Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum

That's how we described the new guys who were eager to go to war, or were otherwise young and foolish. Of course there are exceptions but, generally, the longer a guy is in the military, the less eager he is to see combat, and the guys who have already seen combat are the less eagerist of all. I think that, even today, most soldiers hope they will never have to do what they have been trained to do, but they are prepared to do it if they have to. It's kind of like the guy who has a concealed carry permit that he considers an insurance policy. It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. The guy who hopes he gets a chance to use it on another human being probably shouldn't be trusted with a loaded gun in the first place.

I am no expert on this, but I think that the reason they have white collar prisons is to keep the violent and the non-violent criminals away from each other. No good purpose would be served by throwing embezzlers and insider traders in with a bunch of battle hardened street criminals.  Even the regular prisons are classified as maximum, medium, or minimum security, depending on the nature of the crimes that their inmates have committed. Living conditions are probably more severe in the maximum security facilities because more resources need to be devoted to keeping the prisoners from escaping or harming each other.

It is my understanding that corporate boards hire CEOs the same way city councils hire city managers and school boards hire superintendents. The board decides on general policies, but they need somebody with training and experience to implement those policies in the real world. I'm not sure why those CEOs get paid so much, but I suspect it's because the boards are competing with other companies for the best talent. Boards of directors are usually made up of major stockholders, so it seems they wouldn't be eager to spend company money on something that wasn't likely to increase company profits. I don't think that board members are likely to grow up to be CEOs. It seems more likely that CEOs might end up becoming board members after they have accumulated enough company stock.

I am not aware that there is anything called a "Faceless Horde Channel", everything I know about faceless hordes I learned from watching the news. Not FOX news either, just the regular news. I realize that the news is about sensational, or at least unusual occurrences, and that the majority of the "others" are probably law abiding citizens just like me. Nevertheless, I do know a little about mob psychology and mass hysteria and, when I see something like that on TV, I'm just glad that we don't have it in our neighborhood, at least not yet.

By the way, I heard on the news last night that about a dozen Republican presidential candidates have dropped out of the race. They read the list of names, and I have never heard of most of them. The good news is that my man Rand wasn't one of them. The bad news is that Trump the Grump wasn't one of them either.

Happy New Year.

faceless hordes

Does an army want to fight?  Some of them do.  I reckon the young guys do, they're pretty sure they won't get killed and they want to cover themselves with glory (probably to impress chicks, that's one way evolution gets us off our butts) and it's kind of fun in a grown-up cowboy and Indian way.  Some of the officers probably do too because it is a chance for them to advance in the ranks.  I imagine most of the lifers would rather not, because well, you can get killed that way.  I imagine an army would be a pretty good place to be in peacetime if you didn't mind the occasional spurts of spit and polish.  It would probably be like Camp Swampy without the Sarge beating up on you all the time.

Well we have a veteran right here at The Institute.  What was it like for Beagles?  Was Vietnam known then as a place where you could get into combat, and were guys volunteering to get there?  Was there a difference in motivation between the new guys and the lifers?

I wonder if the difference between the swordsman and the button pusher is anything like the difference between the holdup guy and the white collar criminal?  Probably you would rather be on a desert island with the white collar criminal, probably he would make better conversation, and if he conned you out of the last cocoanut, you would merely be embarrassed rather than having a knot on your noggin like from the holdup guy.

Maybe that's why the white collar guys get to go to those nice jails with the tennis courts unlike the ones with the yards and the walls with the gun-toting, easily-irritated guards, because they are reasonable guys who can see that they are better off if they just do their time and don't raise a ruckus, whereas the holdup guy is more of a hothead ready to bolt the first time he sees a hole in the fence and the guard napping.

And maybe Those guys, Them, remember Them, the guys who run everything, have something to do with white collar prisons.  They are probably always cutting corners and They have rivalries with other Thems and They never knew when They Themselves might get sent up the river, and so maybe They want to have a nice bed in a studio apartment rather than a row of cots, and a clay tennis court instead of a muddy patch strewn with weights.  You know, the way the Thems at the top give the CEOS those huge salaries because They never know when They will become a CEO.

So you don't mind when there is only one Other in your hood, but you don't want two because then they will outnumber you.  Unless maybe there are two of you, like you and your hypothetical wife, and then the Others could take on spouses, but then if they (the Other they, not to be confused with Them who run everything) have children that is going to be a problem. 

But then later on in your argument, you hint that it's not so much them outnunbering you as forming a mob and running over the neighborhood, becoming, oh my, a faceless horde who might kill you, accidentally or on purpose.  Well nobody likes a faceless horde, and I suppose once people outnumber you there is no way to keep them from becoming one, and you know that one Other guy who moves in, he is probably going to get married (because even you-know-whos can do that these days in Obama's muslim socialist paradise), and they are going to have (or adopt) kids, so probably the best thing to do is get down in the swamp with that bag full of ammo. 

By the way what tv do you watch?  Is there a faceless horde channel?  I'm getting a little tired of the murder channel.

Happy new year. I'll have to stay up till midnight to watch the fireworks and along that way I will probably imbibe of a faceless horde of beers so this may be a three day weekend away from The Institute for me.  Keep that beacon shining Beagles.

Nothing Personal

I don't know about the rest of the former British colonies, but Canada and Australia are politically independent, yet they still recognize the Queen of England as their queen. That's what's called a "personal union". (Funny the things you stumble across on Wiki while looking up something else.) England and Scotland were like that before they merged into one country. King James I was the king of both Scotland and England because Queen Elizabeth I died childless and James was her closest living relative. James wanted to unite the two countries politically, but he couldn't get either parliament to agree during his reign. After he died, however, they did agree and the two countries became one. There is also something called the "British Commonwealth", but I think that's just a free trade agreement.

In order to kill a person with a sword or an axe you've got to be personally mad at him. With a gun, not so much, and with bombs or artillery, even less. I don't know what's worse, being so angry that you can hack somebody to death while looking him in the eye, or dispassionately pushing a button that causes the death of millions of people who you don't know. Well, you can only kill them one at a time with the sword, while weapons of mass destruction cause mass destruction. There's nothing personal about it, the button pusher is just doing his job, but the effects of him doing his job are certainly more devastating than the swordsman with blood lust in his eye. Nevertheless, I'd rather be marooned on an island with the button pusher than the swordsman. You never know when the swordsman is going to flip out and start hacking on you, but the button pusher is not likely to blow up the island that he needs as much as you do.

People weren't worried that the crossbow was going to bring the world to an end, they were worried that it was going to make warfare so unpleasant that nobody would want to do it anymore. You might think that would be a good thing, but not if you're one of the soldiers or knights that's going to be put out of a job. There weren't a lot of good paying jobs in those days, most people were either farmers or fighters. I doubt that most of the fighters wanted to become farmers, except maybe after they accumulated enough loot to be able to retire on a nice country estate where they could be a gentleman farmer, which means the guy who gets to boss the other farmers around. Anyway, they needn't have worried, warfare certainly did not go out of fashion as predicted.

You've got me all wrong, Uncle Ken. I don't dislike people who are different than me, I dislike people who outnumber me. One Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or gay guy living next door to me is no threat to me. It's when a whole mob of them get together and over run the neighborhood that they become a threat to me. I can either make friends or avoid contact with one guy, but I can't do that with a nameless, faceless horde that could easily trample me by accident even if they aren't mad enough to kill me on purpose. So far we don't have any thing like that around here, but you never know. If it can happen on television, it can  happen anywhere.

killing at a distance

As a one worlder you probably know I rather favor empires.  The Roman Empire did have its Pax Romana.  The Ottomans made us Europeans anxious with their nibbling up the Balkan Peninsula, but I guess they kept peace among the Arabic states, and by all reports, life in their empire wasn't too bad.  Not too good for culture though.  All that good life of the mind went by the wayside.  The Ottomans weren't interested in culture.

I guess I shouldn't say this because my ilk hates colonizations, but maybe that British Empire wasn't so bad.  At least everybody got to have a common language, of course people did get angry with it and rebelled, oh wait, we did too.  You know we get so all-fired nuts about it every Fourth of July about how thank god we successfully rebelled against those awful British, and right across, what is it, the strait of Mackinaw, there is Canada which I think still has the Queen on their money, and free (okay socialized) medicine, something we will never have.

And I have been doing some reading and maybe even that Austro Hungarian empire that ruled over our people wasn't all that bad, just to keep it together they had to allow some freedoms, which you probably didn't get in some country where everybody is alike.  I don't think they ever called Yugoslavia an empire, but it was convenient having those characters under one tinpot dictator. 

