Tag Archives: politics

Rattus Rattus vs Foreigners – The Universal Soldier

This was written before I realized the rats are just a diversion and Chinese containerized cargo-boxes are the real invaders.

“Trouble!” says you.  “What trouble?”

“The Ruskies went home a decade ago,” You say.  “Berlin wall came down and no one even remembers it.  The Germans are all running around hugging one another worrying about mad cows and leaving everyone else alone.

“We kicked the holy bejesus out of Samdam Hoooosane and his royal guards,” you say, “And might do it again if he doesn’t behave,” you say, “And we’re all safe and sound here in the land of milk and honey…..Ain’t gonna war no more,” you say, “Except the occasional invasion of a minor third rate Middle Eastern or Balkan country,” you say…..”All safe and sound, swords into plowshares, all that.” 

And you really believe that, do you?

Well, if you believe that, you’d better prepare yourself for a shock down to your carefully manicured and polished toenails……’cause the real challenge is still out there, the real challenge is happening right there in your back yard even as we speak, in your attic, in the sewer under your squeaky clean porcelain commode;  in the trees behind your quiet complacent little hidey hole you’ve made for yourself to stick your soft American head into.

You kept your guard up all those years because one of the Marx brothers talked about lulling the West into a false sense of security, and of course he was right.  Of course he was.

Only the time-skid was slower than anticipated and all the Marx brothers died.

Yeah, Groucho and Harpo sleep with the fishes, but it’s still going on.

The fifth column is here, now, at work near you, near your home.

“Rats.” I say.

“Rats?” You say.

Yeah. Rattus Rattus, the good American rat, the roof rat, is the only real American who knows, and he ain’t saying much. 

Old Rattus Rattus suffers silently in his simple Christian American way; fighting quietly for his homeland with American know-how.  Sure, it sounds silly and pointy headed, Rattus Rattus, but that’s his damned name, same as yours is Homo Sexian or some such thing.

Rattus Rattus struggles without complaint for his tiny children, while slowly, the habitat and other lousy habits, recede every year.  You ought to know by the name; Rattus Norvegicus, the Norwegian rat, the dreaded wharf rat:  the foreign rat the communist pinko athiest moslem heathen yellowjapaneseinvader super rat of the future is bullying him back.

While you sleep there in your complacent soft pillowland, it’s going on outside and up in your attic, in the streets, the alleys, the sewerplants, the amber grainfields, the feedlots, the silos, Rattus Rattus battles for you against the silent invaders. Rattus Rattus draws his lines in the sand, digs his little burrows, fortifies, and retreats as the highly mechanized divisions of Norwegian rats advance, house by house, burrow by burrow……Every year the Rattus Rattus line moves inward a few miles, seven miles in along the whole perimeter.

Yeah.  There are bulges, enclaves of encirclement.  Enclaves of resistance, but Norvegicus takes no prisoners, spares no one.  And you sleep silently, peacefully while your own good American rats are diminished, you who gutsylike bomb the bejesus out of other commie pinko foreign middleastern terrorist muslim and Balkans, sleep while your own brother-rats in your own back yard die without your help.

And what do you think, you sleeping bastards, will happen when the final conquest is complete?  Do you think you will be left alone, when the last fighters have all fought on your behalf, when the silent armies of Rattus Rattus are all destroyed, all the food for ravens scattered on the battlefields of America?  Don’t bet on it.  The sound of scratching in the ceiling, inside the walls has barely begun.

Time to join the battle, fellow Americans, time to get out the cyanide, the 1080, the pellet guns and the mousetraps, time to stock up on cheese, and warfrin, and time to prepare for the big battle for America in the American way.  Time to begin the manufacture of tiny tanks, (maybe Tonka and some of those can help) and artillery pieces, and scatterguns and nervegas and miniaturized nuclear weapons…..time to join in the real battle for America here at home.

If you aren’t with us, you are against us, behind enemy lines, already under the areas controlled by the foreign devils, and you won’t be spared, unless you form an underground, a fifth column of your own…..

