A distinction without a difference

 You know even as I was writing that distinction between communism and fascism I was thinking what's the damn difference anyway.  Well you know I am kind of a comsymp.   From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.  Aren't we all in this together?  Doesn't seem right that the boss should make a million times more than the lowliest employee.  

But in practice it doesn't work well.  It's not in human nature to share alike and the commies in charge of splitting up the pie always seem to get the bigger slice.  And then there is that thing where if you are going after something like a little raise for all the workers it doesn't seem right to kill a bunch of people.  But if you are creating the worker's paradise and ending all inequality, well it just might be worth it, so the commies tend to be a bit severe.

I believe what Putin is saying is that the Ukes are nazis, and true enough when the Germans entered Ukraine they got a pretty good welcome from the Ukes, eager to be free of the Russkies and more than happy to turn over their Jews.  But that was then and this was now.

If the Russkies didn't think they were on our side, neither did we think we were on their side.  It was classic the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Patton, and I reckon a lot of our other generals, wanted to keep going east to topple Stalin.

In WW I the commies had just taken power and the first thing they did was drop out of the war to begin establishing the workers paradise.  Probably a good thing because the war was not going well for their side.

Well happy weekend Gennulmens.

What's in a Name?

 Commies call people they don't like "fascists", and fascists call people they don't like "communists".  I think that's because, in their world view, those are the only two political factions that matter.  The rest of us are decadent capitalists, already cast upon the ash heap of history, and thus irrelevant.  Putin may indeed be a fascist, but he has been quoted as saying he's a communist.  Okay what he actually said was that the Ukrainians were trying to "de-communize" their country, as if they hadn't already done so some 30 years ago.  It would be more accurate to say that Putin was trying to re-communize Ukraine as part of his goal to re-establishing the former Soviet Union.

The reason I called FDR a commie lover is that he has been quoted as saying, "Some of my best friends are communists".  To be fair, the commies were supposed to be on our side in those days, and it was fashionable in some circles to be sympathetic to them.  Truth be known, the Russians probably didn't think they were on our side, they thought we were on their side.  To this day, their history books refer to World War II as "The Great Patriotic War".  I don't know what they call World War I, or if they even acknowledge that it happened.

Sorry about the crude language in my last post, I must have been in a sucky mood last night.  The good news is that I seem to have gotten over my recent writer's block.  Maybe I just needed to blow off the condensate that had accumulated in my steam lines.   

More a fascist than a commie

 Now look what you have gone and done, put your post behind a warning.  A little unfairly in my opinion and I read through Google's community standards and I would guess it was either hate speech, calling Biden a senile old Bastard, or sexually explicit for the joke about the cocksucker.

The senile is just standard republican boilerplate, a little strong though, doddering might be more apt.  But Bastard seemed uncalled for.  To me a bastard is a sonofabitch, which is to say kind of a mean guy, which I don't think fits Biden, and the capitalization of the word, kind of bizarre. 

I didn't find anything sexually explicit about the joke, which I thought was pretty good, by the way.  I think it is just the word cocksucker, and maybe the way it was used so often.  We are used to motherfucker, motherfuck this, motherfuck that, but cocksucker you don't hear so often so it is more shocking.  We'll see if the current post ends up behind a warning.  

Of course republicans have been calling every democrat a commie for as long as I can remember, but I think it is strange to call out FDR.  We could never have defeated Hitler without the Russkies.  And I know how you hate Nixon dropping down to visit the doddering Mao down in RED China.  But Nixon built his career calling other people commies.  It's been written that he went there thinking they would help him get out of Vietnam (which was pretty stupid because it was the Russkies backing the Vietnamese), or that he wanted to sell Big Macs there, or most likely to make more trouble between the RED Chinese and the Russkies, which sounds more like his style.  The man loved to start trouble.

The lamps are going out all over Europe some English diplomat wrote on the eve of WW I.  Less than thirty years later Churchill said the lights are going out in response to Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler.  And not too long ago we had Trump, and that Brexit guy, and the guys in India, and the Philippines, and in Brazil, Italy, and the darling of the current reps, the guy in Hungary.  And now in Russia too.  I see these guys as like the fascists of WW II, hatred of immigrants, minorities, democracy seen as a weakness, purveyors of the big lie, that kind of shit.  I think Putin is more a fascist than a commie and that's why they like him.

