Schmaltz und Grieben

 

 

"...I like they way they present their view even when I don't agree."
Lewis Medlock, Deliverance

"...fortuitously discovered in my recent wanderings - good stuff."
Zee, Road Sassy

"...entertaining and provocative. Just how I like it."
Rachel Arieff

"...whew, wow, yowsa and yikes!" Jan Karlsbjerg

"Malignant." Tim Dailey

 

 

Blogroll: Jake's Wisconsin Funhouse Rock Netroots The Political Environment Caffeinated Politics Democurmudgeon

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January 2021

01/24/2021:

 

IF I COULD LIVE MY LIFE OVER, I'D WATCH THIS ON NETFLIX: Obviously I've been gone for awhile. But it's not because a hundred million people aren't lining up to read this blog. Actually, I quit caring about things like that a long time ago.

No, I've been too busy watching in horror as my country goes down the toilet bowl.

Once again, it all comes back to Scott Walker... that "Christian gentleman" (cough) who made our lives in Wisconsin a living hell from 2011 until 2018 (amply documented on this blog), when he was finally run out of office by Democrat Tony Evers.

Except that, you see, he wasn't.

Thanks to the extreme gerrymandering Walker and his minions left in place (amply documented on any real-world new source), Snotty turned the state over to his two most trusted lickspittles: state senator Scott Fitzgerald (now a U.S. congressman, because good fascist lickspittles ALWAYS get promoted) and GOP State Assembly speaker Robin Vos, a well-known slumlord. These sleazebags used the GOP majority in the statehouse to ignore everything the new Governor tried to do, including the mask mandate after COVID struck (resulting in the needless deaths of thousands of Wisconsinites). Like Moscow Mitch McConnell after Obama's election, they made it plain that the Governor was already a lame duck the day he assumed office.

They've kept their word. We still live in a Republican hell. Snott Walker is laughing his ass off. And thanks to gerrymandering, there's no way to get rid of them.

Now we come to Washington and that orange ape-man who deigned to called himself president, donald j. drumpf (to use the original spelling).

drumpf wasn't fortunate enough to have a GOP mentor, like Snotty did, who gave him the Cliff Notes to Machiavelli's "The Prince" and created a monster. So drumpf, being the lazy dumb-ass he's always been, watched Walker rule Wisconsin and thought, "Hey, he's not so bright either and he's got these rubes eating out of his hand!"

This will come out in the scholarship, probably after I'm long gone, but you heard it here first: Everything drumpf did was a copy of Walker's template. Everything. Except maybe overthrowing the government, which Snotty accomplished through non-violent means (Vos and Fitzgerald).

Think about it. "Law? What law? Oh, I don't like THAT law." Pure Walker (and later, pure drumpf). "Sir? You can't do that." "I just did! Ha ha ha!" Pure Walker (and later, pure drumpf). Firing knowledgeable experts and replacing them with morons (Snotty had Cathy Stepp, drumpf had Kayleigh McEnany). Having lackeys fix things when the people tried to discipline him (Walker's recall, drumpf's first impeachment). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

We learned too late, from Snotty at the state level and then, horribly, from drumpf at the federal level, that our beloved government with its system of checks and balances is actually based on a bunch of gentlemen's agreements. That's just fine when you have a gentleman or -woman in office, but what if you don't? You're screwed.

So now we have a former president who tried to violently overthrow our government and become Dear Leader for Life. Three weeks later, he's playing nonstop golf in Palm Beach.

Snotty Walker has an expensive sinecure as the head of Young Fascists for Christ, or some such.

I wish that all of this wasn't real. That I could just watch it on Netflix.

On second thought, no. Turn it off.

Meanwhile the real America loses blood and tries to stagger to its feet.

Two men did this to us. Two men.

Never forget.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

 

October 2o20

10/13/2020

 

YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY? It takes a special kind of depraved asshole to laugh at 220,000 dead Americans.

This kind of depraved asshole.

Dude. Did the devil tell you that you'd have fun in hell? And you believed it?

You GOPhers really are a unique breed of stupid.

Posted by Alois on

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10/11/2020

 

REDS: The local sugar maples are putting on their yearly show here in Wisconsin.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

THIS ASSHAT... may be angling for a role as a TV comedian (kinda like "The Apprentice," yet not) if he ever gets done serving his post-presidency term in federal prison.

 

Vote for this president, or I'll shoot this dog!

 

As evidence, I offer this Trump rant to Sean Hannjobbity of Fox News on 9 October:

California is going to have to ration water. You know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific, because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish that aren't doing very well without water.

Whoa. Dude.

