I often write letters to the editor, they sometimes actually print them. I usually write because of something I read that was either really stupid or really smart - or sometimes they are a combination of both. Anyway, these are a couple of my May 2020 letters one of which was printed and the other is still to be determined. First one is about the Supreme Court considering a case regarding Electors in the Electoral College (one of the greater mistakes in the Constitution.) SCOTUS and Faithless Electors There is some irony to the Strib news story about the SCOTUS case,the "unfaithful electors." There are many misconceptions about the electoral college. Among them is that electors are somehow associated with political parties. There is no mention of parties in the constitution and, in fact, the founding fathers hoped there wouldn’t be any parties. Fools! And no, the Electoral College (not it’s real name) wasn’t created to help the small states or protect us from big sta...
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No Small Government Conservatives in a Foxhole I think we all know that there are going to be many changes in our society and work lives due to the coronavirus. Some seem obvious like more people regularly working from home, most people continuing to use online delivery for a lot of household items and maybe online education and telemedicine will become more mainstream. These will all have large impacts on the economy and depending on your job, some good and some bad. Also on our personal lives - hello frugality, savings accounts and family dinners. There are certain to be some unexpected changes as well. There is a famous saying in the military that there are no atheists in a foxhole, meaning that when one’s life is on the line even the most devout non-believers suddenly become believers. I wonder if a version of that will occur in our regard to the government after this mess. Perhaps we will find that there are no small government conservatives in a pandemic fox...
A re-post but a damn good one if I do say so myself. Now I know how the Inca’s may have felt. Or the Hittites. Or even those stone worshipping people on New Guinea – sheesh. The life and society I have lived is being buried. First, you take away a man’s beer like Budweiser and replace it with Moose Drool or something equally stupid. Then you make him wear lycra shorts and a helmet to go for a bike ride. Isn’t that enough? Apparently not and now they’ve gone too far; they’re stealing my childhood food. Listen to this (From Sept 15 Star Tribune Food section): ” Delicately spiced pork shoulder defies it’s bologna shape; its thinly sliced, warmed and slightly scorched on the stove, cloaked with Gruyere and sharp cheddar and tucked into a toasted and buttered roll.” All for only $11. This is the modern replacement for the good old bologna, Wonder Bread and chunk - of - cheddar cheese sandwich. Really. First, if you even know what Gruyere cheese is I don’t want an...
Pandemic TV Viewing Echo in the Canyon Turn Turn Turn The Byrds We finally got around to watching "Echo in the Canyon," the marvelous show about all the musicians and music that cross pollinated in LA and specifically in the Laurel Canyon area of the Hollywood Hills in the early 60's. It opens with those wonderful 6 opening chords from the song above . . . and bang zoom I’m a senior in high school! Why do you think that is? This dude has an answer: "It has long been held that, just as objective time is dictated by clocks, subjective time (barring external influences) aligns to physiological metronomes. Music creates discrete temporal units but ones that do not typically align with the discrete temporal units in which we measure time. Rather, music embodies (or, rather, is embodied within ) a separate, quasi-independent concept o...
After the Storm Well I’ll be damned. It seems like it was just the other day that I was just sitting around with my buddies wondering if we would ever get through this mess and what would happen after. Now, here we are, a couple years later already (time really does fly when you get to be a certain age) and it turns out all of us were a little right and also a little wrong. Okay, a lot wrong. I'm shocked! Despite all those folks hoarding toilet paper and buying guns we made it without total collapse. It was touch and go for a while there around the time of 2020 election – a little mass hysteria going on there - but in the end it all worked out. Not everything is going well, of course, it never does. For example, the economy – and my IRA – still haven’t recovered but it seems to be getting better. Also, a lot of jobs never came back because a lot of industries never came back so there's tons of change there - can you say too many ...
Notes from a Prisoner in Solitary Confinement So here we are, trapped in our own homes – the horror of it all! You’d think that a guy who has been retired for a few years would be comfortable with sitting around the house all day and pondering his navel. But no, one of the verities of life is that there’s a big difference between doing things we want to do and things you have to do – even if they’re the same things. Watch something on Netflix? Ha, you can’t make me! Take a nap? Who says?! How about cleaning the closet after 10 years of stalling? Who made you the boss?! (Besides there’s plenty of time for that later.) Have a cocktail? My god, are you nuts, it’s only two o’clock! Oh, well, okay. Luckily, Mrs Dear Leader is very patient with me. In fact, she’s too patient with me – she just ignores me. She ignores my whining about no jelly beans in the house or that I’m tired of washing my freaking hands or that it’s stupid that the golf courses are closed. (Her pet name f...
Are You Essential?
Are You Essential? Known for my gift for understatement let me just say that the coronavirus is really something. To say it is unprecedented would be a similarly redundant understatement. I mean the Spanish Flu in 1918-19 was an equally overwhelming event or so they say (I was pretty young then) but it is a different world and America now. It is impacting pretty much all aspects of human life and almost totally in a bad way. I say almost because one can always come up with something good about even the worst of human events – even if only half of us believe it. And it is safe to say that we are not going out the other end of this thing the same as we came in, especially those of us who are non-essential. It’s an interesting term, non-essential. The kindest definition I could find was “not absolutely necessary.” I hope that makes all you folks whose non-essential businesses were closed feel better. Government workers, on the other hand, are very familiar with this term –...