As the Burger turns Part 2

Sunday, June 28th, 2020 at around 4 a.m. Why ?, because I like to hallucinate that's why.

So anyway, there I was, surrounded by the VC, fighting with Charlie.....No wait, that a movie. Man, old people huh? I think Sam Kenison and Rodney Dangerfield is in it.

COVID-19 update (USA)                                 Closed cases (USA)

2,596,770  Cases of the virus                   1,208,646   Cases with an Outcome

   128,152  Deaths                                     1,081,494    Recovered or Discharged (89%)

1,081,494  Recovered                                  128,152    Deaths (11%) 

Disclaimer: The title of this post is the start of my soap opera for old people called "As the Burger Turns" or it could be titled "Tales from the Grill" or maybe even "Flipping for posterity", not sure what to call it yet. Anyway, to make this clear right from the start, everything in this post is wholly created from my own recollections, which may be faulty because I am old, or because I choose to lie about it, take your pick. At any rate, everything I post here today belongs to me, the good the bad and the ugly, and is a product of my highly developed imagination. If I use a situation that you know about and it was actually different, then SHADDUP! , just read it and don't ruin a good story with a correction about some trivial things called facts. It's a story, stories are based on what people think and everybody knows that people lie. 

So anyhow, backing up just a little bit from yesterday and talking about the changes that happen all the time just about everywhere you go. When I first went to work at Steak `n Shake in the spring of 1974, I was this 16-year-old pimple-faced, long-haired, lothario with a thing for older women (I mean I was 16, I thought 25 was an older woman), and a greedy streak about a mile wide. I loved having cash money in my pocket and not waiting for payday all the time. I had not even considered waiting on cars as a "curbie" when I applied to work there, but I remember the manager at the time, a man named Wayne Duncan, who told me if I liked money working the curb would be a terrific thing for me as you got paid by every car and the better you were at serving, the more money you made. 

It was a persuasive argument and on March 12,1974 I began my career by taking a curb tray with 6 of the 10-ounce water tumblers on them, balanced on my right hand at eye level, and walking to the other end of the parking lot. Right next to me was my trainer who told me when I got to be comfortable with the tray that I needed to swing it a little bit so it would move in step with me, it would swing as I walked and I could then start to move a tiny bit faster with each walk around the lot. That is all I did on the first day, well, I carried water and took out the trash. Curb 80, please!!

After a day or so of carrying water, my trainer told me to get my water and follow her. Then she took off running with the tray and the 6 glasses of water and I stood there going, UH, what the hell? Her name was Becky and I could already tell she didn't think much of me because I was this young stupid boy who had this goofy grin and some broken glasses. She had already told me to not even bother hitting on her before I even thought about it because she didn't dig young boys, ya dig? So as I watched her disappear into the distance, running off with the water, red hair blowing in the breeze, mysteriously somehow swinging that tray, running in full stride all the way to the end of the parking lot which was about 400 feet away or so. 

I, on the other hand, had not moved an inch. 

I was stunned.

She walked back to where I was standing and said something like "What happened?", I said "To what?", she said "To you?", and I thought, this girl is silly because she thinks I can do what she just did and run with her and a loaded tray to the end of the lot. I just said "So, you think I can do that?", and what she said stuck with me, She sorta challenged me and said, "You know this is what the girls like right?". I was hooked. Of course, I was young and stupid, and she had just given me a secret so I swallowed the hook and thought, "Well, if she can do it, I can do it" and I took off running with my tray of water tumblers.

Not the only time it ever happened, but I broke every one of those damn glasses. She had not told me how to stop, so when I stopped, the glasses didn't and they all went crashing over the edge. As I was trying to salvage them, I flipped the tray back towards me and most of the 60 ounces of ice-cold water came right back into my face. Then they hit the ground, Ice, water, tray, and now broken glass. An auspicious start if there ever was one. Becky just walked into the store, picked up the broom and dustpan she had already put by the front door in preparation for this moment. She walked out to me, handed them to me, and walked away without saying another word. I cleaned up the broken glass for about 15 minutes.

At least she didn't laugh, to my face anyhow.

My Uncle George it just so happened was the Division Curb Manager at the time, sort of like the chief Curb Captain of Car service for the Division office, which was in a lot of ways sort of like the District Manager of Curb Service. He came by the store to see how his nephew was doing on his first day on the job. I wasn't even aware he knew I had started work there, so it surprised me to see him. He asked me how it was going and I told him what happened, how I had sent the water glasses flying, and they now had me carrying paper cups with lids until I mastered the skill. He squashed that idea, got 6 more ice water glasses, and made me run with him, while he carried the tray and he demonstrated the proper techniques of bringing the tray up and down, starting, stopping, and delivering the drinks to the customer and so forth. He worked with me for about 2 hours individually and when he got done, I could do it and found out I was actually pretty good at it too.

Over the next few weeks, I learned a lot about making money, some good tricks, and some stupid habits that given time and context I saw later how dumb they were. I also found time to think about how my training had gone so far, and I thought to myself that if I was ever put in a position where I was responsible to train someone to perform a function, I would give them the same kind of personalized instruction and help that was afforded to me by My Uncle George on my second day of work. Not many people got that kind of training and I wondered if that was true then what kind of training did most people get? It was a powerful lesson that stuck with me all these years later and I never forgot it. Oh, and she was right too, Becky wouldn't give me the time of day, she laughed at me no matter what I suggested. I tried to be friendly with her, I think she just didn't like me. It turns out years later, it wasn't that she didn't like me, It was just that I didn't MATTER all that much. I was the FNG and she had seen a million of them.

Oh well. 

I was 16 at the time, all 16-year-olds are idiots by definition, so what did I know?

So back to Franklin Road, I was appointed to be a Manager Trainee and was started in training to be a manager. I was eager to learn and it seemed like I was in a self-directed Montessori open classroom sort of 26-week training program. I filled out a self-evaluation every week, but what I did during the week was pretty much ran the place while Mr. Tetrick paid his bills, ran personal errands, talked on the phone, and a BUNCH of other things having little to do with running a burger joint. It turns out that he had been a District Manager for the company immediately prior to this and had been demoted to Unit Manager (Or Store manager as we called them back then) and his heart wasn't in the game. I never did know why he was demoted and truthfully, I didn't care all that much as I didn't really know him and he was pretty hard to get to know as he held you at arm's length all the time. All I knew was that if somebody wasn't in charge of this place, then my day was going to blow so I decided to just take over and let him rest. It didn't seem to matter to him one way or the other. I was fairly happy at the time because I got a pay raise to do what I always did, which was to work my ass off, do my job, and go home.

At the time I remember thinking that it couldn't get much better than this. I was barely 18 years old, got my pay bumped into the Manager zone where if you can believe it, I was making the princely sum of $2.625 per hour for the privilege of working 50-60 hours a week, 5 or 6 days per week and now I had enough money and a good enough job to get married. Also, I was working for these bunch of clueless turds like Mr. Tetrick that didn't give 2 squirts what I did so life was good. I was basically my own boss at 18 and ran a store unofficially of course, but being the short-sighted teenager I was, I can honestly say now, that I didn't know any better. I had my own key to the door, made my own coffee, opened the store and he would stroll in around 9:30 - 10:00 to do the banking. 

It was barely more than 12K per year and I was rolling in the dough. Or so I thought. One day I came to work, found the door already unlocked coffee already made and half-drunk, and about half the line was already set up. Somebody was doing my job.

That was the day I met John Franklin Fair.

First impressions are important and as I found out much later I wasn't very impressive. I knew better, but I had not shaved that morning, my hair was longer than it should have been, my uniform was pretty rumpled, I never ironed a shirt at the time, I always wore wash and wear slacks and I am certain that my shoes had seen better days because I flat wore shoes totally out before I ever replaced them, mostly because I was a tightwad, but usually because, who thinks about shoes? So, pretty much I thought I was king of the world and I was a slob. 

The first moment I saw Mr. Fair, I just knew this was going to be no walk in the park. He was just about 5' 10" maybe, about 220 pounds, had arms like an ape and canned hams for fists. He could have been a little taller I don't know, but he also could have been the bouncer. He had on basically the same uniform I did, except his was clean and pressed. Oh, and the toes of his shoes weren't all scuffed up and worn out either. I went over to him and introduced myself and said "Excuse me, sir,  Who are you? Where is Mr. Tetrick?.", He just looked at me for about 15 seconds without saying a word then shook his head, said "I'm John, your boss. Go do whatever it is that you do around here." and I was DISMISSED. 

So confused and not knowing what in the hell was going on, I went to check the line, started changing plates in the grill box, making sure the steam wells had water in them, checked the hot fudge pump, stocked the shake base and ice cream and got a pan of hot water and cleaner and began to wipe down and check the entire line to make sure it was ready to go for lunch hour. A couple of the other crew members asked me if I knew what was going on and I just said"That's John, your new boss, go ask him." I didn't know it at the time, but two things happened that morning that I found out later had changed Mr. Fairs' opinion of me. His first impression was "Well here is another slob to get rid of", and his first impression was that he was probably going to have to replace me too because I didn't look like I cared much about my job. What saved me was I was polite, wouldn't immediately engage in gossip, and went to work checking the line and worked hard at getting the place clean and ready for lunch. I doled out assignments, got cleaning lists made, made sure the bathrooms were clean, the floors got mopped and the lot got picked up. He caught me using a 14 point program checklist, asked me what it was and what it was used for. After I answered him he asked me if I had been doing it long enough that I didn't need the checklist, I told him probably but somebody told me one time that pilots with thousands of hours of flying time still used a checklist every day to make sure they didn't forget anything so I thought it was a good idea.