Since in the previous post I suggested that Trump may be suffering from a prion disease, I will go ahead and unpack the craziness just quoted and see if you can connect it to the source:

The "president" seems to be reefer-ing to recent news stories about California's need, due to ongoing drought, to divert fresh water from the San Joaquin River to farmers and firefighters--thereby endangering the delta smelt, a small freshwater fish that is near the bottom of a large ecosystem and already nearing extinction.

Did you get that? I thought so.

Please tell me what it has to do with water rationing and the Pacific Ocean. Pretty please?

Posted by Alois on

 

 

10/10/2020

 

AGAIN WITH THE "THANKS": After failing to condemn the right-wing crazies who were plotting to kidnap and murder Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, the drumpf whined (again!) that Whitmer sinned when she failed to "thank" him.

Instead of stating the obvious (for WHAT?!?), I suggest to my colleagues in science that they try to identify the prion disease that is devouring the desiccated orange brain cells of our would-be dictator.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

10/9/2020

 

THE LAST DAY: Picture taken on my way to work on the last day of what I knew of as "life"--March 13, 2020. At the time I had little idea what this day held in store for me.

You've got to admit, it looks like the end of something is coming. Don't know what inspired me to pull over in the middle of nowhere and take this picture, but maybe on some level I knew.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

 

September 2o20

09/29/2020:

 

ANYONE? BUELLER? ... care to go on record about the president 's massive, Trump-Tower-sized motive for throwing the election, after the disclosure that he doesn't pay income taxes, is broke, has three hundred million dollars of  personal debt, and will be indicted for criminal charges the minute he leaves (or more likely, is removed from) office?

Because, like, right now would be a great time to mention that, y'know?

Posted by Alois on

 

 

09/26/2020:

 

ATTENTION REPUBLICANS: When you lose your honor, you lose everything, and you have nowhere left to go.

Also: What a wonderful world you want your kids and grandkids to grow up in, where they'll never know freedom and everything, I mean everything, is for sale at the right price.

You should so be proud of what you've done for to this country.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

09/24/2020:

 

NEWS FLASH! Senator ron johnson (R-WI), possibly the most useless (except to the Kremlin) asshole in the entire United States Senate--and I should know, I'm one of his unfortunate constituents--has been assigned the thankless task by the drumpf of trying to find "dirt" on Joe Biden's son Hunter, who once served on the board of a Ukrainian (our allies, as opposed to the Russians, who are not, in case anyone isn't clear on that) gas company.

Now Fox News, always our forever friend in the pursuit of truth, justice and the American way NOT, is getting its frilly panties in a bundle because no one but Fox News (and drumpf, and rojo as we unfortunates call johnson) seems to care.

 

Some of us might forget that drumpf was, um, actually impeached for trying to coerce the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden as a precondition for receiving desperately-needed military aid to resist a Russian incursion.

So in a best-case scenario, tell me why in the world I or anyone else with a functioning brain is supposed to care what the Kremlin-praising rojo has to say about Hunter Biden's dealings in anything, unless Hunter Biden has chopped-up human bodies in his trunk? rojo, better try again when Putin isn't so obviously leading you around by your johnson (yeah, that was deliberate).

 

And kindly tell the rest of humanity what we're supposed to do with the worst-case scenario we actually find ourselves in, with a president who has announced that he will go to any and all lengths to install himself as dictator-for-life?

AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT HUNTER BIDEN??!?!?!??

Posted by Alois on

 

GO TO HELL. GO DIRECTLY TO HELL. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $2,000,000,000:

1) Whoever did this.

2) Mitch McConnell.

3) Donald Trump.

Posted by Alois on

09/16/2020:

 

IMAGE OF THE DAY: Smoke from the California wildfires is making for some hazy conditions here in Wisconsin. Sunset, September 15.

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

09/14/2020:

 

YANKED RIGHT OUTTA THE SOCKET (September 13, Part II): I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea here. Many, many, many people in this country are in much worse shape than I (COVID victims, wildfire victims, hurricane victims, folks who have no choice but to keep working and risk their lives during the pandemic).

So maybe it's better to explain this as a "strange feeling" and not a complaint.

I was contemplating retiring next year (2021-2022 school year). I was already rehearsing my little retirement speech to the kids, many who have grown up with me as their bus driver (10 years on the same route!). I could already envision my retirement party at the Maple Tree Supper Club, which beyond being the place where our bus company throws retirement parties, is also my very favorite restaurant--also my wife's.

When we came in from our routes on Friday the Thirteenth of March, we were informed that due to COVID, school was officially over for the year. Just like that. It was like being yanked out of a wall socket. We knew something was coming, but we had no time to prepare.

After a long and disorienting weekend, it occurred to me that I might never see any of my kids again (we don't live in the same town) and that "official retirement" wasn't in the cards. I'm old enough to draw Social Security--though I hadn't yet, preferring to work while I was able even if my health is beginning to fade--and I correctly predicted that, with no federal government plan to contain the virus (here it is September with 200,000 dead, and we're STILL WAITING!) school was NOT going to start up in the fall.

