a mask for the time it takes to get in and out of the Walmart?
Due to my donating to Elizabeth just before she dropped out of the race I get emails from her most every day, but I have heard nothing from Trump. I don't know how Old Dog's phone number got into the hands of the forces of evil, but that happens. Shortly after I got my smartphone, some woman named Tara inquired somewhere about a mortgage and gave them my phone number, and four or five years later I get weekly notices of deals on mortgages.
Defunding the police sounds pretty cool when you are marching with your posse. but it really makes no sense. No dem is endorsing it, but then they aren't coming down hard against it either because they don't want to alienate possible voters. Practically speaking it is not going to happen, but maybe we can gnaw at the protections cops get in their union contracts.
Heatdome extending ten days into the future on my yahoo weather thing. Getting a little break from being by the lake, but still it will be getting to the mid eighties. Well, it's good for the tomatoes.
Hope all is good in the swamp. Not like Beagles to miss two consecutive posts.
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Look to the skies
I'm enjoying Uncle Ken's foray into presidential history, especially in light of the current occupant of the White House. Names like Nixon and Johnson seem so far away, and they are, but also seem quaint. What characters! They say that nothing prepares you for the presidency and it is so, but nothing has prepared us for Trump, a man who occupies a completely different plane than that of his predecessors. Who can we compare him to? Nobody, that's who. He has created his own reality and we are all in its grip, apparently helpless. It is inexplicable that Congress has done so little and the best efforts of the free press have been so ineffective in countering his power. Our last, best, hope may be the courts but that is not something I would bet on. With the current Justice Department, the fix is in.
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Covid-19 is making everybody a little nuts, including me. There are aspects of the spread of the virus that defy description and there isn't much that I know for sure. A bunch of sailors from Argentina are infected with the virus and they have been at sea for 35 days; how can this happen? The rate of infection seems oddly selective but there is no discernible pattern and I'm giving up on finding one. I'll continue with my current game plan of face mask/social distance/hand washing; that's the best I can do right now. Whether or not you are outdoors seems to make a difference. There hasn't been a significant increase in cases where those Black Live Matters demonstrations have occurred but most of those participants were wearing masks anyhow. There is a real possibility that we will be dealing with this pandemic for some years to come so we might as well get used to this strange new reality.
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For some reason I keep getting text messages on my phone from the Trump campaign and they're getting a little pushy, telling me that I've FAILED to accept their 5x matching offer. I've gotten four of that kind of message last week and one just a few minutes ago. Are you fellows equally blessed to receive such messages?
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Defunding the police is not a good idea, in my opinion. They need better training, much better screening, and a refusal to accept the military equipment that the Feds like to tempt them with. Bring back Barney Miller!
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Wall Street and big business are completely beyond my understanding. I read that Tesla is worth more than Toyota and I don't understand why unless it's just numbers on a piece of paper. Toyota has more factories, sells more cars, and employs more people than Tesla by a very wide margin. How can it be worth less, smoke and mirrors? It's like those Hollywood movies that pull in billions and yet don't show a profit. More than one game is rigged, my friends.
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Keep an eye out for those deer ticks, Mr. Beagles, they are on the rise in Michigan spreading a coronavirus-like disease. And is the visibility any good in Beaglesonia for the Comet Neowise?
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Covid-19 is making everybody a little nuts, including me. There are aspects of the spread of the virus that defy description and there isn't much that I know for sure. A bunch of sailors from Argentina are infected with the virus and they have been at sea for 35 days; how can this happen? The rate of infection seems oddly selective but there is no discernible pattern and I'm giving up on finding one. I'll continue with my current game plan of face mask/social distance/hand washing; that's the best I can do right now. Whether or not you are outdoors seems to make a difference. There hasn't been a significant increase in cases where those Black Live Matters demonstrations have occurred but most of those participants were wearing masks anyhow. There is a real possibility that we will be dealing with this pandemic for some years to come so we might as well get used to this strange new reality.
-----
For some reason I keep getting text messages on my phone from the Trump campaign and they're getting a little pushy, telling me that I've FAILED to accept their 5x matching offer. I've gotten four of that kind of message last week and one just a few minutes ago. Are you fellows equally blessed to receive such messages?
-----
Defunding the police is not a good idea, in my opinion. They need better training, much better screening, and a refusal to accept the military equipment that the Feds like to tempt them with. Bring back Barney Miller!
-----
Wall Street and big business are completely beyond my understanding. I read that Tesla is worth more than Toyota and I don't understand why unless it's just numbers on a piece of paper. Toyota has more factories, sells more cars, and employs more people than Tesla by a very wide margin. How can it be worth less, smoke and mirrors? It's like those Hollywood movies that pull in billions and yet don't show a profit. More than one game is rigged, my friends.
-----
Keep an eye out for those deer ticks, Mr. Beagles, they are on the rise in Michigan spreading a coronavirus-like disease. And is the visibility any good in Beaglesonia for the Comet Neowise?
more presidents
As part of choosing not to run Johnson had put out feelers to the North Vietnamese about ending the war but Nixon's agents had contacted the North Vietnamese to hold on because they would get a better deal from Tricky Dick. I don't remember offhand if Henry Kissinger was involved in that, but it seems likely, his fingers were all over everything to do with Vietnam and Nixon.
Peace with honor, that's the slogan Dick ran on, hoping he could lure some doves with peace and some hawks with the notion that he, with his anti commie laurels, would bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam. Like Johnson he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. It turns out he did bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam, and then as a tragic sideshow he bombed the fuck out of much of Cambodia. A lot of the latter was Hank's work. Since nothing much was going on there they soon ran out of targets but just kept on bombing anyway so as not to look weak.
Finally Nixon decided on Vietnamization which everybody in the wide world knew was not going to work and it didn't. Then Watergate and Nixon was standing next to the helicopter with his hands outraised above him vees in his fingers.
Ford got into big trouble for pardoning Nixon. Was there a deal? I guess we will never know, though the fact that nothing has come out since then makes me suspect there wasn't. I was pissed at the time, I wanted to see a stake driven through his evil heart, but in retrospect it was probably the best thing for the country.
But then we had this rising star, this good godly man Carter, who was well, ineffectual. Then that great pre-Trump hero of all Republicans, Ronald Reagan. At least he didn't get us into a war. Well there was that Grenada incident. Clint Eastwood made a movie about it, and it just seemed so silly to be sending Clint against the Grenadans, like Godzilla vs the ants. Reagan did his Republican duty by transferring much of the country's wealth from the poor to the rich.
As did the elder Bush who followed him, though he did give us a pretty good war, which as I have said, I was against at the time, but now I think it was well done.
He got usurped by Bill Clinton. I don't love Bill Clinton as much as I did when he was a dem island after 12 years of reps, he was way too accommodating to the reps than I would have liked but maybe that was the best deal at the time, and he did not increase the deficit, and had that pretty good war over Kosovo. And he did have that blue dress thing, which was not all that bad but incredibly stupid. And helped poison the water so that Bush the Lesser got in.
Nobody thinks he was very smart but he was amiable. I think he had some right instincts and might have done well but then 911 happened and he let the neocons take power. It probably fed his vanity, he wanted to be a war president, he liked standing there on that aircraft carrier in that glossy uniform. Anyway many men and much treasure was lost in the mideast.