After lunch hour was over that day Mr. Fair asked me if I wanted to keep my job. I was sort of stunned and said, Of course, It's a pretty good job and I like doing it. He said when I came into work tomorrow and every day after that I needed a new pair of shoes, some new shirts as my collars were severely frayed, some new slacks as mine were worn out and I had to shave every single day. Then he said do you think you can do that? I told him honestly that I could not as it was about 2 days until payday and had already paid my bills and didn't have any money set aside. I told him that I could do all of it by the day after payday, and I would be clean-shaven tomorrow. He just looked at me. Then said go back to work, come and find me and see me before you go home. 

Oh boy, aw crap, ah hell. I screwed up now, I shoulda lied, I shoulda said I could do whatever he wanted. I just know he is gonna fire my ass.

I went and found him after I clocked out and he pointed at his car, said can you be an hour late getting home? I said yes, He told me to go get in the car. I went and sat in the front seat of his car and wondered just what fresh hell I had walked into. I was so nervous I think I could not have shit a pebble because my ass was so tight at this point. He came out of the back door, deposit in hand, locked the door, got in the car, started it up, and drove it away. Me and him, him confident and large and in charge, Me with an ass puckered up so tight I am sure I sat up about three inches taller than I usually did. He drove down to the bank, dropped off the deposit, and went down to the mall. We got out of the car and he and I walked into the mall. He found the Barbershop/style salon whatever it was, pointed at a chair, said "Sit", so I sat, he went over and talked with the stylist who then called me over and put an apron neck thingie on me, and cut my hair. No direction from me at all, and when I attempted to say what I wanted she just pointed at John and said "Your dad told me what to do." 

Ok, so I am totally freaked out at this point and have no clue what in the hell is happening, but it looks like I'm getting a haircut. I needed one anyway so I just said what the hell and let it happen.

Over the course of the next whirlwind 45 minutes or so we purchased a couple of shirts, some slacks, some shoes, some socks and I got a haircut. At this point, Mr. Fair had not said 50 words to me the entire fricking day. We got back to the store, he turned to me in the car and said: "Now can you start looking like I asked you to look, starting tomorrow?", My answer was "Yes sir Mr. Fair sir." He told me "Well that's just fine", and he said he would see me at whatever time it was that I was supposed to be there the next day, told me I owed him for what we had just spent on me, told me to get out of his car and left me standing there, right near the back door of the old Franklin Road Steak `n Shake location. 

I am sure I had the biggest and goofiest grin on my face that anyone had ever had on their face and I just knew that something special had just happened to me, although to tell you the truth I had no idea what I was in for.

Stay tuned for part Three of as the burger turns.

BigMike

Living in weird times

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020 Today is my wife's Monday, can't wait until her Friday

So I missed my first blog post since spring yesterday, as I had to go on my tour of Northwest Georgia's finest medical facilities and greet all my fans in the Radiological. Administrative, Nursing, Scanning, and various other departments that I have had to deal with this week. I've had a ton of X-rays, an MRI of my neck, a radiological scan of my bones in Nuclear medicine, I had a lo-Dose Cat Scan of my lungs checking to make sure I don't have any apparent lung cancer (I don't thank god!), and CAT Scan of my abdomen and pelvis. I am poked and prodded and scanned and X-rayed and Magnetized and done with that crap finally, at least for a time. It is not only time consuming but annoying and you feel as if you are just a peg in the pegboard of the process. You go through all that crap and pretty much nobody can tell you anything.

Oh, I'm wrong, I did find out my kidney function is good.

I have a blast making sound effects like the screeching sound of going around a corner in the wheelchair while somebody else is pushing it. I do that to amuse myself and see if I can get the bored medical person (titles schmitles) to giggle. It usually works to some extent. It's always better when my wife or daughter is there and can be a floor show if I brought PJ. One or two funny things happened, One was a medical student who came to get me from the waiting room to take me to a scanner, and he says "ok let's go, its this way", and sorta turns around and begins to walk away. Then he noticed that I wasn't with him, he stops, looks back sort of puzzled, noticed I haven't moved and says "Do you need me to push you?"I just giggled and said, "If you want me to go with you, yes!" I mean, the scanner room is several hundred feet away down the corridor and around a couple of corners and it's not like it is one doorway to the right, pretty close to me. I could not have moved the wheelchair that far if I wanted to.

Later on, in the scanning room, I was messing with him and said "You did notice I was sitting in a wheelchair right? and that I am handicapped, I mean disabled?", He was embarrassed and admitted he was distracted. It was a giggle. Another time, a nurse came out of a set of double doors that were behind me and to the right of me, behind a wall that was obstructing my view. She came out and called my last name, and I yelled back "Yes?", and she waited. Then she said my name again, "I said "Yes", again and then she came into view from around the little corner we were behind, saw I was sitting in a wheelchair, and apparently was embarrassed and told me to hold on and rushed back into her doors. I didn't have the heart to say "Where do you think I am going to go?", but she came back with all of the blood draw equipment she needed and took my blood sample right there. It is amazing to me that even in a hospital, people are taken aback and a little unprepared for a person who doesn't walk. I'm used to it everywhere else I go, but even in a hospital, it happens. The best part is my wife. She just rolls her eyes and ignores my silliness and goes back to her book.

Anyway, It was a blast, Trust me.

So moving on, my observation today is to say out loud "We are living in very weird times, Bro". I really never thought that I would be a part of a society that seems so intent on tearing itself apart. Ideologically people who have differing opinions from each other are enrolled in the biggest character study I have ever seen.

It's a study in the denial of reality actually.

I watch perfectly normal-seeming rational people argue about some of the stupidest crap I have ever seen and sometimes I have to hit the mental replay button to make sure I heard what I thought I heard. People who I know personally, for example, that I know have absolutely no scientific training whatsoever, and who are good mechanics and great fabricators have formed opinions about scientific subjects that make either no sense or have absolutely no facts behind them. It is sorta stunning that they will believe five or 6 youtube videos made by some wacko presenter but anything actually made by scientists or people who have expertise in the subject being discussed are labeled as "Fake news" or liars, and the sole ONLY reason for this pronouncement from them is because they do not understand what is being said and because of that they don't believe it. Amazing. Just think if they didn't believe that Advanced mathematics was real.

Our leadership doesn't help the situation at all either. I am not talking about one person or party though, because this problem lands squarely on and belongs to each individual, without regard to their political party or their elected position. They all seem to be intent on not coming to grips with dealing with what is happening at ground level. All of them act like we aren't really in the middle of, for example, a pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people. I have seen comparisons that make no sense and don't have anything to do with each other be used as the basis for what I can only call dipshit announcements.

For example, Here is just one stupid one of many, there was a health department questionnaire, that was created (and since withdrawn) in South Dakota, was given to returning Smithfield meatpacking workers who were coming back to work after the plant had been temporarily closed were asked varying questions. Several questions asked things like; Have you been exposed to or worked with someone who has had any of the symptoms such as a runny nose, a high temperature, someone who has been off sick due to the COVID-19 virus, has anyone in your family had the virus, and etc. It seemed that the questions were designed to look for connections between workers who may have been sick. That seemed perfectly reasonable until you read the bottom statement that said something like "If any of the above answers indicate positive then that employee is not eligible for COVID-19 testing".

WHAT? That's right, if you have been exposed, you don't get tested, because the government says testing potentially exposed workers could cause a panic, and meatpacking is an essential industry. Dipshit announcement.

Coronavirus at Smithfield Pork processing in South Dakota

I guess because the virus isn't toppling skyscrapers and leaving big gaping holes in the ground then the facts that 120,000 people have died aren't real enough to matter all that much. I see comparisons made all the time that are just dumb too. People say things like "Hell 50,000 people die from the flu every year and it sparks millions of hospital, doctor and treatment visits so why is this any different?" Well, for one thing, we know how to combat the flu. People die sure for all kinds of reasons like they don't seek treatment, but without treatment and vaccines and intervention millions more could and have died.

The point is we are aware of how serious the flu is and this virus is much more serious because if it takes over your system, we have no real or effective way to treat you. The Covid-19 virus deaths are statistically on top of the deaths from everything else. It doesn't take the place of the flu, hell you could survive the flu and this thing could still kill you. You could get the virus, recover from it, get the flu, and recover from it and then get the virus and still die from it anyway. 

This thing is a monster and it kills in a way that we haven't really ever seen before. It destroys the lungs. Once it has destroyed your lungs, if we could do it, the only way to treat you and reverse the damage is to do a lung transplant. Once it has destroyed your lungs you are circling the drain and are a goner. So why do we ignore it and treat it so blase`? In some areas, it seems like the more you drill down into the data, the more you look and the more you target the areas to look at, the dumber our response looks. The ultimate loss of freedom is to lose your existence, but people are worried about wearing a mask. Dumber than shit. I guess that is our right, but you are still acting stupidly without regard to how you feel about the actions taken by the other political party.

