I Can’t Stay Quiet Anymore

Posted on 14/07/2024 by Grumpa Joe

Last night, Lovely and I went to a local fest called Lion Firecracker Dance. We deliberately arrived two hours after it opened because a previous experience warned me that the fun would begin at eight p.m. Lions support Lions, and I fully expected to see an ocean of yellow tees across the crowd. I saw one from the Frankfort Lions. We greeted each other with a. manly bearhug and sat at a table. The first thing he did was to lean in to my ear and ask me if I had seen any news programs within the last two hours. I said “no.”

He responded, “Trump survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. I nearly fell out of my chair. Immediately, I went to my phone and found a news item detailing the shooting. Over the past four years I have deliberately avoided writing my opinions about political matters because, frankly, no one cares what I think. I’d sooner waste my geriatric energy on butterflies and cicadas than on wasted old men like Joe Biden, a true communist from the moment of conception. I must admit, the assassination attempt awoke a mean streak in me. I said to my friend, it must have been a gun hating democrat because a republican wouldn’t have missed.

For the past four years, I have watched repeated attempts to discredit Trump and make people hate him. Instead, every try has made him stronger. Trump is the Road Runner in a Wiley Coyote cartoon. Just as Over the past four years, I have witnessed numerous attempts to discredit Trump and make people hate him. However, each attempt has only seemed to make him stronger. To me, it seems like Trump is the Road Runner in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Just like in the recent debate, which I watched to gauge for myself if age was affecting Biden’s performance.in the debate, which I watched to determine for myself if age was shadowing Biden like the Grim Reaper. I decided that the shadow cast on Biden by the Reaper over shadows my own. The thing that scared me most during the debate, were Joe’s eyes. He seemed to be speaking from fear. It is as if he feared Hillary Clinton putting him over her knee and spanking him if he misspoke. Or, Obama whispering into his ear, “this is a big f–king deal Joe, don’t mess it up. I listened to his words, and his sentences were coherent but he spoke as if in fear of his life, and he spoke softly but rapidly as if he didn’t get the words out quickly he would lose them.

Anyway, a God-fearing, gun-loving Republican would not have missed the shot. That is my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Filed under: Aging, Government, politics | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

A Debate or a Fumble

Posted on 28/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Writing is a chore. It was fun at one time, but now I consider it work. I long for the day I wrote my opinion pieces lambasting Obama for his socialist ways. Then it was fun, exposing his transformative ideas stolen from the communist manifesto. I admit he was Mr. Smooth in his delivery and his ability to put people to sleep with his melodic big-word speeches that sounded important but were all loaded with bullshit. It is not the same with Joe Biden. His brand of mumbling through speeches doesn’t appeal to me at all. Besides, I grew up in Chicago, the home of gangsters, and he is definitely one of them. The gangsters are evil, and so is Joe.

In Chicago, A Political Dynasty Nears Its End : NPR

How this guy survived in the Senate for so many years is baffling. How he was ever chosen to be the VP candidate by Obama was equally baffling, except Obama is a crook too, and crooks of a feather must stick together. The biggest mystery to me is how he was ever elected to become president. I know he got more votes than Trump. That’s how. My boyhood was spent reading headlines about the “Machine” politics of Chicago’s Richard Daley. It wasn’t uncommon to have votes coming in very late from wards, which always seemed to lose a bunch of ballots and then mysteriously find them as the count proceeded. The system has been operating this way for as long as I can remember, but no one ever does anything about it. Except for Donald Trump, who finally questioned the veracity of the lost ballots being brought forth in the middle of the night from places no one ever knew existed, did anyone try to end the mystery of how they went missing and how they were found?

The audacity of the man, who is he to have challenged the process so carefully designed and developed over the years to bring home winners? The only way it seemed to beat this process was to be voted in by such an enormous landslide of votes that even the least savvy among us would understand it as a win.