Well we were talking briefly about cosmopolitanism, I believe I was for it and I believe you were agin it.  Well you like people, inasmuch as you like people at all, in proportion to how much they are exactly like you, because the more different they are the more you get the impression that they will be taking you over, and if you must be taken over you would probably like it better if the people who took you over were exactly like you.

People are generally all like each other in rural areas, but cities are made up of lots of different kinds of people.  That's why we like to have our rainbow coalitions marching up and down the streets singing Kumbaya.  Well we're not that crazy about it, but as long as we are holding hands we are not trying to stab each other.

I thought the opposition to the crossbow was that it was unfair or unmanly more than because it would end the world.  I think the idea of cowardice is way overplayed but I suppose there is something more cowardly about killing at a distance.  Not so much in that you are not looking your opponent in the eye as the idea that the crossbower in his castle keep (castles did have keeps didn't they?) is not taking nearly as much risk as the guy with the broadsword in the open field.  Of course if the battle goes badly, the guys with the broadswords will creep into his keep and do away with him.

A little more cowardly are the bombers, maybe not so much in WW 2 where they dropped like flies, but against a primitive foe like the North Vietnamese where you could carpet bomb and be home in time for supper.  Not always as John McCain found out, but it did lead to a pretty good political career.  And I know this will sound traitorous, but McCain goes on about how badly they treated him, and no doubt they did, but how would we Americans treat somebody who was carpet bombing us? 

And now we have these guys in Las Vegas flying these drones across the mideast and there is no risk at all.  There is something a little wrong with that.  When it doesn't cost you anything to attack your enemy, it makes you more eager to do it.

Almost a Blizzard

People tend to call any bad snowstorm a blizzard, but meteorologists have specific criteria for what it takes to be a true blizzard. One of them is wind speed, a blizzard has sustained wind speeds in excess of 30 MPH for three hours or more. I didn't stay up all night monitoring it but, at one point, we had sustained winds of 28 MPH, with gusts up to 47 MPH. Another criteria is visibility less that a quarter mile. As far as I know, our visibility never got less than 0.3 of a mile. I don't think total snow accumulation is one of the  criteria, but we got 9.6 inches by official count. That's not unusual for us, but our snow is usually dry and fluffy while this snow was dry and dense, probably because it was wind driven. It would have been worse if it had been wet and clingy, that's what pulls down tree limbs and power lines. As far as I know, the nearest power outages were only for a few hours in Presque Isle County, our neighbor to the east, so we dodged that bullet this time.

Europe was pretty contentious long before the Reformation. Before there were national wars there were tribal wars. The Romans settled things down for awhile but, after Rome went down, it was back to business as usual. It's true that the Mideast never evolved to the level of nation states, but they did have city states that took turns conquering each other and establishing empires. The Turks probably ruled the roost for as long as anybody, but even they went down in World War I, after which the British and the French took their turn at the wheel.

I think it's a good idea you have about carving the Mideast up along ethnic or religious lines, but I don't think any of the factions want that. They each want it all, and they don't want the other factions to have anything. Maybe we should invite the Turks to take over again. It seems like they were pretty good at knocking everybody's heads together and making them play nice. Then again, they might not want it back, any more than the British or the French do. Anybody who has ruled in the region knows from experience that it's more trouble than it's worth. Even the Russians probably don't want to take over, they just want to stir up trouble and aggravate the U.S., although you'd think they would have learned their lesson from the Cold War.

If only a few people have guns, then they have the advantage but, when everybody else has guns too, the only way to gain the advantage is to have more gun toting soldiers at your command. You need competent leadership too, or your army will quickly degenerate into a mob, or several competing mobs. For awhile it looked like the answer was to have bigger guns than the opposition, but then they get bigger guns too, which leads to an arms race that culminates with the atomic bomb, a gun so big that everybody who has one is afraid to use it. Some people thought that the atomic bomb would lead to peace by making warfare so terrible that nobody would want to do it anymore. I understand that people said the same thing about the crossbow when it first came out. It turned out that the crossbow didn't even slow warfare down, and the atomic bombs sit in storage while warfare continues with less devastating weapons. You never know, though. Maybe some apocalyptic death cult like ISIS will get their hands on one of those atomic bombs. They wouldn't be afraid to use it because they all want to die anyway, and take everybody else with them when they go. It probably would be better for everybody if they would just stick with their AK47s.

What We Should Do In The Mideast

I'm thinking maybe the Europe of the reformation is like the mideast today.  There you had prot against catholic like sunni vs shia, but you also had times when a prot ruler would go on the catholic side to get aid in his campaign and vice versa.  How did that finally end?  I think they put the holy roman empire together as more of a coherent state, Philip of Spain ran out of money from the colonies to buy armies.  And maybe people just got tired of it, not the peasants, because nobody ever cares what they think, but the kings, things had been sorted out, the winners had tidy kingdoms, the losers had no means to fight.

They don't have those tidy kingdoms in the mideast, they were never that much into nations in the first place, and then in their heartland they still have those bad colonial borders, though why in a hundred years they haven't been able to redraw them is beyond me.  If I was the grand emir I would create a Kurdistan, a Sunnistan, and a Shiastan in a heartbeat.

I think another thing that keeps the pot boiling in the mideast is technology, more properly weaponry.  In olden days a gang of ruffians could easily be dispatched, but in modern days a gang of ruffians with AK 47s is not so easily dispatched.

There is something inherently undemocratic about weapons.  If we are in a group of ten people and eight of us want to do something and two don't, the eight can probably beat up the two, and so majority rules.  Majority is not always the best thing, frequently the majority is wrong, but there is a certain element of fairness to it, and it's kind of a simple rule that both sides understand,  It's what keeps the dems or reps from running into the swamp with their ammo bags when they lose the election because they know four years hence, they will have their chance then, and vice versa across.

If two of the guys have knives they get a little more respect, but if we really hate what they want to do we might stand up to them. If they have AK 47s we do whatever they want to do.

But high tech weapons are good for civilization in at least one way.  Before, i don't know, the musket maybe, the barbarians invaded civilization whenever they pleased and there wasn't anything civilization could do about it.  So we want our army to be armed to do that, and i think we want it to be able to put down rebellions.  That's a little chancy, because the rebellion might be one we like, but on the other hand it might be one we hate.  I think we're better off sticking with the election thing, but hey that's me.

But then the middle east is awash in guns, so does ISIS have better guns?  Probably, but still.  But the way everybody (the politicians) look at it ISIS is the problem, but before that Al Qaeda was the problem, and if we do topple ISIS won't something else just appear? 

I guess at this point I should announce What We Should Do In The Mideast Is, but I have no idea.  It does seem to me that we are a destabilizing force pouring in weapons and supporting this guy or other.  And now the Russkies have arrived and we are kind of snarling at them, but playing a little footsie too.  It could devolve that we end up supporting opposing sides and having one of those proxy wars that were all the rage during the cold war.  Or it may devolve that we are on the same side defending civ such as it is against barbarians, but I am not so sure we win that one either.

I don't know.

I start writing these posts while drinking my first cup of coffee and finish about the third and am all coffeed up to accomplish whatever I accomplish in the day, but with this subject matter I feel like crawling back into bed.

This Weather Blows!

Right now it's snowing and blowing, just like they said it would. Actually it's been blowing all day, but it's worse now. It's supposed to start winding down in the morning so, if we make it through the night, we've got it made. We are supposed to get a foot of snow out of this, which isn't bad by local standards, but we could do without all this wind. You guys are supposed to get freezing rain, which is worse as far as I'm concerned.

There are still a few people down by Traverse City who have been without power since Thursday morning, they have been putting them up in shelters and everything. Most heating systems need electricity to operate, regardless of their heat source so, when you lose power in the winter, it's more than just an inconvenience. I suppose that your building has an emergency generator, as do hospitals and places like that. Funny thing about electricity, you tend to take it for granted till you lose it, then you wonder how people got along without it for thousands of years.

National Geographic usually tries to write from a neutral point of view like Wiki. They have come out as a believer in global warming some time ago, and they favor evolution theory over creation theory, but they usually report the other side, even if they don't give it equal time. When they write about religion, they say things like "many Christians believe...." or "most Muslims believe....". This particular article was about the Arctic, so they didn't say anything about Miami in it. I think their point was that the Arctic ice cap is rapidly melting, and that it is part of a chain reaction of climatic events, but there is no unanimous agreement about which event is the cause and which event is the effect.