It didn't.

TO BE CONTINUED

Posted by Alois on

 

09/13/2020:

  

SEPTEMBER 13: Well, let's begin with what this day represents.

Six months ago today, I was happily driving my school bus on a March Friday afternoon (the thirteenth, as it happened... makes it kinda hard to forget). The school year was almost done and I was going to spend the summer delivering new school buses all over the state. In the several years past I had driven summer school too, which kept me busy until the middle of July when I would start my deliveries and work till the end of August. But I had noticed in the past couple years that I could do with a longer break from the kids. So I decided I'd spend the whole summer basically on the road with the empty buses.

It had only been in past few weeks that I had begun to realize that at some point things were going to have to shut down for awhile because of the COVID-19 virus. You normally would figure that when you have a once-in-a-century pandemic, your president and your federal government would be right on top of things. But then, in a normal world, your president isn't Donald Trump.

As the bodies began to pile up in Seattle and Trump went on raging tirades against Washington's Democratic governor--as if it was his fault?!?--I and millions of other Americans wondered when the bullshit was going to stop and the cavalry would come to the rescue.

The answer, friends, was never.

Because, you see, we no longer live in "America" as Americans, and even other first-world nations, have long understood it. We live in--to tell you the truth, I do not know WHAT the fuck we live in. Let's just say it's something like a nuclear-armed nation of 330,000,000 angry people with no functioning national government, in the middle of a lethal pandemic, with heavily-armed idiots roaming the streets like rabid dogs.

That's for starters. Gotta go now. Let's traipse along together tomorrow on our merry little quest. See you tomorrow (promise). Ciao!

Posted by Alois on

 

  

BACK, LIKE A BOUNCED CHECK: One year, four months, and six days ago I said goodbye to this blog. Not that I really said goodbye... I just sort of walked away. And it wasn't because I "didn't want to blog anymore" or that "blogging is so square now" or anything like that. It was more like, well, after two and a half years of Donald Trump, I was just tired of slaying dragons (as previous entries will attest, I was pretty much finished after eight endless years of Scott Walker's reign of terror AND THEN WE GOT TRUMP, who makes Walker look like, er, well, Walker.

Anyway, I'm back. For good. Stick around while I blog the end of the world. Fun!

Posted by Alois on

 

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OLD BLOG in its sorry-assed entirety

 

 

May 2o19

05/07/2019:

  

INTERESTING READ: Christian writer Rachel Held Evans has sadly passed away at 37. I must confess that I was not familiar with her work; like I did with the GOP, I severed all ties with evangelicals after they served as enablers to the moral crimes of Scott Walker (and later Donald Trump, proving beyond reasonable doubt that they no longer stood for any Christian faith I could recognize). Evans seems to have been a lonely voice in the evangelical wilderness, steering her co-religionists gently away from their extremely troubling Jesus of Power and Hate.

Here's a fine example of what made Evans special, and why I will be seeking out more of her work.

Why Millennials Are Leaving The Church

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 2o19

04/22/2019:

  

THE DIFFERENCE OF ONE WEEK: Spring can arrive so quickly in southern Wisconsin that it will make your head spin.

The photos below were taken a week apart in April 2017. The first was after our last accumulating snow of the season; a week later fieldwork had begun and I was delivering liquid fertilizer for United Cooperative.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

04/18/2019:

  

APRIL 11, 1965: I meant to write a brief post last week on the 54th anniversary of the great Palm Sunday tornado outbreak, but one thing led to another and I failed miserably.

I have several personal connections to that dark day.

First, my family had just purchased a home in Crystal Lake, Illinois, because my Dad had gotten a new job in Chicago. We were still in Missouri on Palm Sunday when an F4 tornado wiped that house off the face of the earth and killed several nearby residents. We never did live in Crystal Lake and wound up renting a house in far-off La Grange (IL) instead.

Second, part of the research for my first published academic article concerned a Palm Sunday Outbreak tornado that struck Monroe, Wisconsin (and strangely, I was there on business today!).

Third, I had a longtime girlfriend from a town near Monroe who was born on April 11, three years before the outbreak. Her first memory was of her Dad rushing off to help the stricken residents of Monroe and missing her birthday party.

So happy April 11!

Posted by Alois on

 

 

DAILY GAAAZ-O-LEEEN! AWARD goes to a Madison high school student named Ingrid, who reports that "she felt anxious over not being able to check her phone when she wanted to":

Personally, when I know I have my phone in a case and I can’t open it, it’s really stressful. I feel like it’s bad that I feel so detached and stressed out that I don’t have my phone with me, but that’s the world we live in right now.

No, my dear. That's the world you choose to live in.