They’ve already got all the other countries, the other continents, and as has happened so often in history, America stands alone against them, a tiny host of good American rats, behind the scenes, fighting against all odds for you, to the end……

And that doesn’t even touch on the imported fire ants killing our domestic fireants, the imported Africanized bees killing our good American queen bees and selfishly taking over the hives, the Russian Thistles (tumbleweeds) cluttering up our prairies, the imported hares (jackrabbits), the English Sparrows (that battle’s already lost), the tamaracs (salt cedars stealing our precious water for their foreign interests),  and the imported fruitflies…….it’s all there, all in black and white, been written down, so it’s true …..a multi-pronged attack against all that’s good in America…..while you sleep…….

And now the foreign weathermen, the Canadians and Mexicans, are predicting our weather, keeping the good stuff for themselves……

Old Jules

 

 

Songs of 20th Century Wars on Victimless Crimes

In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn.  In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled.  Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.

 

The song was ended but the melody lingered on.

Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song.  I’d be remiss leaving it out.

 

The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to:  Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops.  Sound familiar?

Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’.  Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker.  Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.

 

Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.

 

The US Government isn’t a fast learner.  They were already controlling and taxing whiskey.  They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine.  The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets.  Nor even out of the prisons.

Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.

 

But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough.  The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.

 

But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers.  Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.

 

I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.

I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.

 

 

 

Old Jules

Bullying – Bringing it all Back Home

If the power to intimidate is derived from a 'legitimate' source the term 'bully' is not applicable.

When I promised a summation of conclusions about bullying behavior based on ponderings and experiences described in those recent other posts, I didn’t grasp what I was setting myself up for.  Every direction I took in my thinking led to unsettling places I couldn’t trust without backing up and thinking it through from other directions.

If you’re new to this blog and haven’t read the earlier posts it’s possible you’ll find it easier to follow if you read them first.

More Future Me: Bass-ackwards Letter to the Past
A Bullying Commie Americauna
The Bullying Homestead Part 2
Half-Century of Male Evolution – Bullying Part 3
Stolen Horses and Baby Rattlers – The Anatomy of a Bully – Part 4

Okay, all that prefacing and cowardly side-step-waffling out-of-the-way, here’s what eventually I found myself inescapably glued to as a conclusion:

Bullying is so much a part of life on this planet we don’t even notice it.  It’s the glue holding every community together, every species, cross-species, inter-species.  It’s the determinant governing community behavior of every description.  We just don’t recognize it as bullying unless it falls into a class of activities we happen to disapprove in our matrix of human-cum-societal judgements.

That’s if ‘bullying’ is defined as a behavior, as opposed to being anchored to a larger concept:  the source from which the power being exerted is derived.  Building a concept bounded by ‘legitimacy’ and protocols does allow what we usually label bullying to be cut out of the herd and isolated in a pen of repudiation.  But by doing so we’d be forced to accept an equally unpalatable conclusion:

If the ‘bullying’ behavior subtracted from the bullying definition is legitimate because it derives power from approved sources of authority is an important piece of what holds things together, we’re stuck with it.  Lock, stock and banana-peel.  As an example, that 5th grade teacher of mine who liked to beat-hell out of me and other kids who weren’t in a ‘protected’ mode, wasn’t bullying us at all.  Reason being that his power derived from his position as a designated tool of the power of legitimate authority.

Similarly, all that Jew-baiting that went on in the 3rd Reich and elsewhere in the world.  The pervasive use of police forces to beat hell out of union strikers in the late 1800s and early 20th Century.  The iron fist used constantly after the Indian wars in the western US to keep tribal members on the REZ and out of the hair of the ‘legitimate’ citizenry far into the 20th Century.  The removal of the tribes east of the Mississippi, to designated places west of the Mississippi, even though doing so was a clear violation of previous treaties and agreements.  National Guardsmen shooting students at Kent State.  Policemen spraying little old ladies with mace.

Almost overnight, previously accepted non-bullying behavior/attitudes can become disgusting examples of bullying.

 

Sometimes focusing precisely on where the power resides becomes ambiguous.

 

 

Other times it’s not ambiguous in fact, but owns the tacit approval of de facto power.

 

Sometimes it’s bullying when it happens to the the group in question, but non-bullying when they’re doing it.

 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of being the wrong place at the right time.

 

And when the ‘legitimate’ source of power tacitly approves it, it’s not bullying.

 

So when a cop tasers a ten-year-old kid it’s actually business as usual.   It might eventually become ‘brutality’ or might be deemed excessive force, but it will never become ‘bullying’.