I would think that farms ought to be considered part of nature, but not everybody would agree with that. I used to argue with my old biology teacher about it. She insisted that anything altered by the hand of man is not natural, but I maintained that man himself is part of nature. We breathe, we eat, we reproduce and, if you cut us, we bleed. If that's not natural, I don't know what is. The National Geographic article was part of a series they are doing on national parks, so I suppose they meant wilderness when they said "nature". I think you're right, though. There is nothing magic about looking at nature, it's the change of scenery that is beneficial. Too much of anything can make a person funny in the head over time.

We tend to forget that Europe was a lot like the Mideast is today, until World War II knocked some sense into them. They both have a long history of violence and conflict, religious and otherwise. The difference is that Europe has mostly put that history behind them, while the Mideast is still wallowing in it. Actually, the Mideast used to be ahead of Europe in the civilization department. They haven't really gone backward, they just haven't progressed forward as much as Europe has. Why do you think that is?

all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil

 We're having some intense weather right now, wind, rain, maybe turning to sleet, part of that stuff that went through Texas, and I imagine will probably hit Beaglesonia in a day or two.  Myself I would prefer a blizzard, prettier. 

Sorry to hear about your daughter's boyfriend.

Did NatGeo say which of those schools is more likely to be accurate, which has the smarter people or the better track record?  There are always several schools of thought on any subject, just listing the schools without evaluating them doesn't give much information.  Does any of the schools predict that Miami won't be underwater in fifty years?

I think I told you the story about running into a woman who had lived in my building, but had moved away years ago.  Why, I wondered, would anybody want to leave the magnificent towers.  Well, she said, she just wanted to see some trees.

Not many trees out my window i admit, if I look two blocks down there are some planted along both sides of the river, but mostly it's buildings and bridges, windows and cars.  As the poet (Gerard Manly Hopkins) sez:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge |&| shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.


But for all that i find nature a little boring.  At first sight it is very nice, but after awhile it is just the same thing over and over again.  When Ruby Dew and I go on our Sullivan bank quests we drive through a lot of nature, and it's nice I suppose, but I find the little towns more interesting.  Well it's mostly farms, are farms nature?  They do have trees and plants and some animals.  Before the farms it was just weeds, or native plants if you prefer, grasses growing taller than a tall man's head, and I don't see how that would be restful.

So you wonder what qualifies as nature.  Animals, trees, mountains, oceans, fish, snowstorms, are blizzards restful?  I'm sure if you take urban office workers away from their desks and show them anything their stress levels will drop.

We started out in nature didn't we?  I think one definition of nature is anything that isn't man made, and before we made anything everything was nature.  Kind of remarkable that we ever did make all that stuff that we have considering how stress free, laid back, and napping we were back before we made anything. 

You know when I sit back in my LaZBoy and look out at all the buildings and bridges and all that man's smudge stuff, i drop right off into my nap. 

Saw a movie (71) about The Troubles Saturday night.  The English army raids a house to look for guns in the Catholic side and a mob forms around them and they retreat leaving one of their guys behind.  The IRA is after him to finish the job.  Well not all the IRA, the old established IRA wants to give him back to escape English retaliation, but the younger hot bloods (the provisionals) want him dead because it's a war isn't it?  Then there are the Ulster (the local prots) guys, who aren't all that crazy about the Brits, but are happy with help from anybody.  And the Brits are not just the army, but also the undercover guys who some are like spies, but others of them are constantly making deals with the establishment IRA, and the provisional IRA, and the Ulster men, which they don't want the army to know about.  And then there are power struggles within all these organizations, and maybe someone wanting to be the new boss might make a deal with the other side to knock off the old boss.

And eventually everybody is fighting everybody, and it kind of reminded me of the mideast, and maybe war in general.  More on that in the next post, unless I glimpse out my window and catch a little stretch of green and fall into a deep sleep.

The Times They Are A-Changing

 During this latest warm spell, several daily records were broken in Northern Michigan, records that had been set in 1957. That must have been the year that my grand parents went to Florida for the holidays, and we had warmer temps in Chicago than they had in Florida. Around four o'clock yesterday morning, when the temps were still in the 50s, the wind kicked up as predicted. Our electricity blinked off several times, but it came right back on again. I thought we were going to lose it for sure, but we didn't. This evening I saw on the news that thousands of people in our region are still without power, and some of them won't be back on until tomorrow or even Sunday. Meanwhile, the South is being ravaged by floods and tornadoes.

Weather forecasting has gotten way better in our lifetimes, but it will probably never be perfect because there are so many variables. National Geographic had an article this month about global warming, specifically about the Arctic sea ice melting away. One school of thought is that changes in the Arctic sea ice will have serious impacts on global climate, but another school of thought says that the changes in the Arctic are being caused by changes in the Pacific Ocean currents. Another school of thought says that changes in the Pacific are being caused by the same "greenhouse effect" that is causing the Arctic sea ice to melt. They all seem to agree that there are a lot of changes going on, and that one is bound to effect the other.

National Geographic had another article about how viewing nature reduces stress. They hook people up to some kind of machine that measures physical stress symptoms like blood pressure, heart rate, and brain waves. They have discovered that you don't even need to go outside to benefit from this, all you need to do is look out the window or even look at a picture of nature to reduce your stress levels. The study subjects have been mostly urban office worker types who are looking for ways to reduce the stress in their lives, but I wonder if there is such a thing as too little stress. This might explain why I have been sleeping so much lately, I am overexposed to nature around here. Look out any window of our house, and all you see is nature. Most of the pictures on our walls are nature scenes, the same with our calendars. Even the 20 minute drive into town is mostly through rural settings, and only the last five minutes or so is in any kind of traffic. Of course the traffic here is nothing like in the big cities, you would need to drive a hundred miles to Traverse City to see anything remotely close to that, and we have no reason to go there.

We aren't going to my daughter's tomorrow because her boyfriend is in the hospital with cancer. They say it's inoperable but "treatable" with radiation. It always makes me nervous when they say "treatable" instead of "curable", but I suppose they don't want to make any promises they can't keep. They told him that this type of treatment is usually about 75% effective on this type of cancer. I don't know what that means about long term survival, though, because cancer has a way of coming back on you. Anyway, my daughter is in no position to host a dinner party right now, but she says she might be able to do it next weekend.

lighting the way

Well written post Beagles.

Originally the hippies were stone apolitical.  Politics was square, something establishment types got involved in.  But then came the Yippies, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and the gang, and they looked like us and their politics were lefty but also kind of absurdist.  They were kind of cool, they appealed to us.  And they were anti war like us, and they liked dope.  Smoking dope was not just something you did for fun anymore, it was a way of sticking it to the man.  You could be a new lefty and a hippie at the same time and most hippies adopted that political posture.

I'm sure you know that the Weathermen took their name from that Bob Dylan line, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."  Suddenly there was SDS, there was something called the Port Huron Statement, they had conventions where they chanted lines from Mao's red book.  Red China was cool.  The Soviet Union was not, with their bureaucracy and their greyness they just looked like another establishment to us.

The Weathermen went underground, they started making bombs.  They blew up some building at the University of Wisconsin.  They thought it would be empty, but they killed a janitor.  I was a janitor in southern Illinois at the time and I didn't like that one bit.

The weather, the last outpost of god.  Time was everything in the dark universe was explained by saying it was god doing it, but then science came along and explained this and that, and god was pushed back into metaphysical spirituality, into the heavens.  Truth be told the heavens are pretty well understood these days, and so is its interface with us, the weather, but we can't predict it.  Well we can in general, but not so closely that you can know for sure if you should take along your umbrella when going to the store.

Damn weathermen.  We can send a rocket to Mars, but we can't tell whether it is going to rain tomorrow.  Well sending a rocket to Mars is kind of simple.  Figuring out the fuel and how to pack it in so as not to blow up the rocket on the launch pad is difficult, but not impossible, but after that, to plot its trajectory all you need is the calculus that college freshmen are taught.

The difference is that the rocket does not change the orbit of Mars, well a teensy bit since mass attracts mass, but too teensy to matter in the calculations.  The weather though is the movement of gasses, and every molecule attracts every other molecule and there are a gazillion gazillion of them, and the best our streak of lightning computers can come up with is a vague approximation.  Makes as much sense to pray for a sunny day for the church picnic a couple weeks away as to consult with the meteorologists in their spotless lab coats and their blow dry hair. 

And the sociologists, they have to contend with seven billion people, far less than a gazillion gazillion, but people are much more complex than gas molecules, and if you take into account all the brain cells in every person I think you are getting into gazillion territory.  