That's all for the day.  Interested to see if I too end up behind a warning for my copious use of the C word.

They Both Suck

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Is Biden too old to be running for President?

I think so.

Two and a half years older than me, and I am still pretty spry, getting around town just fine, if a little slowly, mentally at the top of my game except that sometimes while reading some dense material my mind wanders and I have to go back and read a few paragraphs.  And I have to double check everything I write for typos or strange words appearing in the middle of a sentence, and even after double checking I miss some things.  And names and words, on the tip of my tongue until I need to say them and even as I am getting my tongue aligned they flee like frightened butterflies.  I would never be able to hold a press conference in front of a band of shouting reporters.

Maybe ten or fifteen years ago if you had asked Dianne Feinstein if she would resign if she noticed her mental powers fading she would have replied, as I am sure we would have, of course I would.  But now it has caught up with her and I don't think she realizes it and it is a huge problem for her party.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg (almost had to look up her name except that I remembered RBG) had a mind that was still in tip top shape, but, you know, cancer.  She could have dropped out before Obama's term was over, but she didn't and now we have that awful Amy Coney Barrett.

Well we just don't want to hang things up, go quietly to the retirement home and from there to assisted living and then the floor above for the mentally impaired.  We don't even want to think about it.  The best thing to do is just believe we will be in tip top condition forever.  Best to let the grim reaper take you by surprise because there isn't much to be gained by thinking about him beforehand.  

But Joe has already announced that he is running and we dems don't want a messy fight because, if the grim reaper doesn't come a knocking, Trump will be the candidate of the reps, and better to risk a doddering Joe than a full of fire Trump.

now we're talking

 I have been wondering for two weeks where Old Dog got the idea that I was born and spent my early years in St Louis, but in his reply he referenced other blogs. Other blogs?

Oh that's right I have started a couple of them.  There is Uncle Ken's Kitchen which I saw as a kind of humor piece centering around some of the strange foods that I eat, well not strange, but anyway, it wasn't that funny or even interesting so I dropped it after a couple of posts.  

And then there was the Champaign Expatriates blog.  There are several of us who used to hang together in Champaign-Urbana and were Cub fans and it began by just writing emails as we were watching the game and sometimes other subjects would crop up.  But then with the big event of The Corona (remember when we called it The Corona, like My Sharona?) on us I thought it might be a good idea to put our letters into a more formal form of discourse the way emails between Beagles and myself became The Institute. 

Didn't last though, it was hard enough to get most of them to write an email any longer than a few sentences let alone go through the formality of posting on a blog.  Most of them were LAS grads, English Major types, yet when faced with writing anything they were like my third grade kids who when faced with writing, well anything, would whine "I don't know what to write."  Well you're talking aren't you?  Just write that.  How can anybody not have anything to say?  Beats me.

I see now where Old Dog got the idea that I grew up in St Louis.  In one of the expatriate posts I am talking about visiting my friends in St Louis when their kids were very small and I abruptly switched to our family moving into the bungalow on Homan Avenue.  

I'm glad that I revisited that blog.  It reminds me of the way I felt when The Corona game upon us.  See, that's what I was trying to do with posting on The Institute about our Corona experiences.  I did not want to flog a dead horse I wanted to explore the way we felt then and the way we feel now, the things we thought then and the different ways we think now.

But that is awfully close to talking about our feelings and I know we guys hate that and I never got any responses.

Speaking of Old Dog's projects, how are the mangoes doing?

I'm with you on the gender and pronoun crapola.  If they want to go on among themselves with that language and it makes them feel good, fine.  But they are, as Old Dog observes, forcing it down our throats.  They have their own little argot which is changing all the time and if you don't keep up with the latest terms then you are labelled anti-LGBTQ (which it seems even as I typed became LGBTQIA is an abbreviation for "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, intersex,, asexual/aromantic/agender." The “A" in LGBTQIA may also refer to “ally" or “allied," meaning someone who does not identify as LGBTQIA but supports those who do.)

