picnics and ice cream cones

 Well gosh, I have been watching the 1/6 hearings pretty regularly and have learned new things every time, and so have the ink strained wretches, and yet it turns out, that Beagles, sitting there in the freehold has known all this stuff all along.  Well then I will stop bugging him about this.  But wait, no reason for me to mention this because he likely knew all along that I was going to say this.

As he likely also knows tomorrow is primary day in the Land of Lincoln.  The big news here is that. Ken Griffin, the richest man in all of Illinois is taking his moneybags and leaving this crime ridden state for the DeSantis Paradise, leaving behind his pet candidate, the mayor of Aurora, in the dust, and Trump has blessed the hayseed who will win the primary and go down in flames in the regular because we Land of Lincloners do not look kindly on the Trump banner.

And I will be taking part in it as an election judge.  A friend of mine who has been doing it for years had one of her crew drop out and she had me fill out the form and will use her pull to set me to work in the polling place.  Seems to me there will be a lot of sitting around waiting for the voters to elect their candidates, but you never know when an adventure is going to pop up it's exciting head.

Anyway it will be a welcome end to the back to back commercials which make you a little shocked that these guys are running for office when clearly they all belong behind the thickest wall of the strictest max security joint where they can wait out their days until Satan takes them straight to hell.

And then there are all those mailers, big shiny things so big that they do not easily fit into the little pigeonholes we Marina Cityers get our mail through so that our boxes are all clogged up, which is not that much of a problem since the paper recycle receptacle is only steps away.

I should run for something don't you think?  The dawgs know well of my wit and wisdom and my kindly nature.  Not so much the rest of the populace, who will need to be enlightened by my commercials and mailers which will take dough I know, but apparently there are lots of rich guys who are just looking for a candidate to back because there is a shortage of polo ponies currently, and why not Uncle Ken?

Who has a secret (well not anymore since the entire readership of The Institute knows) strategy.  My commercials will be like half the length of a regular commercial and consist of the message that I have spent the rest of  the rest of the money on a picnic for orphans, followed by a few short shots of happy orphans gamboling on bosky dells while kindly Uncle Ken hands out ice cream cones.

Of course my opponents, noting my soaring pill numbers, could do the same, but well and good.  All those smiling orphan faces will likely get boring after awhile but still much better than my opponent is a heartless criminal who they ought to have strung up long ago.  And the orphans will get to go on picnics and eat ice cream cones.  

And maybe my opponents, stealing my strategy, will defeat me in the election, but in the meantime have not the orphans and tv viewers had a swell time?  And that's really all I am about, trying to give people a swell time.

Nothing New Under the Sun

I haven't heard anything about the 2020 election than I haven't heard before, either from Uncle Ken or from any other news source.  More details may have come to light, but nothing that significantly changes the outcome.  Trump refused to acknowledge that he had lost the election and spent the next year or so unsuccessfully trying to overturn the results.  The worst thing he did was incite his followers to attack the Capitol Building while Congress was in session.  Call me "old fashioned", but that's treason in my book.  I said at the time that impeaching him was a mistake, since they knew that the Senate would never convict him.  They should have waited until he was out of office and tried him in a regular court.  Now they seem to be trying to impeach him all over again, which is impossible since he is no longer in office.  They still could try him in a regular court, it might not stick because of the double jeopardy law, but it's worth a try.  I understand that several civil suits have been filed, which they can do because that doesn't count as double jeopardy.  

Speaking of courts, an attitude such as mine would certainly be unacceptable if I was a member of a jury in a criminal or civil trial, but I'm not, and neither is Uncle Ken.  We are both merely spectators of this spectacle.  As such, we have no obligation to pay any attention to it at all if we don't want to.  Meanwhile, our attention is being redirected to Ring Number Two in this circus, where the long simmering abortion issue has been whipped up to a conflagration. 

I don't consider voting to be like betting on a sporting event, which I have never done anyway.  I don't vote for who I think is going to win, I vote for who I want to win.  I only have one vote, and if everybody else votes the wrong way, there's nothing I can do about it.

Sorry Bambi

 I've already seen more than enough of those for my taste.  I am not disputing the testimony being given at the hearings, I'm just saying that I've heard it all before and am already tired of it.  They should either prosecute the guilty parties or stop shoving the evidence in our faces.

What?  Were you not listening when your high school chum and long-time fellow blogger patiently explained that these hearing are not at all like the circus of the impeachment hearings and that they are revealing facts that previously were obscured by the murky cloud of partisanship gone wild?  