So it's a mad storm and people in these troubled times know not where to turn.  Thank goodness then for the clear light of reason of The Institute shining out towards the lost and leading the way.

I think we can use this for our next pledge drive.

"Let There Be Light!"

The difference between the hippies and the Tea Party is that the term "hippies" was broadly applied to any young person who wore their hair long and was suspected of smoking dope, while the Tea Party is a more or less organized structure of loosely affiliated chapters. You are either a member of one of those groups, or you are not. Back in the day, there was a political activist group called "The Weathermen", or "The Weather Underground". I'm pretty sure that all the Weathermen were hippies, but not all the hippies were Weathermen. Then there were lots of weathermen on TV that were none of the above. The difference between the political Weathermen and the TV weathermen was whether or not the "W" was capitalized. If you called a TV weatherman a "Weatherman", it would be inaccurate and possibly slanderous.

Ironically, there is currently a show on the Weather Channel called "The Weather Underground", which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the political group of the 60s. The original Weather Underground must have disbanded and the name must have passed into the public domain by now, or somebody could be sued for using it inappropriately. Of course TV weathermen are now called "meteorologists", and half of them are women. There is also something called a "climate scientist" which, as near as I can tell, is a weatherman who doesn't appear regularly on TV. I suppose it would be accurate to call me a "tea partier" as long as you didn't capitalize it, but I prefer to be called a "libertarian", with a small "l". If I was still a card carrying party member, you could call me a "Libertarian" with a capital "L", but I'm not. I know that you don't care much for capitalization, but it's used for a reason, to avoid confusion about things like this.

The reason I brought up that old hymn was not to convert you to Christianity. I just always identified with the image of an ordinary person, perhaps even a child like I was when I first heard it, holding up his feeble little lamp and saving a poor fainting, struggling seaman in the process, kind of like that old saying "Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness." Light has long been used as a metaphor for truth or knowledge, as in "enlightenment", and organized religion certainly does not have a monopoly on enlightenment. Here are the other two verses, just substitute the word "error" for "sin", and you'll see what I mean:

"Dark the night of sin has settled, while the fearful breakers roar.
Eager eyes are watching, longing for the lights along the shore."

"Trim your feeble lamp, my brother. Some poor seaman, tempest tossed,
Trying now to reach the harbor, in the darkness may be lost."

You may know that Jesus was probably not born on December 25. That date may have been chosen because it coincides with an old Roman holiday with the intent that the Romans wouldn't know if the Christians were celebrating Christmas or the Saturnalia. I think, however, it's more than a coincidence
that Christmas comes hard upon the Winter Solstice, the time when the nights start getting shorter and the days start getting longer. We call it "the first day of winter" but in Europe it is celebrated as "midwinter". It seems that, because of ocean currents or something, our seasons run about a month later than the seasons in Europe. European pagans celebrated the solstices and equinoxes, and the encroaching Christians knew better than to try to talk them out of such an old tradition, choosing instead to assimilate it. Similarly, it is no coincidence that Easter comes near the Vernal Equinox. Indeed the name likely comes from the old fashioned word "Oester", which means "time of eggs" or something like that.

So, call it what you will, have a happy holiday, and always keep moving towards the light.

wearing the right hat

Oh those old hymns.  Oh those long mornings inside that dingy church wearing those awful clothes that you couldn't get dirty which meant you couldn't have any fun in, even when you were finally released until you got home and changed out of them, and even then you would have to hang them up carefully.  Arrrgh.  And then the preacher droning on and on and then that phrase, "Now let us open our hymnals to Hymn 639." 

I don't remember the hymn you reference.  In my mind it is always "The Old Rugged Cross," which was just a slow ugly dirge.  Wait I just remembered another one.  "In the Garden," I think.  It had a sprightly little passage: "And he walks with me, and he talks with me.." kind of like a minuet i guess.  Not that I know anything about minuets, but I have seen people doing them in movies, or at any rate I thought that was what they were doing.

Every now and then I go to a funeral or a wedding and find myself in some protestant church, and there they still are in those little, what, hymnal holders, on the back of the pew in front of you, and I wonder why like tail fins and coal bins and other things of my youth, they have not been replaced by something new.  Maybe they have.  Probably anymore the preacher has them whip out their smartass phones and they download the hymn from the cloud and then they sing it out to the clouds where presumably God takes a minute or two out of His busy day running the universe to see if they are in tune.  I imagine He prefers those dusty dog-eared hymnals, but He is only God so what can He do?

Many of my ilk, along with most of your ilk are against a national
ID, but I'm kind of with you, what's the diff?  I'm a little uneasy about the idea of if you are not doing anything wrong, what do you care who knows?  Don't you sometimes want to pick your nose?  And you know your friends in the NRA hate the thought of any kind of gun registry.

Tea partiers are like libertarians and dare I say hippies.  You don't have to go through any rigamarole to become one.  If you have a tricorner you can be a tea party; if you have a headband you can be a hippie; libertarians I think prefer to go bare-headed, maybe a cowboy hat, who doesn't love a cowboy hat? 

When I was a young man I smoked dope and dodged the draft and grew out my hair, and even though I wasn't exactly like everybody else who did those things, I would acknowledge that I was a hippie.  You want to hide out in the swamp with old Betsy and think the gummint is always up to some nefarious plot, I don't know why you don't acknowledge that you are a tea partier.

Actually back in my youth, when I was one, I never was fond of the term hippie.  It didn't sound, you know, dignified.  But I did acknowledge that that's what most other people called me.  Can you acknowledge that some poor fainting seaman coming across our gleaming blog would probably consider you a tea partier?

I have all my packages wrapped up in two tote bags, ready to haul to my sister's and bring back my haul with, and then it will be over for another year.    Then another week and we begin a whole new year of stoking the lighthouse that is The Institute.

Back At You

I don't mind checking out Face Book once a week like I do, but I wouldn't want a steady diet of it. I'd much rather spend my internet time doing the important work of the Institute. My daughter tells me that the attention span of the general public keeps getting shorter and shorter all the time, which might explain why we have no followers. Well, somebody needs to trim the wick and keep the lamp of knowledge shinning brightly in the wilderness. If we don't do it, who will? I am reminded of an old favorite hymn, I think it's called "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning": 
"Brightly gleams our Father's mercy from His lighthouse ever more,
But to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.
Let the lower lights be burning, send a gleam across the wave.
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save."

A membership card in a political party is hardly in the same class as a national I.D. When you think about it, though, what would be wrong with a national I.D.? It could be used for voting, cashing checks, and all kinds of things. Most of us use our driver's license for that stuff, but I understand that there are some people in this country who don't drive. It's not like everybody's name, address, and Social Security Number isn't already on file someplace. They even claim to know how many homeless people and illegal immigrants there are, so why shouldn't they be able to keep track of the law abiding citizens too? Privacy, shmivacy! If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't care who knows about it.

According to Wiki, most Tea Party members consider themselves to be conservatives or libertarians, so it would not be surprising if I agreed with everything they said. Truth is, I don't know all that much about the Tea Party, and most of what I do know was obtained by looking it up on Wiki in response to your questions.

We haven't had a Christmas tree or put up any decorations since our daughter left home in 1988. We've got nothing against Christmas, it's just that it would be a lot of work for nothing, since nobody ever comes over, and you can't even see our house from the road where we live now. As we have gotten older, we have been looking for ways to make our lives easier, not harder. We don't even have a dog or cat anymore, it would be just one more thing to deal with.

We are going to our daughter's for Christmas on the 26th because she has to work on the 24th and our grand daughter and her boyfriend have to work on the 25th. So, if you aren't doing anything and want to write on the 24th or 25th, I'll be around. If not, have a happy holiday and see you next week.

seasons greetings

Don't get me started on facebook.  Oh you already have.  Most of my friends are liberal so mostly I get liberal propaganda.  But there are some conservatives too.  There are a couple of Gage Park classmates who i never knew that well, but I friended them when I was going through that reunion thing and they post virulent racist and stupid stuff.  One of them recently posted a photo that claimed to be an ISIS parade in Detroit.  What the fuck I thought, that doesn't sound right, so I went to Snopes and sure enough the photo was from one of those Why Can't We Get Along demonstrations.  I did a similar thing with a liberal post that claimed that black Friday, the shopping day after Christmas really was called that because of some racial crap going back to the pilgrims.

Well it's just so stupid.  But people don't care.  I pointed out the error to both posters, but neither one took down their post.  They don't care whether it's true or not, as long as it promotes their cause. 