I mean c'mon guys.  That is if it's still okay to use the terms guys which it probably isn't.

Nice having a little conversation guys.

Sunday evening

Apologies to Uncle Ken for questioning the validity of his Chicago Card.  I came to my conclusion based on a post from one of his other blogs in which he was relating a visit to friends in St. Louis, and crafty wordsmith that he is, I developed a mental picture that placed him there and not in Chicago.  Ah, the power of words!  And shame on me for not following his train of thought more closely but, truth be told, I think he can be difficult to follow sometimes, or so it seems to me.

-----

Fifteen days between posts must be a new record for Uncle Ken; I was surprised he made it that far.  My lack of posts almost make me feel like some kind of anti-social mope but it's not like that. I hope it's not but I can get get overly absorbed in goofball notions and projects, and reading up on whatever strikes my interest at the moment.  And that's much more interesting to me than politics, celebrity, social media, and all the other stuff that tries to define our collective reality.

I had plenty more to say about the many societal changes we are experiencing but guess what?  I deleted it and decided it's not something I want to get worked up about.  A while back I had one of the recent Covid booster shots and they asked a few questions, one of  which was "What race do you identify as?"  I had to pause and think before I answered "Human."  That got a few laughs from the other medical people but then I went along with the gag, looked closely at my hands and said it seems like I'm a white guy, so you should put down Caucasian.

I don't know about you guys but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about race, gender, or the pronoun I should be using but it's a big deal to a lot of folks.  And those folks seem to be insistent that everybody else should think the same way they do, up to point of shoving things down our throats whether we like it or not.  But I've gone on too far with this train of thought and time to get off.

-----

Mr. Beagles, are you still using your wildlife camera to track the critters of Beaglesonia?  I was wondering if anything interesting happened this past winter or if you have observed any trends over the years.  Has Nature maintained its balance?

Still Here

 Sorry, but I just haven't felt inspired to write anything lately.  I seem to remember that we ran the pandemic into the ground back in the day, and I can't get interested in flogging that dead horse yet.  Maybe, in a couple more years, it will qualify as nostalgia, but not yet.

I seem to be gradually recovering from falling on my head back in January, or maybe I'm just getting used to being this way.  I'm still nervous about driving any distance since that time. I fell asleep at the wheel.  I never had a problem driving around Cheboygan, I was coming back from Indian River at the time of the incident.  I did drive to Indian River the other day with my daughter riding shotgun, and I seemed to do alright.  Next week I have to go back there to take my wife for her dental appointment, so we'll see how that goes.  Then I have to go to Petoskey in mid-May to see those sleep clinic people, and that will be the real test.  

Nothing

Friday nothing
Saturday once more nothing
Sunday nothing

Monday, nothing

Tuesday, nothing

Wednesday and Thursday nothing

Friday, for a change
A little more nothing
Saturday once more nothing
Sunday nothing

Monday, nothing

Tuesday, nothing

Wednesday and Thursday nothing

Friday, for a change
A little more nothing7

That of course is the famous Nothing song from the famous Fugs.  One of the records we played over and over again in the summer of 1966, along with a Buffy St Marie and all the Bob Dylan albums up to and including Highway 61 Revisited.  A fine summer of my youth which I could go into in fine detail, but I don't think anybody is interested.  Actually I don't think anybody is listening.  You know that feeling you get when you are talking to a couple people and you turn your head to watch the house finch strut along the rail of the balcony but you continue talking, but when you turn your head back they are gone and you realize you haven't been talking to anybody, kind of a joke, but then there isn't even anybody to share the joke with.  

So I don't know.  Just chucking a rock into a still pond to see what happens.

the shutdown

 My candidate, the teacher's union guy won the election, so I guess that's good.  The other guy was entirely too close to Catanzara, the prez of the Fraternal Office of Police, and one of those guys who believe when there is some questionable shooting that the police are always innocent.  

