The Masking of Cheboygan

 I don't think that a national lockdown would have been appropriate because the virus did not hit all states equally, at least in the beginning.  Last I head, South Dakota still hadn't experienced any significant effects or mandated any restrictions.  I suspect that, if Trump had ordered a national lockdown, both Uncle Ken and I would be on opposite sides of the issue than we are today.  It's like when we were in school, a behavior is only cool if one of the cool kids does it.

Mask compliance in Cheboygan was about 50% until Queen Gretchen issued her latest decree, and now it's 100%.  No store in town will let you in without a mask.  Our sheriff has said that, while he wouldn't directly enforce the mask rule, he would respond if a maskless person refused to leave after store personnel told them to.  I, who am generally anti-mask, have been compliant only because I don't want to cause any trouble for the store personnel.  I only have to wear a mask while shopping, those poor people have to wear one all day.  Maybe that's why it's so hard to find help nowadays, nobody wants to wear a stupid mask for a whole eight hour shift.  

Most of the rural counties in Northern Michigan have been doing contact tracing since the beginning, while the urban counties Down Below complained that they didn't have the resources to do it.  

I have not heard of any large gatherings around here, but I have read about the house parties and street parties in the cities, many of which end up with somebody getting shot.  Shoppers have become generally compliant with the six foot rule, although it's not unusual for some body to wave you on if they see you waiting for them to clear the aisle.  I figure it's not so dangerous if you hustle by them really fast.

I see on the news that the anti-protestors are finally starting to fight back.  I don't remember seeing anything like that in the 60s, but I didn't watch much TV in those days, and I wouldn't have attended a protest if Jesus Christ Himself was leading it, and still wouldn't even unto this day.

The politicians I was thinking of were not the ant-war liberals, I was thinking of RINOS like Tricky Dick and Kissinger-ass, who snatched defeat out of the jaws on victory in Vietnam.  Then there was Truman, who fired MacArthur for trying to win in Korea.  

Lockdown works

 About half the states never put on lockdowns until like a month ago.  As some fb wags have said this was like having a peeing and a no peeing section of the swimming pool. If we had had a real president we would have had a nation wide lockdown not that ineffective state by state with many states doing nothing rubbish.  Yes, that is what I have been stating all along.  Obviously if we had a nation wide lockdown at the beginning, we would be doing much better than we are doing now.  

Testing is increasing but it is nowhere near what it should be to effectively fight the corona.

Maybe it was a month ago that I said that the corona would be spreading to rural areas.  From what has been related a lot of people in Cheboygan have not been wearing their masks when going into the Walmarts and even people working there have not been wearing masks.and even after Gutsy Gretchen mandated mask wearing I'll bet there are a lot of people still not wearing them.  In downtown Chicago roughly two thirds of the people in the street are masked and in the stores everybody is.  I hear from my friends in the burbs that masks are rarer and they all have higher rates than the city itself.

States like Arizona, Texas, and Florida that had huge rates not that long ago have seen their rates go down once they started mandating masks.  Other states like California who had locked down early were doing well, but then they started opening up and they have seen their rates soar.  

Faucci never said that if we wore masks for two weeks that it would knock the corona out, just that it would reduce fatalities by the tens of thousands, and if we had way more testing than we have now we could do a lot of contact tracing which we are hardly doing now, we could put out hot spots as they occurred and this would bring it way down, though it will probably never go away completely.  

And there is a lot more to locking down than masks, it includes social distancing and no large gatherings like we are seeing in the news every day, not least among the Trumpists.  

Fauci said that masking would be effective if ninety percent of the people masked, a number which we are nowhere near.  It is one thing to mandate masking, but if people ignore it it doesn't mean a thing.

When Beagles speaks of politicians not letting us win wars, I think he is speaking of anti war politicians.  There have been just as many or pro war politicians who got us into stupid wars which the voters of the United States grew tired of and voted against, and that's what got us out of those quagmires.

As for the darkling plain we now have a Trumpist killed in Portland.  Both sides will likely be arming themselves now.  No good can come of that.

I Don't Understand

If three months of lockdown failed to stop the virus, what makes you think that two more weeks would do it?  Are you saying that the original lockdown should have been extended for two more weeks, or are you saying that a new two week lockdown should be imposed starting now?  Or maybe you mean that, if Trump had imposed a nation wide two week lockdown in the beginning, this thing would have been all over with by now?

I understand that testing was pretty sparse in the beginning but, last I heard, there was a lot more testing going on now, which is one reason, but not the only reason, the case numbers have spiked.  About a month ago, they had tested over a thousand people in Cheboygan County, and all they could come up with was 21 cases.  This number had held steady for over a month when all the stores in Cheboygan started enforcing the mask rule by order of Queen Gretchen.  Since then our case number has tripled, in spite of  Dr. Fauci's assurance that we could knock the virus down in two or three weeks if everybody would start wearing masks in public.  This doesn't prove that the masks made the virus worse, but it seems to indicate that they certainly didn't make it any better.   

I think the reason our military hasn't won a war in our lifetimes is that the politicians won't let them.  Maybe we should take some money away from the politicians and give it to the military.  

solutions

 Kind of silly to abandon a process that helps the situation just because it doesn't completely shut it down.  What we should have done, and can still do, but most likely won't, is to have a complete tough lockdown for like two weeks, so that anybody that was infected would not be able to pass it on, and when we emerged it would be gone.  Well not exactly, you couldn't totally shut down, and people would cheat, but it could take it way down, and if you had a good testing program you could stomp out the resultant little fires.  But you would have to have the country working together and certainly having a lying sack o shit for prez makes the whole thing impossible.  

It would cost a lot of money and would be a pain in the ass, but not as much money and not as much of a pain in the ass as the current situation.

That's the situation with cops not wearing body cams, the mayor of Kenosha thought it was too expensive and the cops thought it was too much of a pain in the ass. but you have to admit it would be much cheaper and less of a pain in the ass than the current situation there.

