good suits and fine ales, the fruits of capitalism

I'm kind of interested in those guys who you ask if they are bad and they tell you, "Why yes I am, why do you ask?"  I don't think I know anybody like that.  Of course I never come right out and ask them, wouldn't seem polite, but I reckon, since they are proud of it, it might come out in conversation as in, "I prefer a pale ale with a hint of lemon and pine, a bold bitterness, and a dry citrus finish, but maybe that's because I'm a bad guy."

But then you are saying that badness is in the eye of the beholder, so I imagine to you if somebody tells you that they can't wait for the big girl to win the election and run this country the right way, you would assume that this was a bad person.  Myself, I would prefer that he preferred to live in Bernie's socialist paradise, but I imagine if he was drinking an India pale ale and not one of those stupid wheat beers I would think he was alright,  I don't even talk to people who are drinking yellow beer, unless it's Pabst Blue Ribbon, something about that label I guess.

You think that now that Russia is full of mobsters and kleptocrats who like 90 percent like Putin and probably hate America as much as they did in commie days, that they are rehabilitated?  What if we had lost the cold war?  It's not like we actually won the cold war, we don't fly the stars and stripes over the Kremlin, and we didn't even get like a slice of the Crimea.  How about some of that string of islands west of Alaska, we could have extended Freedom into a couple more time zones?  The USSR just fell apart like a cheap suit, perhaps because they were tired of wearing cheap suits.  I remember when Khrushchev visited the USA and tongues wagged about his ill-fitting suits, has to wear on a guy.  Your ilk, the Reagan worshiping faction, which, let's face it, is all of your ilk, thinks Ronnie defeated the Russkies with the jawbone of an ass, no wait, Star Wars, not the movie, the thing with missiles in outer space that nobody ever quite understood, which is just as well since none of it ever worked.

But what if we had lost the cold war, not so much as we had commissars in Des Moines (of course they would never dare to enter The Freehold, they might be commies, but they aren't crazy), but simply the USA collapsed while the USSR stood tall, which I guess would prove that they had the better system and wouldn't you then be behooved to rehabilitate yourself and become a commie?

I'm a little shocked that Obama's tinkering with some little details of the gun laws meets your approval, if not the manner, then the substance.  I thought you were committed to fighting for gun rights inch by inch like a WW1 battlefield, where you were glad to have AK 47s legal, because that was one more fight before the anti gun nuts would have to fight before they could get into the swamp and take Old Betsy from your yellow beer stained hands.  Most of the pundits are saying it won't get past the courts, but if it does, I'm sure the big girl will keep them, and right now she looks like a shoo-in if we have a third party, which it now looks like we will, but again this is the republican primary and anything, anything at all, can happen.

Because I Say So

I guess you're right about good and bad being relative. But relative to what? Why relative to me of course! If I say somebody is bad, then he's bad. If I say somebody is good, then he's good. It's more likely that a bad guy would try to pass himself off as a good guy than it is that a good guy would try to pass himself off as a bad guy so, if a guy tells me he's good, I might take it with a grain of salt. If he tells me he's bad, however, I generally take him at his word. Why would anybody lie about something like that? All kidding aside, I think that this good guy-bad guy thing is mostly relevant to conflicts. In a conflict, the good guy is supposed to win and the bad guy is supposed to lose. That doesn't always happen in the real world, but that's the way it's supposed to be.

Sometimes when a person is bad, it's not his fault, but he's still bad. Your Russian hockey player was a bad guy when he supported the Communist regime, but he didn't know any better because that's the way he was raised. With the demise of Russian Communism, most of the Russians were rehabilitated, whether they wanted to be or not, just like most of the Germans were rehabilitated after the NAZIs lost the war. There were some stubborn ones that clung to the old ideology, but I don't know if that was their fault or not. It would seem that, now that they knew better, it would be their duty to convert themselves, but I'm not sure about that. What if they were so brainwashed that it just wasn't in them
to become good guys? That would be tragic, and not their fault, but they still would be bad guys.

I agree that those CEOs get paid way too much, but I'm still not sure why. It's not like they're taking money away from the other employees because there is no guarantee that, if the CEO was paid less, that the other guys would get paid more. That extra money could go towards capital improvements, research and development, advertising, or stockholder dividends. I keep coming back to the fact that the board members are the biggest stockholders, so why would they pay the CEO or anybody else more than they had to?

