Labor: To work for something of value
Today is Labor Day in the USA, and while it might have some bad Marxist roots with the early unions, the fact is that it has also evolved into the uglier side of capitalism, which is an orgy of shallow consumerism. Big retail sales of everything from underpants to mattresses to cars, America today is awash in carnival tents and men in top hats and coat tails, barking loudly at the masses to step right up and buy the latest greatest gadget or whatever.
Not too long ago, labor unions played such an important role in American politics (and in British politics, for that matter), that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet knew precisely what Labor Day was about. That most Americans, especially our youth, make little or no mental connection between Labor Day and the people who labor away with their hands and bodies to make things of value for us, for them, is the real take-away meaning of today’s national holiday.
But how could young people know, or older Americans recall, what Labor Day is about if nearly all of our labor has been curiously shipped overseas, and to our enemies, no less? A factory job was the family and church and community- sustaining source of income from the 1930s until about 2000, when the last of our American factories were carefully packaged up and sent to China. Now we have 25 years of no no labor and no factories, just Rust Belt husks of buildings, churches, and communities across the Eastern and Mid-Western USA. No wonder our kids are clueless about Labor Day.
However, our snickering elected officials know precisely what Labor Day is about, because it is still directly relevant to them. These self-anointed elites who seek to dominate all of us use our labor to enrich themselves, through the mis-appropriation and mis-spending of our tax monies. This self-destructive activity happens most and worst in liberal “blue” states run by the Democrat Party, where voters enable single-party rule without the checks and balances of multi-party competition. That this repetitive voting pattern is self-defeating seems not to matter to leftist messianic utopians, whose Big Government god requires nonstop sacrifice and endless cash invested in friendly “businesses”.
Where does this endless cash come from, which enables the extravagant “public servant” aristocracy? YOU.
You labor, pay high taxes on your income, and that tax money is taken for messianic utopian policies, like disproven climate change nonsense, that enriches other blue aristocrats who are invested in these schemes.
Ideally, you, the citizen, pay taxes to the government so the government can pay for services to you, the citizen: Firemen, policemen, public education in math, history, and spelling, public roads, trash pickup, etc. This is the social compact of democratic representative government; you get concrete services in return for relinquishing your own money to the Tax Man.
But when government becomes detached from the symbiotic relationship, and begins doing things for itself, and ignoring the citizen, you have tyranny. This is becoming brutally apparent in Britain, France, and liberal states in America. California is an especially scary place because of how far out of alignment the state government is with the citizenry. No services, but instead illegal migrants, homeless encamped in private front yards, general lawlessness, and the highest of high taxes to boot. Complete breakdown of the social compact between citizen and government, and don’t you dare step out of line.
This failure continues because most of the citizenry continues to vote for a single dominant political party that hates the citizenry. In liberal venues, hating yourself is the greatest of virtue signals, and is highly rewarded with public acclamation. I myself could not live in such an unsustainable and bizarre place. The people there are living off of the banked fumes of once-great capitalist endeavors there, now either departed or departing for Texas, Tennessee, or Florida.
Last week Britain’s highest court ruled that the illegal migrants overwhelming British society – built with citizen labor taxes – have higher value and more rights than the citizens themselves. Such brazen detachment from the long established democratic social compact means the British citizens are now mere money sources, slaves, really, infested by and under the boot heel of a parasitic government and its new stakeholders, the illegals, who contribute nothing and demand everything.
Even the British Union Jack flag is being outlawed on the streets of Britain, because it “offends” the illegal border invaders! Say the “wrong” thing about this, do the “wrong” thing about this, and you actually go to jail. True tyranny, not freedom, not democracy.
Britain is headed to civil war, as any nation would be where the government has turned against the people it is supposed to serve, and upon whose tax-paying largesse the government depends. The same thing is happening here in American blue states, where entrenched single party rule, based on a taxpaying slave-political elite slave owner relationship, is about to be confronted by a fed-up federal government trying to hold the Union together. Something of value worth laboring for, again, as it was in 1861.
This is the meaning of Labor Day today.
Dogs vs. Drones in deer recovery Part 2
So you hit a deer, with an arrow or a bullet, and it ran, and now you want to find it. As is common, the critter crossed paths with you and your sporting weapon late in the day (deer especially move most at dawn and dusk), and now the sun is setting and daylight is fading. Finding the trail and following it is becoming less and less likely. After ten or fifteen minutes of looking for it, the sun is down and all you know is that you have some blood at the initial point of contact. Yes, the deer jumped high, mule kicked, and tucked its tail as it ran, all of which are good signs of a solid hit. But, you don’t have much of a blood trail and no light to follow one, even if you could find the spoor.