We have talked about there being a flattened curve, about the need to see new cases fall off so that we were moving in the right direction and all of that. In a lot of cases, people are talking like there has been a falling curve and the truth is a few places that have done a lot of work have seen a fall-off but most places haven't changed all that much and at least 21 states are increasing. Yet, everything in the state is opening back up and guidelines are lessening and the restrictions are going away. The virus is in full swing, hospitals all over the place are out of ICU beds, and the casinos are open. Smooth we are, Yoda said. 

The curve has nothing to do with the decisions being made, but the politics do. Politics are playing a huge part in what is going on. The Republicans are opening everything back up because this is an election year and they are trying to hold on until after the election to react, and the Democrats are trying to close everything up, but not really to save lives. They want to win the presidential election and the best way to do that is to make the President look weak and responsible for this mess. The truth is the leadership of both parties sucks and they are both at once responsible for the increasing cases and not responsible for the viral outbreak in the first place. It is maddening to try to explain this to most reasonable people.

Somehow we deem segments of our society as "too important" to close or to restrict. I understand the argument that closing the country hurts more people in the long run with job losses and unemployment and so forth, however, I have a tough time saying "Grandma , I'm so sorry but you have to die so we can still gamble." It is a ludicrous proposition and makes no sense because there has been no leadership that has been demonstrated by either party on either side at any level. If closing the economy does wider damage than the virus does at full steam, then why do we want anyone to wear a mask at all, without regard to the particularly dumbass opinion that it somehow impinges on your freedom to not wear a mask? 

Why bother with social distancing at any level, why not just get some big assed bulldozers and dig a shit load of big ass ditches and open everything up to full steam ahead,  so every theme park, every cruise line, every theatre, every ballpark, every sports league, open everything and let us have at it. Anybody that DIES gets crumpled up and crammed in the ditch and to hell with them. That way, the all-important economy will not suffer and even the funeral segment will see a rise because we will see a bunch of new purchases of funeral services. That is the inevitable conclusion of the dumbass argument for no masks, no restrictions and let me do what I want that all you morons are crowing all day long on social media.  Makes a lot of sense huh? 

Now we have politicians advancing and the folks who follow them parroting another stupid idea. The idea goes something like this "Do not do so much testing and you won't have so many cases. Simple. Slow down the testing. Fewer tests, fewer cases. Problem solved." Do you immediately see the failure in this logic as I did? Finding too many cases is not what is stressing out the medical systems, it is not what is filling ICU beds, It is not what is leading to more admitting to the hospitals. Testing doesn't kill you. You could do ZERO tests and the same amount (or more) of people would still die.

As you drill down from the national leadership to the more local level, what you generally find are points of view being expressed that model very closely the national parties and decisions that are made based upon politics and not science. That is until you ignore politics altogether and look at medical leadership and medical professionals instead. The one thing that medical people say with one voice is that more testing leads to more negative cases too (And I don't believe I even have to say that), however, you look at it however the same #'s of people still die. Without behavior changes, people die. That is something all medical people agree on and we are not listening. 

That is something I will never understand. I am not advocating a return to a locked-down society. I am not saying we need to stay at home all over again and all the stores need to be shut down. Even if this is the very best option, it is not something that is likely to happen because we do not have any interest in it due to our lack of national leadership and because the common man is so confused by our collective stupidity, he doesn't believe it will help. So what to do, what to do?

Well, for a start we could demand a source of information that is not political and is not bowing and scraping to the president, begging to stay funded. Right now if you say something he doesn't like, he will fire your leader and cut your funding and some guy that ran a dry cleaner last week will be in charge of your laboratory operations and reporting. We need an unimpeachable source of medical news. Can you believe we don't have that at present?

We could have a set of national guidelines that make sense and that everybody could agree on? Instead, we got a real estate meeting run by Jared and Chaired by the ex-talk show host from Indiana that doesn't make any sense and doesn't listen to medical people. Great. If only there was a national organization that was run by scientists that could develop something like that. Can you believe we don't have that at present either?

What we do have is a mish-mash of public health policy made up on the fly by ordinary people who have no scientific training and who do not know SHIT about public health or public health policy. Quite a few of them could sell you a used car, some property, or file your divorce for you. That is the make-up of our coronavirus task force. 

Some much of what we do have our leaders telling us is just about as strange as the old "Duck and Cover" advice I was given when I was a child about hiding under my desk in case there was a nuclear attack. I'm pretty sure that was so the burning of our bodies would be complete and there wouldn't be as much pain and it may make it easier to identify the ash piles based on where we used to sit.

We could have used an example or two about what kind of mask to wear or how to wear it instead of leaving that to the internet meme-makers who point out the helpful advice on that back of the N-95 mask that tells you it doesn't prevent the coronavirus from infecting you if worn improperly or if you don't follow all the instructions. A medical professional explaining all of this would have been nice. But No, why waste time and money on that because Instead, I get to see Bruce the painter show me his nostrils filled with paint because he wore his N95 like a painters mask and it didn't stop the paint from getting inside his nose so how can it stop a little germ??? Trust me, that was really extremely helpful, thank you for forwarding that 10,000 times yesterday alone. It did a world of good.

Something that would have really useful would have been a public demonstration of how to help yourself to stay healthy from our leadership, like the proper way to wear a mask. Hell, they missed a great opportunity for some real MAGA marketing if somebody would have just thought to make red MAGA masks and hand them out at his rallies. He would have been the corona King and would have been the leader on this issue. Instead, we get Buffo the clown saying "What mask, we don't need a mask ", and Baldy the life long Democrat Puking up his BLM bullshit in a kente cloth in a black face mask and saying exactly JACK SHIT NOTHING and trust me, both of you are really helpful fellas.

So really nothing has happened to help us. Neither side has taken the lead, We are all still dying, we are all still sucking worse than we did yesterday and no one has a clue that we are lemmings being led over the edge. 

That's great. I love it.

As a result; (From the CDC yesterday)

2,203,302 Cases of the virus

   120,333 Deaths

   740,000 Recovered

Thank God

BigMike

You are wrong about the Supreme Court

Saturday, June 20th, 2020 at about 7:00 a.m. in the morning

One of the first rules of comedy is to read the room and understand your audience,

I'm going to break that rule this morning and just hope that if I talk below your level of knowledge that you will help to educate me and that if I talk above your level that you will look up the answers and try to prove me wrong while bettering your own knowledge base, instead of just blowing me off because you don't agree with me or just repeating a political talking point.

Today's post is not about who is right and who is wrong, nor is it about your political persuasions and whom you support in your vision of what our society should look like in the future. All I am attempting to do today is to talk about facts as they exist and talk about reality, that is how the facts are seen in relation to what actually happens. I'm not going to address what should occur, nor am I going to get into what I think has occurred when that reasoning is filtered through the lens of politics. Sometimes it is impossible to talk about a subject without some context and that context may be a political filter, however, I only use that filter when it is the only way to explain something.

In my humble opinion, I do not think most people (Joe Average and Josephina Average American) understand the role of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, nor do I think they have a clear understanding of how it works or why it is that way. I see and hear commentary all the time indicating that the commenter thinks the court should have "Just Follow the Law", or "They should not make law" or "They are too Conservative or too Liberal" and other such concepts. I'm sure you have heard these too and/or may have had such feelings in the past on many of these same subjects.

My opinion is that these concepts are cut cleanly and clearly from different cloth with regard to the way most people define those terms. When it comes to higher-level courts these concepts have different meanings and a Justice's roles are much different than you may think it is, whether you agree or like them or not. Nothing in our society or in how we are exposed to a court proceeding prepares us for how an appeals court such as the Supreme Court operates or in how it decides cases. I am of the opinion that most people don't understand how the court operates.

Click this Link --->How the Supreme Court Operates

First and foremost is the process of accepting a case to review by the court. When an appellant is unsatisfied with rulings of the courts once a case has been appealed, they make an appeal to the next level of the court asking for a review. At various levels, those reviews are asking the next appellant court to decide a case judgment based on the facts of the case and asking the Appeals court to decide in favor of or overturn the trial judge or a previous appeal court based upon a mistake the court may have made in reviewing the facts of the case or may have misapplied the law in deciding the outcome. The reasons for accepting and deciding a case can be very narrowly construed at this level and even when decided favorably their decision may not overturn an entire case and may not decide the case at all, they may just point out the error and send the case back to the originating court for a decision with better instructions to that court.

This happens all the time.

In submitting a case for review to the Supreme Court, the appellant submits a Writ of Certiorari, which is a filing asking the court to hear the case, to hear their objections to the decisions of the Appeals court. Usually, the Supreme court only hears cases where there may be appellant review from the Federal appeals court system or the highest case in a state or territory such as a case decided by a state Supreme Court, under the courts' jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has both Original and Appellant jurisdiction. It is limited in Original Jurisdiction (case decisions at case level)  to cases involving disputes between the States or other high ranking ministers. Remember the case of the elections in the year 2000 (Bush v Gore)  That was an original jurisdiction case that went to the court and bypassed many of the usual court proceedings, especially at the Appeals court level.