Even if cops were punishable for their misdeeds and were not inclined to cover up for their bad apples, there would still be times when they wrongly killed a black man, but it would not be as often.  From conversations with I have had most people previous to blm were not as aware of the provisions in police contracts that lets them skate, but now they are and there were polls that most people looked favorably on blm.  Now that they have failed to separate themselves from looters I think they may well have sacrificed that approval.  

And in the Try Something Else mode I would like to suggest that we have been showering the military with money since I was born, and they have not won a war in all that time.  All that dough would help us greatly in the time of pandemic.

Try Something Else

 Just as the lockdown did not stop the corona virus, the protests and riots have not stopped the police shootings.  The lockdown did appear to have a dampening effect on the virus while it was in force, but the virus surged back as soon as the lockdown was partially lifted.  The easy answer is to keep the lockdown in force forever, but you can't shut down the economy forever, so that's not going to happen.  The latest issue of National Geographic has an article about the 1918 flu epidemic.  It shows that the cities that locked down did indeed flatten their virus curves rather quickly, within a few months, but the virus didn't come roaring back after those lockdowns were lifted.  Our current virus appears to be a different animal.  

Meanwhile, the cops are still shooting Black people as our cities continue to burn.  While I can understand the frustration that drives the protests and riots, I don't understand how they can keep doing the same thing over and over again when it's obviously not working.  They can't conduct protests and riots every weekend forever.  Either they will run out of things to burn or the coming winter will dampen their enthusiasm.  The Detroit Riot of 1967 only lasted five days, but the city never did recover from it.  People and businesses moved out and Detroit remains a mere shadow of its former self even unto this day.  

Remember the other day when I said I wish that Blogger offered a different type size between normal and large?  Well they do now, it's called "medium".  Try it, you'll like it.

darkling plain

 Remembered the last three lines of this Mathew Arnold poem watching the news today.  Cops with no body cams shoot this guy in Kenosha and then there are demonstrations that lead to the darker forces tearing up the town and then a teenage Trumpist as part of a militia guns down two of them.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

the wagon train to Bendrooms

Bringing bottles back to Connie's, (which for reasons I have never known we called Ben Drooms, or was it Bendrooms, was it named after a person or was it just a word or what?) was one of my fondest memories.  The guys next door, the O'Days, were maybe five years older than us and they were into cars and spent a lot of time in their garage working on them and drinking lots and lots of pop, but the deposit on the bottles was chump change to them and they were glad to give them to us just to get rid of them.  We formed a wagon train in the alley. two cent, and five cent bottles jostling to the bumps in the unpaved alley, down to 57th Street and then across Christiana and into Bendrooms.  They were not all that happy to see us.  "Did you buy all these here?" they would ask suspiciously, but they knew we would be spending it all back over the candy counter so they rang them all up.

Years later in southern Illinois we would buy a case of Cooks beer for $2.80 a case with 85 cents deposit, and when we drank it all we would take the empties back along with fifty cents and buy a quart of something called Vino Fino which put a nice nightcap on the evening.

It doesn't happen here anymore.  I guess back when it made economic sense, bottles were expensive and it made it a more attractive buy if you could get two cents of your purchase back.  Ecology was not a concern back in those days.  Actually with cans it makes economic sense because the metal in the can is worth something,.  In Austin there were a lot of bums who were constantly searching for empty cans and if you were a thoughtful citizen you would save your cans and when you saw a bum on the street scrounging you would offer him a bag of them.  

A lot of the reason states do that deposit thing is not financial but ecological, just to keep the crap from littering the roads.  It seems like the right thing to do and I am ashamed that my home true blue state doesn't do it while Beagles's dubious purple state does.

It's a minor thing I suppose but what sticks in my craw at the supermarket is those people who have been waiting in line ahead of you and only when the clerk is done ringing them up does it occur to them to look through their pockets or their purses or whatever to find out where their money or card is.  Did they think they were going to get their food for free?

Speaking of the end is near there are those hellish fires in California, and those two hurricanes, one of which is making landfall as I write, AND. there is now a meteor with a .41 percent chance of hitting the earth on the day before election day.  It is only 6 feet across so it won't be eliminating any species, but it could well knock you on the noggin,

I'm surprised to see Yang, a guy I rather admire on that poster of lunatics.  I don't know who those military guys are but one look at 'Jocko' assures me that they will not be getting my vote.  

I expected wild and wacky things from the rep convention, but it's kind of like those chair throwing shows, it gets old fast.  After two nights of watching it between innings I am giving it up.

More Goofy People

 One of the things that our governor shut down when the corona hit the fan was the can and bottle returns.  Of course they still charged us for the deposit when we bought the beer and pop, but the stores were no longer allowed to accept the returns and give us our deposit back.  We were assured that this was only going to be temporary, and it kinda was, but not exactly.  After about three months, it was announced that we could redeem our returnables, but only at stores that were properly set up for it.  The machines had to be in a separate room with two doors, one for entrance only and one for exit only, and only two customers were allowed to be in that room at once.  Walmart was the only store in town that had a set up like that.  They didn't set it up for COVID, it was already like that, been that way for decades.  So now all the returnables had to go to Walmart, including the ones we'd been saving for three months.  I had six 30 packs of beer cans, plus a couple dozen two liter pop bottles.  Not wanting to spend the better part of the day feeding cans into a machine one by one, and not wanting to make others wait while I did it, I decided to bring two cases of cans back every time I bought one new case of beer, which would catch me up eventually.  

Other people (we won't mention their names, they know who they are) chose to bring back all their cans and bottles at once.  Not only that, they must have thrown their returnables into the same bags as their regular trash and then brought it all to Walmart to sort it out while the rest of us waited outside.  There was one lady who had a lot of crushed cans mixed in with her good cans and her regular garbage.  Sometimes the machines will accept crushed cans if they can read the scanner code.  If not, then they kick them right back at you.  Each time one of her crushed cans was rejected, she tried it again three or four times before relegating it to the trash.  She also had some cans that looked good but the machine rejected them as well.  I heard her tell her friend that some of her party guests might have brought some cans from out of state, but she tried each one of those cans three or four times as well.  