But even the ones that are milder, liberal or conservative, I don't like either one.  If you have something to say use your own words not one of those stupid posters that go around, and why does anybody think that if you take some inane slogan and put it against a sunset that it becomes meaningful? 

But like I say if you go on fb don't complain if it pisses you off.

See, you and me, we keep our arguments in this obscure little blog, which is so much better than if we trolled liberal and conservative sites and just posted them to clog up each others' pages. 

The main reason I thought you were kidding about the card carrying libertarian thing is because it seemed so against everything libertarians believed in, isn't that the first step towards a national id, which is the first step towards the rule of the collectivists, who will not only make you marry your gay dog, but you will have to do it walking down an aisle carpeted by Ayn Rand portraits with muddy boots. 

I don't think I actually claim that you are a tea partier, just that they are of your ilk.  I am going by the walking and talking like a duck test.  You may not wear the three-cornered hat of liberty, but you talk just like them.  If you were behind a screen and somebody could only hear you talking they would guess that you were wearing one of those hats.  Can you name an issue where you disagree with the tea party?

But enough of this bickering, this is the Christmas season, and you can tell by the posts on fb, loudly proclaiming that if you say happy holidays instead of merry christmas you are some atheistic commie.

I have my balcony lights.  I put on the Santa hat and give money and red and green Hershey kisses to the bums and twinkle my eyes for the kiddies.  But I have no Christmas tree, and now that I think of it I have never in my life had a Christmas tree.  Maybe I am an atheistic commie, well an atheistic socialist at any rate.

Happy Holidays.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore

 So I don't know where I got the idea that the country was divided on the terrorism issue, unless it was from Face Book. I only go there once a week to see what my relatives have been up to. My daughter told me that, if you "like" something or reply to it, the Face Book Gods will make sure that you see more of it. It must be true, because all the stuff from my daughter, grand daughter, and a certain artist in Chicago is usually at the top, which is good but, when I scroll down to the secondary stuff, I see a lot of liberal propaganda that stands against everything I believe in. I'm sure that I could find a right wing nut site that trends to the opposite extreme, but I wouldn't find any of my relatives there, so I don't bother looking.

I didn't see a dime's worth of difference between Gore and W, but I had my Libertarian blinders on in those days. Looking back on it, Gore believed in global warming and W didn't, but that's about it. Why do you find it so hard to believe that I was a card carrying member of the Libertarian Party for more than a decade? No, that is not just a figure of speech, they sent me a new membership card every year when I paid my dues. On the other hand, you keep insisting that I am a Tea Partier when I have already told you that I am not now, nor have I ever have been, a member of any Tea Party organization. I considered joining them when they first came out, but they were marching in the streets in those days, making a public spectacle of themselves, so I suspected that they were not much different from the liberals. I also remembered that I had ultimately quit every organization to which I had ever belonged because they eventually did something of which I didn't approve. I don't have the time or the energy to go to meetings anymore anyway.

This year is not really an election year you know. The reason it always seems like an election year is that we are subject to their haranguing almost all the time between election years. It's like the holidays, as soon as one is finished they start on the next one. Sports is like that too. I don't follow sports, but I seem to remember that there were separate seasons for baseball, football, and basketball. Now it seems like the seasons all overlap each other, including such formerly obscure sports as hockey, soccer, golf, and marathon running. I suppose, with so many sports, they have to overlap the seasons to get them all done in one year. Maybe it's the same for the politicians, it does seem like there are a lot more of them than there used to be.

I was kidding about the texting and the telescope, but I didn't know that you already have a telescope. When you think about it, though, it's that kind of stuff that has replaced the "howdy neighbor" of the old front porch and back fence days, and that's not all bad either. What's good about it is, if you don't particularly like your neighbors, you can skip over them and talk to whomever you want, no matter how far away they live. I get along fine with my neighbors, but I don't have nearly as much in common with them as I have with a certain artist in Chicago. (We won't mention his name, he knows who he is.)

a house divided?

Seems like a lot of expense to have a big war in order to get the whole country together again.  You know I am not sure that the country is all that divided about this war.  If you poll the people, here's one from November: http://thehill.com/policy/defense/260313-poll-americans-want-more-action-against-isis-but-oppose-ground-troops where 76 percent oppose boots on the ground. But of course, being Americans they all think we should do more, which you know we are already doing plenty.  Well then people just want more of plenty, more bombs, but not so many that we will have to raise taxes to pay for them. 

Well it's an election year, seems like it's always an election year doesn't it?  The Republican firebrands, well they are all firebrands aren't they except for low energy Bush and that doctor fellow who is sinking like a stone, are for making the sand glow in the dark, but if they are asked if they want boots on the ground, except for the biggest blowhard they are all, well um, and what they really want to do is what Obama is doing only more of it.  Oh and they will use the phrase Islamic Terrorists which Obama's refusal to do is what is keeping us from winning this war.

Anyway the war is not dividing this country.  I'm sure your ilk will blame Obama for dividing the country by being so radical even though about half the country approves of what he is doing and much of what he is doing would have been okay among republicans before his election.  It's you tea partiers who are dividing this country.  Everything was just at a simmer before you guys came along and got the pot boiling, and what objectives have you achieved?  Not that you care about achieving anything, you just want to not compromise anything and you don't mind going down in flames over it.

Not that I mind any of that.  I'm glad to see you taking the reps down to the fiery lake.  The big girl shows a hawkish side, but that is probably just another of her fibs-.  It will be a little tiring to see her on the tube all the time, but not as scary as Mr Glowing Sand.

Really, you didn't see any difference between Gore and W?  You must have been pretty far at the edge to think that.  You didn't literally have a libertarian card did you?  That's just a figure of speech, right?  I do remember you telling me though that you did go to some meetings, sent them some money.  Don't you wish you would have bought one of those hats though?  You could have taken a photo of yourself wearing it with Old Betsy in your arms, a steely glint in your eyes, and a handwritten sign behind you, "The Freehold of Beaglesonia."    Put a twig of holly in your tricorner and it would make a dandy Christmas card.

I don't know that the terrorists have gotten further and further out of their place.  I think they are doing about the same for the last twenty years.  It just sounds like they are doing more because this is an election year.

Text?  Did you say I could text people?  Surely you know that i am a landline man, and not a very good one of those.  I generally don't answer it, and anytime somebody wants to communicate by phone I discourage that in favor of email.  I don't understand why people would text when they could just email except that it is more annoying than an email.

One of the first things I did when I moved into the tower was to buy a telescope.  Mostly I just wanted to look at the buildings and the bridges and the boats at sea.  People who visited me though all thought that I was a peeping Tom.  I guess I looked at windows a few times, just in the pursuit of looking at buildings.  It is a bit of an eerie feeling looking at people who don't know that they are being looked at, but it's not like as soon as people know they aren't being watched they do all this weird stuff.  I guess they might pick their nose, but who wants to see that?  As for naked, that's what the internet is for.

What This Country Needs is Another Good War

It was before our time, but we still grew up in its shadow, W.W.II, the last good war. It brought the country together, while every war since then has rent the country asunder. I used to think they did that in purpose, but now I'm not so sure. With Russia out of the picture, they couldn't be in league with the Commies anymore. Russia seems to be back in the picture again but, without Communism, there would be no more reason for our leaders to betray us to the Russians than to betray us to the Italians or the Greeks. So whose side are they on? The Muslims don't have a side, they've got lots of sides, and so do the Americans. What we need is for the whole world to be divided into two sides, the good guys and the bad guys. Make everybody wear uniforms, or at least two different kinds of hats, then everybody would know where they belonged, and didn't belong.

I was still a card carrying Libertarian back in 2000, so I didn't care who won the presidential election. As far as I was concerned, one was as bad as the other. Then came 9-11 and that changed everything, or so I thought at the time. The Libertarians were saying that it was all our fault for getting involved in the Middle East in the first place. While there may have been some truth to that, it was no time to bring it up. First we needed to teach those terrorists a lesson and put them back in their place, then we could go back to arguing about American politics again. The Libertarians didn't see it that way, so we parted company. Fifteen years later, half of that under the Republicans and half of it under the Democrats, the terrorists are more arrogant and farther out of their place than ever. The tail is still wagging the dog, and all the dog can do is chew on its own foot.