My hero tamped a lot of that down, the mideast war, but not near as much as I would have liked him to.
For all the evil that Trump has done, he has not led us into a war which still amazes me. Maybe I'll speculate on that tomorrow.
Peace with honor, that's the slogan Dick ran on, hoping he could lure some doves with peace and some hawks with the notion that he, with his anti commie laurels, would bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam. Like Johnson he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. It turns out he did bomb the fuck out of North Vietnam, and then as a tragic sideshow he bombed the fuck out of much of Cambodia. A lot of the latter was Hank's work. Since nothing much was going on there they soon ran out of targets but just kept on bombing anyway so as not to look weak.
Finally Nixon decided on Vietnamization which everybody in the wide world knew was not going to work and it didn't. Then Watergate and Nixon was standing next to the helicopter with his hands outraised above him vees in his fingers.
Ford got into big trouble for pardoning Nixon. Was there a deal? I guess we will never know, though the fact that nothing has come out since then makes me suspect there wasn't. I was pissed at the time, I wanted to see a stake driven through his evil heart, but in retrospect it was probably the best thing for the country.
But then we had this rising star, this good godly man Carter, who was well, ineffectual. Then that great pre-Trump hero of all Republicans, Ronald Reagan. At least he didn't get us into a war. Well there was that Grenada incident. Clint Eastwood made a movie about it, and it just seemed so silly to be sending Clint against the Grenadans, like Godzilla vs the ants. Reagan did his Republican duty by transferring much of the country's wealth from the poor to the rich.
As did the elder Bush who followed him, though he did give us a pretty good war, which as I have said, I was against at the time, but now I think it was well done.
He got usurped by Bill Clinton. I don't love Bill Clinton as much as I did when he was a dem island after 12 years of reps, he was way too accommodating to the reps than I would have liked but maybe that was the best deal at the time, and he did not increase the deficit, and had that pretty good war over Kosovo. And he did have that blue dress thing, which was not all that bad but incredibly stupid. And helped poison the water so that Bush the Lesser got in.
Nobody thinks he was very smart but he was amiable. I think he had some right instincts and might have done well but then 911 happened and he let the neocons take power. It probably fed his vanity, he wanted to be a war president, he liked standing there on that aircraft carrier in that glossy uniform. Anyway many men and much treasure was lost in the mideast.
My hero tamped a lot of that down, the mideast war, but not near as much as I would have liked him to.
For all the evil that Trump has done, he has not led us into a war which still amazes me. Maybe I'll speculate on that tomorrow.
Monday, July 13, 2020
a tale of two presidents
The lockdown does work, It certainly worked in New York and Europe. Illinois and Michigan have both suffered upsurges since they have opened up a little. Texas, Arizona, and especially Florida have rates that are soaring since they opened up and the response, except in Florida has been to lockdown too. Even a dimwitted fellow, as I have observed lately, as the the governor of Texas has realized that his state needs to lockdown. Almost everybody in the country has realized it except the flat Earther who lives in the swamp. It's like saying because his brand new truck does not travel at the speed of light that it does not work. I am giving up.
I watched Frost/Nixon Saturday night. I've seen it before, but I'm just finishing up my book on LBJ and Nixon is just showing up, and it was free on Netflix. That's the problem with Netflix you see stuff because it is free, not so much because you really want to.
The thing you are always wondering when you see one of those based on a true story movies is what is real and what did the moviemakers put in just to make it a better movie. Not that
I am complaining, making up stuff is the stuff of art, but still you wonder which is which.
Which is why you have wiki, and one scene I was suspicious of was when Nixon makes a late night drunken call to Frost. It didn't really happen. but the movie would have been worse without it.
In the call Nixon starts out talking about cheeseburgers but quickly segues into the idea that he came from an inauspicious background and has had to fight his way up all the way, while all around him the well born, especially the Kennedys, have coasted, and not only that they have looked down on Richard Nixon, and have plotted to keep him down.
And in the book, alone on his ranch, far from the halls of power, LBJ is grousing about the same thing, and especially about the Kennedys who really treated him like crap.
And I am remembering what I have been writing earlier, how LBJ was kind of a tragic hero of the Greek variety. He had something he believed in and he fought his way up from teacher's college to president so that he could implement it, and then somehow that ogre of Vietnam crept behind him. He could have just shined it on, but he thought some small measure would solve it, and when that didn't work he tried harder, and then his pride got into it and he tried to keep it a secret, and eventually it brought him down.
It's hard to say what Nixon believed. Early on he was a John Birch kind of guy but that was just to achieve an end. The general treated him shabbily and JFK put him down. He dusted himself off and slowly rebuilt his career, and in the shamble of LBJ's Vietnam debacle he became president.
LBJ was a domestic affairs guy. He didn't show much interest in foreign affairs, probably the reason he stumbled so badly in Vietnam. Nixon considered foreign affairs to be his forte. There was nothing he liked better than playing poker with the big guys. Which makes you wonder why he did so badly, taking almost four years to get to the terms he could have had stepping into office.
But I don't think most of the American people begrudged him that, they were just happy to be out of the war. And then the dems nominated McGovern, who at the time I was all balls to the wall for, but in retrospect I realize he didn't have a ghost of a chance. and everything was looking like roses for Tricky Dick.
But Tricky Dick didn't see roses. He saw an army of conspirators working against him. and fighting that phantom army he lost everything.
I watched Frost/Nixon Saturday night. I've seen it before, but I'm just finishing up my book on LBJ and Nixon is just showing up, and it was free on Netflix. That's the problem with Netflix you see stuff because it is free, not so much because you really want to.
The thing you are always wondering when you see one of those based on a true story movies is what is real and what did the moviemakers put in just to make it a better movie. Not that
I am complaining, making up stuff is the stuff of art, but still you wonder which is which.
Which is why you have wiki, and one scene I was suspicious of was when Nixon makes a late night drunken call to Frost. It didn't really happen. but the movie would have been worse without it.
In the call Nixon starts out talking about cheeseburgers but quickly segues into the idea that he came from an inauspicious background and has had to fight his way up all the way, while all around him the well born, especially the Kennedys, have coasted, and not only that they have looked down on Richard Nixon, and have plotted to keep him down.
And in the book, alone on his ranch, far from the halls of power, LBJ is grousing about the same thing, and especially about the Kennedys who really treated him like crap.
And I am remembering what I have been writing earlier, how LBJ was kind of a tragic hero of the Greek variety. He had something he believed in and he fought his way up from teacher's college to president so that he could implement it, and then somehow that ogre of Vietnam crept behind him. He could have just shined it on, but he thought some small measure would solve it, and when that didn't work he tried harder, and then his pride got into it and he tried to keep it a secret, and eventually it brought him down.
It's hard to say what Nixon believed. Early on he was a John Birch kind of guy but that was just to achieve an end. The general treated him shabbily and JFK put him down. He dusted himself off and slowly rebuilt his career, and in the shamble of LBJ's Vietnam debacle he became president.
LBJ was a domestic affairs guy. He didn't show much interest in foreign affairs, probably the reason he stumbled so badly in Vietnam. Nixon considered foreign affairs to be his forte. There was nothing he liked better than playing poker with the big guys. Which makes you wonder why he did so badly, taking almost four years to get to the terms he could have had stepping into office.