I spent a good hour waiting in the returnables line, then ten minutes to walk halfway across the store to buy my one case of beer, then another half hour or so waiting in the checkout line because they were only operating three of their dozen lines on a busy Friday afternoon.  I have heard people say some bad things about Walmart you know, but I have concluded that there's nothing wrong with Walmart, it's the people in it.

Tuesday Quickie

We are living in exciting times.

This reminds me of a cartoon, often seen in magazines over many decades of the middle and late 20th century.  It was always the same gag with different captions, featuring a bearded geezer, sometimes in a robe, carrying a big sign proclaiming "The End is Near!"  A humorous notion at the time and not something taken very seriously, a remote possibility at best.  But today?  After watching a few news cycles how can anyone think that the end, or the beginning of the end, is not near?  The Republican Party is off the rails if last night's speakers are any indication.

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In these screwball times I've been disappointed that no third party alternative has made an appearance but a screwier solution has come to my attention.  A group called The Articles of Unity has a crazy plan that has two co-presidents, not just one guy, running things.  Politics makes very strange bedfellows even if it is a little late in the game for these guys to gain any traction.

Goofy People

 I'm sure I posted this before, but we never get tired of those old classics:  When I was in the army, and somebody would say something unfavorable about the army, some smart aleck would always reply, "It's not the army, it's the people in it."  Years later I realized that those smart alecks were right, and it wasn't just the army, it was everywhere. There is nothing inherently wrong with any institution, it's the people in them.  They're not all evildoers, but they all have something wrong with them, at least from my perspective.  I suppose they think the same thing about me, and they might be right.  

I'm trying to think of a simple example, but the only thing that immediately comes to mind is the behavior I have observed in the can and bottle return room at Walmart.  Last I heard, Illinois still didn't charge a deposit on beverage containers, so first I'll have to explain how it works.  Some of the smaller stores just take your returnables over the counter, but the larger stores all have machines into which you feed your returnables one at a time.  When you're done, you press a button and the machine issues you a printed receipt that you turn in when you go through the checkout line where they either give you your money or credit the slip against your grocery bill.  This is not rocket science and it's been around for decades, but some people still find a way to screw it up and make it more difficult for every one else.  

I remember one time, long before the corona hit the fan, when I was waiting my turn at the machine.  I was kind of in a hurry because I was on my way to a doctor's appointment, but I would have had time to spare if it wasn't for Karen.  I knew Karen from the paper mill, so I called her by name to tell her that she was feeding the cans in too fast, which was why the machine kept jamming up.  The store employee who had to keep clearing the jams had already told her the same thing, but I thought she might take it better from me since she knew me from the mill.  Well she didn't, she kept feeding the machine too fast and it kept jamming up until she finally ran out of cans and left.  I got my cans in without jamming the machine once, and made it to my appointment in time, but just barely.  

As soon as I came through the door, this nurse took my blood pressure and said it was really high.  I told her that I have never had high blood pressure in my life, which was the truth in those days.  She asked me if I had experienced any stress lately, which I had, and then told me to come back in a week and have it checked again, which I did, and it was normal. 

Now that you know how the system works, I can tell you about how it has gotten worse since the corona hit the fan, but I'll save that for tomorrow.   

the new greasers

What I'm talking about is a shooting like the one in Lakeland Florida in December 2018.  December 2018?  Why that is little under two years ago.  It seems much longer ago doesn't it?  If you take the corona into it because schools have been closed that takes it down to a year. which is not all that ling ago, Well maybe it's because all this shit has happened since then.  We are living in exciting times.

I wonder what goofy people Beagles is alluding to that got in the way of him getting a decent education.  Myself I had the honor of being named the class clown, but I suspect that Beagles is talking about what we called hoodlums, or hoods, back in the day.  Thinking back I don't recall any bad times from them.

In fact I rather admired them, they were just cool, know what I mean man.  Later they were called greasers.  That was back when people looked back at the 50's with nostalgia and the times became the stuff of musical comedy, much like what has become of the roaring 20's, and later became of the 60's although what they are really talking about in this regard are the 70's.  And what has happened since then musical comedy wise?  And I am thinking nothing really.

The 80's, 90's, oughts, teens, they all seem the same to me, cars became bland, cell phones appeared and rapidly became smaller, there was rap music and hip hop, but really.  When you see newsreels of the time people seem to be dressed strangely and their haircuts look off, but not all that much.

Will the new 20's be something.  Surely the advent of Trump calls for some new era, but who will be the flappers, the stoners, the hippies?  I guess it would have to be the Trumpists, and those militia guys who arm themselves for Armageddon every time they go out to the Seven Eleven for a super slurpie.  And then there are those modern day klansmen and the tiki guys and now the boogaloos who dress up in Hawaiian shirts and AR 15s.  They seem so malevolent now but maybe time will dim their menace and maybe it will someday be a story of romance set against maga hats.   

Same Fish, Smaller Barrels

A wise internet philosopher once said, "When you're shooting fish in a barrel, all you've got to hit is the barrel."  The barrels have gotten a lot smaller lately, which means you have to shoot more barrels to hit the same number of fish.  I searched my news app for "recent mass shootings", and they are still happening, only now they are calling almost any shooting a mass shooting.  I don't know if these smaller and more frequent shootings are producing the same casualty rate per year. Somebody should do a study about that.  

As for school shootings, most schools have been closed since March, which is one way to solve the problem.  You can't shoot people over the internet, at least not yet.  Too bad they didn't have on line schools when we were kids.  We could have gotten a decent education without having to put up with all those goofy people.  

remember school shootings?

 Still curious about Mr Pillow I posted a question on fb asking if anybody had bought a pillow from the guy and was surprised to learn about five of my friends have.  None of them liked it.  The common complaint that it was just like a pillow you could buy at Target for 3.99.  So there you have it, overpriced and inferior.  Along the way I looked him up on wiki and he has been in plenty of trouble with the law.  A rich asshole who got his money by basically fraudulent means.  What is there for Trump not to like?

Haven't watched any of the democratic convention, well I have seen dribs and drabs.  Biden is a wonderful human being, Trump, not so much.  The Trump convention should be wild and wacky and I will probably sample that from time to time.