I see that your man Barack is once again trying to do by executive order what he couldn't get Congress to do for him. In this case, he's just trying to plug some loopholes in the gun laws, which probably should have been done a long time ago, like when the laws were first passed. When was it, 1968? It will be interesting to see if he gets away with it this time. Last I heard, the courts were upholding all the after the fact tinkering he did with the health care act, but maybe some of the cases are still working their way through the legal system. I don't know if it makes any difference that the gun laws have been on the books for over 40 years while the ink is barely dry on the health care thing.

sorta good vs sorta bad guys

Yes back in the day some people thought that rock music was not only bad music, but also that it would bring about the end of the world as they knew it.  And maybe they were right, though I think it was more effect than cause.  Anyway these people were known as old people.  You were old before your time.  Myself I am now an old people and I look at rap pretty much like you looked at rock music so maybe I am old just at the right time.  What is it with you and cannibals? 

So how do you determine if a guy is good or bad?  Is it percentages?  If the guy is 50.01 percent good he is a good guy, and if 49.99 percent than he is a bad guy?  I guess instead of saying good guys vs bad guys we should say pretty much more or less good guys vs pretty much more or less bad guys?  What about the guy, like that Russian guy in the hockey documentary?  He grew up on the straight and narrow, and as far as I know, like Beagles, he is without sin.  He grew up loving his country and its ideology, and loves it still and is now somewhere in Putin's government so is he a good guy? 

I don't know if your tongue is in cheek of if Cheboygan is a peculiar place (how long has it been since you were out of the county?), but I do not believe the simple procedure of asking somebody if they were a good guy or a bad guy would work down here, because the bad guys here are not proud of being bad guys (well maybe if bad means tough, like in bad dude, they do, but then everybody, even the good guys here want to be bad dudes), and if you asked them if they were bad guys they would most likely lie.

The whole problem here is that we are not defining good and bad, and of course they are relative, but that opens up a whole new subject.

I guess I get the idea that you are against the gummint because you bad mouth it all the time, oh and fear that it is going to reach its slimy tentacles down into the swamp and fuck with your life in idyllic Beaglesonia, and you and your ilk want to shrink it down to the size of the universe one nano nano nano second before the big bang.

I admit I am not sure exactly how that money from the CEOs gets passed around, that will take some internet research.  But you know they were getting about a tenth of what they are getting now ten years ago, so are they now ten times better?

So It's True!

Back in the day, there were some people who believed that the rock music of the 60s was evil incarnate, not just ugly and unpleasant, pure evil. They claimed that the lyrics, as if anybody could understand them, were all about sorcery and Satanism. Some said you had to play the record backwards to hear it, but it was in there for sure. I thought they were just paranoid at the time, but now you tell me it was true! I'll have to take your word for it because I never could make any sense out of that garbage. To me it just sounded like a bunch of cannibals chanting "ooga-booga" over and over again while they danced around a fire where a missionary was boiling in a big black pot.

While I can agree that nobody is perfectly good or perfectly bad, I still maintain that are good guys and bad guys. Some of the good guys are gooder than others, and some of the bad guys are badder than others, but everybody falls on one side of the line or the other. Just ask people if they are good or bad and they usually will tell you. They may qualify it by saying something like, "Well, I'm not all that good, or bad." but they usually know what side of the line they are on, and they're proud of it.

I don't know where you got the idea that I'm against government. Of course we need government, but maybe not as much of it as some people think we do. The most important job of government is to control factions. (I didn't make that up, I think George Washington did.) The trouble is nowadays the factions seem to be controlling the government instead of the other way around. You got your racial factions, your ethnic factions, your religious factions, your anti religious factions, your corporate factions, and your anti corporate factions, to name a few. The more power we give to government, the more power we give to whatever faction happens to be in control at the time. I'm sure there are just as many crooks in corporations as there are in government, but that doesn't mean that either corporations or governments are bad things, just that they have some bad people in them.

Okay, explain to me how a crooked board of directors can make money paying an excessive salary to a crooked CEO. Does the CEO kick back some of that money to the board members? It seems like the board would be further ahead to cut out the middle man and just keep the money in the first place. On the other hand, if the company makes money, the board makes money because they are the company's major stockholders, so it would seem to be in their own best interests to hire the most competent CEO they can afford. I agree that some of those salary figure seem quite high, but then I'm not sure exactly what a CEO does at work all day, or how hard it is to find a replacement if he quits.