In appellant review cases they have the responsibility and jurisdiction to review decisions made by the lower courts. Once a brief and response have been filed, discussed, and accepted then a case is set for oral arguments before the entire court. These arguments are usually blocks of time reserved by the court to answer questions that the Justices may have and are not a period of time to re-hash the facts of the case. By now the facts of the case are well known and what the discussion is about is how to decide the case on what set of merits or not. Once a case has been argued and responded to it is set for Judicial conference.

At each conference the justices talk about the cases they have heard arguments from either side about and they vote and decide how they are going to rule on each case, At this point, a Justice is assigned the case to write the opinion for the majority and one is assigned to write a dissenting opinion for the minority. Other Justices may write their own opinions or concurring opinions where they agree with their colleagues but for differing reasons.

To say the court should just "Follow the law" for example is a narrow and fairly naive point of view as laws are found to be and frequently are outside the bounds of Precedent (Stare Decisis), or it may be in conflict with the US Constitution or it may be in violation of another superseding Federal Law.

Recently for example (which is a great example of this concept in action), the court made a decision concerning the DACA case, the so-called Dreamers Act, the court decided that the Trump administration had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in ending the program, and without good and sufficient reason in Unilaterally ending the Dreamer program. They did not decide the merits of the case, that is, the court did not decide whether the program was legal as that was not the question put before the court. That is how many non-legal scholars described the action the court took, by saying that the court ruled against the President personally.

Like many people who like only what they like, they were dead wrong. Not only did they not decide its legality, but they also didn't decide the presidents authority to act and didn't decide the constitutionality of the act that created the Dreamers in the first place. You wouldn't know that by listening to anything said by most political pundits and virtually everyone on Television. Not only were they wrong, but once again they lied and were dead wrong.

They (the court) did however decide that the way the President acted was unilateral and unprecedented and without sufficient and good cause. They also decided that his actions and the actions of his advisor, Steven Miller, violated a long-standing Federal Law and did not meet the guidelines of that law and that the work presented to the court in support of the administrations' actions were "sloppy and ineffective". This is important as it did not as President Trump has stated "rule against him", rather the court ruled against the sloppy work of his attorneys and the filing of his advisor and the way the case was framed in total by Steven Miller.

Mr. Miller and the attorneys filed their brief in support of the action of the President took that essentially stated the reasons given for ending the program were pretty much the verbatim argument of the President that  "It's over because as President, I say it's over." That's good enough in Russia and in Cuba but not in the US, and I really don't get how an educated attorney missed that most important point of their appeal.

The US Federal law that this filing violated with their sloppy policy-making process (their words, not mine) is called the Administrative Procedures Act, a GW Bush-era law that was put into place to prevent the changing of US Policy-based upon the personal whims of the incoming (DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT), Barack Obama and his incoming staff.

The court did not rule on the question of whether or not the President had the authority under US Law to end the program because clearly, he does, however, it does mean he has to follow the law like everybody else, that this is not a dictatorship and things don't get done just because he says they do. That is not how the rule of law works in America. They said he must provide good, sufficient reasons and that the reason he uses must follow generally accepted precedent, as all actions taken by a US president must. They said actions he takes may not be contrived using a negative action based upon a prohibited method, (for example, asking an applicant for a position if they are a woman, and then using the affirmative answer to exclude her from the job), and the actions taken must be lawful. They did leave open the possibility the President may choose to end the act in a wholly separate way, that his administration has the right to a do-over and can act in such a legal and lawful way as to get it right the next time.

If this is what you mean when you say the court must follow the law, then I agree with you.

Things are heating up, I think that the next few months are going to be a wild ride.

1. In Atlanta, Fulton County mostly, they are on the 4th day of a blu-flu epidemic. It started when the mayor undermined the police force by not following due process and firing an Atlanta Police Officer and was exacerbated by the corrupt district attorney filing false charges against that same officer. That officer is plainly not guilty following even the harshest reading of current law.
   
   I really hope the DA gets his ass handed to him. I hope he goes to jail too. I also hope he isn't caught speeding in Fulton county any time soon. What an idiot.
   
   
2. The USAF has named a female to be its highest NCO. JoAnn Bass has been named as the Chief Master Sargeant of the US Air Force. It's a great day in America!
   
   
3. Colorado has ended qualified immunity for police officers and has banned the use of chokeholds too. Their bill also requires all police officers to wear body cameras in all departments to allow public access to the video. They have also banned shooting fleeing suspects or suing deadly force unless a life is in immediate danger.
   
   No word on whether or not the budget has been increased for the now foreseen incredible rise in retirements and the tenfold cost in new recruiting.
   
   
4. John Bolton's new book alleges (about Trump) - (A) The Ukraine allegation was implicit quid pro quo. (B) Similar incidents occurred in Turkey and China (C) He explicitly (Trump) asked China to help him in his re-election bid (D) He did not know that Britain was a Nuclear superpower (E) He thought Finland was a part of Russia (F) Mike Pompeo thought that Trump's overtures to the North Koreans were useless and it was a joke (G) Bolton reported all of this and more to Bill Barr and more and that Trump approved of China's use of concentration camps.
   
   Wow.
   
   
5. Now that Robert Mueller's report has been released mostly unredacted in an FOIA request by BuzzFeed we can plainly see that the Investigators believed that Trump and his team directly lied to investigators. You can also see that the President discussed his answers with Roger Stone in advance. Also, new revelations that Trump knew all about Wikileaks from the beginning.
   
   But yeah, No Collusion, yeah. Keep the faith.
   
   Jesus Christ, we just keep steaming right along, don't we?
   BigMike
   

I should just shut my pie hole

Wednesday, June 10th, 2020 at about 6 a.m. or so

We are in the land of milk and honey and the milk is spoiled and the Honey is under attack by murder hornets!!,

Hey, there fellow believers in sleeping and bathing,

So yesterday I went a little bit off the deep end and got what I call mouth Diarrhea. That's where I just go on and on and even repeat myself to the point where it looks like I begin to circle back to the beginning to try to make a point or two. I really wish I wouldn't do it but I get PISSED OFF at this ignorant stuff that comes out of other people's mouths that we are supposed to believe. Hannity makes me like that, Maddow makes me like that, that creep Al Sharpton makes me like that the race-baiting liar that he is, that idiot that used to think he was cool because he wore a bow tie, Tucker Carlson makes me like that. They say some of the stupidest and most ignorant things and then repeat them so often that I'm convinced they believe their own garbage. It just makes me scream at the TV people and everyone in my house then looks on with pity as the poor curmudgeon loses his mind once again and they show me a great pity party and all is good.

Really what happens is they make fun of me (PJ, Megan), they ignore me (LaDonna), or they bark at me (the dogs) until I come back to reality and shut my pie hole. I am just so sick and tired of this indirect sound bite society we live in.  No one ever says what is on their mind, they talk all the way around it and you are supposed to figure it out because some media consultant had told them it's better for their reputation that way. Man does that ever suck! I think it is worse today than it has ever been, IMHO.

I mean Elmer Fudd isn't going to be carrying a gun anymore, because he has a gun. Find the logic in that statement. It's what they said announcing their decisions (the same thing has been said about Yosemite Sam- No guns),  Even though outsmarting Elmer in spite of his gun has always been the point and he never kills a damn thing, he can't be shown with a gun because, you know, the children. Most if not all of the cartoons from the 70s and 80s have been effectively banned from TV because the characters exhibit violent tendencies and exhibit violence as their preferred method for solving the problems of our society and that supposedly sends a very bad message to our kids who we left parked in front of the boob tube in the first place by their parents who have long ago abandoned any pretense of parenting because you know, the children.

I really cannot imagine why there is no room for TV shows like "All in the family" or  "The Jeffersons" anymore, but we can make and show this absolutely useless drivel genius of product placement and commercial success that is those two shows "Black-ish" and "Mixed-ish".

Hey MJ, didn't you know there is a serious dialogue going on in this country about race and violence? There is a dialogue about race in this country? What dialogue is that? Which sound bite being promoted by which side is the right one to listen to. Hell, even our smartest people are being sucked in to and are displaying this "It's Us versus Them" mentality. Honestly, the only one I have seen make a serious attempt at a discussion in the last 5 years is Geroge Will and he was pretty much just ignored after he left the Republicans in disgust. Until the day he announced his departure he was a "Senior Statesman" and an arbiter of conservative values. To make it clear, he is the same guy, the party has shifted so dramatically to the right he doesn't fit anymore. That is hard to imagine. Who are those people anyway? Shepherd Smith left Fox News and suddenly he is a media darling for the left because of his commitment to the values in our country. The same guy, except yesterday he was a conservative nutjob, today he is a committed value maker.

It's a bunch of crap we are being fed day after day and we consuming it at a voracious rate. We are being fed it one commercial segment at a time. We are being fed a continuous stream of lies and made up junk and twisted bits of truth so fast and in such a high volume we don't even recognize it anymore as a matter of public discourse. The narrative is made of swiss cheese on purpose and is full of plot holes so big it seems obvious yet, only complaints about the "Other side" are ever entertained. Oh? What so ever do you mean BigMike? Whatever are you talking about? I'm convinced somewhere above all this is an entity of some kind that plays both sides against the other for their amusement.

