Tag Archives: politics

September 2, 2026 · 12:59 am

Planting Some Onions

I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions.  Consuming them is good for you.  It cleans out the system.  It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them.  Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end.  And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane.  So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.

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It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.

  • Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies.  I am not saying I want that to happen.  I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either.  But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season.  Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
  • Human civilization is doomed.  We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive.  We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way.  And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway.  I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
  • The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth.  They will not save us from ourselves, however.  President Trump won’t allow that.  After all, they are immigrants.

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  • Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us.  It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view.  Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally.   Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
  • Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese.  Onions get the gas out.  Cheese makes you constipated.  The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better.  Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
    “Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”

    Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden.  In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin.  Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate.  You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.

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April 29, 2026 · 1:14 pm

Old and Grumpy

Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.

No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.

But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.

Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.

What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.

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March 31, 2026 · 12:12 am

Politics Are Doodoo, not Voodoo

President Ronny Ray-Gun

In the Republican primaries in 1980 it was Republican candidate George HW Bush who gave the old Gipper’s economic policy the accurate nickname of “Voodoo Economics.” Then when the Gipper defeated the last American President to have an administration without a war in it, that Voodoo became the things we do.

Banks became predatory, using credit card ploys to turn us into a nation of debtors where wealth defies gravity and trickles upward instead of down. To help that along, Republicans deregulated things, killed off the Savings-and-Loan industry through scandal to reduce competition. Wall Street learned to make greed good by building bubbles that allow profits to inflate them and eventually explode them. When the business moguls at the top of economic food chain went through the Great Depression (the ones who didn’t jump out of windows) they learned there are ways to turn recessions into profitable ventures for the wealthy elite. Income inequality grew fat on the raw meat of recession after recession.

And wars became a popular pastime again. Every president from Reagan onward had to manage a war they either started or inherited from their predecessor.

Gorbachev became the Premiere of the USSR. He attempted to modify Russia with Glasnost, opening up about the Russian past and the contemporary state of Russia’s economy. By opening up the ban on criticism, he caused the USSR to fall and the Cold War basically ended when they fell. Still, Republicans managed to always increase military spending, and use any excuse (in fact, making up some excuses) to declare war on somebody, especially little guys who were easy to beat up and bully. The Gipper did his happy dance and declared that Republicans had defeated evil. And stupid people gave him so much credit that two of the next three Republican Presidents got there with fewer popular votes than their opponents. And this was all okay because some voters count bigger than the rest of us.

And so the era of elections being decided by angry people and stupid people who want to punish the rest of us began.

Somehow a rodeo clown from Texas who dodged serving in combat during the Vietnam War became a war President, starting two wars, one against the wrong country. The Republicans deregulated more. Corporations cut down trees in National Forests more. They burned more coal. They fracked up the place and got more oil. And they looted and polluted more and more during the time when we could’ve done something to reverse the worst of climate change. They crashed the economy again. They made more money. They left a mess in the economy for Obama to clean up. And when he cleaned it up, they blamed him for not doing it right, and even for causing it all somehow before he took the oath of office.

And when Obama was done, and we were hoping we could return to breathing safely in the atmosphere that was quickly overheating and being filled with doodoo smells, the angry and stupid people elected an orange guy (seen above with the green guy he tried to help destroy the world.)

And now I cannot watch the news without getting steamed, or crying over pictures of dead children in Ukraine. And all of this Voodoo doodoo is deep-rooted in the Republican poopoo, growing in horrific power and doodoo smells since the time of Ronny Ray-gun. (Why can’t Star Wars Anti-Missile Systems take out Russian missiles over Ukraine? Did we not pay enough for them?)

If you are wondering why I do less and less political humor anymore, well… It really stopped being funny.

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March 21, 2026 · 12:30 am

The Mirror in the Clown’s Hand

Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.

So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.

I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.

An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.

Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.

I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. twice as an actual nudist. I can tell you, they were very hot days even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.

I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novel Catch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.

Brekka the Telleron tadpole (also a nudist) with her friend Lester the man-eating plant (who only ate her once)

As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.

Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.

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January 9, 2026 · 2:42 am

Malevolent Marx Brothers’ Movies

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“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House (and broadcast on Truth Social), okay.  I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay?  We are going to make a new Marx Brothers movie.  It’s going to be great… bigly tremendous.”

“Wotta you sayin’, boss?  The Marx Brothers is dead.  How you gonna make a movie with dead guys?  You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”

“No, no…  We will play the roles ourselves.  I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind.  I really am very smart, you know.  Everyone says so.”

“And who am I gonna play?”

“Steve Miller, you get to be Chico.  You know, the fast-talking Wop guy.  You think of the greatest plans.  They are really great, you know.”