I don't know why the feds are letting those goofballs out west get away with all their shenanigans. Maybe the West is just too big and the federal forces are spread out too thinly to be effective against the faceless hordes. Maybe that's why they call it the "Wild West".





 

scalawags

You have this way of presenting systems, corporations, and libertarianism in an ideal form, but the opposite for democracy (the people, in their wisdom, select the wisest leaders who steer the ship of state in the best direction, because they know that if they don't the public will vote them out of office).  Which sounds not unlike your description of how corporations work, and which you seem to approve of, but government, especially at the federal level is full of scalawags (I like this term better than pricks and crooks which sounds a bit coarse). 

All these systems, they work great as long as there are no scalawags.  But scalawags are everywhere.  It's like saying a certain umbrella works great as long as their is no rain.   And I want to say something about good guys and bad guys, nice guys and scalawags, and on the gun side, law-abiding citizens and criminals.  What I want to say is it's not like people are one or the other.  As the Rolling Stones sang in the late sixties, "Every cop is a criminal and all your sinners saints."  Of course the name of that song is "Sympathy for the Devil," and the speaker is that great scalawag, Beelzebub himself.  And it ain't it just like the devil to try to sow discord among the sons of men? 

It seems to me that the terms good guys and bad guys used to be used in westerns and comic books, and in general in the world of kids.  When adults used them they were kind of referring to the simplistic stories of their youth, but it was something they had left behind.  Anymore you see pundits and guys running for the highest office in the land throwing those terms around with impunity, as if they described the way the world was, and as if all that was needed to set the world right was for the good guys to whip the bad guys.

But as the Rolling Stones said, even though they were speaking in the voice of Beelzebub, and their mission was to sow discord among the sons of men, nobody is all good and nobody is all bad, and the good guys whipping the bad guys is not the solution to our problems because we are all some of one and some of the other.

I guess all I am trying to say here is corporations (big business) are full of scalawags who are out to feather their nests and don't give a damn about the USA, or even the corporation, and certainly not with providing you with whatever it is you need to fix your truck at a fair price.  Oh they will provide you with that part, but not necessarily at a fair price because they are in cahoots with their competitors or maybe they drove them out of business, and they will charge whatever they can get away with, and if making a cheaper inferior product makes them more money they will be fine with that, or if something with manipulating money is more profitable they will do that.  Have you noticed how many of those guys end up in the slammer even though they have the best lawyers money can buy?

Those huge salaries the CEOs get have nothing to do with getting the best talent.  That's all I wanted to say.

Clive stayed back at the ranch, it is his nutty son who is out there.  They still haven't tried to collect that million from Clive, probably because they would pay more than a million dealing with his gun-toting faceless hordes.  That arson thing is a little strange.  Apparently they set fire to public lands and got short prison terms, but now the gov wants to give them five years, so how does that work?  But they are going peaceably to the hoosegow and want nothing to do with the mini faceless gun-toting horde.

Local FHs not bothering me.  I'm not so afraid that I want to stock up on AK-47s.

Hired Guns and Moral Mobs

The primary purpose of any "for profit" corporation is to make money for it's owners. If they try to provide the best products at the lowest cost, it's only because they figure they can make more money that way. In a "public" corporation, the owners are the stockholders. The board of directors usually consists of the biggest stockholders, so anything that profits the corporation profits them more than anybody. The board would be stupid to pay their employees, from the janitor to the CEO, any more than they had to, because that would increase production costs. Those increased costs would either reduce corporate profits or increase the price of the product, which would have a negative impact on sales, which ultimately would also affect the profit margin. The reason the janitor is paid less than the CEO is that it's easier to fill the janitor job when an opening occurs. If there were more qualified CEO candidates than janitor candidates in the labor market, then the janitors would be making more money than the CEOs. Okay, that's just in theory. In practice, people are people. Some people are pricks and some people are nice guys, some people are crooks, and some people are virtuous. The pricks and the crooks are in it for themselves, they don't care about what's good for the corporation, or the government, or the rest of the people, except maybe their close friends who are pricks and crooks just like they are.

