if only there weren't so damn many of them

 I've done microwave instant coffee since I have had a microwave which was maybe a couple years after I got back to Chicago which would be the early nineties,  At some point my sister who has more couth than I do, bought me a coffeemaker to elevate me into a more refined lifestyle, and it's been okay, coffee is a little better but it is also more work and sometimes of a morning I am not in the mood and do the instant and that serves just as well.

That thing about the measuring cups reminds me of an interesting evening at the Ten Cat when I think it was Old Dog, maybe it was somebody else, wondered does the Ten Cat pint glass hold 16 oz.  Turns out it doesn't, it holds like fifteen and a half, which is not as shocking as it sounded right off.  Fact is all pint glasses, hold fifteen and a half ounces.  Just something they do, and they still call them pint glasses because that's what they do.  Sounds like some bit of chicanery and maybe it is.  I wonder if in Merrie Old Englande where those pint glasses came from if they are also fifteen and a half. Actually Englande has gone metric, so you would think it would have something to do with the metric system, but you would think that ye olde pubbe would be one place where maybe they hold to the measures used back when Britannia ruled the waves.

I went to google and it is more complicated than I thought.  I will leave it at that for the nonce and the reader can read further on the subject if they are of the mood.

Most matters are beyond my power of control.  I am interested in this because well, I am just interested in what is going on in the world.  

And right now I am near the end of Emma Goodman's autobiography and she is in Ukraine which was a hotbed for the anarchists, who were uneasily joined with the commies when they had the czar in common to fight, the enemy of my enemy sort of thing, and now that the enemy is gone so has the friendship between the two and the commies are putting the hammer to the anarchists.  Their most potent weapon is their bureaucracy which they also turn on themselves.

And a Putin knock off has appeared on House of Cards, pretty much looking like Satan.  Well you know on tv and in the movies Satan always has a lot of charm and do does this guy and normally I would go along with all that, but thinking of the current Putin I find no charm. no cleverness, nothing but, dare I say it? Trump across the waters.

I seem to remember that Europe was overrun with refugees from the Middle East a few years ago.  They finally had to start turning them away because there were just too many of them.

See this is what I have been talking about, the idea that refugees are turned away not because they are too different, but because there are too many of them.  The deception being in the idea that if there were fewer of them it would be ok, but in fact a handful of them would be too many, unless of course they looked like you and maybe their enemy is your enemy (interesting how Putin is now most everybody's enemy) and then the sky is the limit.

A little off the subject but those Cubans were hispanics like the Mexicans further west, who Beagles is always worried about taking over the country, but we let in a whole slew of Cubans and now they have taken over south Florida delivering the whole state to Trumpette, De Santis, and I don't see that disturbing the sleep of Beagles up north in the freehold.

But of course there are other differences between the Ukrainians and the wretched masses of the mideast yearning to be free and the situation is more complicated than that, but I am just saying that the argument that we would be kind to the huddled masses if only there weren't so many of them is pretty bogus.

I remember when Nixon used to rant and rave about Uncle Ho, how he had enslaved so many of his countrymen to a godless ideology and then had caused this huge war where so many had died and I thought geez he did all that, just this skinny little guy with the wispy goatee, how had he done all that by himself?