But I don't think most of the American people begrudged him that, they were just happy to be out of the war. And then the dems nominated McGovern, who at the time I was all balls to the wall for, but in retrospect I realize he didn't have a ghost of a chance. and everything was looking like roses for Tricky Dick.
But Tricky Dick didn't see roses. He saw an army of conspirators working against him. and fighting that phantom army he lost everything.
Re-Training the Vets 2
In Berlin we had two different modes of operation when in the field, tactical and administrative. Tactical meant we were operating under simulated combat conditions, and administrative meant that we were not. We had been tactical all morning, but they told us to go administrative for lunch. They served us in a wet muddy field where there was no decent place to sit down, so we were eating standing up. While we were thus engaged, some goofball shot off a burst of automatic weapons fire nearby. Since we were administrative at the time, we were not expected to respond to this, and most of us didn't. Those guys from Vietnam, however, dropped their chow and flopped down prone right in the mud. Apparently they had little or no experience with the administrative mode, which was another thing we had to teach them.
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"He would have seen that this pandemic was going to hurt not only the people but his own presidency and would have taken the advice of the experts. which by the way, was not all that hard, and we would have not even be having a debate about opening the schools. Our restaurants and bars would be open and staying open." - Uncle Ken
Since the lockdown failed to stop the virus, it seems likely that, if it had been imposed earlier, it just would have failed earlier. Be that as it may, Uncle Ken seems to be saying that there was something Trump could have done that would have stopped the virus and made the lockdown unnecessary. I have not heard that one before, please enlighten me.
Friday, July 10, 2020
for a lack of twenty votes a pandemic response was lost
First thing that hits my eye this hot and humid morning, is a typo in yesterday's post. I meant to say that Arizona has a lower population than Michigan not a higher one. I reread these things, but stuff gets by me.
Speaking of hot and humid whatever became of heat domes? Used to be that when you had a lot of sweaty days in a row the weather experts would explain that we were under a heat dome. Easy to picture in the mind, like one of those domes we were going to live under when we inhabited the moon. Didn't make it any better, made in worse in fact because you had this mental image of this big heavy thing you were laboring under just to get to the Walgreens and buy a sixpack, but it made it more exciting, like polar vortexes in the winter.
Not surprisingly the pandemic is having a good effect on global warming, not as many emissions etc. Just a temporary thing because we will eventually weather through this whole thing and get back to our old bad habits just like we did a hundred years ago. I think that pandemic hit all nations equally, but this one clearly is hitting the US and the third world hardest. The US and the third world, get used to that phrase.
Just think, just five months ago, if just twenty republican senators had voted to remove the boil we would have had president Pence. I don't like the guy at all, BUT he is not nuts. He would have seen that this pandemic was going to hurt not only the people but his own presidency and would have taken the advice of the experts. which by the way, was not all that hard, and we would have not even be having a debate about opening the schools. Our restaurants and bars would be open and staying open. We would be like Europe, tsk tsking at all those third world countries that were wallowing in misery because they were saddled with terrible leaders.
Speaking of hot and humid whatever became of heat domes? Used to be that when you had a lot of sweaty days in a row the weather experts would explain that we were under a heat dome. Easy to picture in the mind, like one of those domes we were going to live under when we inhabited the moon. Didn't make it any better, made in worse in fact because you had this mental image of this big heavy thing you were laboring under just to get to the Walgreens and buy a sixpack, but it made it more exciting, like polar vortexes in the winter.
Not surprisingly the pandemic is having a good effect on global warming, not as many emissions etc. Just a temporary thing because we will eventually weather through this whole thing and get back to our old bad habits just like we did a hundred years ago. I think that pandemic hit all nations equally, but this one clearly is hitting the US and the third world hardest. The US and the third world, get used to that phrase.
Just think, just five months ago, if just twenty republican senators had voted to remove the boil we would have had president Pence. I don't like the guy at all, BUT he is not nuts. He would have seen that this pandemic was going to hurt not only the people but his own presidency and would have taken the advice of the experts. which by the way, was not all that hard, and we would have not even be having a debate about opening the schools. Our restaurants and bars would be open and staying open. We would be like Europe, tsk tsking at all those third world countries that were wallowing in misery because they were saddled with terrible leaders.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
a second-rate country
Texas, Arizona, and Florida all have higher growth rates than Michigan, before this is over they will have more deaths except maybe for Arizona which has a higher population. There are so many different measures of the corona and it's hard to see them all in one place at the current time. My comment on dubious calculations was the decision of those states to open up way early, if ever, and now they are having to lockdown, except for maybe Florida, though I think they are allowing some cities to make their own decisions now.
I'm sure we have all seen this graph https://www.gzeromedia.com/the-graphic-truth-two-different-pandemics-eu-vs-us And I think are all aware that nobody in Europe will let us step on their soil, and that goes for Mexico and Canada too. 100 years ago when the first pandemic hit we had just made our bones in the hierarchy of nations through our performance in WW I. And now with the passage of pandemic II we are about to begin our descent from that lofty post.
And maybe that's not that bad, look at Canada, They do alright aye? When something goes on in the world they are like what can we do about it we're just Canada, while we are all like this is America and we are proud to be the world cops, let us at them, and there goes American lives and fortunes.
This great big army that costs us a fortune, what has it done for us since the 50's when we fought the North Koreans to a standstill? Well no actually we have had a couple small successes.
Being a peacenik and all I was not for Desert Storm at the time. In retrospect I think it was well done. We had the approval of the world and we had a simple goal which we achieved and then we got out. At the time there were some who were pissed off that we didn't take out Saddam, but in the light of the results of the war by the much lesser son and his madcap gang of neocons, it turned out that the elder Bush had it just right.
And who remembers Kosovo anymore? A most peculiar war in that we had no national interest and we did not lose a man. Some would say doesn't the UN still have to man the borders to keep the Serbs at bay? And yes we do, but it seems like a small price to pay to keep people out of concentration camps.
Now that our economy is going to be in the toilet, unlike those Europeans who saw the train coming down the tracks and dealt with it instead of pretending it was a mirage, we will no longer be the world cops we won't need this huge army anymore.
But we do we defund it? If we let our boys go, won't they all be unemployed? If we sell all our fancy weapons that would probably raise some good money. but then what if they get turned on us?
China seems to have come through this corona pretty well so far, and this might be a silver lining. We owe them a ton of money and if we go kaput there goes that cash, so maybe they will look out for us.
I'm sure we have all seen this graph https://www.gzeromedia.com/the-graphic-truth-two-different-pandemics-eu-vs-us And I think are all aware that nobody in Europe will let us step on their soil, and that goes for Mexico and Canada too. 100 years ago when the first pandemic hit we had just made our bones in the hierarchy of nations through our performance in WW I. And now with the passage of pandemic II we are about to begin our descent from that lofty post.
And maybe that's not that bad, look at Canada, They do alright aye? When something goes on in the world they are like what can we do about it we're just Canada, while we are all like this is America and we are proud to be the world cops, let us at them, and there goes American lives and fortunes.
This great big army that costs us a fortune, what has it done for us since the 50's when we fought the North Koreans to a standstill? Well no actually we have had a couple small successes.
Being a peacenik and all I was not for Desert Storm at the time. In retrospect I think it was well done. We had the approval of the world and we had a simple goal which we achieved and then we got out. At the time there were some who were pissed off that we didn't take out Saddam, but in the light of the results of the war by the much lesser son and his madcap gang of neocons, it turned out that the elder Bush had it just right.