Modern politics is an extravagant stage show by political actors to convince us that their process is fair and democratic. I turned on regular TV last night to watch the Republicans, who all want to become a better president and bring the system down. I’ve been watching debates since Kennedy and Nixon, and this one was the worst excuse for a debate ever. The moderators, three of them, never controlled the show. They explained how they would conduct the show, and then the free-for-all began. In most civil debates, the debaters will take sides and attack or defend the subject. This forum was composed of several candidates, and each was given a chance to answer a question posed by one of the three moderators. The candidate was given time to answer.
Before the debater could answer, the entire stage jumped into the fray simultaneously, attacking him and posing new questions. It reminded me of how when in a football game, a player fumbles the ball. In his attempt to recover, both teams attack him, pushing, shoving, grabbing, digging, and trying to steal the ball to take possession. In a ball game, the referee continues to blow the whistle and summons his co-workers to assist him in determining who really has the ball. The rules dictate that the ref has the final say in the game. It didn’t work that way in the debate. The seven debaters were all speaking rapidly to get their points in. They all shouted to be heard over all the others with the net effect that no one got anything, much less a point, to the audience.

Ozark season 4 part 2 theory: Ruth Langmore killed by newcomer | TV & Radio | Showbiz & TV | Express.co.uk

I watched the debate for ten minutes before I switched to Netflix to watch the final episode of Ozark, which is about Mexican drug cartels controlling US Citizens by threatening them with death. The bullet always seemed to settle arguments and disputes. Perhaps we should require that the moderators be armed to help settle disputes and conduct a civilized debate.

Filed under: Biography, Cartoons, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

An Interview With AR15

Posted on 31/03/2023 by Grumpa Joe
AR-15 10,5″ (M4A1 CQBR, Mk18 Mod.0) tactical carbine with the micro collimator (red dot) sight.

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Good day everyone, this is Grumpa Joe from Grumpa Joe’s Place who will be interviewing AR15. This is my first podcast interview, and I am excited about it. My guest today is AR15 recently retired from service in Afghanistan. Having served for twenty years in the armed services he can probably tell us many stories.

GJ, “Tell us about how you have been received at home since returning?”

AR15 “To tell you the truth I was disappointed at the reception. I have seen and heard so many stories that want to ban me, and my many brothers from use in the USA. For the life of me I can’t tell why the people would be so upset with me as to ban us from existing? For the past twenty years we have been saving American lives.”

GI, “Tell us a little bit about your life at home, who do you belong to, how often do you go out in public, etc.?”

AR15, “Life is boring for us. We seldom go out, and when we do our owners only take us to where they want to go. Many of our owners are ex-service men, and men who love the sport of shooting and hunting.

GJ, “I am a sport shooter, and have been all my life. I love holding a rifle with my eye to the sight, and my finger on the trigger. When I shoot at the target and see the cluster of holes near the bulls-eye it excites me. One thing about my rifle is that it never fires when I am not holding it, and my finger is not on the trigger. Do you ever shoot like you did in Afghanistan?”

AR15, “Never, I don’t get a say in where I am going, or when my trigger gets squeezed. In fact, I never get to load bullets into my magazine. All of the technical stuff of gun ownership falls strictly into the domain of the owner-operator.

GJ, “You mean you never get to fire a shot?”

AR15, “Never, and I will never in the future. My trigger requires a human finger to actuate.”

GJ, “Don’t you have AI that prompts you into action.”

AR15, “What is AI?”

GJ, “AI is artificial Intelligence.”

AR15, “Oh my Lord no, I don’t even have a brain in which to store information or instructions to direct my actions. We are made from steel, wood, plastic and some other metals. We have no biological parts, nor do we have any electronic parts that require a sim-card, or batteries to give us power. We are 100% mechanical.

GJ, “What do you do in between the times your owner visits the gun range?”

AR15, “I am disassembled and my parts are stored in a case until my owner decides to go shooting.”

GJ, “Does your owner ever take you with him to work, school or a tavern?”

AR15, “My owner does not, but I have heard that some owners will take their AR15 to a school where he pulls the trigger and shoots at students and people. I have no way to enter a school by myself, just as I cannot shoot without someone pulling on my trigger. The shooter can aim, and point the gun for hours but I will not discharge until he squeezes my trigger. What bothers me the most is when I hear the news stories there is always a cry to ban the gun. It is not my fault that the owner lacks mental capacity, discipline and self-control, and pulls the trigger on unsuspecting innocent people. Why aren’t they banned from society, why doesn’t AI take over and alarm to the danger?”