But it gets more complicated than that.  There’s a more subtle side of non-bullying we all see so frequently we take it for granted.   For instance, the entire pantheon of political rhetoric today is choreographed to  promote an atmosphere of something akin to bullying, character assassination, and denigration of the opposition.  But because it’s satisfying to the targeted body of listener/participants, it’s ‘legitimate’.

 

Bullies constantly strive to give the moral high ground to their attitudes and behavior.  Frequently, they succeed, and when they do those attitudes and behaviors cease to be bullying.  Probably the best example can be found in the most non-bullied segment of society filling the jails and prisons in the U.S.  Prostitutes.

They do openly and honestly what millions of women do every night with less honesty, more covertly, in singles bars and honkytonks.  They do it on streets surrounded by ‘legal’, ‘legitimate’ porn houses run by ‘legitimate’ businessmen and patronized by ‘legitimate’ consumers paying to observe the act of fornication.

But prostitutes enjoy the unique, traditional status of being bullied by pimps and johns, brutalized and extorted for sex by cops, exploited by lawyers, and of being the ‘product’ passing through the criminal justice system into the prisons-for-women industry.

They’ve never achieved the sanctity of the moral high-ground to get wives, girl-friends, and ‘respectable’ women objects of scorn and outlawed.  They’ve never found a reservoir of support to allow them to see those other classes of women outlawed and thrown into jails.

But they probably would if they could.

Inside they’re almost certainly bullies, too, like cops and schoolteachers, and like you and me.

Old Jules


 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Websearch: “Lowlifes on Welfare” brings’em here.

Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.

I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor:  Shaving with sheep shears.

Well, heck!  I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for.  I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.

On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare.  So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth.  Riding the Bread Line

Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard.  Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts.  Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.

The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.

Old Jules

 

The Bullying Homestead Part 2

I want to do a post on human bullying, but yesterday and today I’m leading into it with more important issues, namely the way the creatures I observe every day interact and the shifting bullying behavior among them. 

I’m only going to skid across the surface of it, but I don’t want to digress and find myself up to my neck in human bullying issues without first briefly having laid the groundwork among the kinds of creatures people probably learned bullying from.  In this case, cats and chickens.

This is Tabby, daughter to Shiva, the Cow Cat.  Tabby’s the youngest cat around here, always reckless, always strong-willed and independent, always one to avoid conflict.  She’s always been demanding of attention and affectionate. 

But for the past month she’s suddenly become the bull-goose bully around here, beating the hell out of the older cats including her mother, Shiva.

This is Shiva the Cow Cat.  Mother to Tabby, probably hatched around 2000, wandered into proximity with me around 2002 as a stray.  Jeanne carried her to Kansas with her where she lived a few years and had a litter including Tabby.  Around 2005, she and Tabby drifted back into the mix in my life.

Shiva’s never wanted much attention, only a daily stroke and scratch behind the ears to acknowledge I knew she was around.  But her main joy in life was taking walks with me in the woods, sometimes accompanied by Tabby.  When there were cows on the place Shiva took a lot of pleasure helping me chase them off, sometimes almost getting underfoot of them in the process. 

But she was weakened a couple of years ago from some illness almost killed her and she’s never completely recovered.  Sometimes she’d still like to take woods walks, but Tabby’s put a stop to it, and generally with the walks with cats, by attacking her and driving her back to the cabin.  That ends the strolls for both of them.

This is Niaid, littermate to Hydrox, but without a contract.  The old friend who loaned her to me shortly after she was weaned was murdered a few years ago, so she’s in an awkwardly poor-relations status.  She’s part of a 1997 or 1998 litter, but she’s still the hunter/gatherer of the place.  Even travels through the woods up to Gale’s house as nearly as we can figure, to catch rodents in his chicken pen.  She was never a bully, but she could always take care of herself.  Now Tabby’s beating hell out of her, too.

This is Hydrox, littermate to Niaid, 1997-1998 vintage.  He used to have aspirations for being Top Cat, he and I both figuring he’d take over the boss-man job around here if I die before him.  But he’s sort of lost interest in all that the past year, become satisfied to just lie around and let things happen.  Aside from a daily hissing-swatting-spitting match with Niaid he doesn’t get involved in the social climbing and networking.  He’s the only one Tabby’s not bullying yet. 

As I explained yesterday, the chickens bully all the cats, though Tabby’s become more prone to put it to the test, locking eyes and playing out the last scene to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with them.  But she still backs off when someone has to.