Friday morning and the bridges are down.  I can see maybe five cop cars with their bubblegum machines blinking scattered across downtown.  Not much action lately and none expected this weekend.  I hope that is the case, but you never know.

So how about those school shootings?  And what you may ask because there have been none of them, or mass shootings of any kind, for a couple years.  Well everybody agreed it was a terrible thing, and everybody agreed we ought to do something about it.  And in the end what we did about it was nothing.

The anti gun nuts were all about banning guns, particularly those super guns that kill so many so quickly.  The gun nuts were for anything as long as it didn't involve gun control.  They proposed mental health programs as if putting a few dollars into it (which they never were serious about doing) would solve a problem we have had since forever.  More ludicrous ideas like banning violent computer games and giving our souls to Jesus never happened.

We liberals were proud of those kids, those innocent babes, and their pure idealistic anti gun marches, but polls showed that for every marcher there was another kid who loved guns.  Myself I think at least the carnage would be lesser without super guns, but that is not going to happen anytime soon.

So do any of the fellows of the institute have any idea why there have been no shootings lately?  Damn I know I shouldn't have brought it up because if suddenly we have one next week it will all be my fault.  

mr pillow

 When I first started seeing those Mr Pillow commercials I was all like, What?  Like many of my fellow oldsters I sometimes have trouble entering the arms of Morpheus, but it never occurred to me that the reason for this was because I was sleeping on an inferior pillow.  I mean a pillow is a pillow right?  Some are softer and some are harder and some are bigger and some are smaller and some are just right and others are not just right.  And he never really explained why his pillow was a superior pillow, but I guess we were supposed to assume that he got rich enough to buy all this commercial time by peddling his pillows so they must be pretty good.

Well I never fell for that shit, and nobody I know, and I know plenty who have a tough time getting to sleep, ever bought one.  And of course it never crossed my mind to vote for Trump and almost nobody I know ever has.  Could there be a connection?

And sure enough there have been reports in the news of Mr Pillow showing up at Trump rallies and being considered for this or that position among the Trumpists.  

And now he has invested in, and got Ben Carson to join him, in some snake oil scam, and Trump is all "We'll look into it."

He was on CNN the other day bragging about all the studies that have shown this snake oil is a miracle cure, but when Anderson Cooper asked him what studies he was like oh they are everywhere and when Cooper pressed him to name one he blustered that he was a man of god and had integrity.

Conventions have been boring for like twenty years, being virtual will not make much of a difference.  I'll probably peek in on the Trump convention though just for a cheap thrill with some wacky thing.  

There are a few republicans left who are true republicans and believe in the old republican values and aren't eager to sell their souls for a couple supreme court judges.  As far as dems for Trump, I believe you have Blago, but I can't think of anybody else offhand.

I'm surprised that with an unemployment rate twice that of the rest of the country that Cheboygan has Help Wanted signs, but I am taking Beagles's word for it.  I haven't seen any here since March.

From Whence the Idea Came

The more I thought about it, I thought that the old movie I saw at an impressionable age was about the San Francisco Earthquake.  I looked it up to be sure and, sure enough, that must have been the one.  Turns out it happened in 1906, not "18something", but a certain amount of memory loss is to be expected at my age.  Also, it wasn't the military command that issued the "shoot to kill" order, it was the mayor.  Indeed, some of the looting was done by a few bad apples among the soldiers themselves.

"On April 18, in response to riots among evacuees and looting, Mayor Schmitz issued and ordered posted a proclamation that "The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to kill any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime".^[39] In addition, accusations of soldiers themselves engaging in looting also surfaced.^[40] "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#Response

Uncle Ken is probably right that no such order was issued in the Detroit Riot of 1967.  I do believe that there was some undocumented shooting that went on.  Shit happens in a war.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, but the current situation in Chicago may not be that desperate, at least not yet.

This must have been the movie, although I don't remember any of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(1936_film)

It cures what ails ya'

And now the political conventions begin, Woo! Woo!  No, I'm not watching any of it; analysis by the pundits is good enough for me.  The fact that notable Republicans are addressing (if you can call it that) the convention is adding another ring to the political circus.  Will big shot Democrats come out in support of Trump and address the Republicans?  Anything can happen this year and I'm about ready to quit trying to figure it out.  Will we have a legitimate election this year?  It took a month for the Gore/Bush contest to be resolved way back in 2000 and that was a big deal at the time but was settled relatively amicably.  We won't be so lucky this year, especially if the Post Office goes down the drain.  It seems to be well on the way.

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I've got to catch up on the news.  There's a new crackpot cure for Covid-19 that Trump has been touting, derived from some poisonous flower.  Sounds promising!

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

 The last time I saw "help wanted" signs on almost every business in Cheboygan was Saturday, August 15, 2020.  Actually, most of them didn't say "help wanted", they said "hiring" or "now hiring".  Little Caesar's Pizza was even offering a "signing bonus", I seem to remember that it was for $300.  I also recently saw an ad in the paper for nurses in Petoskey that was also offering a signing bonus, I believe that one was for $3,000. 

I think I got the idea about shooting looters from an old movie I saw on TV when I was so young that I didn't know what they were talking about until my father explained it to me.  There was some kind of natural disaster, it might have been the San Francisco Earth Quake, the first one back in 18 something, or maybe it was about the Civil War.  Part of the declaration of martial law they announced was "Looters will be shot on sight".  It has a nice ring to it but, the more I think about it, maybe it's not applicable to the current situation in Chicago.

I was in Cheboygan when the Detroit Riot of 1967 broke out.  I didn't have a TV in those days, but there was a lot of talk about it on the street, and I knew some of the National Guardsmen who were sent there.  They told me that the death toll was probably higher than the official reports said.  They were frequently shot at, and they returned fire until their attackers' guns went silent.  Then they moved on to the next incident without even checking to see if they had killed anybody.  Ironically, these guys had joined the Guard originally to avoid combat in Vietnam, while I had joined the Army with the hope of going to Vietnam and saw no combat at all in Berlin.  There is an old saying, "God protects the fools and the drunks."  If that's true, I must have been doubly protected in those days.

