To Be Honest

 With all this woke, transgender stuff, pronoun chatter and folks stressing out....I'll quietly just say this....to be honest:

- I really don't care to know you, your sexual fantasies, or your 100-page self-spoken history of woes and problems.

- I really don't care to know your shoes size, your boob size, or the reason for your nervous tick with your right eye.

- I really don't care to hear about your disadvantages in life.

- I really don't care to your feelings over religion.

- I really don't care to discuss your reasons for being a vegan.

- I really don't care to hear your thoughts on daylight savings time.

- I really don't care to know how your first, second, third or fourth marriage failed.

- I really don't care to hear talking points over the unfairness of welfare.

- I really don't care to hear your blame-chatter over the amount of stress in your life.

- If you do want to talk over the TV series 'Lost', or Gumby episodes, or septic tank placement, or cowboy westerns from the 1960s, or Star Trek (but not Star Trek Discovery), or the health of Putin, or the failures of New York City.....then I'll give 30 minutes of my time.

Beyond that...maybe you and I really don't have that much to fill three minutes of conversation.  

The Anti-MAGA Discussion

 With the hype of MAGA, we got some dose by President Biden of the anti-MAGA business last week, and it brings up this odd discussion.....why can't President Biden or the national Democratic 'players' invent opposite MAGA....to oppose the Trump 'gimmick'?

In the past six months, this has been on my mind.

I eventually came to this conclusion....there are probably forty different minor counter-MAGA 'gimmicks' at play currently, but nothing really ties them into one central package.  

You can't invent a national counter-MAGA that influences working-class Democrats, Hollywood Democrats, Hispanic Democrats, Black Democrats, Puerto Rican Democrats, farmer Democrats, mass urban Democrats, rural Democrats, woke Democrats, environmental Democrats, and so on.  So there is some minor theme being played out, and probably only appeals to 5-to-10-percent of the Democratic base itself. 

The college debt thing?  There's a lot of folks in this group....but if you spread it out across the US....it's not a unifying thing.  A fair number of non-college working-class Democrats actually aren't that thrilled of the deal.

The 'soul of America' speech by President Biden last week?  Maybe in some weird way....he tried to present a negative slam on MAGA, but then you wondered....where was the counter-MAGA?  Basically, he just wanted you to stand up and hype democracy.  Thats a sales gimmick with limited potential.  If you lined up a hundred odd Democrats....probably a quarter of them were thrilled with the speech and the rest were either shaking their heads or wondering if there was a phase two to the 'soul of America' 'arc'.  

So this is the odd part of the landscape.....as badly as there needs to be some counter-MAGA.....no one has yet to figure out how it'd work.  It's like inventing a cheesecake which has only 16 calories per slice, and you know it just isn't rocket science.  

Paper and Digital Chatter

 For about twenty years of my military life....I worked in vaults and handled classified material.  Just in paper content and shredding/burning....I probably handled enough crap by myself to fill five tractor trailers with material.  

At one location, we had a closet area big enough to store about two-hundred grocery bags of plastic or paper.  About every two months, we'd have a group of three folks who'd get forced into hauling this to one central burn facility on the base.  You'd start the fire around 10 AM, and it'd take a good three hours of continued burn to be done.  Then you wasted an hour cleaning the ashes.  Your plus-up?  By 1:30 PM.....you were done and sent home.  Usually, you were dehydrated and your uniform had this smoke scent to it.  I should note, this was always a Friday job.  

But added to this burden, there was usually every six months....this effort to clear out the folders.  You'd go through three-hundred-odd folders (marked Secret or higher) and you'd rid yourself of old crap. 

What you did with the old folders?  Well....you threw them into a box, and they got re-used.  You might have a couple hundred of these stamped folders....with nothing in them.

So I look at this FBI chatter going on in the past day or two, and nothing makes sense.  They seem hyped-up about stamped but empty folders in the Trump raid....like they should not exist and something funny is going on.  No....the crap that was not useful to keep....got shredded or burned.  It's not rocket science.

Why are the FBI idiots like this?  I sat and contemplated this, and came to this logical 'ending'.  In the FBI world....shredding/burning is not their function.  They probably hire out some contractor group....a $15 an hour job....for Marvin, Woody and Delmar to come once a week....pick up their classified waste and dispose of it.  So they've never gone on a burn trip or wasted four hours shredding 700 pounds of paper garbage.