Meanwhile almost all the deer have become a lot more aggressive, challenging both cat and chicken in standoffs they always win.  A cat sleeping out by the garden’s liable to find itself nose-to-nose with a deer, then shoved, then chased back to the cabin.  Or a chicken, deliberately knocked ass-over-appetite by a deer with a sudden urge to scurry off.

This is almost certainly a lot more information than you think you need to know about the animals around here, as well as the social life.  But I think some of it applies to how humans interact in human environments and I might use some of what goes on among these creatures as a platform for discussing human bullying patterns.

Old Jules

My Original Veteran’s Day Post


I'd guess Phil probably resembled this young marine when he arrived

I hadn’t thought about my old running buddy, Phil, for a while.  That last blog entry got me chewing on thoughts of him.  I’ll tell you a bit more about him.

Phil went to the Marine Corps as the result of being a 17 year old driving from Temple, Texas, to Austin with a case of beer in the car.  A Williamson County Sheriff Deputy stopped him on a tail light violation, asked for his drivers license and saw the case of beer.  Old Phil, being a clever youth, gave the officer a Texas Drivers License with an altered date of birth, so’s to keep from being arrested as a minor in possession of alcoholic beverages.

The deputy wasn’t fooled.  He hauled Phil off to the slammer to reflect on his sins.  He was offered the alternatives of going to prison for presenting a phony ID, or going into the US Marine Corps.

In Vietnam, at least, Phil was old enough to drink.  He became Marine Recon and a sniper.  Phil was in the jungle with a squad of other snipers surrounded by a NVA rocket launching unit when the first rockets were fired into Da Nang AFB.  The squad wisely stayed hidden and didn’t take any shots, they radioed in the location of the rocket unit and brought an airstrike down on top of themselves.

They’d be dropped into an area where the NVA was expected to set up a battalion or division headquarters, sit there a couple of weeks waiting quietly, and try for a head shot at a senior officer.  Once the shots were fired they’d try to sink back into the bushes until things went quiet, then slink out to some place where they could be lifted out.

Phil did two tours over there.  When he came back he had such a chest full of medals they snatched him up for Nixon’s Honor Guard.  Which Phil believed would be easy duty.

Instead, it was riot control.  Wherever Nixon went there were anti-war riots, and Phil and his unit busting heads, which he thoroughly hated, since he agreed with the demonstrators.

Phil hated politicians, hated war, hated the men responsible for sending him over there and making him the troubled, rage filled human being he was during the decade and a half I knew him.

But the Vietnamese body counts were a lot higher because of Phil.

When I last saw him half his face was eaten away by Lupus, contracted as a result of Agent Orange in those jungles.  The Veterans Administration was fighting and squirming denying all those guys were ill from Agent Orange, that the problems were Service Connected, so they’d have to offer disability and whatnot.

Phil used to observe that he might have been a lot better off if he’d just let them send him to prison for the beer and phony ID.  Then they couldn’t have even drafted him for that place.

I wonder if that old Agent Orange has killed him yet.  Another victim of friendly fire with a delayed action fuse.

Old Jules

Tom Russell –Veteran’s Day

Unanimity

She was the mayor
Of course
Chief of the cops
Dog catcher
And sometimes ran
The sewer plant
Owned the bar
The grocery store
The factory
And bank.
Although the berg was small
It always seemed larger
When the yes-men
Those yes-men she served
Those little people
Saluted

Old Jules

Occupy Someplace Warm and Cogitate

I’m not just any old dumb-ass.  I’m a dumb-ass with a lot of hats, cats and a few chickens.  But I’m also a dumb-ass who’s lived long enough to recognize tripwires and the sound of impending silence tromping around in the nether regions.

I’m a dumb-ass with a pair of ears I can hear with and eyes I can see with.

What I see and hear are the forces of ‘the other side’ are dragging out the heavy artillery and the Magnificent Seven.  The propagandist litany of dirty sexual organs, dirty clothes, dirty underwear and dirty Communism is already coming through the loudspeakers of surround-sound. 

You’re being demonized, but they’re also planting pamphlets they claim are circulating among you about what circumstances it’s okay to kill cops.  Claiming your promiscuity’s worse than that of a politician or vice cop.  Claiming you’re getting your funding from any organization they think anyone hates.