And who remembers Kosovo anymore? A most peculiar war in that we had no national interest and we did not lose a man. Some would say doesn't the UN still have to man the borders to keep the Serbs at bay? And yes we do, but it seems like a small price to pay to keep people out of concentration camps.
Now that our economy is going to be in the toilet, unlike those Europeans who saw the train coming down the tracks and dealt with it instead of pretending it was a mirage, we will no longer be the world cops we won't need this huge army anymore.
But we do we defund it? If we let our boys go, won't they all be unemployed? If we sell all our fancy weapons that would probably raise some good money. but then what if they get turned on us?
China seems to have come through this corona pretty well so far, and this might be a silver lining. We owe them a ton of money and if we go kaput there goes that cash, so maybe they will look out for us.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Re-training the Vets
It wasn't just the spit and polish, those guys didn't know how to act in a field training exercise. We were really fussy about radio procedure in Berlin because the Russians were listening in, and our own people were also listening in to make sure we didn't say anything on the radio that the Russians weren't supposed to hear. I'm not just talking about secret stuff, they didn't want the Russians to get the impression that we were like unprofessional or something. One thing was that you never said anybody's real name on the radio. We all had code names like "Lucky Delta Six", and these were changed from time to time. We were told that, in a real war, it was important that the enemy didn't know any of our people's names. I think that traced to "Tokyo Rose" back in World War II. She would broadcast stuff like: "Private John Smith, your mother is really sick and she wants to see you before she dies, but that's not going to happen since you're stuck here in the trenches with all your Yankee Imperialist friends. Also, I have it on good authority that your girlfriend has found somebody new. You should be getting a 'Dear John' letter any day now." Her intent being to demoralize our troops.
So one day this new guy from Vietnam was assigned to our outfit and joined us in the field before he was given the customary orientation. He was told to call in a pretend fire mission to our mortar section. (No actual rounds were fired.) I was manning the FDC station with my mentor Specialist Baker when this call came in: "Hey Baker, gimme some mortar fire on that fucking hill over there." Did I mention that we weren't supposed to use profanity on the radio either? Also, there was a formal procedure for calling a fire mission, and that certainly wasn't it.
I'm pretty sure that the numbers they gave in that article were facts. The opinions about why the numbers had spiked came from Police chiefs. Next time they should interview Uncle Ken if they want a more informed opinion.
Speaking of numbers, Arizona, Texas, and Florida each still have fewer corona related deaths than Michigan. Of the three, Arizona is the only one with a smaller population. Florida has twice as many people and Texas has four times as many.
So one day this new guy from Vietnam was assigned to our outfit and joined us in the field before he was given the customary orientation. He was told to call in a pretend fire mission to our mortar section. (No actual rounds were fired.) I was manning the FDC station with my mentor Specialist Baker when this call came in: "Hey Baker, gimme some mortar fire on that fucking hill over there." Did I mention that we weren't supposed to use profanity on the radio either? Also, there was a formal procedure for calling a fire mission, and that certainly wasn't it.
I'm pretty sure that the numbers they gave in that article were facts. The opinions about why the numbers had spiked came from Police chiefs. Next time they should interview Uncle Ken if they want a more informed opinion.
Speaking of numbers, Arizona, Texas, and Florida each still have fewer corona related deaths than Michigan. Of the three, Arizona is the only one with a smaller population. Florida has twice as many people and Texas has four times as many.
this and that
It's a double typo, the original typo that I meant to correct was: I hope Old Dog puts his cyber problems behind me, so that we can begin discussing movies and other stuff. and I meant to amend it to: I hope Old Dog puts his cyber problems behind him, so that we can begin discussing movies and other stuff. but I neglected to make the change and just repeated it as it was. My crime, my time.
When I visited my mother at her retirement home before heading on to the Ten Cat they had a little park in the center of the complex and inside the park was a pond, and inside the pond was a little island, and a mother duck chose that area to make her nest and raise her ducklings. It worked out pretty well, she had a strapping brood, and the residents were delighted. And then one day they were gone and nobody seemed to know why.
I am glad that I don't have rabbits because they would be nibbling on my tomatoes. The stories I have heard from folks who grow at ground level is that they take a bite out of a tomato and discover that they don't like it and then take a bite out of another tomato that looks exactly like the one they didn't like. and so on until the crop is destroyed.
So those GI's in Germany just said boo, no explanations? Well I guess we will never know then. Was retraining the guys from Vietnam a matter of getting them to pay more attention to rules and regs. Along with the danger of being on the front lines is that they cut you a little slack on the spit and polish aspect of the military, and you resent having to polish your brass so often when you get back to headquarters.
That quote from Monahan might have been interesting if I knew who Monahan was, sounds like one of those police union guys. That's what I didn't like about the article. Too many opinions, too little facts.
I'm not a defund the police guy, but one can't help but feel that if these guys don't want to do their job, maybe they can find something else to do. There is always a long line to get into the police academy. If you get down to the nut of this whole thing it was that cop who killed George Floyd who started it. You would think all cops would at least say this particular thing was wrong, not only because it was wrong, but because it was only going to make their jobs harder, but outside of a few guys you heard precious little of that from the thin blue line.
Covid spreads like wildfire in the prisons because they are so crowded, and the calculation was made that by letting some lesser offenders go that would help to diminish the pandemic. It might be a dubious calculation, but these times are full of dubious calculations. Witness Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
When I visited my mother at her retirement home before heading on to the Ten Cat they had a little park in the center of the complex and inside the park was a pond, and inside the pond was a little island, and a mother duck chose that area to make her nest and raise her ducklings. It worked out pretty well, she had a strapping brood, and the residents were delighted. And then one day they were gone and nobody seemed to know why.
I am glad that I don't have rabbits because they would be nibbling on my tomatoes. The stories I have heard from folks who grow at ground level is that they take a bite out of a tomato and discover that they don't like it and then take a bite out of another tomato that looks exactly like the one they didn't like. and so on until the crop is destroyed.
So those GI's in Germany just said boo, no explanations? Well I guess we will never know then. Was retraining the guys from Vietnam a matter of getting them to pay more attention to rules and regs. Along with the danger of being on the front lines is that they cut you a little slack on the spit and polish aspect of the military, and you resent having to polish your brass so often when you get back to headquarters.
That quote from Monahan might have been interesting if I knew who Monahan was, sounds like one of those police union guys. That's what I didn't like about the article. Too many opinions, too little facts.
I'm not a defund the police guy, but one can't help but feel that if these guys don't want to do their job, maybe they can find something else to do. There is always a long line to get into the police academy. If you get down to the nut of this whole thing it was that cop who killed George Floyd who started it. You would think all cops would at least say this particular thing was wrong, not only because it was wrong, but because it was only going to make their jobs harder, but outside of a few guys you heard precious little of that from the thin blue line.