'

shooting looters

 Help wanted signs were prevalent before the corona hit because unemployment was very low.  Now that unemployment is much higher I have not seen any help wanted signs since the middle of March.  The only people I hear saying that the bonus unemployment money is keeping people from taking jobs are Republicans who not long ago blew a huge whole in the deficit with their big tax cuts for the rich a couple years ago, but are worried about giving money to working stiffs. I'd like to know when was the last time Beagles saw a help wanted sign.  

Shooting looters, it sounds like the sort of thing those assholes with the Kill them all, let God sort them out t shirts would say, but nothing any responsible politician would ever say.  And I was wondering if the Detroit police were ever ordered to do that, and I did some researching (here is an interesting article:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/understanding-detroits-1967-upheaval-50-years-later-180964212/) and I could not come up with any evidence that they were.  The article mentions the movie Detriot from 2017 which I had seen but watched again last night, powerful stuff.

There were some rioters shot by cops but they were mostly like snipers and guys who were keeping firemen from putting out fires, and sure there were probably some looters shot by cops but they weren't obeying orders.  

But then you have to step back and look at the situations, Detroit was burning down their own neighborhoods, what was happening in Chicago was they were coming downtown to loot.  There was no burning, there was one instance of shooting but nobody got seriously hurt,  You want to shoot people for that?  There is a lot of jaywalking going on in Chicago, and if cops shot people doing that it would probably put a stop to that, but is that something you want to do?  I don't.

We're learning more about the looters from those who were arrested.  Almost none of them came from Englewood, most of them had clean records, most of them were young.  None of them expressed strong feelings about the shooting in Englewood.  There seemed to be a prevailing attitude among them that everybody is doing it, why not me? 

What they were doing was clearly wrong, they were arrested and they will be prosecuted, but shooting them seems inappropriate to, well almost everybody.

There was another incident of the Umbrellas last weekend.  I am calling them Umbrellas because I don't know what else to call them.  During the siege to tear down a statue of Columbus a couple weeks ago, a group amid the protestors carrying umbrellas separated themselves from the rest, and screening themselves with the umbrellas, changed into black clothes and then came forth very violently at the cops.  The same group did the same thing Saturday night.  Sounds a little bizarre I know, I'm suspecting that they are anifa or some antifa like group, but I am waiting more information,

You Can't Get Good Help Nowadays

Silly me, I thought that y'all wanted to stop the looting.  Of course my suggestion is no good if you want the looting to continue.

Like I said previously, Cheboygan is still experiencing Empty Shelf Syndrome.  It's not nearly as bad as it was right after the Corona hit the fan, but it's not unusual to have to go to two or three different stores to find something, and then have to settle for a different brand or package size.  I'm still not convinced that Corona is entirely to blame because, like I said, we have been having this problem since way before.  

According to a recent article in our local paper, other parts of the country besides Northern Michigan are having the same issue.  The store managers blame their suppliers, the suppliers blame the manufacturers, and the manufacturers blame their suppliers of raw materials.  They all blame the previous lockdown and say it might be a year or two before the pipeline is refilled.  

Another thing they all agree on is that it's hard to get people to come in to work anymore.  To be fair, this was also going on pre-Corona, but it's worse now.  Even during the lockdown, the "essential" businesses that were open all had "help wanted" signs posted and now they all do.  Some say it's because of that $600 bonus that was added to the unemployment checks, but that expired July 31 and, last I heard, hasn't been renewed yet.  Indeed, anybody around here who can make over $600 a week working would be thought of as upper middle class.  

Still, some people were complaining that the American work ethic was dead long before Corona.  I know that I would never hire some of my former colleagues at the paper mill, but there were others that I certainly would.  

blm at the crossroads

Bringing in a lot of guns and ammo and blasting away is a common solution to all problems by a certain kind of people who just generally like blasting people away as long as it is not them, and particularly if the guys being blown to kingdom come are of a different race or belief or whatever.  But it doesn't really solve any problem.

The bridges are up this morning and I will have to catch my train home from the Ten Cat before nine pm or I will be walking,  I really don't expect any trouble but you never know right?

Faithful readers of my posts will know that while I approve of the cause of BLM I am on the fence about their methods.  Well I don't quite approve but it seemed like they were getting results in public opinion.  Still their attitude that they were always right and that those who opposed them, or even did not support them sufficiently were by definition evil people and not deserving of any consideration.

If you have been paying attention, and I have. you will notice that we have not heard anything much from BLM lately.  Their outrageous statements in the form of looting is moral reparation since just after the um, unpleasantness is going over like a lead balloon.  They tried to stage a rally in Englewood where the precipitating incident occurred and the residents basically kicked them out. because you  know, black businesses got looted too.  Several local columnists who had supported them before this do not support their support of looting.  Without support from the mainstream these guys don't have much and hopefully they are rethinking their actions.

If they could join the rest of the city in rejecting the looting, I think that would be a big step forward and would get them back a lot of their support.  I don't think most of the black community supports looting, just as  I think a lot of cops don't like their union boss, if both sides could get together maybe something could be done to make the current mess better.

The derecho did not effect me much but it tore down trees in the northern suburbs.  Not all fonts are of the same size and if Beagles would like a smaller font he could experiment with that.

On the shooting of Latrell there has not been much light.  It appears, but is not certain that the cops were in the right.  If only they had been wearing their body cams.

Summer in the City

Uncle Ken's link was helpful, I think I'm up to speed on that one now.  I couldn't get it to open in a new window or a new tab, but I copied and pasted it into Cortana's box and she took me right to it.  

It looks like Chicago is a mess with all that looting and shooting going on.  This is too big a job for the police, more like a job for the National Guard.  Declare martial law and shoot all looters on sight.  That's what they did in Detroit back in '67 and it was effective in ending the riot.  I know it sounds like harsh medicine, but it will save lives in the long run.  Or you could just wait a few months and the fall rains will dampen it down eventually.