Consider this scenario. One side of the political persuasion wants to dramatically limit your rights to own, display, or carry a gun under just about every scenario you can imagine. The other side wants to expand those rights in such a fashion that they have beach clothing designed for concealed carry. They also want to enshrine your indemnification in the law. All of these issues are being litigated right now as we speak, in every court in this country, even in the hallowed halls of the court of public opinion. In every way that is possible, it is being manipulated for and against in the media as well.

Guess who owns the media companies? Guess who controls the legislative and the Court systems? While the Democratically controlled left-wing extremists tell you that Elmer Fudd cannot have a weapon anymore because it enshrines violence and you know, the children, The Conservative Right-wing Republican legislatures and Courts are trying to hard code the Second Amendment in gold and make it off-limits forever. Using laws, Judicial appointments, court decisions cartoons, and any other means as they think is necessary to get the job done even if they consume the Republic during the battles for the soul that occurs because you know, say it with me, The Children dammit!!

Here is the problem with ALL of that action and EVERY type of thinking like that. The truth has nothing to do with the outcome and very little to do with either point of view. The truth doesn't exist in either narrative and hasn't had much to do with it for a very long time. That's the part that just totally pisses me off. We haven't yet told the truth in media or in politics about most of the famous deaths "in custody" in this country. The only ones that have been presented with even a modicum of a factual basis are those with video. Virtually every other incident has a series of lies attached to the occurrence and mostly for political expediency.

"Those bums won their court case.", "Who?",  "The Nazis". "I hate Illinois Nazi's."

1. Georgia has received and installed an entirely new voting system and used it in this election. The news is calling it a slow-motion unmitigated disaster, with long lines, extended voting hours, non-working machines, and a slew of other problems. I used it yesterday and it was pretty flawless. I guess where I live it was an exception to the rule. I was in and out of the polling location in 10 minutes or less.
   
   Here is how its supposed to work. You first fill out an affidavit and then if its a primary, get a ballot card for your party assigned to you. You then take the electronic ballet card that is the size of a credit card and slip it into a touch screen voting machine and it loads your ballot. You then proceed to use a touch screen panel to select the candidates that you want to vote for. Once you have reviewed and finalized your selections you tell the machine you are done and it spits out your card. Then an attached printer prints out a ballot confirmation sheet, listing who you have voted for complete with QSR bar code. You then take this sheet up to the exit area of the polling location and slip it into a machine that looks similar to a copier. Once you have affirmed that you have previewed the votes on the ballot confirmation sheet and the sheet is inserted into the machine and it has accepted it, you see a display on the machine that says "Success", which means the ballot has been recorded. You hand in your ballot card and you are done.
   
   
2. Why does every damn thing anyone says is any good to eat have to be so freaking hot that it burns going in, going down and coming out?
   
   
3. There are currently 1,979,971 cases of Covid-19 in this country.
   There have been 112,006 confirmed deaths so far.
   
   
4. Michael Jordan entered a Marlin fishing tournament where he and his crew and a huge fishing boat caught a 442 Lb Marlin the other day in North Carolina. That wasn't even big enough to be in the top 3!! Jesus Christ, who needs a  fish that big?
   
   
5. Why does the media keep asking that dumbass LeBron James questions about social policy or really anything else? He is just an overpaid athlete, and not much of one at that.
   
   
   Have I ever told you how much I cannot stand that guy?
   -BigMike

Where do we go from here

June 9th, 2020 on a hot muggy Tuesday morning at 5:30 in the morning

Jesus man I am still going on and on blathering at the lip,

Bear with me here before you start screaming stupid crap at me. Read the story at least ok? Then yell away. At least you will be willfully screaming at that point.

This is how they collect Use of Force Data

And this is the explanation

Imagine if you will a country where the white man is not the dominant color of the population. That won't be very hard to imagine in a few years because the scales are already tilting towards a population browner than ever before, due to a lot of factors, none of which I'm going into here. Just suffice it to say that the moniker of a "white man" will be a passe` statement in not so many years. I won't be here to see it because they predict less than 200 years and my fat ass won't live that long but that's not the point. You will have to forgive me for being so grating and thoughtless as to bring any of this up right now, but I feel manipulated by the press and by the politicians and I am wary that it is a carefully staged pile of garbage.

Whatever you call that society (and I do not care, use your own terms), imagine it already exists. Now imagine that the minority society we are imagining is mostly all-white or at least non-brown, non-black folks. Now imagine that we would see a TV network that is owned by a rich and famous white person in that imaginary society. In this imaginary society we are describing, imagine we had a series of incidents like those that are constantly described in the media where people of color are attacked and killed by the police. Imagine those people of color are white and the minority and the police are black. In other words, just invert the facts on the ground as they exist today, don't invent new facts just polarize them to a different hue, and then look at the scenario that already exists.

Could you imagine a TV special being called "Where do we go from here", led by the famous white personality who owned the network and one of the taglines is "What are our demands?". Once you have got this all straight in your mind please tell me how the scenario I have described will in any way help to reset the structure and/or the systemic issues that are in the society. Isn't this just another way to complete the divide and drive us apart? I don't get why the special I described is real and going to be led by Oprah and will include not one single white person and not one single person of authority. It seems to me that the purpose is predefined and the outcome is prearranged because it seems scripted. How are we supposed to trust that setup I've described?

Anyway, I am sorry if I just pissed you off, it was not my intent. I just do not like being manipulated. Here is my next question. What good does it do to publish a picture with a caption but no story, of a child who has been allegedly been sprayed with pepper spray directly in the eyes, without any supporting context, story, or additional pictures? I've seen this scenario a dozen times in three different social media platforms, and all it is and says, without further narrative or description, is "Adults are seen pouring milk of the eyes of a child who has been pepper-sprayed".  OK. Where, When, by What department, on what day? at what time? , during a protest of during looting? On a roadway? Was this the only person? See this kind of crap just pisses me off because it looks like a designed hit piece with no backup whatsoever. What would you say If I published this kind of rhetoric and accused a famous person of doing it to my child? It's aggravating.

It has been about two weeks (or maybe has been two weeks) since the death of George Floyd at the hands of the white asshole police officer. In those two weeks, I have watched numerous youtube videos (remember I am retired, I have time to do nothing at all like that), I have read almost everything I can find on these subjects and all the interconnected ones as well, such as the rioting, the protests, the looting, the treatment of protesters, how the politicians have reacted (or not) and just about every angle that has been dissected with regard to the treatment of our citizens at the hands of police and police like entities (security guards, military police, National Guard, etc). I'm fairly well-read on all the various subjects in regard to this with the glaring exception of two points of view. I can't wrap my mind around the neoconservative hawkish point of view that sees protestors and demonstrators as the enemy and I just can't get in line with the extreme Libertarian point of view. The mainstream Libertarian I get. Less government, less regulation, get out of my checkbook and my life, etc. I cannot for the life of me begin to understand the extremist point of view on either side that distorts the facts so rigidly and bends the truth so violently that the less educated among us start to believe their nonsense (Infowars bullshirt, Breitbart nonsense, etc). Ranking right in there is the Ultra Liberal point of view although I have to admit I do not read a lot of that because it enrages me to try to understand their illogical viewpoints in the first place.

See here is the thing. No One, not one of the aforementioned entities gives two shits about truth or the facts or the value of the timelines or accurate reporting of anything that happens. Even if they are called out on their love of the twisted crap they sell, they embrace the twist as if because Hannity or Rachel said it, there can be no other way of looking at it. That is such a goofy concept I can't even contribute to the argument or the discussion.

All of the latest demonstrations and political catchphrases have this narrative that sticks in the headlines, but the truth about these phrases doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what happened to Michael Brown actually, because of what actually happened to Eric Garner. I know you don't want to hear this kind of thing in general because it seems like a rehashing of things already settled, however, that is exactly the point and is exactly why it should not be settled thought, it should not be closed and the facts should be reported accurately. By Lumping Michael Brown (for example only) in with and on par with the death of Eric Garner, you have not only legitimized the actions of Brown, but you have cheapened the death of Garner. It's not about who deserved to die, it is however all about circumstance. The narrative would have you believe facts that don't exist for the absolute stupidest reason I can think of and that is political expediency. I'm going to dive deep today ladies and gentlemen, and If you think I am disrespecting you in the process, well, just understand that all I care about is an accurate set of facts and an accurate recounting of the events. That's all.

This is a video you won't watch, but should----> These are facts boys and Girls

The very latest data we have seem to indicate that this whole mantra of "Police Brutality" is a fairly bogus concept overall. It does happen and is a part of life in the black community, but and this a big but, it doesn't happen like anybody in the media (right or left) would have you believe. Most of what you hear and see on TV is just not true in the absolute, without regard to whom you listen to when examined in the entirety of our society. This is not a popular opinion I know, but by looking at the statistics and seeing the actual data you actually see a wholly different story than the media or the politicians would have you believe. I was sort of stunned when looking at the data. I know I won't change your determined mind with a bunch of number whiz-bang stuff however you should at least be armed with facts before you make a bad decision.