Covid spreads like wildfire in the prisons because they are so crowded, and the calculation was made that by letting some lesser offenders go that would help to diminish the pandemic. It might be a dubious calculation, but these times are full of dubious calculations. Witness Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
That's Just Ducky
I don't know why those guys were booing LBJ. Like I said, I was shocked and appalled by it. It had to be either '65 or '66 because I don't remember it as being either early or late in my time in Berlin. I got there in September 1964 and left in February 1967. The Vietnam War and partisan politics in general were not of great concern to us, we were caught up in our own local issues most of the time. When we did talk about Vietnam, it was usually to criticize the tactics being employed. We thought they should fight and win the old fashioned way like they did in World War II. We had some Vietnam vets assigned to our unit towards the end of my tour. We had to re-train them because they didn't know how to do anything the way we did it in Berlin. They said it was hard to believe they were still in the same army.
The reason I thought the link I posted would be of interest is it attributed the recent spike in urban violence to both the corona thing and the George Floyd protests. I was surprised to hear that a lot of criminals were released early because of corona while, at the same time, the rest of us were being told to stay home and off the streets. Then there's this:
"The explosions started after the murder of George Floyd, after the protests here in the city, after the animosity towards the police within this city, after a feeling of emboldenment by the criminals on the streets that the cops can't do anything anymore, that no one likes the police, that they can get away with things and that it's safe to carry a gun on the street," Monahan said.
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Gardening was one of the things I gave up some years ago in order to have the time and energy to do other things. It never was very productive anyway, our soil and climate are not the best you know. My main focus now is on hobby forestry.
Those ducks that nested in a tree had to be wood ducks, unless you mean they nested on the ground under the tree, in which case they were probably mallards. Both of those species often nest a surprising distance away from the water. Soon after the ducklings hatch, their mother leads them in a single file march to the water. Once they launch, they never return to their terrestrial birthplace again.
The reason I thought the link I posted would be of interest is it attributed the recent spike in urban violence to both the corona thing and the George Floyd protests. I was surprised to hear that a lot of criminals were released early because of corona while, at the same time, the rest of us were being told to stay home and off the streets. Then there's this:
"The explosions started after the murder of George Floyd, after the protests here in the city, after the animosity towards the police within this city, after a feeling of emboldenment by the criminals on the streets that the cops can't do anything anymore, that no one likes the police, that they can get away with things and that it's safe to carry a gun on the street," Monahan said.
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Gardening was one of the things I gave up some years ago in order to have the time and energy to do other things. It never was very productive anyway, our soil and climate are not the best you know. My main focus now is on hobby forestry.
Those ducks that nested in a tree had to be wood ducks, unless you mean they nested on the ground under the tree, in which case they were probably mallards. Both of those species often nest a surprising distance away from the water. Soon after the ducklings hatch, their mother leads them in a single file march to the water. Once they launch, they never return to their terrestrial birthplace again.
Of little import
Since Old Dog did not post today, I'll be his substitute scourge.
Many thanks to Mr. Beagles for his keen eye and attention to detail; these thing make a difference even if some do not think so. There are times when I lose interest in engaging Uncle Ken in discussions, it's like he is simply not paying attention. A while back I mentioned that I didn't understand what he meant about something he wrote and he replied that it was a typo. Good enough, I thought, except that his "corrected" text was exactly the same as the original text that I didn't understand. I'll give up on that one.
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With all of the noise in the media it's easy for me to forget the important stuff, the little things that bring me pleasure. For instance, I've neglected asking about the garden situation up in Beaglesonia. I think Mr. Beagles mentioned that a small garden is usually in play and depending on the crop various critters must be dealt with; they don't all have the same appetites.
I'm a big fan of the farming YouTube channels, and it's spilling over into smaller farms and homesteads. Some of these guys are newcomers to farming, city folk who have decided to quit the urban life and start tilling the soil, with absolutely no previous experience. Yes, mistakes are being made but knowledge is being gained and shared. It takes quite a leap of faith to decided that the quality of your life will be improved by raising ducks and geese.
Every once in a while I'll read about Chicagoans raising chickens in their back yards but there are none around here. As long as it is not a commercial operation I think it's legal even if your neighbors think it's a nuisance. No roosters, no worries.
Sorry about the tangent, I've been in a fowl mood lately. Some time ago my sister mentioned that she saw some hummingbirds in her back yard, which was a surprise to me. I didn't know those little guys roamed around here. And then she said a duck built a nest in her backyard tree and laid some eggs. Baloney, I thought, until I saw the pictures. We don't know what happened after the eggs hatched; there are also red-tailed hawks in her neighborhood and they get hungry. So, little sister gets all the cool wildlife while I'm stuck with a rabbit or two hopping around the 'hood.
Many thanks to Mr. Beagles for his keen eye and attention to detail; these thing make a difference even if some do not think so. There are times when I lose interest in engaging Uncle Ken in discussions, it's like he is simply not paying attention. A while back I mentioned that I didn't understand what he meant about something he wrote and he replied that it was a typo. Good enough, I thought, except that his "corrected" text was exactly the same as the original text that I didn't understand. I'll give up on that one.
-----
With all of the noise in the media it's easy for me to forget the important stuff, the little things that bring me pleasure. For instance, I've neglected asking about the garden situation up in Beaglesonia. I think Mr. Beagles mentioned that a small garden is usually in play and depending on the crop various critters must be dealt with; they don't all have the same appetites.
I'm a big fan of the farming YouTube channels, and it's spilling over into smaller farms and homesteads. Some of these guys are newcomers to farming, city folk who have decided to quit the urban life and start tilling the soil, with absolutely no previous experience. Yes, mistakes are being made but knowledge is being gained and shared. It takes quite a leap of faith to decided that the quality of your life will be improved by raising ducks and geese.
Every once in a while I'll read about Chicagoans raising chickens in their back yards but there are none around here. As long as it is not a commercial operation I think it's legal even if your neighbors think it's a nuisance. No roosters, no worries.
Sorry about the tangent, I've been in a fowl mood lately. Some time ago my sister mentioned that she saw some hummingbirds in her back yard, which was a surprise to me. I didn't know those little guys roamed around here. And then she said a duck built a nest in her backyard tree and laid some eggs. Baloney, I thought, until I saw the pictures. We don't know what happened after the eggs hatched; there are also red-tailed hawks in her neighborhood and they get hungry. So, little sister gets all the cool wildlife while I'm stuck with a rabbit or two hopping around the 'hood.
troubled times
Resigned, chose not to run. Is there really such a difference? But I did the crime and I'll do the time.
American troops booed LBJ in Germany? This is something I have never heard before. What year was this? What were they booing him about? While some folks were mad about us being involved in the war, others were mad about it not being prosecuted hard enough. But I wonder how hard the war was going on at the time he was booed.
My first year or two in college I was largely unaware of what was going on in the outside world. When JFK got assassinated, I was unhappy about this cracker taking the white house. The Kennedys had called him Uncle Cornpone, and LBJ himself had long thought that it was impossible for a southerner to ever become president.
All that civil rights and great society stuff would have improved my vision of him, but I was largely unaware of that, and knew him only as the guy who was fighting the unpopular war. Goldwater struck me as bull goose loony and I was glad to see him lose the election. When he said that he chose not to run for reelection I was overjoyed. I rooted for Eugene McCarthy, but I was not that crazy about RFK. which didn't matter that much because he was not around long. I might have gone for Humphrey if he had repudiated the war, but he did not, and so, like those Bernie Bros and the dems who were just too dainty to vote for the big girl, I did not vote at all and gave the election to a republican/
The Vietnam vets that I knew who almost all against the war, but they were the ones going to college on the GI bill so they might not have been representative of the whole group,
I have heard it said that Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, and maybe so, but it took him a long time to do it and to do it on terms that he could have gotten when he was elected. There was a lot of gamemanship going on and Henry Kissinger doing a strange little dance between North Vietnam and Nixon didn't help anything.