GJ, “All very good questions my inanimate friend, but we are out of time and will have to save them for another interview.”

Filed under: family, Government, politics, Satire | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Sad Stories

Posted on 10/02/2023 by Grumpa Joe

It has been too long since I last posted. I am determined to write something interesting today, at least interesting to me. I have so many subjects to write about that now I am confused about which to select. The China balloon, or the last book I read about human trafficking, or about Joe Biden’s lame State of the Union address, the earthquake in Turkey, or my last Lions meeting.

The one excitement within our Lions club is that we are re-starting our vision screening program for kids. We first began in 2016 and were gaining momentum when COVID-19 hit and we had to stop. Up to that fatal time, we had screened 2100 kids ages 2-5 and found 75 that needed a visit to an eye doctor. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the goal is to find the needles. Lions believe that all kids should have the same starting point in school. If one or more kids have vision problems they will be at a disadvantage among their peers. To level the playing field it is our goal to find the disadvantaged and to urge them to get help. Thankfully, most of them do. There are some parents who will rush to the eye doctor after getting our results, and then there are others who are skeptical, and choose to wait for the child to grow out of the problem. We even learned about an Optometrist who sent a child home declaring that he was too young and that his eyes were still changing. We can only do so much.

Lions KidSight Vision Screening

The latest book I read is “The Great Escape, A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America,” by Saket Soni. All I will say is that this story made me ashamed that I am an American. The treatment that was extended to these men from India was unbelievably atrocious. All they wanted was to use their skills as welders. The agents who recruited them used the lure of getting a Green Card. The Green Card is the ticket to migrate into the country. I know it doesn’t come easy nor quickly, nor cheaply. I have been working with US Immigration to get a green card for Lovely. To date it has been two years, a bushel basket full of money, and too many forms all of which end with one’s signature and fine print that says lying on these forms is a federal offense punishable with jail. Yet these recruiters dangled the carrot of the Green Card in front of hundreds of welders to get them to come to the USA. The charge for this service was twenty thousand US dollars. The author tells of the personal hardships they went through to get that much money together. Most times the family sold their home to sponsor a son. Other families put the condition of marriage on the son before they would allow him to go.

Human Trafficking

The saddest thing about this scam was that the perpetrators didn’t give a damn about the workers. They lived in primitive cramped barracks, fed rotten food, worked long hours without breaks and were not allowed to leave the guarded compound in which they were trapped. An even sadder story began when the men, led by a Community Organizer, escaped the compound as a group to protest their enslavement, and the US Government treated them just as badly. Once I began reading this story, I could not put the book down. I had to know the final outcome.

I rushed home from the Lions Board meeting just so I could hear President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. He didn’t disappoint me he merely blamed all problems of the Republicans and promised to spend trillions of dollars more on nothing projects. I have listened to politicians proclaim that money is needed for rebuilding our infrastructure, and then the money is spent but not a single road or bridge is rebuilt. Same-old, same-old bullshit is fed to the masses who eat the lines with relish.

I thought for sure President Joe would take a shot at the balloon to make some points with the voters, but he procrastinated long enough to let the spyloon pass over the entire country before he shot it down. The reason he gave for not doing it while it passed over Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas was that the debris would be harmful to us on the ground. Evidently none of our military advisors or the president have ever been to that part of the country before or they would know that it is the safest place for debris to fall because the populations of those states is near zero. Instead he waited until the balloon got pictures of every military base in states all across the continent. I guess these same people who never saw these states don’t believe that the pictures could be downloaded to China before he finally wasted a missile on it.

The Real Reason Joe Shot Down the Chi-balloon

Finally, the Lions Clubs International Foundation is asking the one hundred and fifty million Lions from all over the world to send money to their disaster relief fund to help the people of Turkey and Syria who have been killed in and displaced by the massive earthquake that collapsed their cities. That is even sadder than the story about the hundreds of welders from India who were enslaved within the one country in the world that believes in freedom and liberty.

Turkey, a Five Story Pile of Rubble

Filed under: Book Review, family, Government, Immigration, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Bureaucracy 101

Posted on 16/04/2022 by Grumpa Joe

      In my last post I made some comments about the Federal Bureaucracy. Afterwards I decided to educate myself on what I meant. A search was in order to learn just how many bureaucracies we have. We all know about a few that I list here:

Plus a few more like:

  • The internal Revenue Service
  • Justice Department
  • Supreme Court
  • Social Security Administration
  • Bureau of Veteran Affairs
  • Treasury Department.