For all the hoopla there should be thousands upon thousands of bodies lining the streets if all the accusations about brutality were true. factually it just doesn't ring even a little bit true, there are neither the complaints against police nor incidents in any number to back up any kind of claim such as that. Now I admit I have not experienced life as a black person, that's not hard to figure out. There is discrimination in the real world and I'm not even touching on that. We all know it exists, and in some areas, it can and has been deadly for Black Americans. I'm not saying that it hasn't. I have seen the shitty side of the human experience, however. I've seen what happens to people when they are shot and lost a lot of blood. I've experienced the pain of murder of a family member at the hands of others. I've seen the aftermath of when humans treat other humans like bags of garbage. It is real and it is visceral and it is true. It happens every day, to a lot of people, a staggering amount really. But it doesn't and never has belonged to a singular race. Low life assholes kill people of all colors. Usually, it's not a cop though. The facts are, that when measured against all races, blacks are not killed by police at a rate above any other race. No matter how you slice the data, even when you equalize the data sets on a per capita basis, it just doesn't shake out that way.

I am sorry that we ever have to experience a George Floyd or any other person ever has to die at the hands of the authorities or anyone else. His death was not necessary, no matter what his history, no matter what went on, no matter what the actual cause that led up to the conflict that killed him. Nothing is worth dying over, nothing in this regard at any rate.

The actual facts about Police abuse of power do not back up the narrative, however. There are a number of false narratives at play here that only serve to inflame passion and have little to nothing to do with what happened. For example, protestors have made the widely used phrase "Hands up, don't shoot", a popular rallying cry, because it harkens the memory of Ferguson, MO and the death of Michael Brown, in that the first stories that were written about the incident that cost him his life, were later proven to be false, untrue and it never happened.  The story was that he had his hands up, was surrendering and was killed execution-style by the white cop involved, even though his hands were up. Factually, the DEMOCRATIC OBAMA LED ERIC HOLDER JUSTICE department, concluded that the police officer acted in self-defense, that Michael Brown attacked the police officer, that the police officer was never indicted at the state level or at the federal level after 3 separate investigations.

You won't read this, but you should--->  Hands up Dont shoot never happened

Once the facts were ascertained, and although he was forced to give up his job as a policeman and he will never be a police officer again, he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the death Of Michael Brown. What is amazing is that it has never been widely publicized, because as I said earlier, if it doesn't fit the needed narrative and isn't useful to one group or another, it just doesn't matter. Hands up, don't shoot my ass.

 You won't read this but you should---> Michael Brown DOJ report

It must be my white privilege which allows me to read the facts and research the incidents at many sources and draw reasonable conclusions based on an analysis of the data, however. That is all I can figure. That is what it must be because I cannot subjectively cherry-pick things I like about the stories I read and discard the things I don't. I cannot regurgitate the pablum because it is popular with the media or to the activists and say what they would like me to say. I mean of course Black lives matter, who said they didn't? They should matter most of all to the citizenry who experiences these horrors and others like them. I mean to answer the only question that is ever asked and not the other ones, is there, and has there been the use of excessive force by police, and has it been used against black people?  Yes, It has happened. That is not all that has happened but it is one of the things that has occurred.

Does that somehow make it magically ok to deface monuments that have nothing to do with this movement? Does that make it ok to spray paint everything in sight with curse words and A.C.A.B.? I mean, HELL NO, it doesn't and you and I both know that if the truth about all of these incidents were ever reported and the bad cops were charged and thrown in jail, it still would never justify the damage caused by rioting and looting no matter how you arrange the alliances. If the actual facts were ever reported then Michael Brown is not a cultural hero, the murder of George Floyd is still wrong, and Travon Martin would have been characterized correctly as the 6 foot 2 inches, muscular 17 years old he actually was instead of the picture of the tiny little 12-year old boy that was used by the media.

Without regard to anything else, if those reporting the incident had been honest with us, then 5 ft 8 inch 185 lb George Zimmerman of ethnic descent is shown with his broken nose and his head injuries on the back of his head and we could have made our own mind up instead of being pushed into a narrative just like we are with this story and every other one so far. The truth would have been good enough.

The reason why it seems like none of it makes any sense? I really cannot explain it, however, I can define why you can't explain it.  It's because a primary basis for logic is consistency. You must have a consistent bedrock of principles upon which to build your foundation of knowledge. I've yet to meet a person with a political agenda that really has a foundation that can't shift for the right amount of money or power or influence. Take any one of those things out of the mix and you are left with the morass of the many. We are a naturally chaotic species, we don't think alike, we don't behave rationally and we don't do group consensus unless you want to talk about the "Wave" in a football stadium and then it never rises above 70% at best. I believe that the best you can hope for are ideals that appeal to enough people so as to create a society of order out of the chaos.

Otherwise? There are enough warmongers on the planet to kill us all many times over. I believe in realism most of all. There is no room for that in a political idealogues life.

The truth is not enough, you can't handle the truth

1. An actor names Hartley Sawyer has been fired from the Flash TV show because of some racist and misogynistic tweets from 2012 and 2014.
   
   Another one bites the dust, and another one gone and another one is gone...
   
   
2. A man named Henry Rogers ran over a group of protestors is an admitted leader of the KKK in Virginia. He is an admitted propaganda maker of theirs and a spreader of Confederate ideology.
   
   That explains how he confused his left and right feet.
   
   
3. Chicago just registered its deadliest 24 hour period in over 60 years. They had 18 murders in one day. On the weekend accompanying the 18 murders, they had 85 people shot and 25 people were killed over the two days. Most of the victims were young black males and so are a majority of the suspects.
   
   I want to say something smartass here, but I will refrain.
   
   
4. France has banned the use of the chokehold by ALL of its police forces nationwide.
   
   
5. Prince Andrew has been requested by US Investigators for interviews concerning Jeffery Epstein and his activities. They say he is not a target nor a suspect.
   
   His pedophile ass should be though.
   
   
   Have I mentioned how much I abhor pedophiles?
   
   BigMike

crash and burn in more ways than one

11:30 a.m. on May 31st, 2020 because I slept the last 16 hours or so

This is like shooting swamp rats back home in the canyon (Stay on Target!!),

Last evening was crash and burn night in more ways than one. As many American cities were being set on fire and were burning, I went off to take a nap about 4p.m. or so and the next thing I remember is this morning at about 6:30 a.m., After I sat up for about 2 cups of coffee and then went into the bedroom to get dressed, I woke up again about an hour ago. I finally got showered and dressed and here we are.

That's what happens when you barely sleep at all. Usually, I sleep somewhere between 3-5 hours a night and sometimes dramatically less, then about 2 o'clock in the afternoon I am ready for another nap until my wife gets home from work and we chat for a bit, she eats dinner and then we go to bed again. Lather, rinse, repeat until at some point I run totally out of gas and it eventually catches up with me and I crash into the brick wall and you couldn't wake me up with a shotgun blast. Have you ever experienced that weird feeling where you wake up and look at the light coming in the window, and it is sort of like daylight, so you look at the clock to see what time it is except you don't really know if it is telling you that it is morning or it's evening? Yeah, that was me this morning. While I was asleep last evening, riots were happening all across America.

So it is my understanding that police departments all across America got totally re-trained on-the-fly the last few days using practical OJT training, sponsored by the same good people who are complaining about the legacy being left to them by the last few generations. I guess living among burning embers and burned out apartments is preferable to standard housing but what do I know? Over 30+ (I don't know the exact number) of cities experienced rioting, demonstrating, and major clashes with the police all across the country last night. It is tough to write about this being about our so-called advanced societies like we are supposed to be.

I'll bet Canada regrets signing that lease they have above that crazy-ass meth lab now huh?

Allegedly, supposedly, purportedly, this was all set off by the actions of one corrupt patrolman cop in the town Minneapolis in the State of Minnesota in the US. The actions of one man killing another one-man are what some of the media says is the cause of these disruptions to life and these clashes with authority. If you buy that one I have a little swampland and a bridge I want you to take a look at, low money down, move in right away, free financing.

The actual cause of this goes a long way back in our society and we add to that cause like adding a match head to a tinderbox of dry grass and twigs every time we tolerate this nasty racist attitude that is so deep-seated in our society. We like to say that we are a tolerant society except for the HELL we are. If we were a tolerant society for whom there is a prevalent attitude of forgiveness and love and respect, we wouldn't have places like Chinatown (NYC has 8 of them), or schools that are more than 95% black students or neighborhoods all across this country that are segregated into color and race by choice and those that are not. If we were tolerant we would not tolerate singers of any color using racial words in their music. Because we are not tolerant we have abdicated our responsibilities to each other and to society and abandoned our morality by ceding the use of certain race and class words as "belonging" to one race or the other. If we were actually anywhere close to tolerant there would be no prison gangs run by color and race, and no need to even think about this as we classify and assign new inmates to wing and bunk assignments as they enter prison life.