Archery hunters commonly back off at this point, and either wait an hour or two before resuming the search in earnest, using strong lights and extra eyes from friends, or they just leave the site altogether. Returning in the morning provides better light for trailing, and the good likelihood that the deer will have run only a short distance, bedded down because it is wounded and does not feel pressured, and then expired.
But what if you are worried about coyotes eating your prize overnight? And what if you think the hit was really good, and the ground cover is just so thick and difficult that there is a good chance the deer is lying dead just fifty yards away, and yet tough to see from where it was hit? Faced with these prospects, a lot of hunters will go after the deer, good blood trail or not, good visibility, or not.
Comes the question, what is the best way to find this wounded and probably dead deer: Should you stagger about in thick thorns in the dark, losing half your own blood and clothing in the process? Or should you call in the cavalry?
Today, calling in the cavalry means either getting a deer tracking dog (www.unitedbloodtrackers.org here in central PA), or getting a drone operator. Using either dogs or drones is not necessarily permitted in all states. After a ton of political wrangling over a twenty or thirty year period, Pennsylvania only got search dogs for finding wounded deer less than ten years ago, while for hundreds of years many southern states still use dogs to chase deer to hunters. So one state is worried about disturbing the hunting woods at all, while another state is OK with basically setting the woods on fire… for hunting.
Today, using drones to find wounded or expired deer in Pennsylvania is unsettled business. In fact, it is a mess. Here, too.
That is because the PA Game Commission worries about the misuse of drones for unethically looking for wildlife to hunt (gaining an artificial advantage), for herding and moving wildlife, etc. Fair enough, but what about the states that do allow drone recovery? Are those states just made up of unethical slobs who could never do a good job hunting or managing wild game?
And what about all of the cool videos online that show guys using drones to successfully find expired deer in the most improbable places that would have never occurred to even the most experienced band of searchers, or that would not have been accessible to a dog and its handler?
No question about it, recovery drones are both cool new shiny technology, and largely successful.
Deer dogs have their noses and the guidance of their experienced owners, while drones have infrared and thermal cameras that can go over a lot of territory quickly, at night, and often see a warm carcass through cover while the hunter simply stands and watches the video feed. Drones can often do the hours of work of a tracking dog in just a few minutes. On the other hand, dogs can pick up a two day old scent and follow it to the long-cold carcass, something a drone cannot do, unless the carcass is out in the open. In which case it will be but a pile of fresh bones.
But there are real concerns about drones, like spooking and pushing out an entire herd of deer, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, or looking too soon and unnecessarily pushing off the wounded animal to even farther distances, maybe over property lines. Some drone operators mount big flat screen TVs in their vehicles, so the drone search becomes less about recovery and more about entertainment and snooping on trophy deer at night. Some states require that the hunter who wounded the animal not be able to see the drone search results, to eliminate a possible inducement to cheat (like going after another, bigger, animal in the dark).
Of course, in places with big swamps, pythons, and alligators, a drone might be preferred!
One suggestion that Central Pennsylvania tracking dog handler Vicky Church has: Get deer/ game animal recovery drone operators certified. Not just by the FAA, but also by the PGC. Make sure that drone recovery operators are behaving ethically and legally. It is hard to argue with some version of this, even though I am philosophically opposed to any more regulation on our already far overburdened society.
Vicky says the deer dog people had to do it, so the drone people should, too. Hard to argue with her.
Hunting is supposed to be fun, and no wounded wild game animal should be abandoned to the coyotes just because search options were artificially limited by over-anxious regulators. My opinion is drones should be allowed for finding wounded wild game. But let’s face it, it is a lot more fun to watch a dog work the scent and the field.
Nothing beats the happy look of a smiling dog, or the people with it.
Wild Game recovery dog handler, Vicky Church. Photo by Tom, a hunter who benefited from Vicky’s help
Vicky and her dog trailing a wounded buck. Photo by Tom
No way a human is going to do this easily or well. Oh, many of us have tried it, without success. A drone might achieve this, if the cover is not too thick
Memes, memes, memes
seeing is…tasting?