I saw something on our local news the other day about that big blow that wreaked havoc across the country.  Looks like Chicago was right in its path, but it missed Northern Michigan.  Although we get our share of crummy weather, many of the big summer and winter storms pass south of us like that.  

Our County Mounties all carry body cams, but our State Police do not.  I don't know about the Cheboygan City Police.  I can't remember the last time I heard anything bad about any of them.  

I think I'm going to try this larger font size for awhile, although I think it's a bit much.  I wish they had something in between.  

Latrell Allen

 That's the guy who the cops shot.  Here is an article about it.  https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/8/11/21363544/latrell-allen-chicago-police-shooting-looting-bail-charges  I think this will open it in a new window which should be more convenient..

Give Me a Hint

"And this just in, the cops weren't wearing their body cameras.  Had they been and had their actions been justified, maybe there would have been less of a kerfuffle.  Although I don't think the looters cared a fig whether the shooting was justified.  But still they should have been wearing them.  They should always be wearing them." - Uncle Ken

Maybe this stuff is common knowledge in Chicago, but it is not in Beaglesonia.  Even if I was a news junkie like my esteemed colleagues, I doubt I would be as well informed as they are about current events in Chicago, any more than they are about current events in Cheboygan.  Well, Cheboygan doesn't actually have as many current events as Chicago because we don't have nearly as many people, but that's not the point.  I searched my news app for "recent Chicago shootings", then narrowed it down to "Chicago shootings this weekend" and got different numbers from different stories.  Then I noticed that some of the stories were dated August 3, which made them about last weekend.  Even the ones about this weekend did not all report the same numbers because one of them was dated Saturday, another Sunday, and another Monday.  It sounds like the one Uncle Ken is talking about was a police shooting, and I didn't see any of those in the stories I perused.  

what's wrong with blm

 That quote by Ariel Atkins and similar ones by other BLM activists have been widely quoted and there is no need for a link for stuff that is common knowledge.  And I couldn't disagree with it more.  It is wrong on so many levels that I am not going to waste my time taking it apart.  If BLM was like regular organizations it would have a spokesperson and that person would discuss it with other members before saying it and hopefully they would craft a more sensible message.  All very boring and slow and stuffy, but if you want to oh, not be crazy, that is the price to pay.  The way BLM is structured anybody with access to a microphone can shoot their mouth of at will.  

Actually I had hoped this would be like a teachable moment where BLM would see that hitching their wagon to the looters' star was a bad idea, but as yet that does not appear to have happened.

And this just in, the cops weren't wearing their body cameras.  Had they been and had their actions been justified, maybe there would have been less of a kerfuffle.  Although I don't think the looters cared a fig whether the shooting was justified.  But still they should have been wearing them.  They should always be wearing them.

Two things the cops and BLM have in common, they don't believe rules should apply to them.

I'm not growing any trees on my balcony.  Actually I don't like to do a lot to control my plants (though I admit that sunflower splint was quite a feather in my cap),  I plant them, I water them, and this year I Miracle Grew them, though much of that has been degraded by those balcony painters, and that's it.  I particularly enjoy the battle between the tomatoes and the morning glories.  I think they end up in rather a symbiotic tangle, but that is just my speculation.

I see that pessimism about taking Donald down, in many other anti Trumpers.  He does seem superhuman somehow.  One nice thought is that mail in ballots are already going in with him about ten points down.  And I'm sure he can't just stand there and refuse to leave, pretty sure.

These new interfaces are like when the grocery store reorganizes its shelves.  I hate that.

It's All I've Got

"At one point, BLM organizer Ariel Atkins called the looting tantamount to "reparations," telling the crowd, “I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store, because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance."

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17QGcW?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

The link doesn't seem to be working so you'll have to copy and paste it in.  Stupid new format!  Whatever happened to "If it ain't broke don't fix it."?

Okay, it's from FOX, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's all I could readily find on my news app.  Our TV news briefly mentioned it the other day, but no details were given.  Stay safe y'all!

Plant Lives Matter

Uncle Ken's green thumb has been getting quite the workout lately, especially with the sunflower's splint.  I think he's ready to move up to grafting and growing different fruits from a single root stock.  That's how apples grow and I think you can grow oranges, lemons, and grapefruit on the same tree.  I don't know much about tomato plants except they like a lot of sun.  A good pruning might make the plant happier.

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The looters the other night in downtown Chicago have me shaking my head; I think those dummies just wanted to break windows.  What can you expect to gain by looting a McDonald's or a Tesla dealership?  I must be missing something.

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Now that Biden has made his pick for  VP I have a sinking feeling that something will go terribly wrong and he will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  This is going to be a bumpy ride.

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Blogger has a new interface it keeps shoving down my throat and I keep reverting to the old version to make new posts.  What do you guys think of it?

the morning after

 

Venus and a sunflower, the morning after the derecho and two mornings after the looting.

BLM

Black Lives Matter has no titular leader, there are people at the top, but it's not like they can tell anybody in the organization what to do.  There are no card carrying BLMers, somebody calls for a demonstration and whoever shows up shows up.  Back in my day our demonstrations had a pretty set goal, end the war, bring the boys home.  As a generally leftist group there were a lot of other things that we would have liked, but we kept on message.

Not so the BLM.  The thing that usually sets off these marches is not so much that a cop wrongfully killed a black guy, but that he skated on it.  In the obvious case the city would like very much to put him behind bars, or at least to get him fired, but there are all these union rules that prevent them form moving quickly on that issue.  And then the goal of the marchers is to change the union rules that allow cops to get away with this shit.  This is a very laudable goal but a tough one to deal with because it's in their union contract and you have to resort to the courts and that takes forever.  

What is with that by the way?  All you have to do is appeal some judgement and suddenly it is all tied up in the courts and it will take forever so in fact it seems like nothing can be done,  I am speaking here of how the prez's men seem to able to stonewall all the subpoenas against him, but I guess that is another issue.

And then from police reform the mission creep of BLM goes to black issues in general, and what the hell LBGTQ stuff.