Anyway I see LBJ like one of those Greek Tragic heroes, he really did believe in the domino theory. but Nixon was just some kind of conman playing poker with American lives. Just one democrat's opinion.
I don't know what to make of that article Beagles posted. It was long on opinions and short on any but anecdotal facts. But it may be pointing to a a potential break between the public and the cops, not a good thing.
In these troubled times
Monday, July 6, 2020
Subbing For The Scourge
Since Old Dog did not post today, I'll be his substitute scourge.
"Now this book was written not long after LBJ resigned." - Uncle Ken
Spiro Agnew resigned, Richard Nixon resigned, but LBJ did not resign, he just chose not to run for re-election. Since he served less than half of JFK's term, LBJ was eligible to serve two full terms of his own. I was too young to vote when he was elected in '64, but I would have voted for Goldwater anyway. If he had run in '68, I probably wouldn't have voted for him then either. Nevertheless, I was shocked and appalled when all those GIs booed and shouted vulgar expletives in that movie theater when a newsreel showed LBJ making some kind of speech. I had never witnessed that kind of hostility toward a president in my young life. My parents were certainly not great fans of Harry Truman, but I never heard them or anybody speak of him that way. Of course everybody liked Ike, and JFK was on the road to sainthood even before he was martyred for his cause. Being stationed in Germany where there was no English language TV, I had no idea that LBJ had become so unpopular. It seemed to me that people should have had more respect than that for the office of the presidency, even if they didn't like the guy who was currently occupying it. Nowadays it wouldn't surprise me at all, but those were kinder, gentler times, at least they had been up to that point.
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"Now this book was written not long after LBJ resigned." - Uncle Ken
Spiro Agnew resigned, Richard Nixon resigned, but LBJ did not resign, he just chose not to run for re-election. Since he served less than half of JFK's term, LBJ was eligible to serve two full terms of his own. I was too young to vote when he was elected in '64, but I would have voted for Goldwater anyway. If he had run in '68, I probably wouldn't have voted for him then either. Nevertheless, I was shocked and appalled when all those GIs booed and shouted vulgar expletives in that movie theater when a newsreel showed LBJ making some kind of speech. I had never witnessed that kind of hostility toward a president in my young life. My parents were certainly not great fans of Harry Truman, but I never heard them or anybody speak of him that way. Of course everybody liked Ike, and JFK was on the road to sainthood even before he was martyred for his cause. Being stationed in Germany where there was no English language TV, I had no idea that LBJ had become so unpopular. It seemed to me that people should have had more respect than that for the office of the presidency, even if they didn't like the guy who was currently occupying it. Nowadays it wouldn't surprise me at all, but those were kinder, gentler times, at least they had been up to that point.
*********************************************************************************
This just in:
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LBJ
Went to the Ten Cat last night. I guess it has been open for a week or two already, but this is the first time I went. Pretty empty, there was plenty of room to social distance. The bartender wore a mask and used what smelled like a pretty strong antiseptic between drinks. But four of my beer-drinking buddies were there and the conversation, as always, was clever and heartfelt, and the beer was cold and wet, and I left with a spring in my step and a song in my heart just like I did three and a half months previous, and thus far no dry cough or ache in my muscles.
Well back to Lyndon Johnson and the unpopular war. Back in the time when the draft was breathing down my neck, I thought the war was just plain evil and so therefore the people who were running it and their supporters were just plain evil. But then one day it occurred to me that maybe they just thought differently. When I did the math in my head it always came out that the war was evil, but maybe when they did the math it came out as a just war. It made me a little uncomfortable because everything was clearer when I considered the hawks to be evil, but if they were merely misguided that made things more complicated.
And worse still, if they, many of them were as intelligent as I thought I was and with better education than I had, then maybe I was the one who was misguided. I did the math often and I listened to what the hawks had to say, and read a little history, and the war still came out as evil, but maybe they were doing the same thing and coming out with the war was just.
Now this book was written not long after LBJ resigned. Doris stayed out at the LBJ ranch for like six months and talked to LBJ like every day. She had been a minor functionary on his team, but she had always been openly antiwar, so maybe one of the reasons that he had wanted her to write the book about him was to use his immense powers of persuasion to win her over.
Johnson never understood why the people had turned against him. Hadn't he done great work for civil rights and given people the great society?
He was never a big fan of the war. He complained to Doris often that his true love was the great society and now the war was draining the money that he would rather have spent on the great society.
But he couldn't abandon the war. He believed in the domino theory, and maybe more importantly he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. He also thought of himself as something of a moderate. The hawks were always on him to like bomb Hanoi, and he held back from that, thinking he will give them this and that instead and thereby avoid a larger war.
That's all of today, the balcony beckons, it's still a little cool this morning but we have like seven ninety degree days ahead of us.
Well back to Lyndon Johnson and the unpopular war. Back in the time when the draft was breathing down my neck, I thought the war was just plain evil and so therefore the people who were running it and their supporters were just plain evil. But then one day it occurred to me that maybe they just thought differently. When I did the math in my head it always came out that the war was evil, but maybe when they did the math it came out as a just war. It made me a little uncomfortable because everything was clearer when I considered the hawks to be evil, but if they were merely misguided that made things more complicated.
And worse still, if they, many of them were as intelligent as I thought I was and with better education than I had, then maybe I was the one who was misguided. I did the math often and I listened to what the hawks had to say, and read a little history, and the war still came out as evil, but maybe they were doing the same thing and coming out with the war was just.
Now this book was written not long after LBJ resigned. Doris stayed out at the LBJ ranch for like six months and talked to LBJ like every day. She had been a minor functionary on his team, but she had always been openly antiwar, so maybe one of the reasons that he had wanted her to write the book about him was to use his immense powers of persuasion to win her over.
Johnson never understood why the people had turned against him. Hadn't he done great work for civil rights and given people the great society?
He was never a big fan of the war. He complained to Doris often that his true love was the great society and now the war was draining the money that he would rather have spent on the great society.
But he couldn't abandon the war. He believed in the domino theory, and maybe more importantly he didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. He also thought of himself as something of a moderate. The hawks were always on him to like bomb Hanoi, and he held back from that, thinking he will give them this and that instead and thereby avoid a larger war.
That's all of today, the balcony beckons, it's still a little cool this morning but we have like seven ninety degree days ahead of us.
Friday, July 3, 2020
Yu Darvish 2
Likely people get tired of me telling the story (Where were you in the great war Grandpa?), but I never get tired of telling it.
March 13th, Friday March 13th, I walked out the door of the Ten Cat full of bonhomie and beer, and of course I have not been back there since. The next day I had my last meal in a restaurant, and Monday I had planned on a few last beers that night, but I had a routine doctor's appointment in the morning and I casually asked how well she thought I would hold up to corona and she scared the shit out of me. Well doctors, they are always doing that aren't they? They know they have to maximize the danger to get our attention. and we know that so we always discount what they say. Nevertheless I stayed at home that night.