Cops and soldiers are hired guns whose job is to protect the good guys from the bad guys. Most of them are hired by the government, but they can also be hired by corporations or private citizens. Of course cops and soldiers, being people, are subject to the same human frailties as everybody else. The people who hire them try to weed out the crooks and the pricks but, some of the hirers must be crooks or pricks themselves, because they are people too. I suppose some cops and soldiers start out as good guys but turn into bad guys later because they can't handle the stress of the job, or for some other reason. The cameras are probably a good idea because they should help determine who was right and who was wrong in a confrontation, but only if they are used responsibly and effectively. A camera can be misused like any other tool, which brings us back to the people problem. If everybody always did what they're supposed to do, we wouldn't need cops, soldiers, or cameras. We would still need corporations, though, unless you want to go back to the days when everybody had to make all their own stuff, which didn't leave them much time to invent things like the internet, without which we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I read about that Oregon thing on Face Book over the weekend. I couldn't find anything on Wiki about it, but I clicked on the link provided on the FB post. It seems that Clive Bundy and his son are heavily involved in this thing. Remember Bundy? He was the guy who backed down the Feds when they tried to confiscate his cattle for non-payment of grazing fees. I said at the time that he should be in jail, and you said the they would pick him up later after all the publicity died down. Well, he's back, or maybe he never went away. There was also mention of some guys who were charged with arson on federal property. I wish I knew what that's all about. Maybe Wiki will have something in a few days.

I haven't been following the Trump rallies, but you're probably right about those particular faceless hordes making spectacles of themselves. Good luck with those FHs in Chicago, I hope they are able to maintain their focus and keep out of trouble.

faceless hordes, a force for good?

You have an awful lot of faith in big corporations operating on a merit based system, i e, paying that new CEO a gazillion dollars because they want to get the best man.  I'm not buying it.  These are all big money guys and they hang with each other and what goes around comes around.  They figure one way or another they will get a piece of that gazillion dollars, unlike say, paying their employees minimum wage.  I don't know how you can think the gov is so thoroughly corrupt and the big corporations are just meritorious gangs of guys just wanting to provide us with the best product at the lowest price.

So there is no faceless horde channel, but there is a mass hysteria channel, no wait, that's something you see on tv, the only glimpses I get of that are those cellphone videos of the Donald at his rallies.  And the people there are all white, and probably all straight, so does that kind of hysteria make you want to take Old Betsy and that sack of ammo into the swamp?  Actually those rallies kind of make me want to join you in the swamp.  Oh and in this breaking news how do those militia guys in Oregon make you feel?

Your man Rand is indeed still standing, but he is likely to be sent down to the kiddie table in the next debate.  Trump is still numero uno, Carson is sinking like a stone (I don't know why he was ever that popular, the evangelicals I guess), Cruz is moving up, Rubio is behind him but not gaining ground, Bush is still on his slow horse, Christie is making a move from behind while Kasich and Fiorina are along for the ride.  I would advise that Rand throw in the towel, but this is the Republican primary, anything could happen.

But back to faceless hordes, which I believe is a more advanced case of making a spectacle of yourself. we have a situation here in Chicago.  October of 2014 LaQuan McDoanld was staggering around Pulaski by 41st with a knife in one hand and high on pcp.  The cops had him surrounded, he wasn't going anywhere and he wasn't really threatening anybody with the knife just trailing it behind him.  A cop car pulled up, a cop named Van Dyke jumped out and shot Laquan 16 times from about thirty feet away killing him deader than any doornail.

This didn't come out right away, the twenty or so cops in the area all said that Laquan was lunging at Van Dyke, the video was suppressed, the city gave the family five million hoping this would all go away.

But it didn't, the courts eventually made the city release the video and all hell broke loose.  The faceless horde wanted the heads of the police chief, the mayor, and the state's attorney.  The mayor tossed them the police chief, but the mayor isn't going anywhere, and the special prosecutor is up for reelection soon and is probably dead meat.

But the faceless horde is in the streets.  They've were particularly active during Christmas shopping on State and Michigan.  They blocked the entrances to stores and they tied up traffic, but there were few arrests and certainly no burning or looting. 

They are still around, they were at the mayor's house a couple nights ago.  On the one hand, I wonder what do they expect to achieve, aren't they tying up traffic for no reason?  On the other hand, demonstrating is fun and they do have a legitimate issue.  The shooting of LaQaun was clearly unjustified, but even more so to me was all those cops and all of them lied, that dreaded blue line of silence.

There has been this whole thing since Ferguson (I think the cops were on the right side of that one), and it has resulted in cameras, I believe Aquaplane was caught on dash cams, and this is all for the good.  So maybe the faceless hordes are up to some good.