We almost always end up hating our mayors by the end of their rule and I was looking up former mayors on wiki and came across a list of vice mayors.  Vice mayors?  I don't remember hearing anything about that.  Well you learn things researching your blog posts.  All the more reason to post often.

The indictment was, well disappointing.  I didn't quite understand it when Bragg read it and then CNN put on one of Trump's lawyers and he trashed it, but Trump lawyer, so what?  But then they put on one of their pundits and he sort of trashed it too. Since then I have been reading pundits of various ilks and the responses are disturbingly various, so I don't know.  Even if it's all in good legal order, if it's so complicated how are you going to explain it to a jury?  And now nothing much happens until December so it's like no big deal.  It has set Trump to squawking and that never helps his case, so there is that.

I did want to get into the shutdown though.  I looked up that Michigan barber, Karl Manke though, and he is still kicking.  Sweden had that no shut down thing, and that didn't work well for them, even though Swedes are very responsible people.  I liked the Chinese model at the time which was lock 'em up.  Not very nice I know, but it seemed effective covid-wise.

At the time I favored something on the Chinese model but not so extreme.  My reasoning was that if we could isolate everybody for a week or two, the virus could not spread anywhere and that would be the end of it, and the expense and hassle of the lockdown would pay off by ending the plague which would go on for a couple years.

I would still be for it if I thought it would work, but in retrospect there is no way we could have isolated everybody and some virus would escape and have an open playground once the big shutdown was over. 

big Tuesday

 In describing the dem agenda as enslaving everybody regardless of race, color, or creed, I think a more accurate description would be creating the worker's paradise, but of course reasonable, like ourselves can sometimes disagree on a minor point.

How about this one?  What if GG unilaterally extended her state of emergency to  block a process that would take away Old Betsy? Would you be mad about her for that?  Well of course none of us dems want to take away Old Betsy, but say it was some gun control measure you didn't like.  Well, not likely that GG would be against a reasonable gun measure.  Let's say there was some Republican that you like (if there are any anymore) who extended unilaterally to block a gun control measure, would you be as angry at him for doing that as you were at GG?

Big election in the Chicago Mayoral election Tuesday, the police union vs the teacher's union, polls say it neck and neck.  Of course I am voting for the teacher's union, but I fear that if either man wins the city will end up even more divided than it was before.

Anyway I will cast my vote moments after the polls open downstairs and then I will do some painting, maybe a nap, maybe lunch, kinda depends on when The Indictment takes place and of course I will be watching it like a hawk.  Not that I expect any unexpected events, I will just love the ritual.

Of course we don't yet know what the charges are.  I assume that will be revealed at the indictment.  I think the main one will be that his payment to Stormy was a payment for his campaign that he did not report as he should have.

I don't think it is as strong as the classified records or Jan 6 cases, but, I think Michael Cohen said it this way, once you are in the clutches of the law things are beyond your control, and who knows what will happen?

One thing I fear is that a sleeper Trumper will end up on the jury and then no matter how strong or weak the case is he will skate.  Well a chance that has to be taken, there are other indictments reaching out for him with the long and strong arm of the wall.

What Agenda Indeed

 "But what agenda did you think that the conservatives were forwarding rather than beating down the pandemic?"

A long time ago the Republicans had an agenda of lower taxes, less regulation, and more personal freedom, well at least for male White people, which I like better than the Democrats' goal to enslave everybody regardless of race, color, or creed.  Nowadays the only agenda they seem to have is Trump.  Since Trump denied the seriousness of the pandemic, his minions felt compelled to do likewise.

"So were you mad at Gretch because of what she was doing or how she was doing it?"

A little of both, I suppose.  Some of her edicts made sense, and some did not, like shutting down golf courses and motorboats.  Then, when she tried to unilaterally extend her state of emergency beyond its statutory limit, it was the icing on the cake.

Speaking of Trump, of all the bad things he has allegedly done, why are they finally charging him with the least of them?  I don't think it's even illegal to bribe your ex-girlfriend to keep her mouth shut, so they are charging him with keeping false business records or something like that.  Of course, all the other stuff is being investigated, and will continue to be investigated indefinitely.  Job security for the investigators, I guess.