Our garage has never been used for a garage, it's a furnace room, workshop, storage area, and smoking lounge but, for some reason, we still call it the garage. It's kind of a porch in the summer because I leave the big door open a lot of the time, particularly when I've got the propane grill going just outside. There are no passers by, at least not any human ones. Before old Splash died in 2008, We used to say howdy to each other and make small talk while I grilled supper and the blue jays stole Splash's dog food. Now the pen stands empty, but the blue jays still sit on the fence waiting in vain for me to fill the dog feeder again. I guess old habits die hard.

The front of the house faces away from the road, and dense vegetation blocks sight of the road from the house unless you go up on the roof and look right down the power line. Cars don't go whizzing by because the road dead ends in the junkyard just past our driveway. The neighbors might stroll by occasionally, but we can't see them and they can't see us. It seems like your balcony could serve as kind of a porch too. If you wanted to say howdy to somebody, you could just text them wherever they are. You could also mount a telescope on the railing and look through the windows of the other tall buildings around you. Who knows, you might see an attractive lady looking back at you through her telescope, and she might hold up a sign with her phone number on it. I seem to remember seeing that in a movie or TV show, so it must be possible.

howdy neighbors

Another error on my part, of course I meant the year 2000.  I was just getting into the internet and a friend of my ilk and I were exchanging emails every five or ten minutes when they were counting the votes and at one point, it looked like Gore would take it, but then the networks had a change of mind about the outcome in Florida and took it out of the dems column, and then the whole thing slid into a republican win.

Oh woe was us, but actually i didn't think Bush would be so bad, I was a little hornswoggled by that compassionate conservative crap.  I don't think he would've turned out so bad except for 911 and then he let the neocons in and they went to Iraq, and there was one fine mess he stepped us into.  I think he was a weak stupid man who fell under the command of the great satan Cheney, and now sometimes I even feel a little sorry for him, but I don't tell the rest of my ilk that.

I don't recall that it was ever resolved who had won that 2000 election, but here's another thing I don't tell my ilk, I don't hold it against the republicans that much.  If the dems had the power people in the right place I would've been okay with us stealing it too. 

Even if it was later decided that the reps had won it fair and square, that doesn't change anything, since if it had been decided that they didn't win it, they would not have given it back.

1992 was a good year for me.  I had that fat state job, and I moved into the towers and we got that booming Clinton economy. 

I couldn't find anything about the circulation of the Cheboygan Trib in five minutes of internet research, but every other newspaper in the country is losing readership to the internet so I wouldn't think the Trib was immune.

I guess you drink beer in the garage because you want to smoke your cigs while you do that.  One thing that isn't so hot about condo living is that we don't have garages or basements or attics.  And we don't have front porches.  No place to set up a lawn chair on a cool summer evening and yell "Howdy folks," to the passersby and have little conversations about the weather.  But then I don't suppose your front door is too close to the road, and the passersby are probably going by in their streak of lightning cars, and not strolling by, and then Beagles is not that fond of neighbors, even straight white right wing Cheboyganers.


Now the big girl has told a whopper, claiming that ISIS is passing around videos of Trump, which is not true at all.  She could have just said that Trump's words are encouraging muslims to join the Taliban, and had a pretty good argument, but then she threw in that fib and that weakens her whole argument.  Well she is a known fibber.  Remember when she spoke about dodging bullets in Bosnia?  Time was a politico caught in a lie would blush and back down, but Trump has set the precedent of just sticking with it.  I wonder where the big girl will go with this.

Where Were You in '92?

What happened in '92? That was the year that your man Bill Clinton won against Bush I. If you are referring to the Hanging Chad Fiasco, that happened in 2000. It did look kind of fishy when the Supreme Court gave it to Bush II, but the recount was dragging along, Inauguration Day was fast approaching, and somebody had to be president. I seem to remember that the recount ultimately gave it to Bush II anyway. Funny thing about those recounts, every time they have one, it never comes out exactly the same as the first tally. Kind of makes you wonder if any vote count is really accurate. What were they doing with those goofy punch cards anyway? Even little old Cheboygan County had optical scanners by then. We never even had those punch cards, we went directly from the mechanical machines to the optical scanners. Just goes to show that it's not a good idea to buy every new "improvement" when it first comes out, better to wait a few years and see if it's going to last.

I don't think our local paper is losing much circulation to the internet because they also put out an internet edition that you can get for free if you subscribe to the paper paper. What they did is start inserting a magazine called "The Mackinaw Journal" once a month and moving our subscription expiration date forward one day for each Mackinaw Journal they gave us. My hypothetical wife, who notices all kinds of things that the average person would miss, called their attention to it. At first they denied it, but they eventually told us about the Mackinaw Journal. It's a fine little magazine, but we never ordered it and assumed we had been getting it for free. If they wanted to sell us the Mackinaw Journal, they should have asked us if we wanted it and billed us separately if we did. When we told them we didn't want the Mackinaw Journal under those circumstances, they said it was not optional, we had to take it the way they gave it to us. Our local office said there was nothing they could do about it because the decision had been made at the corporate level. I didn't even know they had a corporate level but, apparently, some outfit in the U.P. has owned our little paper for some time, and now they were asserting their dominance over it. We had already resolved not to renew our subscription some months before they announced they were shutting down the printing press in Cheboygan because they already had one in Sault Ste. Marie that could handle our paper in its spare time. The press in Cheboygan had been operating since the 1960s when it replaced a much older machine. As far as I know, there was nothing wrong with it, they just didn't want to deal with it any longer.

Petoskey was a big tourist draw in the 1920s and still is. Actually, many of them aren't really tourists, they're resorters.  The Blogger spell checker says there is no such word as "resorters", but there is so. There is even a weekly newspaper that comes out of Indian River called "The Straitsland Resorter". It's no substitute for the Cheboygan Daily Tribune, but I think they know how to spell their own name! Okay, I seem to remember the old fashioned word for it is "cottagers". Happy now Mr. Spell Checker? Anyway, these are people who own summer homes or cottages and visit them regularly, while a tourist is a transient visitor who may never come back again. Some of those "cottages" are pretty fancy, fancier than most of the homes of our permanent residents. They are occupied for the "season", and shuttered up the rest of the year. The "season" doesn't just mean summer, it is a social thing that lasts for a month or two, after which the whole entourage goes off to enjoy another season in Acapulco or someplace. Talk about your fat cats!

There once was a brewery in Cheboygan, but it closed down a long time ago. The old building still stands, but there has been an auto transmission repair shop in there for as long as anybody can remember. This new outfit didn't want the building, they just bought the name from whoever owned the rights to it and put up a brand new building downtown. There is a tavern in the same building as the brewery where you can sample their product and eat cheese and stuff like that. I might go there some day if they ever add a yellow beer to their product line but, till then, I'll keep drinking Milwaukee's Best in my garage like regular guys do.

A classier name for yellow beer

Are you accusing my ilk of stealing elections?  Well we Chicagoans always get that rap, and probably for good reason, but since we are all dems we are just stealing it from each other.  There is that story about us stealing the 1960 election from Tricky Dick, but even if he had won Illinois, he still would have lost the election.  And speaking of stealing, what about the shenanigans the GOP pulled off in Florida in 1992, giving the election to Dimwit who embroiled us in the Mideast?  The Mideast may well have boiled over without us breaking Iraq, but we would not have been in the middle of it.

I was being sarcastic about the fat cats being rich, and what I was alluding to was there is likely some advantage to spending a gazillion dollars on a political campaign.  Didn't Obama say we needed smarter government?  Sounds more like the kind of thing he'd say.  But of course smarter is a relative thing.  Some people think smarter would be the rainbow coalition marching up and down the street singing songs of love, and some people think hiding out in the swamp with a big sack full of ammo would be smarter.  Different strokes for different folks as the song goes.

Soros was a republican boogeyman, but apparently not for long enough for you to have heard of him.  Maybe he was more of a Fox creation.  When Beck drew his diagrams there was always a prominent square with arrows coming out of it representing Soros.  But probably you never watched his lunatic hour.  It was something I tell you.

And I guess you never saw those costumed tea partiers on tv.  Really, it was all over tv.  Not likely we would have much of a tea party presence here in the true blue city of Chicago, but the more distant burbs are very right wing and I never hear anything about tea partiers attending meetings out there, and I don't see any of their letters from any tea party organizations in the newspapers.

Which I might say are dying.  It has nothing to do with somebody running them into the ground, they are losing out to that awful internet.  Newspapers will continue to shrink and go out of business and there is nothing to be done about it.

You know I heard NPR talking about Petosky yesterday, I came in at the end of it so I didn't get the whole story, but I got the impression that it was quite the hot spot in like the twenties.