And one wonders what the hell do they think they are ever going to get done?  And lately they have gotten into tearing down statues. which to me is the ultimate useless but exciting activity.  Yes Christopher Columbus was a very bad man, but then all those Spanish conquistadors were very bad men, and okay all those confederate guys were fighting for the right to keep men enslaved, all very vile, but what matters is the laws on the books, not the statues in the park,

Well you know you get together with all your BLM buddies and you are all of like men and your cause is just and on the other side are all manner of bad men,  And even though your cause is just you know if you proceed through proper channels it will go on forever and it will be boring.  Tearing down a statue is anything but boring and likely you will be toppling it in the end and there is a concrete victory, a big metal thing lying on the ground.

No minds are changed, in fact you have probably set your cause back a bit, but God that felt good.

Planning out this post last night I was thinking of adding that there has been a welcome lull in this rioting activity.  But this morning all the bridges are up and no busses or trains are running to downtown.  No specific sparking incident that I know of, and it appears to be more of a looting than a demonstrating thing and I will have to wait for more news to learn what exactly went down.  

the occupiers

Remember the Occupy movement?  It started out as Occupy Wall Street, which it actually never did, but it did occupy Zicotti Park, a small park near Wall Street.  I don't remember any precipitating event, it just seemed to come out if the blue in September 2011.  Their goals, as wiki tells me in a glowing article that appears to be written by occupiers themselves, were vaguely income inequality and real democracy.  Real democracy is too vague for me to get ahold of, but income inequality, why that is something I have been yammering about in the ivied halls for years, with surprisingly little results.  

My methods for diminishing income inequality would be closing loop holes and a more progressive income tax, and having the gummint provide basic services for everybody.  The Occupy Movement's methods would be, well they weren't telling.  They weren't telling because, um, they wanted to see a thousand flowers bloom, they wanted to see a lot of answers out there and they didn't want to discourage anybody by getting behind this idea or that because that might discourage others who preferred other ideas and they would drop out of the movement. and the movement wanted to be, above all things inclusive.

Well that's one way to have a big movement, and it was pretty big, there were little islands of Occupy everywhere, and it seemed like a grassroots movement, that might well, as Beagles is fond of saying, take over.  The mainstream press loved them, those young smooth untarnished faces with their hopeful gaze.  Is it not said that a child shall lead them, but the only thing I remember children leading is that crusade that came to a very bad end.  

And while the Occupiers didn't end up being sold into slavery, they did fade into obscurity.  They occupied these little bits of property here and there. but after that what?  If a reporter stopped by to ask what they were thinking they would hear a bunch of idealistic pap. and nothing more.  Like the morning dew they just evaporated away.

Couldn't they see this coming?  Couldn't the leaders have done something about it?  Well there were no leaders.  There was no titular leader of Occupy.  There were all these little charters who were quasi independent, surely among them there were folks
who were more charismatic than others and were sort of leaders, but they could lose their unofficial position whenever a more charismatic guy came along, and if he became too charismatic the whole group in general would reject them because they didn't believe in leaders.

And that is exactly the kind of hierarchical structure that Black Lives Matter has.  More on this after the weekend. 

Uncle Ken's garden

Here is a closeup of my sunflower splint.

And here is the sunflower doing quite well thank you.

And here is a tomato plant dead on the bottom but blossoming on the top.

good vs evil

I liked to think that the demonstrations of the sixties put an end to the Vietnam war, but anymore I am not so sure.  In the end it may have just been the long loss of bodies and treasure without achieving any goal.  And looking back it is hard to see where the demonstrators changed any hearts of minds.  Our behavior once we started tossing bottles and rocks was the sort of thing that pisses people off rather than persuades them.  Burning the flag, what was with that?  I guess I would still defend burning the flag as a first amendment right, but what is the purpose of doing so?

Well arrogance.  We were right and the war hawks were wrong, and being in the right gave us license to do things that offended those who were in the wrong.  Like I've said before I thought we were good people and the people we were opposing were bad people, so it was a battle between good and evil.  

But since then I have realized that our enemies also thought that they were doing the right thing,  I think they were wrong of course, but then they probably thought I was wrong.

Anyway if the cause is police brutality then I think the current protester's cause is just, and there were some polls earlier that showed public opinion had moved towards their cause, so that is all good.  

But then there was the violence.  I will have to say that there has been almost no personal violence, just property damage.  But that damage has been very extensive, and is certainly not right.  There is a story going around that the good protesters are the ones who come around early in the day and protest peacefully, but with the fall of night out come the bad protesters who do the damage.  But I think some of these guys are the same people, and you don't see the peaceful protesters doing much to clamp down on the violent protesters.

Part of this may be due to the structure of the Black Lives Matter organization, but I'll get to that later.


My balcony faces straight east so the only sun I get is morning sun.  Peppers, especially hot ones grow well.  I get tomatoes but not a lot of them, and not very large.  This can be overcome by putting in a lot of plants and this year I was going balls to the wall by paying a few bucks more for more advanced seedlings and buying a jug of Miracle Grow.  Everything was going fine until last week when they finally got around to painting my balcony ceiling.  They put tarp over the plants but that didn't do them any good and there was something toxic in the paint that set my tomatoes way back.  The leaves along the main stems are shriveled but they are growing at the tips, which is the way of tomatoes and I may yet get a few.  My sunflowers had just crested the railings and the tarp bent their heads which were about to flower.  Three of them popped back but the fourth had an actual break of the skin at the bend.  I thought this is crazy and will never work but I made a little splint at the spot with string and a piece of dowel rod, and by gum it worked.  I feel pretty good about that.


I am not disputing the numbers of those links, which is the same news I see every day in the papers and radio and on tv.  I dispute that they do anything to back up Beagle's assertion that lockdown does no good.  In almost every case states that were locking down were doing better than states that weren't locking down.  When states that had been doing well by locking down, California is the most obvious example, started opening up in what we now know was too early they got hit bad.  That lockdown deters the pandemic is plain and obvious.

