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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September 2o20

09/18/2020:

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.

 

 

Posted by Alois on

 

 

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

 

 

 

March 2o19

03/18/2019:

  

COMPLETELY UNHINGED: Why is this man President? Anyone? Bueller?

President Donald Trump spent the weekend venting venom at a bewildering list of targets -- even as much of the rest of the world was still trying to come to terms with a true outrage -- the carnage wrought against Muslims in New Zealand.

In a stunning display of personal grievances aired on Twitter, Trump demanded the return of a supportive Fox News host who was missing from her usual spot on Saturday after verbally attacking an American Muslim lawmaker. He escalated his beyond-the-grave feud with late Sen. John McCain. He complained at being lampooned by NBC's "Saturday Night Live." Trump also fulminated against the Russia investigation, "Radical Left Democrats" and took shots at an Ohio union boss before demanding a now-closed GM plant in Ohio be reopened or sold.

I have a couple of borderline-special-needs middle schoolers on my school bus. When they carry on like this (because they're the only ones who do), I tell them to put a sock in it--part of my job, as I see it, is to prepare all these kids, INCLUDING the emotionally-challenged, for adulthood. And part of being an adult is learning to conduct coherent discourse with one's fellows. You don't just rant and rave and expect anyone to pay attention, except in a negative sense (the police are on their way).

Obviously, if today's Republican Party had the spine it used to have and existed as something more than a money-funnel to the super rich, a death sentence to the sick and the uninsured, and a means to spit-shine a would-be dictator's shoes, we might expect said Republican Party to do its part as the school bus driver for our nation (yeah, I think that's a pretty good metaphor) and tell Mr. Trump when he needs to put a sock in it. But they won't. Because, truth be told, they like this shit. Just like a bunch of blond-haired Germans in the 1930s liked being told that they were the Master Race.

Posted by Alois on

 

 

 

 

February 2o19

02/15/2019:

  

NO MORE MR. NICE GUY. CODIFY, CODIFY: It's sad to say, but much of the glue that has held our country together for 250 years falls under the heading of "gentlemen's agreements."

Which is to say, many of our laws (and our Constitution too) work from the assumption that elected officials will ultimately have the best interests of their country in mind, and would never act in such a way as to jeopardize the country or the people who live in it. Up until pretty recently, that was almost always the case.

Then came the Supreme Court's Citizens United case in 2010 and the subsequent election of Scott Walker to Governor of Wisconsin. Rife with undocumented cash from billionaires all over the world, Walker almost immediately set about to change the rules that had governed Wisconsin since 1848. As I have posted many times in the past, the common reaction from Wisconsinites was, "He can't do that!"--a reaction that was based on the gentlemen's agreements that made up our state laws and state constitution. Meaning, "We take it as a given that no elected official in Wisconsin would ever knowingly work against the best interests of the people of this state." So the rules were written with that in mind, and as such contained any number of massive loopholes that could be exploited by a malevolent leader who simply had to turn a jaundiced eye toward a particular law and say, "I don't like that."

Case in point: The famous "Fourth of July Massacre" in 2015 when GOP lawmakers, led by Walker's office, sought to overthrow Wisconsin's model Open Records Law and make virtually all government records and communications off-limits to the public. No previous governor had ever even considered such a move, because Wisconsin was proud of the transparency of its government and its accountability to the citizenry. But Walker cared for none of that. Walker only wanted his giveaways to large corporations (Google "Wisconsin WEDC" for one of the most disgusting chapters in our state's history) to be off-record and out of the public debate, and he surely wanted his treatment of dissidents against his regime suppressed from public inquiry. When the news was leaked from the (conservative!) Wisconsin State Journal newspaper in Madison, the entire state erupted in howls of protest. The WiGOP's response? "Uh, we were just trying to protect people involved in deliberations with the government." Never mind that "people involved in deliberations with the government" had always previously assumed that their every step would be monitored by the taxpayers (and rightfully so). One could only wonder what Walker and company were trying to accomplish by removing this accountability.

(Yeah, we already know the answer. See "WEDC".)

As I have written here on numerous occasions, we in Wisconsin were treated to a five-year prequel of the reign of boy-king Donald Trump, by the similarly clueless and malevolent Scott Walker. It's almost humorous now to see the American people screaming about Trump's end-run around the Constitution of the United States, declaring a State of Emergency to get the money for his vaunted Border Wall Vanity Project. But think about it: Why is this even necessary? Why should the American people have to put up with these childish acts of terrorism against our beloved laws and institutions?

The answer is simple. Both in the Wisconsin case (which should have served as a national warning) and in the current BUILD um FINISH THAT WALL! conundrum, all of this could have been avoided by simply codifying our laws so that there is no wiggle room by despots. Little-known factoid: both of our two previous Presidents have invoked national emergencies to deal with specific situations--Obama with the national flu pandemic in 2009, G. W. Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The reason most people are unaware of this is that these were true national emergencies and, as such, were rubber-stamped by Congress, because the health and well-being of Americans were seriously threatened.

But the Wall? Come on. No one, from the Border Patrol to anyone who pays attention to the (real-world) news, thinks that this is a national emergency.

This is a Donald Trump vanity project and nothing else. He wants to look good to the 30% of Americans who think he is the second coming of Christ, and could care less about anything else.

Eight billion dollars of emergency funding that could have gone to homeless veterans. Or national healthcare. Or the opioid crisis. Or education. Wasted on a despot's ego. Is this really the nation we have become?

Time to lawyer up and seal the holes that allow evil men to take advantage of the system that was once the greatest in the world. Because we didn't think that anyone ever would.

 

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Someone who does not know the difference between good and evil is worth nothing.- Miecyslaw Kasprzyk, Polish rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005

 

 
   
 
    

Wichtiger Wortschwall:
 
The Rant auf Klaus*, Parts I II III
 
Free Tibet
 
Ménage-à-Trois
 
Mother Church
 
Shut Up and Make the#*&$ Widget
 
Perry County
 
Ahmed Shah Massoud
 
Bly, Oregon
 
The Day I Met The Man
 
Pope John Paul II, 1920-2005
 
The Suburbanites
 
Attention: This Is Not About Your Bicycle
 
Renn-aissance
 
This Is No Viet Nam
 
Words of Mass Deception

The Hate

 A Government of Stupid

They Were Forgotten

I Am The Middle

Like Rolling Around in Filth

 

 



 

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