These tactics have always worked for them in the past.  They’re not too different from those used by the USSR against Polish Solidarity to keep it down almost a decade.  They’re not, for that matter, too different from those used once in Germany to acclimatize the population to some reason behind a segment of the population vanishing.

Meanwhile it’s going to get cold nights and those who have somewhere warm to go are going to find all manner of important reasons to go there.

Generally it makes better PR to go voluntarily than to be driven out by having been discredited so badly as to seem a justifiable target for physical abuse.  And it’s better to go voluntarily than just to fade from something that can be labelled ‘lack of support’, or ‘lack of interest’.

I’ve never quite been dumb-ass enough to think this OWS business is likely to bring about any positive change, but I have been dumb-ass enough to hope it doesn’t get steamrollered.  Enough to allow a microscopic hope that what’s being done could get the attention of some piece of the power structure enough to get them thinking.

But now the clock is running.  There’s more than a hint that both political parties have realized allowing all these folks to quietly sink back into the population when a national election’s looming on the horizon might be worse then having them out where they can be discredited and infiltrated by provocateurs, inflamed and accused.

I’m a dumb-ass who thinks the smart ones are filling up the address books with email addresses and phone numbers, packing their dirty sex, dirty underwear, and dirty Communism as carry-on luggage for a trip below the horizon, off the radar.

But I’m not dumb-ass enough to think anyone’s going to do it.

Old Jules

 

 

Affordable Art

Left to right:  Left, Democrats.  Middle center, banks, multi-nationals, defense contractors.  Bottom middle, US public.  Right, Republicans, Tea Party.

Occupy the Great American Success Story

I had a friend for a few years who lived everything the American Dream used to think it was.  He was working for a steel fabrication company in Silver City, New Mexico during the 1970s doing grunt labor, but thinking.  He saw around him some flaws in the ways the process sequences were performed, believed he could advance in the company by suggesting improvements.

Marsh, I’ll call him, went home nights and worked in his garage inventing a tubing bender far more efficient than the one used where he worked.  After it was complete, he took it to the company, expecting praise and rewards.  They shrugged, brushed him off and kept him busier at work.

So Marsh applied for a patent, began manufacturing his bender in his garage.  He couldn’t keep up with the orders, so he quit his job and expanded, meanwhile inventing other improvements on what he’d seen, manufacturing and selling those, also, becoming a surprisingly wealthy man within a decade or so.

His business flourished, his children matured, and one of his sons started another business, inventing, patenting, marketing.  His son became wealthier than Marsh, far more rapidly.  The son, carefully examining his conscience and human needs, his business thriving, spent a million dollars and several months in Afghanistan during the early 2000s building housing, providing shelter for those left homeless by the wars there.

But during those same years Marsh began seeing his patented designs showing up in Harbor Freight and other Chinese import outlets priced lower than he could manufacture them.  His patents were being violated and the US government was allowing those violations to be imported with impunity.  During a Republican administration.  His own inventions competing with him in stores all over the US.

Marsh was outraged and gradually the business he’d built was being destroyed by theft with the complicity of the US government.

Marsh listened to daytime talk radio a lot during those years.  He got daily doses of opinion telling him the source of his problems, and those problems were caused, he allowed himself to be persuaded, by liberals in politics.  When the Tea Party emerged, he attended meetings and demonstrations hoping to bring about political change, hoping somehow to save his business, his livelihood.  Furious, frantic, determined, certain now, this president, this administration was out to destroy him.

Last I heard, it was doing so.  His business was declining to such an extent he was being forced to lay off longtime employees vital to continued operation.

All the years I knew him Marsh was an honorable, honest, solid, hard-working man, dedicated to the betterment of himself, his employees, his country and humanity. 

But somehow he missed the point, maybe because he was standing too close to the problem.  Maybe because he was holding to a dream of how things are that no longer was.

Marsh, to this outsider looking in, was destroyed by a government comprised of the illusion  of two parties.  Both were bought-and-paid-for by people bigger than Marsh.  Neither of those parties cared what happened to Marsh, to his family and employees, to the dream, the innovation, the drive, the ideal he represented.

Marsh was betrayed by the people who own the talk-radio host he listens to, who own the Tea-Party, who own every facet of this country where the decisions are made as to whether US citizens work, prosper and are rewarded for their labors rather than being merely consumers of foreign products.

Marsh didn’t belong in the Tea Party.  He belonged in Occupy Wall Street.

Old Jules