Apparently not.  And as for not wanting evidence shoved in your face, I have to say that I would not want you to be sitting in the jury box, unless I was guilty in which case I would certainly want you sitting smack dab in the middle of the box proclaiming to your fellow judges that you do not need any stinking evidence.

Suit yourself, this America and you can do whatever you want.  Like for instance find a libertarian who will lose to one of those wacko Trumpists in the primary who will then lose handily to Gutsy Gretch, America's Sweetheart.  

Did a brief search and couldn't find one, but there surely is since anybody can call themselves a libertarian.

And apparently we radical libs have failed once again to wrest Old  Betsy from Beagles' grasp and once our jackboots are planted firmly in the swamp make him marry his gay dog.

Sorry Bambi, maybe next year.

I'll Pass on the Drama

  "See now that's what I have been saying about the Jan 6 Hearings, unlike the impeachment shows which consisted mostly of senators making little speeches, these hearings are full of drama.  Not too long-ago Beagles was complaining that most things he can't see for himself and has to listen to other people tell him about it and here he has a chance to witness the hearings live and direct and he chooses not to in favor of listening to other people, who I might add are steering him very wrong if they are telling him that nothing much is going on."

I wasn't complaining, I was just saying that there are lots of things that we will never witness ourselves and have to rely on secondary sources to tell us about them.  It's not a bad thing, it's just the way life is.  Watching the hearings is not the same as witnessing the events for ourselves anyway, unless you count the video segments, and I've already seen more than enough of those for my taste.  I am not disputing the testimony being given at the hearings, I'm just saying that I've heard it all before and am already tired of it.  They should either prosecute the guilty parties or stop shoving the evidence in our faces.  As the old saying goes, "Shit or get off the pot."  As for the drama, I have gotten to the age where I don't want more drama in my life.  What I want is comfort and tranquility. 

I still say that we don't have a two-party system in this country, system being the operative word here.  Of course, we have political parties, but there is no system about it, and there is certainly no law or rule that limits the number of parties to two.  There are laws and rules that govern the conduct of parties, varying slightly from state to state.  There are also laws and rules governing the use of automobiles and firearms, but by no stretch of the imagination could you say that we have an automobile or gun system in this country. 

Speaking of guns, I see that the Senate passed some new gun laws while the Supreme Court overthrew some others.  Sounds like a break-even day to me, and at my age I can't ask for much more than that. 

so many topics this morning

 See now that's what I have been saying about the Jan 6 Hearings, unlike the impeachment shows which consisted mostly of senators making little speeches, these hearings are full of drama.  Not too long ago Beagles was complaining that most things he can't see for himself and has to listen to other people tell him about it and here he has a chance to witness the hearings live and direct and he chooses not to in favor of listening to other people, who I might add are steering him very wrong if they are telling him that nothing much is going on.

Has Old Dog considered that maybe his computer is becoming sentient?  Maybe those opening windows are like baby computer crying out for something and those strange characters are baby talk.  Maybe if he were to speak to it gently like a mother it could pick up on his cadences and learn to speak English.

The founding fathers did not want a party system, but bam there it was in four or eight years because it is just a natural outcome like mold growing on your corn muffins that you let sit too long in a closed box.  I thought it worked fine when Obama got elected (it could have given him more congressmen though so that we could have real socialized medicine instead of the hodgepodge we have today which is still much better than the republican alternative which was nothing, oh, and tax cuts for the rich, because everything is better when the fatcats are happier.

I think things started going south when LBJ passed the voting rights act which he knew down the road would lose the south for the democrats, and was accelerated when Nixon chose the southern strategy, and the tea partiers, with their no compromise attitude and their silly hats pushed it right to the edge of the cliff.  And then along came Trump, and really what kind of system would ever work with that jerk in power? 

We do get that cooling effect in Chicago and cooler by the lake is how the weatherman closes his forecast, but when Mother Nature sends those westerly blasts across the plains the lake might as well be where the Atlantic Ocean is.

The party was cancelled for the first time in its forty some years in 2020.  It came roaring back in the covid lull of summer of 2021 when suddenly it looked like we had it licked and the engineers and the passengers on the train and the people in the station and oh hell everybody you met on the street were smiling and high fiving each other.  Then along came omricon. Which I think is about beat, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have been dropping for months.  Well how come all those people in the news are getting it?  My Champaign friend says what is going on is that everybody is getting it but it is so mild that nobody notices.  Those famous people get tested all the time and that's why they are in the papers.  Of course that doesn't mean some new variant won't be stepping out of the wings.