And now I hear that the Ten Cat is open, and I will probably go there tonight. Outdoors makes a big difference, your chances are twenty times better in the great outdoors, and the Ten Cat has a beer garden, so I am planning on making use of that. I am a little worried about the train though. I have ridden them during the pandemic and they have been less than half full and most of the people were wearing masks. But now the city is pretty open and this will be rush hour. I am thinking of walking it, but it's supposed to be 90 degrees today, so I don't know, maybe I will walk halfway,
But speaking of trains I am reminded of my post of April 23, Yu Darvish, which was about a trip I took to the end of the Brown Line and back the day before. I had had my nose deep in a book. but I looked up at a stop and there was a big poster by Marquee, the group that had bought the rights to almost all Cub games, affiliated with Sinclair, a foul right-wing organization, and I was happy to note that they would be taking a bath on the deal because now there was no baseball.
But now there is baseball, well kind of a short silly season, but what the hell I will watch it. And just this morning I am reading that one of our aces, Q, sliced his thumb washing dishes, so that will make Yu Darvish even more important in the Cubs rotation.
The book I had my nose deep in when I looked up and saw that poster was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by the very fine writer Doris Kearns Goodwin. I had just brought it along for the train ride, my main read at the time being being a long history of the United States, so I didn't get started on the Goodwin book for some time. But today I got to the last chapter which will probably be him leaving office. There is a very interesting take on how LBJ dug us so deep into Asian soil, and maybe I will relate that Monday, but for now the balcony beckons.
I said I would no longer engage Beagles over corona. but perhaps I will make one last small observation, and that is that Beagles appears to be even dumber than the governor of Texas and that is a whole passel of stupid.
Happy weekend.
March 13th, Friday March 13th, I walked out the door of the Ten Cat full of bonhomie and beer, and of course I have not been back there since. The next day I had my last meal in a restaurant, and Monday I had planned on a few last beers that night, but I had a routine doctor's appointment in the morning and I casually asked how well she thought I would hold up to corona and she scared the shit out of me. Well doctors, they are always doing that aren't they? They know they have to maximize the danger to get our attention. and we know that so we always discount what they say. Nevertheless I stayed at home that night.
And now I hear that the Ten Cat is open, and I will probably go there tonight. Outdoors makes a big difference, your chances are twenty times better in the great outdoors, and the Ten Cat has a beer garden, so I am planning on making use of that. I am a little worried about the train though. I have ridden them during the pandemic and they have been less than half full and most of the people were wearing masks. But now the city is pretty open and this will be rush hour. I am thinking of walking it, but it's supposed to be 90 degrees today, so I don't know, maybe I will walk halfway,
But speaking of trains I am reminded of my post of April 23, Yu Darvish, which was about a trip I took to the end of the Brown Line and back the day before. I had had my nose deep in a book. but I looked up at a stop and there was a big poster by Marquee, the group that had bought the rights to almost all Cub games, affiliated with Sinclair, a foul right-wing organization, and I was happy to note that they would be taking a bath on the deal because now there was no baseball.
But now there is baseball, well kind of a short silly season, but what the hell I will watch it. And just this morning I am reading that one of our aces, Q, sliced his thumb washing dishes, so that will make Yu Darvish even more important in the Cubs rotation.
The book I had my nose deep in when I looked up and saw that poster was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by the very fine writer Doris Kearns Goodwin. I had just brought it along for the train ride, my main read at the time being being a long history of the United States, so I didn't get started on the Goodwin book for some time. But today I got to the last chapter which will probably be him leaving office. There is a very interesting take on how LBJ dug us so deep into Asian soil, and maybe I will relate that Monday, but for now the balcony beckons.
I said I would no longer engage Beagles over corona. but perhaps I will make one last small observation, and that is that Beagles appears to be even dumber than the governor of Texas and that is a whole passel of stupid.
Happy weekend.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
"Taking Over" Revisited
My examples of "taking over" were in response to Uncle Ken's question about what I meant by "taking over". He seemed to think it had something to do with civil rights, which I guess it indirectly does. When I used the phrase, however, I meant when one culture displaces the dominant culture in a given area and becomes the new dominant culture. Of course the Indian and Black experiences were not exactly the same. I chose them because they were similar in one respect, that the old dominant culture was marginalized when the new dominant culture displaced them. As Uncle Ken correctly pointed out, you don't have to be Black to vote for a Black mayor, or White to vote for a White mayor. I suppose you don't have to be Black to feel at home in a Black neighborhood or White to feel at home in a White neighborhood either, but it sure helps. When I was looking up Hamtramck I remembered that it used to be predominantly Polish. According to Wiki, it was German before it was Polish, French before that, and Native American before that. Now it is predominantly Islamic, with mosques and everything. Four of the six city council members are Islamic, and the mayor has a Polish sounding name. None of these people could have gotten elected without the support of the Islamic community, which is basically the whole city of Hamtramck. I think it's fair to say, then, that the Islamics have taken over Hamtramck, just like the French, the Germans, and the Poles did in their day.
Say what you want about that corona thing, I still think the lockdown was an expensive failure in that it trashed the economy and did not stop the virus. The lockdown was originally promoted as a temporary measure because, let's face it, you can't lock down the economy forever.
Illegal border crossings were still going on at the rate of thousands per day long after the caravans dispersed. Last I heard, they had slowed down to a trickle, largely due to the efforts of President Trump. I expect this problem will rear it's ugly head again once he is out of office.
I don't know what's going on with those Chicago police, but I still wonder why they are mostly White when the city as a whole is not. Go ahead and defund them if you want, just leave our rural police alone. I have not heard of any problems with them.
Say what you want about that corona thing, I still think the lockdown was an expensive failure in that it trashed the economy and did not stop the virus. The lockdown was originally promoted as a temporary measure because, let's face it, you can't lock down the economy forever.
Illegal border crossings were still going on at the rate of thousands per day long after the caravans dispersed. Last I heard, they had slowed down to a trickle, largely due to the efforts of President Trump. I expect this problem will rear it's ugly head again once he is out of office.
I don't know what's going on with those Chicago police, but I still wonder why they are mostly White when the city as a whole is not. Go ahead and defund them if you want, just leave our rural police alone. I have not heard of any problems with them.
Deborah Harry turns 75
One of the reasons democracy has largely failed in Africa is that each tribe forms its own party, and the tribe with the most people wins every election. The reason it works better here in America is that people cross the color line to vote for who they think is the best man, well it is a little more complicated than that, but still in general. Per Beagles we can see that black people crossed that line to vote for a white guy. Worse than being denied a right to vote most of the Indians lost their very lives. The comparison between the destruction of the Indians and blacks becoming the majority in Detroit is ludicrous.
What is important in fighting the corona is not total deaths but what the current growth rate is. This is an example of a non sequitur, making a remark that is not germane to the issue at hand. Arguing with Beagles about corona I have been barraged by them. and it's exhausting and makes me start out the day with anger and I will no longer be discussing the issue. The news is making my argument better than I can anyway.
I think at some point I just stopped discussing those caravans that were going to destroy America and I was a happier man for that.
Yesterday morning as I was sitting down to begin blogging the radio announced that Deborah Harry was 75. 75. Deborah Harry. Of course I turned 75 three months ago, but I didn't have those good looks to lose. It's a shame.
Tearing these statues down I don't get it. Changing the names of those forts named after Confederates, I don't get that either. Who even knew who they were named after before this whole thing. And in a way they are playing into the hands of the Man, because it's easy to lose a pigeon encrusted statue in the park, but much harder to reform police.