I like to cook. In fact, about 42 years ago I was trained by Andy Zangrilli as a cook and chef, at his Highway Pizza and The Deli restaurants in State College. I am proud of this experience, because Andy took a doofus 18 year old kid and gave him (me) a valuable skill. To this very day, you can put me in a kitchen heretofore unknown to me, with a wide variety of ingredients, spices, herbs, whatever, and, assuming the kitchen has the necessary pots, pans, utensils, gas stove, etc, I will make you a meal that you will at the very least greatly enjoy, if not go crazy for. Spices are a big part of being able to impart certain flavors and nuances to anything we cook, boil, broil, simmer, etc., and thus an essential part of my cooking.
Thank you, Andy.
So as I still greatly enjoy cooking, spices are still my thing, and I use them liberally in almost every dish I make, sweet or savory. Several days ago I made an applesauce from our backyard’s sweet crabapples and granny smith apples. With very little sugar added, it needed something to keep its tartness from making people cry. And so some nutmeg and cinnamon were added, which made it “perfect” according to one shnarfling admirer. She could not stop eating it. Dad added a dollop of real maple syrup. Mom ate it straight.
Somehow over the past year or so, our home’s spice drawer has become ever more populated by bottles with odd, capricious, whimsical names. These names contrast like the Himalayas to the Appalachians, with the staid old “Paprika,” “Garlic Powder,” “Thyme,” “Rosemary,” “Basil” and so on. I do not recognize these things. Other than ketchup and pickle flavored spices, few of these newcomer spice bottle labels describe or even hint at what taste or flavor is expected from their contents.
Green Goddess? Is this a new superheroine? Everything but the Elote stumped me, because despite an A+ English vocabulary, I have no idea what an elote is. Which pisses me off and makes me think I don’t want to know. It must be useless. Aglio Olio? A spiced dry oil in a bottle…not OK, but rather weird and trying too hard to be different.
Multipurpose Umami sounds like a versatile American Indian tribe. And in my friend’s spice drawer in Denver last month, I encountered a huge number of similarly named mystery spices and flavorings that all emoted colors and activities, which in my 100% male brain do not connect to anything related to flavor or aroma. And in fact, it is his wife who has amassed this enormous collection of verbal creativity in a bottle.
I don’t think my friend uses anything but salt and pepper in his foods.
Most or even all of these appear to come from Trader Joe’s, that famous venue for posing, posturing, preening shoppers in tight yoga pants. And I think that is the ticket to understanding what is going on here with these weirdly mis-named bottles of flavorings: Girls/ women/ ladies/ female humans apparently are willing to have a fling with flavor. They are willing to just try something new and unexpected in their food experiences, because apparently the lack of rote routine meeting known expectations is stimulating.
Men, think about this.
Think hard.
If women are sprinkling a bottle called “Green Goddess” on their food, then what does that tell us about these women’s food experience? About how it makes them feel, like a goddess…
I am going to sign off here, stumped as I am. I confess, I am just a man; I can change, I suppose; if I have to (thank you to the Red Green Show).
Gotta go add some more of my home grown basil to the home grown tomato sauce I have simmering away on the stove right now. I know it will end up tasting delicious, because there is a nice linear straight-ass line from the basil to the flavor outcome. No mystery involved here, and I like it that way.
Mystery flavors in a bottle appeal to someone I am not, but I remain intrigued
Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.
The drowning men of Europe
Most of Europe is drowning.
Drowning in debt they cannot afford, drowning in socialist economics like climate alarmism, drowning in power-mad authoritarianism that backwardly pits governments against the citizenry, drowning in cultural dissolution from uncontrolled mass migration by foreign people from failed nations who have zero interest in becoming European, but who simply want whatever quality of life goodies Europe can offer them for free.
Everyone around the world is watching this slow motion train wreck happen, and the worse it gets, the more the drowning governments refuse to change their policies to save themselves. This is the price of worshiping power and holding onto it at all costs. Drowning is the eventual cost.
Only a handful of European countries have resisted this drowning, namely Poland, Hungary, Russia. Border enforcement is the first and best method to ensure that Poland, Hungary, Russia remain themselves, and control their expenditures and streets. Russia obviously is a separate subject due to its invasion of Ukraine, but the fact is, Russia is still Russian, one of the greatest cultures in world history, in terms of art, literature, music, dance. There are no bongo drums at the Bolshei, yet, nor likely ever.
Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany are especially fraught, the water lapping at their lips, with their native citizens starting to engage in open street warfare with the invaders. But these same governments have strangely taken the side of the invaders, who do not pay taxes, commit endless violence, and are an unbearable financial burden. Censorship and repression of the native citizens for merely speaking about the lawless invasion is now common policy, so the governments can artificially, not legitimately, hold onto power. Everyone can see that confrontations between fed-up, repressed citizens and their corrupt governments are inevitable. And yet, the repression only tightens.
Governments in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France, especially, seem to be laser focused on Must…Hold…On…To… Power. At any cost. And so they continue to drown, going under from the weight of their increasing mistakes.
What do drowning people do, but grab onto anything or anybody around to keep from going under for the last time. A drowning person will pull down every rescuer with them, due to mindless panic and a primitive attempt at self preservation.
When I was young, I was a Water Safety Instructor. WSIs taught Red Cross lifesaving, and we certified lifeguards. I signed only those Red Cross lifeguard certification cards that I believed were truly earned. At any waterfront or pool, we WSIs were automatically the senior pro in charge, and I conducted many drills to prepare and train active duty lifeguards at many different lakes, pools, and beach fronts.
And I did rescue drowning people, many. Almost every time the drowning person would scratch me, claw at me, try to stand on me, in an attempt to climb on top of me so their lungs could reach the air. It is a dangerous moment trying to rescue a drowning person. Both the swimmer and the life saver can go down together, locked in a fatal embrace driven by panic.
The drowning men of Europe are doing the same thing right now as does a dying swimmer. They are all wildly splashing away at their own people, while trying to find something, anything, anyone, to prop themselves up onto. Here are some of the public policies the drowning men of Europe are doing that will in fact only hasten their death:
A) More unlimited mass migration, censoring and even jailing critics
B) More climate alarmism nonsense, censoring and even jailing critics
C) Siding with Islamic jihadis, the worst enemies of Western democracy, and thus pledging to “recognize” a new state of “palestine” in boundaries no one knows, under undefined conditions, with inevitably violent results. France, Britain, Spain, Ireland, and Germany are the leading proponents of rewarding jihadi terrorism by giving it another official place to call home. Just like they did with the new jihadi rulers of Syria.
That this new country would be created in the middle of an active war zone, not after the conclusion of a war as has been done in the past, does not daunt these drowning men. That it would be run by the avowed opponents of everything the drowning men used to stand on, does not daunt them. They are simply willing to sacrifice Israel and Middle East peace if it just buys them a few more minutes of life above the water closing over their heads.
I think Americans are going to end up riding in and saving Europe a third time, because the inevitable results of all of these self destructive policies by the drowning men is going to be that Europe goes under. And when Europe goes fully under water, all hell will break loose between the native Europeans and their would-be replacement invaders.
America is not going to stand by and let nuclear-armed England, France, and Germany become run by jihadis. Just ain’t gonna happen. We didn’t let Hitler drown Europe, and we sure won’t let the Mega Hitler jihadis do it, either.
Proving once again that Europe was always the rough prototype, and that America was the perfected implement, God’s gift to humankind.
A Day for Mourning…Doves
Satiricist + pianist + comedian-ist + mathematician-ist + Harvard-ist from a long distant past when a degree from racist + fakist + indoctrinationist Harvard used to mean something Tom Lehrer died the other day. He was 97 years old, and apparently laughing and humor were good for him, gave him longevity. Or maybe long life was due to him not having kids. Or being married…
Tom Lehrer’s silly music was a fixture on a radio show I was fixated on as a kid, from age nine to probably nineteen, called the Doctor Demento Show. This very silly, often demented, and highly entertaining show was the audio version of Mad Magazine, also a fixture of my mis-spent youth. My youth happened at a time when kids did actually read things to entertain ourselves. There were no videos, no constant and endless television shows, or, the horror, mind-evaporating video games. Mad Magazine was low brow humor, and forcefully informed two generations of American boys about the man-eating birds, killer bees, and fake female breasts available for only ninety-nine cents.
Aside from being chock full of hilarious and acidly cruel parody, long before Hollywooders started taking themselves seriously, Mad Magazine also had ads for mail order “variety” stores. For a pittance, these stores would sell kids fake vomit that was sure to make your mom jump sky high when strategically placed on her mother’s Persian rug. Also sold were palm buzzers, whoopie cushions sure to embarrass your mother’s friends over for tea, and toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin.
Toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin, you ask?