“Okay, boss, I got one already.”

“Really?  What is it?”

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“I think we gotta do an executive order.”

“Executive order?  What’s that?”

“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know?  You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”

“Ooh!  I like the sound of that.  We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup.  It’ll be tremendous.  The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”

“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Venezuela, Colombia, and Somalia.  That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from.  You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats.  And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists.  And WOKE Mexicans.”

“Ooh!  Yeah!  Extreme vetting rhymes with bed-wetting.  Tremendous.   But what if people say I’m being racist again?”

“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know, the ones that eat the cats and dogs?  We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt.  And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person.  No matter where they’re from.  We’ll get everybody that way.”

“Good one, Steve, I mean… Chico.”

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In the Homeland Security camps after the executive order.  (Possibly people waiting to be executed in Alligator Alcatraz.)

“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”

“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”

“My name is Hegseth, boss.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”

“HEGSETH!”

“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath!  Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him.  It will be really great.”

“And me, boss?”

“Oh, JD, I almost forgot about you.  What’s the name of that other brother?  Dumbo?  You get to be that one.”

“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap.  Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”

“Oh, yeah!  The worst way to execute is the best way.  I feel the need to tweet a truth about it.  This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best.  It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”

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Trump, Hogsbreath, and Steven Miller, ready for Woke Mexicans and protesters.

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December 2, 2025 · 3:33 am

Who Do You Listen To?

There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news.  Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.”  He never seemed to put a spin on anything.  No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK.  You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?”   His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.

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The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?”  Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.

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William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me.  I loved to listen to them argue.  They were equally matched.  They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion.  Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego.  Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos  with  an equally giant ego.  I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them.  They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth.  And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.

George Will
When I was young I identified as a Republican like my father, and thought George Will was a reasonable opinion-leader.  After all, a man who loves baseball can’t be a bad guy.

Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate.  The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre.  The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA.  I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)

And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part.  And with him came Fox News.

Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious.  I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something.  So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News.  They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy.  And I suspect they do the same for everyone.  They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.

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News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions.  And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news.  So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real.  I found it in the most surprising of places.

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I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment.  It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?”  Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations  hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing.  And these are very smart men.  As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is.  I know because I have tried to do the same myself.  And is it really “fake news”?  It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.

So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news.  Is that where you expected this article to end up?  If not, where do you get your news?

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November 6, 2025 · 2:28 am

Healing From A Fatal Wound

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This is a repost from 2016, the beginnings of terrible times under a pumpkinhead president.

The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for dessert.  And as far as I can see, the war is over.  We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth.  The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.

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I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well.  You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die.  I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to.  I got that one right.  I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on.  If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.  3f96a6e4e030fa8fa38c97da9d206240

“Jeez, Mickey!  You don’t call that humor, do you?”

Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you.  We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts.  The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest.  And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop.  Never mind that we will also be buried.  They brought it on themselves by the choices they made.  Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.

I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay.  I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today.  With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want.  We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one.  But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well.  I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.

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Thanks for sharing, Cousin Will.

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September 4, 2025 · 12:01 am

Planting Some Onions

I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions.  Consuming them is good for you.  It cleans out the system.  It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them.  Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end.  And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane.  So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.

herriman2b

It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.

  • Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies.  I am not saying I want that to happen.  I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either.  But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season.  Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
  • Human civilization is doomed.  We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive.  We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way.  And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway.  I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
  • The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth.  They will not save us from ourselves, however.  President Trump won’t allow that.  After all, they are immigrants.

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  • Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us.  It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view.  Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally.   Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
  • Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese.  Onions get the gas out.  Cheese makes you constipated.  The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better.  Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
    “Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”

    Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden.  In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin.  Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate.  You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.

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August 14, 2025 · 12:24 am

In Search of the Mythical Socialist Bigfoot

adventurers2x

While the Republican President continues to shoot his mouth off… and sometimes shoot his own foot off… or put his foot in his mouth and shoot both off… (Dang!  See what you get for being too friendly with the NRA, Republicans?) I decided to track down the mythical creature that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Watters… (no, that last one is not smart enough to know who I am going to name) constantly warn is the socialist-communist-terrorist-really-bad-guy behind everything President Obama and liberals do, Saul Alinsky.

You see, I have been battling the evil Bond villain Badfinger for days now.  He has been exercising his evil on my more Republican and conservative Facebook friends for a while.  They have been posting up a storm of crap about how terrible Obama is, the Biden Crime Family, and how false climate change is, and how we should not try to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich… things that sound suspiciously like talking points on Fox News where they mention Saul Alinsky a lot.  (Yes, I do watch Fox News sometimes.  It is always on at my favorite A&W in Lewisville.  And besides, sometimes it is therapeutic to induce vomiting when you’ve had too much poison and disrespect.)

