At least, in an honest election.
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Well, I dunno--maybe if the election was held in 1946 and the candidates were George Washington and Adolf Hitler. But they were both dead by then.
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Eh? "What about the 'no politics' rule on holidays?" Today is a political holiday, so screw it. Besides, this blog is not a democracy (or even a representative republic) but is, to borrow a phrase from Limbaugh, a benevolent dictatorship. Translation: these are all rules I made for myself, so I can break them when I want to. But I'm not breaking the rule here, since I am commenting about the holiday itself.
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Ever since Thursday's festivities--cleaning the patio, chopping up some firewood--my lower back has been extremely troublesome. Aching like crazy unless I'm lying down, very stiff, sore, etcetera. Argh etc.
However, muscle relaxant and ibuprofen help a great deal. The former indicates that I strained some muscles. It'd be nice if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of this dang gut I've got on me, because I have a feeling that my spare tire is part of the problem, but that's not going to happen.
This office chair of mine certainly is not helping matters. It's crapped out and I can't recline in it; I have to sit upright as if I were sitting on a stool. Back no like. So one of the things I'm pondering is the purchase of a new chair, one rated for my oversized frame that will not die as quickly as this one did--but it's going to cost a bit more than this one did. Like, maybe four times as much. *cringe*
I spend most of my free time at the computer; I ought to have a good chair for it.
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Friday I ordered a new switch for the office.
The old switch was not giving me any trouble, but with the basement now being in a semi-usable state, I want to run an Ethernet cable down there. Problem: switch has no free ports. Solution: new switch with more ports. Amazon had a gigabit ethernet switch with eight ports for just under $22, shipped, so I jumped on it and wired it in as soon as it arrived (yesterday). The 5-port switch that it replaced can then go downstairs, and I think you get the rest of this equation.
Soon enough we'll have the whole shack wired for Ethernet. Just in time for, uh...I don't know.
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Declaration of Independence was signed 245 years ago. Seeing the state of the union that resulted, after that time period had elapsed, would likely send the signatories into apoplexy.
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We're back to warm and muggy weather. Well, summer, right?
Corn loves the hot and humid and rainy weather, such that most of the places that it's planted, it's hip high by, well, today. "Knee-high" is the target, so it's doing better than usual--at least, so far.
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Went to Menards to buy a ceiling fan for the master bedroom; and while we were there, I also got a cheap leaf blower. $35, "Worx" brand, but it made short work of getting all the debris off the front porch. A bit noisier than a broom but so much easier on my back. Two-prong plug, though, the kind where you have to take the extension cord's end and fit it to recessed plug in handle, so you can't use a 3-prong extension cord. I do have a 2-prong extension cord but it's approximately 15 miles long and isn't on a cord reel, so I need to rewrap it when I use it. Simplest solution there is to get another cord reel, I guess.
Still, despite being cheap it seems to work well enough. I will probably have to use it on the patio before we start lighting off spinny fireworks, but that shouldn't take too long.
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So there is this show on which various celebrities trace their roots, and I most recently saw a black man discover that his great-great-whatever grandfather was white and owned slaves.
"I need to sit down," he said, upon discovering this.
No reparations for you, you racist! Your ancestor owned slaves, which makes you a racist and a bigot, and you need to give all your money to--huh?
I am being informed that his skin color is officially a get out of reparations free card. Further, because he is black, he is still owed reparations for slavery even though his ancestors owned slaves.
Well, that's how it is.
The really neat thing about that story, though, is that it proves just how murky the whole issue of slavery actually is. There were plenty of black slaveowners in antebellum America, and I doubt they treated their slaves any better than the white slaveowners did. Further, an awful lot of white people were also slaves, particularly in the colonial period; that's very carefully not talked about because it muddies the water, which is already fairly turgid. Or else it's lampshaded with talk about "indentured servitude". But read Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" to understand how indentured servitude can be abused to keep a man in bondage approximately forever; and even if there's an expiration date on your slavery, you're still a slave. It is better only by degree; just because your suffering has an end date, after which you're free, you still endure the suffering.
There's been a lot of talk about how slavery is racist, but there wouldn't have been nearly as many black slaves if other blacks hadn't sold their captured enemies to slave traders. Haley's Roots makes a big show about Kinta Kunte being captured by slavers, but I'd bet the fact is that Kunta Kinte was captured by a rival tribe and sold. I mean, why would you bother risking life and limb to capture someone, when there are people already caught and bound, and you can buy them for a pittance of what they'd sell for in the New World?
