Wednesday, September 18, 2024

TOO MANY LETTERS

 





 

Spelling is overrated. 

 

Young people today write in social media speak.  My wife researched an 1832 house and found the original owner signed his name at least four different ways.

 

We write to relay or transfer information or thoughts, or to tell a narrative.    Spelling can be a nitpicky way of stifling creativity.

 

To begin with, we should shorten our alphabet.  Why 26 letters?   The number 25 is a lot easier to deal with.   Kids could memorize it in groups of 5, and 25 is an integer of 100 – not a prime number but an easier concept to deal with. 

 

So to begin with, I suggest we rid ourselves of the letter C.   In almost every case K can replace C resulting in the same sound:  Kat, kake, kar, kot, kap, krap, kokonut…   In very few cases where K will not fit (Cynthia or ceramics), an S will substitute just as well: Synthia, seramics…

 

English is a difficult language to learn and we have made it so with too many letters in our basic alphabet. 

 

Thank the gods for spell checkers.

the Ol’Buzzard


Tuesday, September 17, 2024

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE CULT ATTRACTION FOR DONALD TRUMP

 





The Republican Party is the party of the rich and powerful, though they maintain their base of working white men with the distraction of God, guns, gays, and racism.   The Republican aim of ‘Small Government’ is to eliminate all social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Obama Care, and government assistance programs, to lower taxes for the wealthy and deregulate any restrictions that hamper big business.

 

 Regan said it out loud: Trickle Down Economics.   Make the rich richer and the rest of us can survive from the crumbs of their tables.



The Republican Party did not foresee the takeover of the MAGA movement. 

 

The seeds of MAGA started when the mega-rich Koch brothers organized and financed the Tea Party, bussing large groups of easily manipulated people into D.C. to disrupt and prevent the election of the first black president. 




 

Unbeknownst to the Koch brothers, the inmates would take over the asylum.

 

Trump is a phenomenon that came along at the perfect time to cement a movement. 



P. T. Barnum said you don’t have to be smart to be a con man.   You just need to be smarter than the rubes you are conning.

 

 

MAGA

1.    White supremacist

2.    Q-Anon

3.    Militia insurrectionist

4.    Science deniers

5.    Christian Fundamentalist

6.    Fox News devotees

7.    People feeling undervalued

8.    People easily manipulated

9.    And people who don’t like the Democrat Party.

 

Many of my neighbors are MAGA and the best people you could know.   They would be the first to show up if I had an emergency at home.    In most cases, we have different opinions about politics, but basically, we are alike.   However, I am puzzled that some have drunk the cool aid, to the point they seem to have a mindless, almost cult following of Donald Trump.



I do not understand what they see or don't see when they listen to Trump.

 

It is beyond me how any x-military could support Donald Trump. He denigrated John McCain and belittled POWs saying “I like people who weren’t captured.”




 

Trump has called military dead suckers and losers according to General Kelly, and he refused to attend the Marine cemetery at Bella Woods because it was raining and his hair would get wet (according to his aides.)   He told his Chief-of-Staff never to have a wounded veteran at any of his speeches because it didn’t make him look good.   This from a man who dodged the draft for Vietnam.






 

I also don’t understand how any working man can identify with Trump.   He is the son of a billionaire who was given every advantage possible. He was a playboy who had unlimited money.   He went to private schools.  He was given the equivalent of six hundred million dollars (in today’s money) when he graduated from college and he quickly parlayed that into five bankruptcies.   He has accumulated billions of dollars in property and debt and lived in a gilded luxury apartment in Trump Tower where he pooped in a gold toilet. Trump talks about the price of goods at the supermarket, but it would be a safe bet that Trump has never entered a supermarket in his entire life.




 

It puzzles me how any regular person would look back on Trump’s four years of Presidency as anything but a disaster.  Remember the refrigerator trucks parked outside the hospitals because the morgues could not handle the number of dead?   The only thing memorable that Trump accomplished was a three trillion-dollar tax cut for the mega-wealthy, and he ran up the national budget by eight trillion, higher than any president in history.




 

Women for Trump?   When you are famous you can grab them by the pussy.   I alone was able to get rid of Roe vs Wade.




It would bother me to be identified with a group that included white supremacists, and the militia insurrectionists of January 6.   I would feel uncomfortable around religious fundamentalists claiming Trump is anointed by God to bring about a new world order.   Then there are some outright nut cases in the MAGA cult, like the few hundred people who hung around Dallas Texas for two weeks waiting for JFK to come back to life and run as Trump’s Vice President; not to mention that Trump advised the NIH to look into the possibility of drinking bleach and shooting up with disinfectant as a cure for Covid-19.  Now it’s Haitians are eating your cats.

 

I am exhausted with Trump.  I like my neighbors, but the name Trump is a poison pill to relationships and I dare not mention his name.  Yet we have more in common, just trying to live our lives and get by in an economy that has never served the middle class since Regan introduced the trickle-down economy. 

the Ol'Buzzard

 

 

 

 

 


Sunday, September 15, 2024

TRUMP FATIGUE?

 



 





Friday my wife and I took a ride about fifty miles north to the Rangeley Lakes region.   Route 4 carries you through mostly rural countryside. 

 

In 2020 we rode the same route and there were Trump-Pence signs in front of many homes and no Biden-Harris signs.

 

Yesterday there were no Trump signs – zero - and two Harris-Walz signs. 

 

I don’t know if this means that rural people, his steady supporters, have finally tired of the Trump Circus, or perhaps the Republican Party didn’t supply signs to this area of rural Maine. 

 

But the Trump show has been exhausting and maybe people have finally moved on. 


the Ol'Buzzard