the worst thing about dumbo

You are old fashioned Beagles, just getting your news out of the Cheboygan Daily Tribune, although I guess that's better than getting all your news from facebook.  Newspapers used to be pretty good.  They were fat.  They disdained that celebrity crap that now fills the middle and seeps into the regular news.  Anymore they are pretty thin gruel.  Used to be the Sun-Times would take me through lunch, now even the Trib, the fatter of the two won't do that.  In looking through small town newspapers, say the Champaign News-Gazette, there is just not room in there for much news.  So I mean, how can you know very much if you don't read much news?

I have been hearing vet in the sense of examine since I was a teen-ager.  Dumbo has popularized it by adding the popular catchphrase extreme, more commonly Xtreme to it.  What does that mean?  Does anybody know what extreme as opposed to regular vetting means?  No.  What it means is we aren't ever going to let you in because some people of your religion have done some nasty things to us.

People who live in those countries that we spell different now have always called it by the same name, we have just changed the name or the spelling to get closer to what they call it.

I don't think the Chinese call it Peking duck anymore than the French call them French fries, strangely enough we Americans call it  American cheese, but then I don't think anybody else eats that yellow crap.


I felt a little bad after yesterday's post.  I had been angry, probably rude, conduct unbecoming the ivied halls of Beaglestonia, and the standards I like to think that I conduct myself by.  I admit that sometimes there is a bulldoggish element to my argumentation, but it is calm.  There is no growling or snarling.

Okay, so sure Dumbo is an imbecilic, narcissistic, ill-mannered, short tempered, attention-spanned, and fingered, big fucking asshole who is going to fuck up America, but is that any reason to be uncivil?   But the thing is, the thing is, he is an enemy of Objective Reality.  Do I hear a collective yawn roar through Beaglestonia?  No matter, in my bulldog fashion (see above) I shall press on.

It's that wearing a red tie and insisting it is blue thing.  Okay that never happened, but the thing about his inauguration, and those cheering crowds of muslims on the rooftops after 9/11?  I pick those two because they are the first come to mind, and because they are demonstrably false.  Even the five million illegal votes doesn't fall into this category because there is no proof that there weren't.

And yet dumbo insists they are true.  He is standing in my fucking back yard and saying that the tree is not there.  It can reasonably be said that all politicians lie.  Of course some lie more than others, but more important, there are different categories of lies, there are some that are just false generalizations or speculations, or repetitions of what some idiot said, or just spun out in a flight of fancy.  But demonstrably false lies are a category of their own, to deny what is right before everybody's eyes, to deny the tree, the color of the tie, the photos of the crowds, is to deny (pause) Objective Reality.

All our knowledge is built up from facts.  To deny facts is to deny knowledge.  All our communication is based on facts.  Okay that's a lie, but if Beagles was to claim that water and cornstarch are the same thing then that whole interminable yammering about ice cream would have no meaning.  Furthermore, the very basis of The Institute A forum for reasonable discussion among reasonable people.  would have no meaning.

So there it is, the reason I may have been danderred up is that not only is dumbo a big fucking asshole, but he is an enemy of Objective Reality, the royal road of civilization.

Then there is the whole thing of instead of refuting what somebody says not by carefully crafted arguments, but by calling the other guy a liar.  But the hour is getting late.


Old Dog's off-topic suggestions look like things that come out of the food section of the newspaper.

How about this one?

Funny things about dreams, you start forgetting them the minute you wake up and then you have to run them through your mind to imprint them so you don't forget them, but you have to make little changes in them to construct a narrative, and then when you write them you have to change them a little to be able to put them into words.

Do we have any free will in dreams?  I generally feel like I am just watching something passively, sometimes it's like reading a book, sometimes like seeing a movie.
 

I had this dream about having an  art show in Mexico, While there I ran into an old friend who I hadn't seen in some time. I was vaguely aware that my ride home would be leaving soon, but I spent time talking to my old friend to catch up on things, and I ended up missing my ride.

I don't think dreams arrive in the brain like a script to be followed.  I think they are all improv, this happens, then that.  So was my action to talk to my old friend at the risk of missing my ride an actual decision of mine, or did I just remember making a decision, the way I remembered going to the art show?


Philosophers argue about whether or not we have free will.  They think that our memories of making decisions are just that, memories.