Hey, I'm not exactly a Luddite; this post is being composed on a cell phone. But it's starting to creep me that so many people can't spend even five minutes without looking at their phones. What exactly is going on here???

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

04/10/2019:

  

TODAY IN WEATHER HISTORY: The Red River tornado outbreak, including the infamous Second Wichita Falls Tornado... forty years ago today.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

  

WISCONSIN... OR NUNAVUT? We didn't have an especially bad winter here in Wisconsin.

Except for February, which was a corker.

When I took this picture from our front porch, it was minus 29 degrees F. It was several degrees warmer that day on the North Slope of Alaska.

 

Posted by Alois on

 

04/09/2019:

  

TODAY IN WEATHER HISTORY: The Woodward Tornado (also called the Western Tri-State Tornado) of April 9, 1947.

 

 

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04/08/2019:

  

CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE RESIDUAL: Fiery sunsets (and sunrises) here in Wisconsin. Taken at the bus barn.

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

04/06/2019:

  

STORM'S COMING: I took this picture at United Cooperative during the last year I drove fertilizer trucks for them (2017). Severe weather was rolling in from the Plains. Being a weather weenie with a new phone that actually took pictures, I couldn't resist.

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

  

LIKE ROLLING AROUND IN FILTH: Why I Won't Blog Politics Anymore

This February 24th marked S&G's 16th anniversary. February 24, 2003.... that long-ago date not long after 9/11 and in between the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Interesting times, in the Chinese sense of the word.

Schmaltz und Grieben is one of the oldest continuously-running political blogs on the Internet, and I am proud of that. I refer back to my first blog post, and it had to do with Sam Muldia of Estonia (later of Finland, then Canada, now Estonia again). Sam and I are still (Internet) friends, and he's helping me learn Finnish. It's a beautiful language, and it reminds me that there are still countries in the world that function like countries ought to function, with some modicum of regard for the people who do the work and pay the taxes and yes, make the trains run on time. And then there's the United States of America.

This country... the country where I was born and raised... has lost its fucking mind.

"Lost its fucking mind" can be summed up in two one-syllable words: guns and Trump.

I don't need to explain any of this to any rational person who knows what's going on in the world. My intelligence is insulted on a daily basis by people in love with guns and people who don't see anything wrong with Trump. Fine. Let 'em have the motherfucker, I'm done.

As this blog has amply illustrated, the eight years I spent living under the regime of Scott Walker and his toadstool minions in Wisconsin prepared me well for what to expect when Trump was, thanks to our Electoral College and probably some funny business in states like Wisconsin and Michigan and North Carolina, "elected president." You'd see college-dropout Scott Walker tripping all over himself trying to form a coherent sentence, dismembering inconvenient agencies that he absolutely did not possess the intellectual wherewithal to understand (the Department of Natural Resources!), and crowing to Wisconsinites that their taxes were going down when actually they were going up. My jaw spent a lot of time on the floor, because certainly there couldn't be millions of my fellow Wisconsinites who could be dumb enough to fall for this circus act. But there were! And they voted for Trump, too! Go figure.

Liberals shouldn't get smug here, because they are the ones who pinned their hats and their hopes to Barack Obama, who--although a much better man than Donald Trump--still enabled the oligarchs and the staggering income inequality that made our nation ripe for the picking for some junior Hitler. It always happens the same way. Which is why a great progressive thinker like Thomas Frank had to write Listen, Liberal (and if you haven't read it, you should).

But I absolutely cannon bring myself to abide anymore of the unbridled stupidity and immorality that the lunatic right has unleashed upon this country (Lock her up! Build that wall! Put them migrant kids in cages! Bulldoze the national parks! Everyone should be forced to own an assault weapon!). It's just plain Nazi ugliness and I don't want any part of it. I spent nearly a decade of my life choking on the bile that Scott Walker made me cough up, only to find that, once the Good Guys won a hard-fought battle and reason would prevail again (Tony Evers' slim election to the Wisconsin governor's seat in 2018), actually the bad guys had it rigged all along and there was no way that a Good Guy would prevail. Scroll down to "Wisconsin Iron Curtain Swings Open, Slams Shut Again" and read all about it.

Now there are rumbling that the Divine Ruler may not go gently into that good night. Personally I would be surprised if he did. Trump doesn't care one whit about the duties of the presidency, only that being president assures him of the continual rush of national attention that he craves like an OxyContin addict.

So that's it, people. If you want to read about how bad our president is, there are any number of resources to which you can turn. If you want to read about how he was sent by God (spare me, please), there's Fox News. If you want to read reams and reams of drooling idiocy, go to Scott Walker's Twitter feed.

In whatever time I have left on this struggling sphere, I'm going to concentrate on blogging about Things That Make Life Beautiful.

Thank you. It's been real. And remember...

NEVER, EVER, EVER VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Posted by Alois on