The national security adviser doesn't agree with me. No systemic racism in Police departments

If we're really interested in changing our society for the better, we would have figured out long ago that to tolerate this way of thinking is to extend it not to extinguish it. We instead turn our head and let it flourish. We feed it by celebrating white supremacy and we celebrate it by allowing it. We allow it by glorifying drug use and gang life in our TV shows and movies, we give it a soul by lifting up our biggest stars for whom gangs were a way of life as they became famous and for whom recognition if not active participation has made them platinum artists and filthy rich millionaires. We feed this toleration of separate and unequal by laughing at old men for whom integration was a stain on their memories. We tolerate this type of society by not demanding that our police departments lead the way in racial and gender harmony and in racial and gender equality. We give this incipient bigotry an underlying place to fester and to live by allowing our defenders of law and truth and justice to only be so inclined when it doesn't involve one of their own.

When it involves one of their own, well, it's an us against them attitude and then we worry about protecting and defending and all that other crap it says on the outside of the cars. Make no mistake, I  am NOT saying that this is every cop and every department and certainly it is not in every case, however it is prevalent enough and it happens enough and exists enough so that everyone knows it exists and no one takes any action to grind it out of existence. In my opinion, this is the first thing that must change if we want George Floyd to be the last time a person of color dies because no one was strong enough or thought it was right enough to make that asshole get off of his neck. All it would have taken was one of those cops to say "Get off of the man's neck", and then pulled him off if he wouldn't move and Mr. Floyd would still be alive. It's funny how in God, Beans, Butter, and Bullets land in small-town America everywhere there were no riots or rioters huh?

That's because there are also almost no people of color there either. 

1. Space-X put two American astronauts into orbit yesterday. It didn't blow up either. Yay!!
   Full coverage here---> Space-X launch to docking with the ISS
   
   
2. In the age of social media and instant messaging just about anything anymore is fair game. Today in the News out of the good ole boy network in Thomaston Georgia, a Police Officer from that city has been terminated (for poor judgment), for sharing a picture of a Latino police officer wearing a black beauty masking product next to a blonde white woman and the caption read "I date a Black Man."
   
   Long Live the Dinosaurs!
   
   
3. The US Supreme Court has decided that the religious objections filed against orders and restrictions placed on church services are invalid and have allowed the restrictions to remain in place. These were obviously restrictions ordered by the government concerning social distancing and the like in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
   
   The ruling was 5-4, Chief Justice John Roberts and the courts 4 liberals voted in favor.
   
   
4. Denzel Washington was spotted earlier this week putting his hand where his heart is. He was seen helping a distraught homeless man who was in the street back to the curb and he stuck around when police showed up and helped the man remain calm. Video and pictures show him holding the man's hand and encouraging him. This happened in West Hollywood CA, according to bystanders he was unaware of the filming until it was basically over. It was amazing how calm it stayed and the man was not detained after they determined he was not a danger to himself or others.
   
   I love feel-good stories.
   
   
5. It turns out however that the white ex-fired ass cop who knelt on Mr. Floy'd neck and killed him (I'm never saying the assholes name ever), worked together with Mr. Flotd as a security guard at the same Latin night club as recently as last year. The club's owner says this cop has a background of racist and over the top reactions.
   
   Imagine that. Maybe that will come out at trial.
   
   
   "Your Honor, our next ten witnesses are folks arrested by the defendant who all have broken legs, knees, fingers, or knuckles and the like from the defendant. Their police reports all say "They fell down".
   
   BigMike

Get rid of the Dinosaurs

Last day in May of 2020 on the 30th at about 4:30 a.m. who needs sleep anyway

Sleep is overrated, its all you ever you do, once you're dead,

So like any other web site, I track visits or what is called hits. Specifically, I look at a couple of things, one is how many people made it as far as to open the blog and look at it, however brief that may be and the other is the referring URL, that is the basis of the visit, where was the link from that sent them here. I also look at other stuff but only because its there, things like what country are they from, what part of the USA referred them, etc.

Overwhelmingly, almost 100% of my visitors come from my Facebook feed on my personal page saying there is a blog post to go look at. About 50% of my readers use a mobile device and almost all of them that are mobile devices are using iPhones. I have occasional visitors from all over but for the high majority of them they are American, and within the 48 states, except for one person whom I know that looks at it that comes from Alaska. That's pretty cool, and so is she (wink, wink). One thing I found odd is that my Facebook friends in Canada don't seem to care for my blog? Oh well. Nothing I can do about that. It's not like I am selling books trying to appeal to a worldwide audience huh?

I haven't been able to sleep much in the past 48-72 hours. A few hours here and there but mostly I've been pondering the same questions in my mind that I know there are no answers to. Things like what in the hell where they thinking (the cop). What in hell were the other cops thinking? Why does it seem like Minnesota is always right in the middle of this stupid shit? Is it the cold weather in the winter? Do they have to many Somalian area refugees and it has made them all crazy dealing with "foreigners"? Why did those dumbass cops think it was a good idea to arrest a CNN news crew live on air? What did they think that was going to get them? I can't imagine a conversation going on in somebody's head saying "Man. I'm gonna be famous tonight! I locked up a news crew!" Did anybody call their boss and say "Hey Boss, we're locking up a CNN reporter of color right now and his crew, you got a problem with that?"  I'm guessing there was a police commander blowing his stack yelling "Have you idiots been paying attention to what's been going on at all for the past couple of days?.

It is pretty tough for me to stay completely out of the politics of all this. I want to bash somebody so bad, but know it would only inflame and do no good at all (and I'm not talking about the Orange Tornado). No politics though, whew!

I wonder if there is a tape, is there a 911 call where the boss is on record right now just absolutely losing his shit because they had to let them go and the Governor apologized for them? Can you imagine how much ass-kissing and ass-covering is going on right now in Minnesota? Do any of these questions seem to be ones that would have been good training scenario questions?  How long are good cops gonna keep covering up for bad cops like THAT jackass in keeping with the famous tradition of protecting their brothers and keeping a strong thin blue line? Does that make any sense to you at all? I'd pay money to hear that 911 tape though, I'll bet it's under lock and key with a quickness.

I think All that was missing this week was snarling dogs, rubber truncheons and a good old water cannon. That would have helped I'm sure.

You know, in the last 20 years we have spent literally millions and millions of dollars militarizing our police departments and doing idiotic shit like sending Hunmees and flak jackets and stormtrooper gear to all these cities in this so-called fight against terrorism. I believe they should come and take it all back. Calhoun Ga doesn't need military-style police gear, but we have a Humvee. We should take every piece of military supplied gear back. Then to replace it they should give the cities and the states the money to hire cops and then require that they actually train them. I mean real training, not this bunch of wink, wink, grab your nuts, and tell war stories training they are famous for. I'm not talking about a bunch of times on the range either.

We have enough square-jawed iron pumper crew cut wearing gung ho cops everywhere you look already. I don't really think we need any more of them. Do some rigorous Navy seal style weed out the nonhackers who can't make good decisions kind of training, and then do what? I'll tell you what, Do what our Sherrif Mitch Ralston in Gordon County Ga did and Go through the ranks and throw out every idiot you have that is wearing a badge and do not tolerate this shit in your departments, not one minute longer, police union or no police union. Enough is enough is enough is enough.

On a more introspective note, do you think any of the peaceful protesters, did any of them have any problem with an Auto Zone being burned to the ground? I saw a bunch of stories about how they were out picking up the trash left behind in the streets by the looters. and I believe that's pretty cool. Did burning the Auto Zone down somehow advance their cause of "George Floyd, I can't breathe, I need brakes for a '99 Chevy?" Did that help at all? Participating in your protest and wearing the same clothes, the same masks later on captured on surveillance video and news cameras and also rioting, did that do any damn good at all?

Several newscasters showed pictures of some young guys who I guess couldn't resist but to participate in both sides of the melee. One series of shots show these two guys protesting and when the sun went down it shows the same two guys apparently, knocking the crap out of a police SUV. What does the community of color gain when Ferguson or Atlanta or LA or Minneapolis is set on fire? I asked that question out loud and someone said "Black people are tired of being treated like shit on the bottom of the white man's shoe".  OK, well that begs a further inquisition? I am a curious kind of guy so please answer me this. I'm begging you for a serious answer, anyone, anyone at all, please explain to me how making an absolute mess of your own community,  of your own communities businesses, the place where you live and eat and do business, of leaving burning streets and cars and buildings and mountains of trash and flaming debris and then fighting for 2 or 3 nights with the police until the damn National Guard is called in promote your cause?

How in the hell does this help?, I'd sure like to know because I have not the first clue how this does any good. Just how do you think the politicians are going to react in this age of cameras and DNA and forensics and investigatory prowess? Do you think they will just roll over and give up? Oh well, nothing we can do, Ya THINK?

Do you think any politician in his or her right mind could stay in office for very long by advocating a policy of retreat and surrender? I am watching countless videos of mostly black but not all black and lots of dark-skinned protesters with very very few white folks (factually stated just look at the videos) fighting with police and burning things to the ground and looting and wondering how this gets justified this time, that somehow this is more "White Privilege", that absolutely stupid and infuriating phrase coined by some sociology professor who went back to his neat and tidy house in the gated community after the interview. I only heard one other worse piece of Garbage catchphrase, the one that thinks one skin color matters more than all the others.

And Don't say the N-word but you know we can, JUST get a grip.