Looking at this whole discussion over achieves, the Trump material and discussion.....you come to this odd aspect.  Data is data, and typically....there are probably 15,000-odd copies of x-message around on literally hundreds of servers throughout the CIA, the White House, the Pentagon, etc.  To say that the message (one single message) matters when on paper?  No.....it's the digital copy that should matter and exist in the end.  It's been that way for over twenty years now.  We no longer live in a paper/plastic world.

Maybe there are some sixty to eighty year old government idiots around with paper on their mind, but at this point....the shred/burn gimmick is becoming less and less of value....because there's more digital than paper.

The Joe Strategy For Mid-Terms

 This centers on four things:

1.  Shipping out tons of US funds to Ukraine.

2.  Selling Trump as a combination of Cartman (Southpark), Stewie Griffin (Family Guy), Cruella de Ville (101 Dalmatians), and Mr Burns (The Simpsons).  

3.  Making MAGA sound like a combination of Covid and the plague.

4.  Allowing woke to be a national standard.

Fascism Chatter

 With all this semi-fascists chatter going on via the network news business....I sat and contemplated this 'word-game'.

Could you be just one-quarter-fascist, or 50-50 fascist, or three quarter fascist?

Could you be woke and still a tiny bit fascist?

Could you be normal at home, but full-up fascist at work?

Could you be a juvenile fascist?

Could you attend Sunday school, and hype your fascist side?

Could you avoid showing any movie from the 1950s, without being fascist?

Was Deputy Dawg, Space Ghost, or the Coyote (from Roadrunner fame) fascist?

In today's world, would Italian Benito Mussolini be considered full-up fascist, or just one-quarter fascist?

Are there more male fascists than female fascists, and why?

Finally, is there a rehab or propaganda program to counter fascism....without creating a whole counter-fascism angle? You know....fascism versus fascism?

Three Observations

 1.  When you go back and add up the participants of the Confederacy in 1860, it's something like 99-percent who were NOT slave-owners.  So it's hard to sit at a table today and say they were pro-slavery.  

If however, you examine the amount of biased news, corrupted chatter by both political parties, and the dynamics of the day....it was a 'us-versus-them' situation, and men felt compelled to fight over 'something'.  

If you then take this script and apply it today?  You get a very enthusiastic group, who in a single year....could go from simple woke-enthusiast to a fighting individual over 'something'.  

It is odd how history repeats itself.

2.  About fifty-percent of the hype that President Biden uttered at the Philadelphia speech....has been 'walked-back' by the President.  He says he didn't mean all those things he said.  

Just odd, but he makes so few speeches these days.....you have to assume he never read the speech text before that evening.

3.  I noticed off one news site.....apparently Americans are applying for pay-Apps, where you can buy groceries, then 'loan' you the money, for you to pay back later.

Yes, for grocery money.  

It looks remarkably like 1929/1930 in a way. 

The Thing About Neanderthals

 I'm one of those people fascinated by discussions on Neanderthals.  This week, I sat through a podcast where a PhD guy sat and discussed this one odd difference between modern man living in this same age as the Neanderthal folks.

When you go and talk about a crowd of Neanderthal living in some cave or some location....the number goes from five to fifteen.  Modern man in the same era?  It could be as low as twenty but typically got into the 120-range (yeah, a tribal unit).

Why?  No one has figured this element out.

You would think that with zero birth control and lusty relations going on....typically every two years, the Neanderthal gals were delivering new 'troops' to the clan.  Were they more susceptible to disease or early death?  Unknown.  Was it simply bad luck and one out of every births lead to a death by age ten?  Was there some weird ritual going on where someone was sacrificed every six years? 

The problem with a low number in the tribe 'game'....for defensive purposes.....you just never can be sure of some fight with the other tribe on the far side of the valley.  You might wipe most of them out in a hour-long battle and find two members of your clan were wiped out as well.

Were they just territorial and always inclined to fight over a forty square mile space with any intruder clan?

It's a silly question but you just wonder if the Neanderthals just never grasped that there was safety in numbers.