So  I will be heading south on the 3rd.  Oh, and I will be taking down my show on the first so if Old Dog wants to see what may be my last show he might want to amble some blocks south before then.

It's Not Really a System

 "I will say this, though: after the last five years I can safely conclude that the two-party system doesn't work anymore." - Old Dog

I have heard people refer to the "Two-Party System" all my life, but truth be known, there ain't no sucha thing.  There is no mention of political parties in the U.S. Constitution, but that doesn't mean they weren't invented yet.  Political parties certainly existed at the time the Constitution was written, but the Founding Fathers chose not to make any of them an official government agency, which was probably a good thing.   There are all sorts of rules and regulations concerning political parties, mostly at the state level, but I am not aware of any state that limits the number of them to two.  Michigan categorizes them as "major" and "minor" parties, depending on how many votes they got in the last election.  If more people voted for the Libertarians than either the Republicans or the Democrats, the Libertarians would be promoted to major party status in the next election.  That doesn't mean, however, that one of the others would necessarily be demoted to minor party status.  I don't know what the current threshold is, but if all three parties exceeded it, there would then be three major parties in Michigan.  

We've had some hot weather this year, but nothing like what they are getting Down Below.  I think it has a lot to do with the Jet Stream.  We are usually on the cold side of it.  It may shift north of us on occasion, but it doesn't stay there long before shifting back.  Then there's the lake effect, not the one that brings the snow, the other lake effect.  As the sun rises in the morning, it heats the air over the land faster than the air over the water.  This warm air then rises, allowing the cooler air over the water to drift in and replace it.  I'm not sure why you don't get that in Chicago, but I think it has something to do with all that concrete and asphalt covering the ground.

I read somewhere that this January 6 committee doesn't intend to prosecute anybody as a result of their findings.  So, what do they intend to do with all this information besides preempting my favorite TV sit-com?  Has anything new been discovered, or are they just re-hashing, all the stuff we've been hearing for the last year and a half?

Ghost in the machine

Hope y'all had a fine summer solstice, and now the days will be getting shorter again.  Tempus fugit, eh?

Even though I've been avoiding the news I must admit that the hearings that are going on are quite entertaining.  Tomorrow should be a doozy; I read that the British guy who was filming the transition period is going to testify.  Should be fun.

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So, instead of watching the news I've been going back through the Institute archives and reading about the hot topics of days gone by.  I've got most of the stuff in a huge text file so I can easily find stuff; just do a keyword search and see what comes up.

There is a lot of stuff to peruse and the quality of writing is such that I'm jumping in and out of rabbit holes.  A lot of food for thought and I'm in no hurry to draw any conclusions, I'm enjoying the process too much.

I will say this, though: after the last five years I can safely conclude that the two party system doesn't work anymore.

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There have been some strange computer problems on my end, probably hardware related but I can't track it down.  There is a ghost in my machine that has taken over the keyboard but it comes and goes.  It's like a demon is pressing keys without my input; I'll watch an open Notepad window fill up with thousands of characters, like a period, tilde, bracket, or a letter.  Hundreds of them, and then a pause, and then hundreds more.  Sometimes the characters change, sometimes they don't.  It comes and goes and is not predictable and would be entertaining if it wasn't so frustrating.  I'll be entering some text and then the field fills up with equal signs and keeps going.  The only way out of it is to smack the keys in the lower left of the keyboard, like the control, alt, function, shift, and maybe the spacebar.  That usually gets it to stop.  I suspect that it's simply a keyboard issue, maybe some gunk in there somewhere.

I've run a bunch of programs that check for viruses, spyware, and malware and I think I'm fine on that front.  The most puzzling thing is that it doesn't happen on a regular basis.  The machine can go for days with no problems and then it's hours of headaches, like today.  I was doing a text search and then dozens of new Notepad windows started opening up.  WTF?, I ask myself.  And just now the cursor started going down the page, as if someone kept hitting the return key.  A few judicious smacks and I'm back in business.

The computer is a laptop, and that's the keyboard that is giving me the flux and requires the occasional attitude adjustment.  I'm typing on a nice, big Microsoft keyboard that's plugged into a USB port, real keys with plenty of travel and a dream to type on.  Not as good as some of the old IBM keyboards but whole lots better than the crappy keyboards you see today.  Okay, I'm done venting.

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It's nearly time for Uncle Ken's sojourn downstate for Fourth of July festivities, isn't it?  I know he keeps in contact with his old (and getting older, ha, ha) chums from his University days and Covid has screwed things up lately.  Maybe this year things will be back on track.