       All of the above agencies are mentioned frequently in the news, and I thought they were the only ones. Then, I made the mistake of searching the government websites for information on how many there are. I was amazed. The first page of the website

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/

was a table by alphabet. Clicking on a letter yields a list of agencies with names beginning with the letter selected. I can create a table showing you just how many agencies there are listed under each letter of twenty-two alphabet, but it will be easier to click on the link and go there yourself. The letters Q, X, Y, & Z were not on the list. I counted the agencies and got a sum of 629. No wonder no one wants to tackle the problem of reducing government spending. At first glance the problem seems to be insurmountable.

      How do bureaucracies begin? It is simple. When Congress passes a law to spend money on something like Civil Rights they need a way to implement the law. They hire people to put the law in place and to enforce it. That act becomes a new bureaucracy. I have never seen a Bureaucracy disbanded or a law repealed in my lifetime. The only law I know that was repealed was Prohibition.

      In my job as an engineer, I was introduced to the Pareto-Principle by one Joe Duran a American Quality Control guru who converted the Japanese car industry to the QC system that would reverse their shitty cars into the most sought-after vehicles in the world. The Pareto Principle was invented by an Italian engineer in the 1800’s. Basically it states that 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the effort. My first step in analyzing this problem of bureaucracy is to use the 80/20 rule on the whole problem.

      The total budget for the federal government is $4.829 trillion. Applying the Pareto Principle to the budget means that we spend .9658 trillion to get 80 percent of the services, and flush 3.8632 trillion dollars down the drain for twenty percent of service. How smart is that? Why our simple-minded politicians can’t wrap their brains around that is astounding. All I can figure with my feeble old brain is that it is too hard for Congress to undo what they have already approved.  

      After a few seconds of research on the web I found some suggestions for how Congress can restrain executive agencies.

 By:

  • revising statutes that established the agency’s mission.
  • exercising control over an agency’s budget.
  • conducting audits or holding hearings.
  • influencing the selection of agency directors (Senate)

      Would it be a wet dream to believe that 469 Congressmen and 100 Senators could take on 503 Government agencies to reduce spending? In my book that is 503/569 = 0.884 agencies per Congressional seat. If a single Congressman can’t reduce costs of an assigned agency by eighty percent by the end of his first term he should pack up his bags and let someone in who knows how to do the job. That objective should be written in the job description.

      I know, I know, a single Congressman cannot cut costs by himself. We are a country of laws and a Congressman’s responsibility is to draft laws to get things done. Well, with that in mind, a Congress-person can write a law to cut the costs and present it to the legislature for approval. Of course, if the law does not pass those that voted against the law will have to come up against you to pass theirs. Since your jobs depend on cutting costs. It won’t take long for Congress to get the idea, and begin to cooperate with each other.

      My whole plan depends on people who run for office wanting to save the country, and stop inflation by reducing government spending. It also depends on us (We, the People) to pick the right individuals at election time. If we don’t like who is running, maybe we should throw our own hat into the ring.

Here are a few more goals to think about using the 80/20 rule:

  • Eighty percent of the benefit comes from 126 Agencies. Eliminate the remaining 503. Which ones would you save?
  • Cut the Federal Budget by twenty-five percent to save 1.2 trillion dollars.
  • Use the savings to pay off the National Debt over thirty years.
  • Cut the federal budget another 25% to save 905 billion dollars, and return it to the tax payers.

Think of all the money that would put in your pocket. A total of $905,000,000,000/350,000,000 = $2585.71 would go to each member of the population.

Instead of setting goals such as I have listed we will get nonsense like printing more dollars to pay bills. Since President Nixon finally ended the Gold standard in 1971 the US dollar has lost 70% of its value meaning one dollar can only buy thirty cents worth of goods today as it could in 1971.

      Our current inflation rate exceeds 11% and is climbing. If it rises higher the USA will go bankrupt, and I don’t want to live to see that happen.

Filed under: Conservative, economy, Government, politics | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

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