I'm Not Sure

I'm not sure if Uncle Ken is disputing the numbers reported by the links I provided or my interpretation thereof.  I can't vouch for the veracity of the numbers, I calls them like I sees them.  All I meant by way of interpretation was the states that locked down early, like California, Illinois, and Michigan, seem to have lost the advantage they once held over the states that locked down late or opened early like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, since they all have seen a recent surge in new cases.  I see that the death count in Texas has finally caught up with the death count in Michigan, which is not surprising since Texas has four times the population of Michigan.

I have heard of pulling stumps ropes and pulleys, but I have never tried it with my Kubota.  With the trees and bushes growing as close together as they do on my property, the roots are all tangled up with each other, so I doubt that I could pull stumps like a dentist pulls teeth.

First Tuesday in August

...the truth is plain and obvious...

Aye, and there's the rub.  Such a statement is worthy of that great sage, Donald J. Trump; a little snarky and condescending.  My impression is that Uncle Ken seeks the truth, a sometimes slippery notion, and Mr. Beagles is like Sgt. Joe Friday, "just the facts, Ma'am."  I hope that the difference between truth and facts is not an elusive concept for my esteemed colleagues, and let the yammering continue.

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I'm still enjoying the farming oriented videos on YouTube, learning something new every day.  It's amazing how productive dirt can be when it's properly utilized.  I saw one guy who had one acre's worth of produce growing, in raised beds and greenhouses.  He was able to grow $200,000 worth of stuff, lots of "boutique" veggies and a lot of labor was involved, but still...not bad at all.  I didn't notice the expenses involved, maybe he spent $195,000 on fertilizer and pesticides.

What's the direct sunlight situation on your balcony, Uncle Ken?  There are probably some fruits or veggies that are perfectly suited for a micro-farm; I don't think it's too late to get something going.

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There was another series of videos that I found interesting, and I thought of Mr. Beagles.  Using a little tractor such as his new Kubota (did I get that right?) and a series of ropes and pulleys a tree stump is not a big challenge.  Very cool to see the earth yield as the stump breaks free, not unlike pulling a tooth.

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Happy August, gents.  A year from now we'll be laughing at what a screwy year 2020 was and how we got through it in fine shape.  We will be laughing won't we? 

the big demonstration

There was an article in The New Yorker over the weekend about how powerful police unions have become.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/how-police-unions-fight-reform

There It's pretty long but it tells a comprehensive story


There was one more demonstration that I  took part in.  This was about fifteen years ago when we invaded Iraq.  I was against the invasion of course, but I didn't think protests had much effect, and I mainly went because a friend visiting me wanted to go.

It was pretty pleasant actually.  We paraded through downtown at night and it looked like the bystanders were on our side.  There were chants, but there was no screaming.  Nothing was thrown and nothing was broken.  And the cops, I was expecting the snarling cops of the 1968 convention but these guys were polite, nice even.  They were lining the demonstration, and if you wanted to drop in or drop out, they were all like very good Sir or Madam.


The first Black Lives Matter demonstrations came down State Street shortly after the McDonald videos were released.   There was no property damage, and surrounded by cops on bikes, they were pretty orderly.  But I just didn't like their attitude.  Instead of solemnly marching they were dancing and hopping around, well they were mostly all kids, but they were all in the cops' faces, just nasty.  Okay the march was against police brutality, but not all cops are brutal, and some of the cops who took the abuse were probably nice guys. It didn't seem like they were changing any minds.  It seems like they marched pretty regularly on weekends for a month or two and then it died down.  

And then came Minneapolis.  Sometimes you wonder why one particular thing lights a spark, and in this case I'm guessing it was the video.  McDonald was maybe the case of an itchy finger, but here was slow purposeful death going on for eight minutes.  Anyway it was huge.  A dense crowd of demonstrators covered the State Street and Wabash Avenue (where that guy got shot a week or two ago) bridges, more coming up Kinzie, and the IBM plaza was full of them.  All of them facing a thin blue line of helmets.  I was looking down from 21 floors so I couldn't see closely, but mostly the blue helmets looked relatively calm, professional I would say.  The demonstrators on the other hand were way too excited, screaming at the cops in a most unpleasant way.

But nothing was being thrown, and the lines were pretty steady and I went back in for a couple hours and returned to the balcony and there was a cop car on fire (that particular incident was the work of some yokel who drove up from Galesburg with no attachment to the cause or the demonstrators but just a guy who liked to blow things up).  The complexion had changed, stuff was being thrown.  But the cops were gaining the upper hand, they pushed the demonstrators south off the Wabash Avenue and State Street bridges and then raised them.  With the bridges up I couldn't see what was going on but I saw on tv how they were looting and burning the stores on State Street, the Potbellys, the big Walgreens, the Target all busted and looted.  And many many more, Wabash, Michigan Avenue, west down to LaSalle where they left a bridge down and they crossed and did a job on north LaSalle.

And then into the neighborhoods and then the suburbs, although most of these guys didn't appear to be demonstrators at all, just guys who were watching on tv and noticed the chaos and realized that the cops were busy and drove to the nearest strip mall.


I read about five of Beagles' links and didn't find anything that supported his case,  I'm not going to read five more.  I don't want to carry on this argument because the truth is plain and obvious and if Beagles chooses not to see it, then I have done all I can, I can do no more, and I am not going to get into another yammering situation.

Is So!

"States that shut down early or late and/or opened up early or late, it doesn't seem to matter." - Talks With Beagles 

"This is not true and nothing in that link backs it up." - Uncle Ken

Uncle Ken, did you even read the link?  Please try again and, this time, click on the box that says "Continue Reading" when you get to it.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17nPYn?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Here's an updated report from yesterday. Again, you have to click on "Continue Reading" if you want to see the full story.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17sFIe?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Another update from today. You won't have to click "Continue Reading" on this one.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB17tXPt?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

If that's not good enough for you, here's something closer to home, your home, not mine.  Michigan is in a similar situation, but I can't give you a link for that because my information came from the TV and local newspaper.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-coronavirus-illinoiis-pritzker-20200729-tokhpmz2x5ejpdswqysxzgobim-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1kxZuQrudXQUQz9g8rmSkJuI--B34AOB-CpzcIB7wIm67Xis0KPkgfqlY