Yes, America was once such a cool and free country that little kids could buy through the mail from demented strangers things soaked in genuine high explosive in order to terrorize family pets and grandpas smoking their pipes or cigars. These explosive toothpick slivers came in an innocuous, small, round steel tin, and their gist was for demented youngsters to slip one into the end of a cigarette, cigar, or the stem of grandpa’s pipe, and then sit back and mock the unfortunate recipient of the inevitable explosion. Just the touch of a match or lighter flame was needed to set them off. They were truly explosive.
For one summer I did indeed use these things against my dad and my Papa Morris, to my great mirth and to their unforgiving unhappiness. But I also received my just punishment one day as I was running around in our yard, as mindless summer-minded boys used to do, and damned if the mere friction of my leg movement did not set off that whole tin of explosive toothpicks in my pocket. The loud report sounded like a gunshot, and the immediate pain was real. So I dropped to the ground, yelling “I’m hit, I’m hit!”
Not until I realized not another soul was anywhere near me or our home or our twenty-five acres surrounded by unbroken farmland and forest did I begin to explore the perfectly round hole in my pants. I had not received friendly fire from a neighbor kid, nor had my dad finally tried to take me out. So the cause had to be closer to home, like what the hell was I carrying in my pocket.
My thigh skin was badly bruised, already discolored and puffed up from the injury. And then I found it, the bottom half of the steel tin. Lodged halfway through the fabric in the pocket of my dungarees, it had been driven with great force against my body. Its lid had also been blown off with great force, through the fabric of my dungarees, and was lying somewhere out on our “lawn” as war shrapnel.
For decades I kept that little tin bottom in a small cedar box where I kept other childhood keepsakes, like old stone Indian arrowheads and beads I found in the tilled fields around our home. This little round piece of non-descript light-blue metal symbolized to me all that a boyhood in America used to be or could be: Free, foolish, exploratory, mischievous, silly, dumb, and filled with painful and sometimes near-death learning experiences. In a word, awesome.
Poor kids today have no idea how much fun we kids of yesteryear had. Yes, we had the Doctor Demento radio show, Tom Lehrer songs, and the scandalously mature kid reading material, Mad Magazine. But we also had access to small amounts of explosives, and dirt bikes, and often firearms. And whatever we did that did not permanently maim or kill us made us stronger and more interested in chemistry than any kind of textbook or classroom experiment could achieve. (I once blew off my eyebrows and eyelashes, the huge fireball also leaving my face an unnatural and alarming red color. Upon arriving at home late for dinner, my mother merely tossed my plate of food in front of me, wordless and by then immune to frighteneing answers and smart enough to no longer ask what the hell happened to you).
So, back to Mad Magazine, its crazy ads, and the related Doctor Demento Show, described on complete bullsh*t weakipedia as “Barret Eugene Hansen (born April 2, 1941),[1] also known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and unusual recordings from the dawn of the phonograph to present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California.”
From 1971 until, yes, college, I listened to the Doctor Demento Show. As a kid this was done quietly at night with the crusty old 1960s radio in my bedroom, after my parents had declared “lights out.” In high school, I listened to the radio show along with one or two other misfits also disinclined to be serious about homework. We sat there in silence, occasionally laughing hysterically. In college, I was joined by even more misfits, but by then we also had beer, hard alcohol, and would sing along together to our favorite silly songs spun by Doctor Demento.
Songs like Fish Heads, and of course every single song by Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer’s songs were a mainstay of every Doctor Demento show, and sometimes his funny lyrics were woven into a Mad Magazine article. Adults found his song about pollution poignant and timely, as everyone knew by then that just about every summer the Cuyahoga River would actually catch on fire because of the wild amounts of combustible pollution dumped into it by unchecked industry (note to today’s young people: Water is not supposed to burn). Whereas urbanites, already surrounded by pollution, warped by it, dying early from it, creating it, and imagining themselves immune to it, were much more entertained by Lehrer’s song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
Because who the hell doesn’t hate urban pigeons?
Tom Lehrer, comedian, humorist, satiricist, and core of the beloved Doctor Dementow Show
My Eighth Grade school portrait, alarmingly alike to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, of What, Me Worry? fame.
Trump & Obama weird symmetries
Watching this strange symmetry unfold, again, where Barack Hussein Obama and his senior law enforcement and national security staff illegally concocted a hoax about Donald Trump and Russia in 2017, and where these same people, including Obama, have now been referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution, because no one is above the law …. but, liberals tell me, this holding big name law breakers accountable “is just as wrong as what they did to Trump.”