And I looked up that Cheboygan craft brewery.  Maybe their Lighthouse Amber Ale is the beer that displeased you in that restaurant.  I would have gone with their IPA, and I see where they are coming out with an American pale ale.  That might be good.

I see from their history that there was a Cheboygan brewery way back when and at one point they brewed something called Bohemian beer,

Stroh's used to claim to be Bohemian beer, and I guess I drank my share of that, but really it never tasted any different from Budweiser or Millers or any of those beers that were all you could get before the golden age of beer that we live in now.

They have a name for yellow beer now.  Well they still call it lawnmower beer, but the classier name is American lager.  The next time you are in a classy Cheboygan restaurant to impress the hypothetical wife, who my guess is will not be impressed, you might inquire as to what they have in an American lager.  But your fondness for Milwaukee's Best makes me think you have discovered the truth about American lager/lawnmower/yellow beer which is that the cheapest one is the best one.

Fat Cats and Alley Cats

Your ilk is always accusing my ilk of buying elections. So what's better, stealing them? I suppose you're right that there are more fat cat Republicans than fat cat Democrats. So what's wrong with that? Like you said, those guys didn't become rich by being stupid. Does that mean that there are more intelligent Republicans than intelligent Democrats? Of course virtue does not always accompany wealth and intelligence, but it doesn't always accompany poverty and ignorance either. Your friend Obama said something a long time ago that makes sense: "We don't need bigger government, we don't need smaller government, we need better government." True as far as it goes, but then we need to define "better", because one man's better is another man's worse.

I remember you saying something about George Soros once, but I have never heard of him before or since. Like I said, you follow that stuff a lot more then I do.

I don't remember seeing a lot about the Tea Party on TV, but I'm pretty sure that I never saw them wearing any kind of costumes. We have a local chapter here in Cheboygan, I've never seen them on TV, but I have read about them in our local paper. They seem to be focused on local issues, and routinely attend city and county board meetings to speak against some local boondoggle proposal. I have never heard of them conducting street demonstrations or otherwise making a spectacle of themselves. They write letters to the editor and their leader occasionally writes a guest column in our local paper.

The opinion page is the only thing in that paper that I'm going to miss. They print all kinds of opinions there, even opinions that are critical of the paper itself. Hopefully, after they get their tax write off, or whatever it is they are hoping to accomplish by running the paper into the ground, somebody will buy the paper and restore it. It would be shame to see over a century of journalistic tradition perish from the Earth. It never was a perfect paper, rumor has it that it was once nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for typographical errors, but it was our paper.

If you take a closer look at Mullet Lake, you will see a narrow channel that goes from the north end of the lake through Cheboygan and out into Lake Huron. This is the Cheboygan River. Be sure to bear left when you come to the Forks, or you will end up in Black Lake instead. The Black river is wider than the Cheboygan river at that point, and it looks like it should be the main channel, but it's actually a dead end. Crooked Lake, near Petoskey, is also a dead end at the other end of the inland Waterway, where the Indians used to portage. I understand that there was a proposal at one time to cut a channel from there to Lake Michigan, but it never came to pass.

Our local stores carry all kinds of craft beer, and we even have our own craft brewery in town. I tried some of their beer once in a restaurant, but it was some kind of amber crap and I didn't like it. I try to patronize our local businesses as much as possible, but not to the point that I will drink beer that I don't like just because it's local. If they ever come out with a good yellow beer, I will buy it, even if it's more expensive than Milwaukee's Best.

Pilsner Urquell si, Capri pants no.

I think the reason I brought up the fact that the current tea party is largely funded by fat cats was a way of slamming it for its grass roots pretensions.  I'm guessing at the beginning it was more of a grass roots thing, there were organizations that people joined and they went out a-protesting or something, anyway you used to see them on tv making a spectacle of themselves.  You know those hats, I have slammed them, but actually they are kind of cool, and a puffy shirt isn't all that bad, but those Capri pants, I have to say, even though our founding fathers proudly strutted around in them, not very manly in my humble opinion.

And it seems like they did use to protest the fat cats back in those days, and even though it was pretty clear that they would never ever vote for a democrat, they pretended to be outside the party system.  And it seems like there were actual tea party organizations back in the day.  I don't think they went in for carrying cards, not their style, but I think they used to endorse candidates.  You don't see that anymore. 

Anymore it is a top down sort of thing, the candidate declares himself a tea party kind of guy and then the fat cats back him and buy ads and  then voters of that ilk vote for him.

There are Democrat fat cats.  Remember when George Soros was the devil?  Whatever happened with that?  You never hear about him anymore.  I don't have the wiki research at my fingertips but I'll gladly wager that the reps have far more and far richer fat cats than the dems.

But is having fat cats pour unlimited money into campaigns wrong?  I think it is.  I think it violates the one man one vote principle because in the shouting match of debate some of us have just one of those cones and others have big amps like a rock band.

But is that effective?  I think I agree with you here, i don't think it makes much difference in like a presidential campaign where both sides are spending bazillions and the ads come in blizzards so you can't hardly tell which side is which.  Look a poor Jeb! (the explanation for the ! is that it makes him more exciting, but one wag has pointed out that calling it brocolli! does not make it bbq ribs) he started out with way more money then the rest of the clowns, and as the crown prince clown will gladly tell you, he is at three percent.

But I think it makes a lot of difference in the down ballot races, certainly it is not that hard to buy a close state rep seat, and then you can control the state house and come reapportionment time gerrymand it to beat the band and gain some federal representatives.  And that money just sloshes around and helps the candidate in various ways.  And these fat cats are always fighting to get legislation passed that will allow them to give more, and if they were dumb would they be rich?

You know I saw that when I was mapping out my route, that little hat that the state of Michigan seems to be wearing (is there a name for that?) and there is sort of a line of lakes and rivers from Petosky to Mullet Lake, but I wasn't sure if it went clear through.

I guess all I have to do now is find a collapsible canoe I can get into the elevator and buy a case of Dinty Moore.  If I don't eat it all I will be glad to share when I get there.  But no yellow beer.  Any local craft beer pale ale will be fine, or maybe you could stock some Pilsner Urquell, the beer of the homeland.

Nothing New Under the Sun

The reason I brought in that content from Wiki is that you asked me about it and I didn't know, so I looked it up, and I didn't want you to think I made it up. Sure enough, rich people support conservative causes. So what else is new? From what I read, it seems that there is nothing new about the Tea Party movement except the name, and even that is getting old by now. Apparently a bunch of conservative and libertarian types got together and re-branded themselves as the Tea Party, nothing wrong with that as far as I can see. It's not surprising that rich people would be drawn to a cause like that because they stand to lose from any kind of redistribution scheme, while the poor people stand to gain, or at least they think they do. Of course there are rich liberals too. I think the principle difference between them and the rich conservatives is that the rich liberals feel guilty about being rich, while the rich conservatives do not. Maybe the rich liberals feel enough guilt for both of them, which is why they are not content with only giving their own money away, but would rather drag the rich conservatives down with them. Notice I said "maybe". Truth be known, a guiltless person like myself finds it difficult to identify with guilt ridden people, so I can only speculate about their motivation.

I haven't seen a Star Wars or other superhero movie in a long time, probably since my daughter grew up and left home. Kids used to be the target audience for shows like that, but I don't know if that's still true today.

Navigating the Great Lakes in a canoe is certainly possible. The Indians used to do it all the time, but we don't know how many of them died in the attempt. What you would need to do is stay close to the shore and keep an eye on the weather. When the wind and waves kick up, just pull out somewhere and wait it out. I seem to remember reading about a guy who circumnavigated Lake Michigan like that, but it took him all summer, or maybe it was two summers, I forget. He must have had some way of obtaining food and other supplies along the way because he couldn't have lived off the land like the Indians did. When you get to Petoskey, a short portage will connect you to the Inland Waterway, where you will have a smoother passage than if you continued along the shore and under the Mackinaw Bridge into Lake Huron. There are a couple of inland lakes along the way that can get pretty rough, but nothing like the Great Lakes. You will pass through one small lock on the Crooked River, unless it's still (or again) closed for repairs, in which case you can portage around it. When you get into Cheboygan, there is a public boat launch just past the Lincoln Avenue Bridge on your right, which is about three miles from Beaglesonia. Give me a call, and I'll come pick you up.

If you choose to go the whole Great Lakes route, you can paddle right up the Cheboygan River about a mile, go through the lock, and the boat launch I told you about will be on your left, just before the Lincoln Avenue Bridge. The structure at the mouth of the river is not a lock, it's just a break wall. If you want to avoid paddling upstream against a current that can be pretty stiff at times, go to the right of the break wall instead of up the river. There you will find a nice sandy beach from whence you can call me to come get you.

