• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I had a client years ago who was in his late 80’s. He grew up on a farm in Indiana and I remember him telling me a story about threshing grain. He was just a kid in the 1920’s, shoveling coal into the firebox on a big Case steam engine that they took from farm to farm. He said they would try to stay near a creek whenever they could so they had a water source for the engine. It was hard, hot work. He said there was a “big German fella” who worked on their crew who never drank anything but hot black coffee, something which fascinated him as kid.

    It was an interesting story to listen to. Such a mundane activity but the fact that it’s no longer a thing and only existed in the memory of someone who remembered doing it made it kind of fascinating






  • I read an interview in the Democrat-Gazette with the daughter of Ms. Taylor, one of the victims. There are no words to describe how awful it must be to have one of your friends or family members just minding their own business only to be shot to death while checking out at the grocery store.

    Ms. Taylor’s daughter expressed frustrations that she wasn’t there because she thought she could have done something, implying that she would have shot the assailant. In her defense, the woman’s grieving and people who are in that state tend to think and say all kinds of stuff.

    But here’s the thing, the “good guy with a gun” mantra is idealistic at best. Even if you are a “good guy” with a gun, odds are that by the time you can even respond, the “bad guy” has already killed someone. Not to mention that in that very panic filled moment, there’s a much higher chance that you might accidentally shoot another bystander.

    “Good guy with a gun” is not a solution to “bad guy with a gun” because no amount of bullets fired by “good guys” will bring back the people who are already dead.







  • My personal experience essentially echoes what you’ve said. I’ve usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.

    The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here’s where things go off the rails.

    Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he’s upset about and figures that if he doesn’t understand it, neither does anyone else. He’s also a little too proud to admit he doesn’t understand it.

    This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.