Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Trial Balloon Legislation

To my way of thinking, a lower house, such as of representatives, not the senate, is a place to properly float trial balloon legislation. The point of the first few iterations is less to get something passed than to see who shoots it down and for what reasons exactly.

For example, as a lower house rep for the Asylum District, a role I'll assume for the sake of debate, I'd propose Oregon extend friendship to the people of the breakaway republics in the crossfire between Cold Warring superpowers.  We know how it feels, to be trampled underfoot by military oligarchies.

Oregon has a lot of ethnic Russians who remember what Nazi aggression was like, and how certain elements within the Ukrainian oligarchy abetted this aggression with their own forms of tyranny and oppression. Some Ukes today actually feel nostalgia for those days.

Ever since WW2 and Operation Paperclip, the DC bureaucracy has made it a priority to recruit obedient former Nazis to the righteous cause of building a Fourth Reich where the third one had failed.  Lessons had been learned.  The Business Plot, frustrated by Smedley Butler, had come so close to succeeding.

Most of us know, from historian Edwin Black and others, that the eugenicist program to manage procreation based on the latest science, through forced sterilizations and bogus theories about "race", was much admired by Hitler's Germany, especially for how well the Americans were managing to pull it off.  Men of Anglo heritage, many of them in banking, were providing the blueprints, accounting for Hitler's reluctance to destroy them at the end of the day: they were Aryans, like him.

Fast forward and you get an alcoholic cocaine addled good old boy in the White House, running the show against the former Yugoslavia. Clinton was the Boris Yeltzin of those Monica Years, stumbling from crisis to crisis, as inept as they get, and then some.

I know, I know, we're supposed to romanticize his performance as "the first black president" or whatever it was (Obama the second? -- sounds racist to my ears) but I can't say I was ever that taken by either Clinton.  Ordinary schmoes at best.  Christopher Hitchens saw something more sinister.

Anyway, I'm long past trusting the DC-based imperial presidency to make wise choices and I support the separation of powers, between and among cities this time.  Any government wholly intra the District, is too ingrown to be other than monstrous.

Sure, lets have a trucker rally, but why not send the convoy to LA instead?  We all know the media power brokers live on the left coast.

Silicon Valley kicked the last US president's ass, hard, off both Facebook and Twitter.  Send the convoy to the real centers of power why not?  Bring your case to the Pacific Rim overlords.

DC is just a creaky old museum full of clueless old men, hoping to relive their glory days, for the most part.  The Pentagon: a giant nursing home, full of basket cases with awkward reflexes.  

Show some charity.  

Let other cities shoulder more of the burden of conducting themselves admirably against the backdrop of world history.  Stop pretending we need just the one CPU city.  DC is obviously in over its head, swamped.

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

Truckers Revolt

Whereas some around my household might be glued to the Beijing Olympics, my iPad is open on Ottawa a lot lately.  I can't say I'm getting it all in real time.  In this case, getting it asynchronously is sufficient.

I was telling Dr. D. on our recent walk up Mt. Tabor, that from my own selfish point of view, I feel enough has been done to protect me against coronavirus.  It's not in my name, not personally, that edicts and mandates go forth.  

What I want, for my fellow human, is for them to have a free choice to get vaccinated if they wish to.  Have vaccines available.  As long as much of the world is under-served, these noises about freedom of choice have little meaning.  Did anyone offer you a free set of shots, as they did me?  I took them up on it.

Whether you've been vaxxed or not, I'm as protected as modern science allows me to be.  I'm actually not paying that much attention to who is and who is not.  I empathize with these truckers who say there's plenty of science on their side.  I don't think it's so cut and dried that those who defy the mandates should be punished in severe ways.

We may need to grow the health care system though.  I'd say that goes without saying.  If ER beds are in short supply, then more ER beds would make sense.  That would involve a reallocation of resources away from the more homicidal approaches to the human predicament.  A lot of ideologies advocate killing our way to peace.  I've never been much of a fan of those belief systems.

Trucking needs to be interesting work involving intelligence gathering and diplomacy.  Truck stops replicate the ancient oasis, in terms of serving converging / diverging caravans and solo travelers.  These blogs, as well as my Medium writings, allow a glimmer of this possible future to filter in, enlightening our relatively dark age with more hope-filled premonitions.

Truckers should have a lot to look forward to.