A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.
A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.

Boy, Saul Alinsky sounds like a real monster!  But if Saul Alinsky really said this, and he really is a socialist, why do so many of these sound so much like fascist/capitalist ideas?  The kind of control they are urging is what appears to me to be the thing that would benefit fat-cat oligarchs and rich-old-guy control freaks.  So I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about this evil, very evil guy.  (I know, Wikipedia is discredited because it is edited and referenced by the people who use it… but a source that is factually checked and edited daily can sometimes be more accurate than the rarely updated articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

Saul_Alinsky

Wikipedia says that he was a Jewish-American community organizer and writer.  (Red flags have to go up for Republicans for that alone.)  And worse yet he was focused on improving the lives of poor people in American cities, particularly black people.  He was working with black people in ghettos in New York City, Detroit, and other notable “trouble spots” in the 1950’s.  How did he avoid the wrath of righteous commie hunters like Senator Joe McCarthy doing a work like that?  Oh, wait a minute… It says in the article that William F. Buckley praised him as an “organizational genius”.  How did he avoid prison after being endorsed by a commie like that?  Um, right?

His book, Rules for Radicals, begins like this; “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

There’s the damning evidence right there.  He means to punish the wealthy and the greedy and the powerful by taking away some of their excess and giving it to the powerless who are starving and suffering from want.  No communist except maybe… Jesus Christ… could have proposed anything more radical and perverse.

And look at some of the terrible methods he used.  He once used what he called a “fart in” to disrupt rich folks’ sensibilities at the Rochester Philharmonic concert in Rochester, New York.  He organized a group of classical-music-loving radicals to eat huge quantities of baked beans, then go to the concert and intentionally alter the atmosphere for rich patrons of the arts.  That will either bring down Western Civilization as we know it, or make somebody die laughing.  You can’t get much more evil than that, can you?

When asked whether he hadn’t actually considered joining the Communist Party, Alinsky responded like this;  “Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”

Man, oh, man!  I owe such a debt to my conservative Facebook friends for exposing this monster to me.  I didn’t know what Fox News was ranting about until now.  I now believe this evil Saul Alinsky may actually be worthy of respect.  They may have actually reinforced my loony liberal belief that the American Government exists to better the lives of all its citizens.  It has definitely opened my eyes to the dangers of…thinking like a Republican.

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August 13, 2025 · 12:19 am

The Happy Pessimist

“I’d rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.”

― Benjamin Franklin

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Truthfully, I have always expected the worst out of life.  That expectation has never let me down.  In fact, it has made me a much happier person.  “How is that possible, you dim-witted dolt?” you ask.  Well, just as Franklin said it.  I am never taken unpleasantly by surprise.  In 1983, when I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, skin cancer, I prepared myself to die at 27.  But I was pleasantly surprised.  I not only survived, but it was completely eradicated by surgery.  No chemotherapy.  No recurrence.  No more cancer worries (beyond assuming each and every mole I had removed after that point in my life was melanoma revisited).  I can now celebrate 42 years of being cancer-free.

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Watching politics as a humorous hobby benefits greatly from a pessimistic outlook.  I just assumed that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would win the Presidency in 2016, and I prepared for that dismal dip into depressing gloom.  If Rodeo Clown Bush the Sequel had been elected, or Scott Walker got the nod, the more likely scenarios, I would have been pleasantly relieved and surprised, even though I would still have been expecting the ultimate heat-death of the planet to come from those administrations.  If Marco Rubio got the nod, better still.  He’s kinda young for a senator and stupid, but he’s demonstrated that he does care at least a little bit about the common man, and he doesn’t really want us all to die.  He’s even demonstrated the ability to learn from mistakes.  And if a Democrat had won, especially Bernie Sanders, that would have been a repeat of the marvelous surprise we all got in 2008 from the election of Professor Obama, man of the people. Of course, the worst happened, and the evil Pumpkinhead won in both 2016 and 2024. I will be preparing for the world to end after this next election, but there is actually a higher percentage chance of survival and limited suffering.  After all, people, even the mega-polluters in China and India, have recognized the need to try to repair the planet.

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I was, honestly, as a pessimist, expecting to be dead before the new school year started in 2015.  So I was pleasantly surprised to be able to start a new collection of morning-dog-walk sunrise pictures.  I am prepared and at peace with the world because I always expect the worst to happen.  Looking at everything from the dark side is ironically the way to find the light and hope in the new day dawning directly ahead.

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