The head of the Chicago police union, this Catanzara is now urging the cops to take it slow in reaction to this defunding stuff. Aren't we Chicagoans paying their salaries? Who the fuck is the boss here? All the more reason to defund.
What is important in fighting the corona is not total deaths but what the current growth rate is. This is an example of a non sequitur, making a remark that is not germane to the issue at hand. Arguing with Beagles about corona I have been barraged by them. and it's exhausting and makes me start out the day with anger and I will no longer be discussing the issue. The news is making my argument better than I can anyway.
I think at some point I just stopped discussing those caravans that were going to destroy America and I was a happier man for that.
Yesterday morning as I was sitting down to begin blogging the radio announced that Deborah Harry was 75. 75. Deborah Harry. Of course I turned 75 three months ago, but I didn't have those good looks to lose. It's a shame.
Tearing these statues down I don't get it. Changing the names of those forts named after Confederates, I don't get that either. Who even knew who they were named after before this whole thing. And in a way they are playing into the hands of the Man, because it's easy to lose a pigeon encrusted statue in the park, but much harder to reform police.
The head of the Chicago police union, this Catanzara is now urging the cops to take it slow in reaction to this defunding stuff. Aren't we Chicagoans paying their salaries? Who the fuck is the boss here? All the more reason to defund.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Last I Heard
Last I heard, Detroit had a White mayor, although they have had a couple of Black mayors in the past. The reason I say that the Blacks took over Detroit is that Detroit's population is 82.7% Black and 10.6% White. Back in 1950, it was 83.7% White and 16.2% Black. The rest are mostly Hispanic now, they weren't even counting Hispanics in 1950. There are also some Arabs and other Muslim types, but they live mostly in Hamtramck, which is an autonomous enclave surrounded by Detroit. Highland Park, another autonomous enclave adjacent to Hamtramck is 93.5 % Black.
The State of New York has reported a total of 24,866 corona related deaths, while Florida has reported 3,550. The population of the State of New York is over 19 million, while the population of Florida is over 21 million.
I don't have official numbers for this, but my informal observation suggests that about half of the people shopping in the Cheboygan area are wearing masks. Cheboygan County, with a population of about 26,000, has reported a total of 22 corona cases and one death. Last I heard, 19 of the cases had recovered, so we presently have one or two active cases.
The State of New York has reported a total of 24,866 corona related deaths, while Florida has reported 3,550. The population of the State of New York is over 19 million, while the population of Florida is over 21 million.
I don't have official numbers for this, but my informal observation suggests that about half of the people shopping in the Cheboygan area are wearing masks. Cheboygan County, with a population of about 26,000, has reported a total of 22 corona cases and one death. Last I heard, 19 of the cases had recovered, so we presently have one or two active cases.
at the movies, and an elegy to dear old DOS
It's a typo, should have been: I hope Old Dog puts his cyber problems behind me, so that we can begin discussing movies and other stuff. That sort of thing slips in on me all the time. I always reread hoping to catch them, and am always surprised at how many of them there are. I catch most of them, but some slip through, my apologies for Old Dog for the time he lost puzzling over it.
Those DLL files, my understanding is that they are kind of catchall files with several different functions in them that the main program every now and then dips into and if it doesn't find them it just rises from its desk, puts on its hat, and clocks out for the day, and doesn't bother to leave an explanation. I always think of them as a curse brought in by Windows. In the grand old days you could just look for the exe file and have a clue as to what is going on, once Windows took over there were like twenty files and no way to know which one did what. As Ice T says in that awful, often repeated, Car Shield commercial the days are over when you could fix your car with a screwdriver and a smile. Anymore with computer glitches occur you try this and you try that and if you are lucky it works, but you never know why the thing you did last worked while the others didn't.
I've heard about that original version of Sling Blade, but I never watched it. I liked the Billy Bob Thornton version just fine, hmmm, hmmm. Did the guy in the short do that thing? Anyway i found the longer version sufficiently lean and mean, a simple solution to a simple problem (not unlike the days of DOS), a few more overly sweet scenes than I remembered, but altogether, satisfying.
I miss the old days of movies when a movie would come out and there would be reviews and I would read through them and keep in mind what I wanted to see and when it showed up in the video store or later on Netflix, I would get the CD and watch it and there were almost always extras with the CD like deleted scenes, or best of all the commentaries, which when they weren't nothing but directors puffing out their chests, could be most informative. Particularly Robert Altman who always had something to say.
Nowadays movies just dribble out and you catch a review where you can, and then you have to search out what streaming service it is on, and it is just a pain in the ass. Towards the end I had a hard time with the selections for Netflix's CD service so I went to streaming, and the selection is even shittier. You end up watching what they have available rather than what you really want to see. And those series which people are all giddy about binging on for days are just like twenty or thirty slices of the same old shit.
I've seen most of those maps on fb, but separately. Nice to see them all together. I will peruse them at my leisure.
There is only a cosmetic similarity between our extermination of the Indians and Detroit having a black mayor which I am assuming it does. To use the same phrase to describe both is ridiculous.
Witness New York and Florida, the lockdown surely worked. If it hasn't worked as well as you would like it to it's because of maskless yahoos like yourself.
Those DLL files, my understanding is that they are kind of catchall files with several different functions in them that the main program every now and then dips into and if it doesn't find them it just rises from its desk, puts on its hat, and clocks out for the day, and doesn't bother to leave an explanation. I always think of them as a curse brought in by Windows. In the grand old days you could just look for the exe file and have a clue as to what is going on, once Windows took over there were like twenty files and no way to know which one did what. As Ice T says in that awful, often repeated, Car Shield commercial the days are over when you could fix your car with a screwdriver and a smile. Anymore with computer glitches occur you try this and you try that and if you are lucky it works, but you never know why the thing you did last worked while the others didn't.
I've heard about that original version of Sling Blade, but I never watched it. I liked the Billy Bob Thornton version just fine, hmmm, hmmm. Did the guy in the short do that thing? Anyway i found the longer version sufficiently lean and mean, a simple solution to a simple problem (not unlike the days of DOS), a few more overly sweet scenes than I remembered, but altogether, satisfying.
I miss the old days of movies when a movie would come out and there would be reviews and I would read through them and keep in mind what I wanted to see and when it showed up in the video store or later on Netflix, I would get the CD and watch it and there were almost always extras with the CD like deleted scenes, or best of all the commentaries, which when they weren't nothing but directors puffing out their chests, could be most informative. Particularly Robert Altman who always had something to say.
Nowadays movies just dribble out and you catch a review where you can, and then you have to search out what streaming service it is on, and it is just a pain in the ass. Towards the end I had a hard time with the selections for Netflix's CD service so I went to streaming, and the selection is even shittier. You end up watching what they have available rather than what you really want to see. And those series which people are all giddy about binging on for days are just like twenty or thirty slices of the same old shit.
I've seen most of those maps on fb, but separately. Nice to see them all together. I will peruse them at my leisure.
There is only a cosmetic similarity between our extermination of the Indians and Detroit having a black mayor which I am assuming it does. To use the same phrase to describe both is ridiculous.
Witness New York and Florida, the lockdown surely worked. If it hasn't worked as well as you would like it to it's because of maskless yahoos like yourself.
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