And the other thing to bear in mind is that the majority of black slaves went to the islands in the Caribbean, not to the United States. (Or to the english colonies before there was a US.)
...but of course all I'm doing is shouting at the wind.
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I've seen a lot of talk about a "preference cascade" and this post from Dio's Workshop echoes a lot of what I've been seeing:
All the government and media negativity isn't because of reality: its because of fear.I'm not forming my opinion that the ruling class is scared ex nihilo, but from reading a couple of dozen other right-wing commentors and bloggers. The feeling among them is that our government--or, rather, the people who are running it--is scared out of its britches by the rumbling coming from the general populace.
They are losing the power of top down control and they fear for their 'power'. And I'm certian more than a few of them are in fear of the truth coming out.
They are scared as hell and are slinging the narrative around hoping to beat the entire human species back into submission. But the genie is out of the bottle and the only way to get it back in is to smash the very things built that got us here. The infrastructure of power distribution, world wide communications and information access.
Look: our elites believe themselves to be the smartest people in the room, if not ever. However, the fact that their self-evaluation is wrong--that it grossly exaggerates their intellect--does not make them stupid. And it does not take much information to demonstrate even to a mid-wit that their perch atop the pile has become precarious.
The fact that every time one of theirs gets a position of power, gun sales rise dramatically--the fact that Obama (and now Biden) have been the best gun salesmen in history has to have given them pause. The ammunition shortage is due to all those new gun owners wanting to have a good supply of ammunition. Four hundred million guns in the hands of three hundred and twenty million people, a bit less than 1.3 guns per person--and they know it's not that thinly spread, that it's probably closer to a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio, particularly because there were a lot of guns already in the hands of citizens before the federal gun laws began to appear, and that a vast majority of the people who have all those guns do not vote democrat and will not peacefully surrender their firearms.
Imagine 1-2-3 Waco events per week--the rank-and-file commies love the idea, but you have too many of those and people start to shoot FBI agents on sight as a precaution, rather than risking having their kids incinerated.
Someone pointed out that the congresscritters were nearly shitting their pants on January 6, while the press covering the event wasn't, even though the so-called "insurrection" was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the FBI and antifa. A lot of them would not have been told of the plan, and so they must have believed that it was real, that Americans had finally had enough of their horseshit. They knew they were rigging an election--even the republicans--and they thought that they were facing a real revolt.
That's why the republicans dropped their opposition: scared shitless, now they were angry and determined to punish the people for daring to question their authority. Or, more accurately, for daring to frighten them.
Honestly, I think that was the whole point of the Reichstag Insurrection: to get the republicans to fold. To give some of them an excuse to fold. Very few of them wanted to do anything to oppose certifying the election, even though it was obviously fortified; too many of the republican politicians "go along to get along" even though they are "going along" right down the road to hell. As long as their rice bowls remain full, they couldn't care less what happens to the rest of the country.
Now the media are claiming that a black man--some security goon inside the Capitol--shot Ashli Babbit. This was revealed a handful of days ago. I have to wonder about that; the timing of the revelation is certainly suspicious. They have a picture of him demonstrating really poor muzzle and trigger discipline--muzzle covering other security personnel, finger on the trigger--and the guy has a prior weapon incident, where he left it in the bathroom (in 2019) so he's really a good choice...but is he really the guy who shot her? Is there a way we can tell? Perhaps he was holding his gun on someone else who had actually been the designated shooter.
Blaming a black man for the murder, and giving out his name, is meant to be a goad for the supposedly racist right-wing community: "That [scotsman] killed a white woman! Let's lynch him!" But if I'm capable of seeing the possible charade, then I'm betting a whole bunch of people are, too--and because the "shoot everybody" switch has not been flipped, we know it's more likely that any threat on that black man's life is coming from a handful of FBI agents, a la the supposed plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Where two guys were arrested, and the other three were FBI. Otherwise known as "entrapment".
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By the way, the more mainstream right-wing outfits are starting to say #DefundFBI, but remember that you heard it here first.
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Well, anyway, it's a holiday, it's just after noon, and Mrs. Fungus hasn't gotten up yet. Real festivities don't start until later in the day, so I'm going to go flop for a little while longer.