This morally relativistic approach to the rule of law, which is really no approach at all, is repeated by US senator Adam Schiff and NY AG Letitia James, both of whom apparently committed mortgage fraud. Both James and Schiff say that them being prosecuted for breaking the law is just political warfare, the exact UNFAIR lawfare they themselves inflicted on President Trump.
Somehow this shallow claim and admission of their own former wrongdoing supposedly exonerates their actual lawbreaking. And for partisan Democrats, it is sufficient. People operating in sound bites don’t need anything more than sound bites.
As I was just told by a liberal who expressed his own opinion to me in person, “… but I don’t want to talk about it.” Apparently my own opinion was not desired
Looks less like what liberals want, and more like liberals can’t talk about politics with people who differ with them, because liberals are unable to engage in the critical thinking and analysis that is the core of any debate. If it is not gently spoon-fed, and concurred with, all liberal systems shut down and go into the fetal position.
And so, the same people who said nothing about the endless lawless lawfare attacks on Trump are now saying, in effect, “Some people are in fact above the law.”
In the past, Republicans melted at the first hint of liberal resistance. Republicans would say “It’s not worth fighting about. We will get them next time. We can’t have these fights getting in the way of getting things done in Washington,” and other similar spineless cop-outs.
However, there is a rage among the GOP base at the endless Democrat lawlessness and the endless lack of accountability for it. That rage is forcing the GOPe to at least make noises about holding liberal law breakers accountable. It is possible that the old asymmetry that for fifty years has marked the difference between Democrat and Republican accountability is about to break, and boomerang back onto the Democrats’ favorite sound bite, “No one is above the law.”
If the DOJ does bring charges against Comey, Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, Obama, Stzrok, Schiff, and James et al, it will mark a turn for the better, where parity, symmetry, and the rule of law are actually equally applied to all Americans. If America is about anything, it is about the equal application of the law to all of us. No one is above the law.
Re NPR & PBS
Looking like far-left wing opposition research and partisan propaganda outlets NPR, PBS, and CPB are finally going to stop having American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars supporting them. Good! I mean, why not give taxpayer money to the National Rifle Association, too? The NRA has been around since 1857, making it America’s oldest civil rights organization. The NRA certainly qualifies for getting lots of American taxpayer money, if NPR and PBS do.
Fact is, the entire world has changed since the 1970s, and public funding of radio and television programs goes back decades before that. By the time of Sesame Street and its band of cute fuzzy monsters talking about racial harmony, correct English spelling, and counting numbers correctly, the tide of technology was already turning in other directions. More TV and radio channels were becoming available every year. By the 1990s, the Internet was born, access to all sorts of programming and information became 24/7, and NPR, PBS, and CPB had gone hard left and become fully an arm of just one political party (not the GOP).
The marketplace of ideas and information had changed as radically as the industrial revolution had changed hand labor and home crafts, demand for government funded programming had greatly diminished, and yet NPR, PBS, and CPB were fully addicted to big wads of free taxpayer money. They insisted they were still relevant, and also wanted to be independent of taxpayers, but still getting our money. Which seems like a strange asymmetry. Usually if you get money from someone, you are accountable to them.
Now, bills are passing in Congress to withdraw all taxpayer money from NPR, PBS, and CPB, and it appears this will actually come to pass. This is a just and good outcome. However, we cannot forget the intellectual property of NPR, PBS, and CPB that was also created with public funding. Things like trademarks, logos, copyrights are all intellectual property that belongs to We, The People American citizens.
It is not as if NPR, PBS and CPB can get scads of private cash and continue on with their far left attacks on American culture and politics. No. They will have to relinquish the use of all of their identifying logos and trademarks. They have no claim on this public property. Oh, NPR can go ahead and do it is whatever they want to do, but they are going to have to come up with new names and new logos. It’s not my problem if they are undistinguished and unidentifiable in the marketplace.
It is almost as if they really did need that public funding after all, despite telling Americans for the past thirty years that our tax money was only a small amount of their overall budget. I think they were most aware that removing the public money also meant removing all of the other public taxpayer investments made there over the years, too.
It is almost as if without all the taxpayer money, NPR and PBS will really in effect cease to exist…Welp, too bad, NPR. So long Screwy, see ya in Saint Louie!
Sorry, that won’t work either, because that’s a Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny line, already taken, and you NPR people are going to have to use something else. Good luck, don’t take a wrong turn at Albequerque!