I'm sorry, but my hypothetical wife will be no help to us at all. She just hates the kind of conversations we have at the institute, probably like the wife of the Greek guy who founded the Skeptic School of philosophy. The word "skeptic" comes from a Greek word that means "porch", which is where they used to gather for their discussions because their hypothetical wives wouldn't tolerate that crap inside the house.

paddling my own canoe

There's usually some kind of fucking with the format when you bring some content from one place to another.  Happens to me all the time when I try to bring stuff into email.  I think the best thing to do is write out everything you want to say and when that is done, you import the foreign content.

I'm not sure why you brought that content into Beaglesonia.  Doesn't it just prove what I was saying that the fat cats are largely bankrolling the tea party?  Way back at the beginning I think the Tea Party was more grassroots and you would hear the tricorners rant about the evil of big business, but I don't think any of them say that anymore, certainly not any candidate bankrolled by them.

Newspapers in general have gone down the tubes.  I get both the Trib and the Sun-Times, but they have much less news than they used to and a lot more of that celebrity crap, just traversing the news from one section to the other it is hard not to keep up with the Kardashians.

Speaking of showbiz crap, how about this star wars hoopla?  I guess the first two or three movies weren't so bad, but then they were the same old same old and pretty juvenile, and now everywhere you go it's star wars this and star wars that?  And who gives a shit?  And how come half our movies and tv shows are about superheroes anymore?  I know i spend a lot of time complaining about kids these days, but adults these days are nothing to write home about either.

Actually there is a marina right underneath Marina City.  It's owned by a different entity than the condo association so we get no special privileges.  I wonder though if i could get some kind of small or collapsible canoe, or maybe a kayak that would fit in an elevator and I could just bring it down and plunk it into the water.  I could probably hide behind some big boat and get past the locks and then it would be clear paddling all the way up to almost Canada, illuminated by the flames of the city as it was being taken over by those undesirables, and then right under the bridge.  Is that a lock at the mouth of the Cheboygan?  I reckon I could get past that too, and then I guess I would paddle through that crowded town with no room for Beagles' elbows, and then i would beach my craft (is that the way you boaters talk?) and open up my nostrils for the clear scent of freedom and follow my nose to Beaglesonia. 

Just think, instead of just the hour I spend in the morning and you in the evening we could talk like this all day long.  Probably into a tape recorder so that it could be preserved for prosperity.  I'm sure your hypothetical wife would not mind transcribing then into print, and bringing us sandwiches and beer throughout the day.   I would however require a nice pale ale and none of that yellow beer that you like.

Alrighty then.  See you soon.

Groups in the News

Fundraising

Sarah Palin headlined four "Liberty at the Ballot Box" bus tours, to raise money for candidates and the Tea Party Express. One of the tours visited 30 towns and covered 3,000 miles.^[216] Following the formation of the Tea Party Caucus, Michele Bachmann raised $10 million for a political action committee, MichelePAC, and sent funds to the campaigns of Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio.^[217] In September 2010, the Tea Party Patriots announced it had received a $1,000,000 USD donation from an anonymous donor.^[218]

Support of Koch brothers

Main article: Political activities of the Koch family

In an August 30, 2010, article in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer said that the brothers David H. Koch and Charles G. Koch and Koch Industries provided financial support to one of the organizations that became part of the Tea Party movement through Americans for Prosperity. ^[219][220] The AFP's "Hot Air Tour" was organized to fight against taxes on carbon use and the activation of a cap and trade program.^[221] Former U.K. ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer wrote in the Daily Mail that the Tea Party movement is a mix of "grassroots populism, professional conservative politics, and big money", the last supplied in part by the Kochs.^[222] A Koch Industries company spokesperson issued a statement saying "No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundation, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties".<sup>[223]

I got this from the same Wiki article I referenced yesterday. Copying it here has apparently done something to the text format, and I can't seem to get it back the way it was, so this will have to do. I noticed that the statement I quoted yesterday has been edited a little, but it still says basically that the Tea Party was propelled to fame by the election of President Obama. All I really know about these guys is what I have read and seen on the news, so if you want to know more about them, I suggest you read the Wiki article for yourself. I am not, nor have I ever been, a card carrying member of any Tea Party organization.

Okay, now it's worse. I can have this size or this size, but nothing in between. Maybe it will straighten out when I go away and come back tomorrow.

My access to the news media has recently been diminished because we have allowed our subscription to the Cheboygan Daily Tribune to expire. The paper was bought out by an outfit in the Upper Peninsula some time ago, and they seem to be deliberately running it into the ground. The are engaging in deceptive billing practices, and have moved the printing operation from Cheboygan, where it has been for over a century, to Sault Ste. Marie, laying off ten local people in the process. There is no other local paper in the region that duplicates the coverage of the Tribune, and the Detroit Free Press is way to big for our tastes. I don't know how I'm going to fill that void. I can get much of the national and international stuff from Wiki, but I don't know what I'm going to do about state and local coverage. I hate to increase my viewing of the TV news because I think that's where I get my bad attitude about minority groups. Besides, my hypothetical wife would never stand for it, she just hates the TV News, says it's too depressing.

I'm sure I've told you before that I have nothing against individual minority people, it's when they form themselves into groups that I get paranoid about them. Of course the news doesn't tell you about the millions of ordinary people who live their lives without causing any trouble. Every time you see these people on the TV they are swarming in a big mob and making a public spectacle of themselves. One gets the impression that they must breed like rabbits and are hell bent on crowding the rest of us right off the planet. Truth be known, I probably don't have anything they want, but I feel sorry for anybody who does.

Isn't there a place to keep a boat right under your building? I thought that's why they call it "Marina City". Other tall buildings have parking garages under them, I thought yours had a marina. I always wanted to live on waterfront property, but it's quite expensive and usually quite crowded. We have the best of both worlds here. When the snow melts in the spring, or we get a lot of rain, we can look out our windows and see ducks and geese swimming around in front of our house. My hypothetical wife insists that a muck hole in the swamp does not qualify as waterfront, but she doesn't recognize Beaglesonian sovereignty either. Women ain't got no imagination at all!

Muzzle loader season ended Sunday. I only went hunting twice out of a possible ten days, and didn't see anything. I've been really tired lately, and just getting through the everyday chores has been about all I could handle. The weather didn't help any, we've usually got snow on the ground by now and deer season, like Christmas, doesn't seem quite right without it. I'm not complaining, you understand. If all the rain we've been getting would have been snow we'd be buried alive by now, and that's no fun either.</sup>

yuletide on the southern bank of the lake

I never understood TARP very well, my main impression is that if the banks had gone down, much as they deserved it, it would have been bad for the rest of us, the recession would have been longer.  I guess we'll never know now exactly what would have happened if we hadn't.

I think most everybody was for it at the time, the political candidates, the big economists.  It seems like anybody who was president would have done it. 

It would have been nice if afterwards they had gone after some of those guys and put them in the iron hotel, but the only guy who talks much about that is Bernie Sanders.  They did pass some regulations to hinder that thing in the future but the reps are always trying to repeal those regulations.

Aren't most tea party organizations anymore PACs funded by the Adelsons and the Kochs, and their ilk?  At first you heard some of the haberdasherly challenged carping about the fat cats, but anymore I think they have been bought off by the big money.

When you say you got a little carried away with the xenophobia are you saying you don't really want to expel all those people and build all those walls? 

Fast boat?  Were we talking about fast boats before?  Oh you mean like the one I have anchored at the end of Navy pier so that when the invasion of Muslims, Asians, Hispanics (are you sure you didn't mean to include blacks and gays?) takes over Chicago, I can hop into it and head north and take a right just before Canada and land on the freedom soaked borders of Beaglesonia.  I hear it is guarded by some Elmer Fudd type character but he is mostly asleep.  Maybe I cold bring him a nice cut of Whole Foods venison.

Marina City Christmas Party tonight.  I will be wearing my Santa hat and eating and drinking and glad handing, but the word is that there will be a tv and at 8PM they will be tuning into the Republican convention.  All us nice blue staters watching the clown show, snickering into our craft beers. I am telling myself I will just steal a glimpse every now and then, but I don't see how, having once turned my head I will ever be able to turn it back again.

I am still a little unsure of what you expect the hordes of undesirables to do to Cheboygan that you are huddling in the swamp with that taped up Old Betsy guarding against.

Speaking of Old Betsy, what is the Beagles vs deer score so far?