Does any protester seriously think that a police officer in his right mind is going to approach a situation like this with anything other than the intention to stop it by the force that is necessary? Are you going to protest tomorrow when several people get shot and killed by police in running gun battles with other people and with the police? Do you seriously think the police are just going to stop enforcing the law because you are mad? Protests have erupted in at least 20 major US cities overnight. How many people are going to hospitalized or injured before you have a big enough TV and that is justification enough?

As dozens of people are arrested in Minneapolis for various nonprotest related crimes like burglary, arson, looting, and other acts of stupidity the Governor has activated over 1700 National Guard troops to come to town and restore order. Make no mistake, the military will restore order if they have to kill your ass to do it. Anybody remember the Rambo story? That was a movie and a made-up story, however, those kinds of actions actually happened.

Kent State actually happened. Soldiers are not cops.

When it gets this bad that the politicians hand over the fighting to the military, people usually die, its what they do. It's what we train them to do. Is this really what all of you idiots want? And for the record, Bob, I'm glad you were not there because I know you would have stopped that cop and you would have gone to jail yelling at his stupid ass the whole way. I would have bailed you out and even though you would have hated every second of it I would have turned your case into a national cause and had the ACLU defending your ass too. Like I said Bob, I'm glad you were not there. You know who you are. I love you too much to see you rot in Jail.

My favorite phrase, Jesus H. Katy Christ on a Crutch this is so freaking stupid.

1. 1700 National Guard deployed in Minneapolis. These are citizen soldiers. I hope someone has locked up the ammo. More than 2500 officers from everywhere are helping to keep the peace. This is the largest deployment in Minnesota history.
   
   The kneeling Numbnuts bail is set at $500,000 and his wife has filed for divorce. I didn't know you could get bail for murder. I'm gonna have to ask Lucas Davenport about that. After all the BCA arrested him.
   
   Welcome to the club Minnesota. Your people are stupid too.
   
   
2. The city of Portland Oregon has declared a riot underway and has ordered protesters to go home. The friggin tree huggin liberals are rioting for crying out loud!
   
   Their shootings and at least one death in Detroit, oh and riots too, but they are used to it. Hell Detroit has been on fire since about 1987 I think.
   
   Denver has been hit by unrest and the National Guard has been deployed in Atlanta as well. Governor Kemp has declared a state of emergency and has ordered everyone to leave the area and all businesses to close. I'll bet he had to ask somebody how to do all of that too. About 80 miles from me give or take a couple of miles with at least a bunch of broken windows, 2 cops hurt, burning stuff and LOTS AND LOTS of stupid on Patrol.
   
   Dallas says their protests have been mostly peaceful and they have the support of the mayor and the police.  And so forth and so on, I'm sure you get the drift here.
   
   
3. LA has declared a curfew and ordered everyone to go home or face arrest. A few have been arrested, blocking the highway and breaking windows is discouraged in Hollywood. What a bunch of idiots. The impact would have been much bigger without the looting and the violence.
   
   
4. Lost in all of this was the story that one of Space-X's other toys, the SN4 a so-called Starship, blew u on the pad today. It was a major explosion. From an article about it "SpaceX had just conducted yet another static fire test of the Raptor engine in its Starship SN4 prototype launch vehicle on Friday when the test vehicle exploded on the test stand in Boca Chica, Texas. This was the fourth static fire test of this engine on this prototype, so it’s unclear what went wrong versus other static fire attempts.
   
   StarShip Blows Up VIDEO LINK
5. In local news from the carpet capital of the world dalton Ga, the headline is "Unemployment rate in Dalton, Georgia, jumps above 20% in record job losses during April", This is right here around here where I live so this is news to us. 20.5% Unemployment is a big Fat Hairy deal.
   
   
   - From The website - The coronavirus pulled the rug out from the Carpet Capital last month, pushing unemployment in metropolitan Dalton to a record high rate of 20.5%. The Georgia Department of Labor and Workforce Development said Thursday that employers in Whitfield and Murray counties shed 1,657 jobs during April following major job cuts in March. Over the past 12 months, employment in the Dalton area fell by 13.8%, or 8,569 jobs, as carpet mills, restaurants, and other major employers furloughed workers due to government-ordered shutdowns and lower sales.
   Read the whole article here ---> Dalton Unemployment 20.50%
   
   
   Crap is occurring, keep your head down.
   High-Speed defecation is being impacted by whirling spreader devices.
   
   - BigMike
   
   

The Criminology edition

05/29/2020 on a Friday morning at about 6:00 a.m. damn the birds are noisy today

I don't have a snappy opening today sorry, I am just too brained in my brain,

You know it seemed like when I was a little kid that we had national tragedies that were much differently defined than the kinds we have today. I'm not saying one or the other is better I'm just noting for the record that when I look back at my childhood years it seemed like the big stuff going on was really big stuff. I now know that it was just the events of the day being blanketed over by the ugly undertones of what was to come. We had the four major assassinations in the '60s, with Dr. King, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X all being shot and killed with about 5 years of each other.

We had an ugly war that cost us over 58,000 American soldiers and we really didn't achieve that much once it was all said and done, except maybe the development of a few new weapon systems. We had a civil rights movement that made major strides towards achieving racial equality and took definitive steps towards racial equity. We had a national discussion that thought long and hard about the role of women in our society and moved us toward an era where we are more equal than not. That's not all to be sure, I'm not trying to write a definitive treatise on any subject. It just felt like as a society we were trying to work out our differences.

I thought maybe we were on the right track.

In the world of today, we have anxiety so bad that seventh-graders take huge handguns and rifles to school and shoot up the school and kill their classmates. We have embraced divisiveness so deep that we talk the language of war when speaking of others with who we disagree. For really the first time that I can remember, there is open talk of insurrection and civil disobedience so strong that it smacks of a society that seeks to conquer itself. We have had open talks about movements within states in our union that seek to form separate countries of their own.

Like never before in our society has the lack of a national voice been so strong. In the past 20 years, there have been at least 25 incidents of deaths at the hands of authorities. There have been at least 10 deaths of police officers that I know of (and maybe more) where they were murdered in cold blood in the line of duty, where the criminals that shot them just walked up and pulled the trigger, while they were sitting at a stoplight, while they were pumping gas, while they were eating a meal in a restaurant, or while they were sitting somewhere at the end of their shift completing the paperwork necessary to end their day. It has happened so often that it is sad to say, it is no longer shocking and it damn well should be.

Now another death and another uprising that eventually will be quelled hopefully without the use of military force. Peace will finally be restored in Minnesota and elsewhere but I am not so naive as to think that will be the end of it. We had Rodney King and the LA riots some time ago and did that change anything?

There are lessons to be learned here I am sure, however, I'm also sure that as we speak there are forces gathering that see a conspiracy in every move. That sees an underlying agenda being directed from an unknown force being applied to push the population is a certain direction.

Sadly, that will not end unless and until we have a reason to act as one united people.

1. The riots in Minnesota are NOT understandable but are somewhat of a given because of the gravity of the situation at hand there. What is not understandable is the connection being made between the man's death (George Floyd) and the people that are looting the Target at the mall, the young fellas who burned down the Auto Zone, or who were seen on cameras stealing TV's and electronics.
   
   The peaceful and angry protests underway are good people doing what they think is right. Protesting tyranny is a given right enshrined in our deepest principles, much as is the freedom of speech. This part is democracy in action. We must accept the right to protest if we also accept the right of rule of law.  You cannot have one without the other, because you really can't please everybody, all the time.  Protesting is one of our deepest most closely held philosophies as a country.
   
   I do not see the right to burn down an apartment building or smash windows in a beauty salon the same way. Nowhere in any of our founding documents does it say "When you are pissed off go steal liquor from the corner liquor store and when you have emptied it, burn it down to the ground."
   
   Protesting is legal and protected free speech and should be.
   Rioting and looting is felony criminal activity and those caught doing so belong in jail.
   
   
2. Every cop page I have seen on social media ( and there are a few) have decried the actions of the kneeling cop in Minnesota, who murdered George Floyd. And yes I said Murder because even if were deemed to be legal, it was still a murder by definition. When you cause the death of another that person has been murdered. Every Police officer I know (and I know several) has came out very strongly against what happened and has decried the actions taken by that officer as illegal and wrong. Not one Cop I have seen quoted has supported him. They are 100% against his tactics. Every one of them says he should be held accountable. Every single one of them has come out against what happened.
   
   I am happy to see that and fully support their right to express their opinion about the matter. The saddest part for them is that now ALL of them know this and all of them must wear the stain of this death on their badges every time they strap on their weapons. Every time they dress for work, they know that every person who looks at them will wonder if they are like THAT guy.
   
   There are a ton of good cops behind their badges on duty in America every day. I know a few of them. I respect them for the sacrifice they make every day, for the dangers they face, and am saddened by the CRAP they will now have to put up with because of cops like THAT guy.
   
   See? This is the problem with the so-called "thin blue line", in protecting their "brother officers", they sometimes end up protecting a creep like this lousy piece of crap of a human being who could care less about whether someone he is arresting lives or dies. I guarantee there are stories out there (if you could get them to be told) of other excesses committed by this guy. I'm also sure there are stories about where other cops just stood there and felt like they could do nothing, because there is a culture in place almost everywhere that protects that kind of behavior.
   
   Nobody wants to be the cop who calls for help and won't get any because the other cops know he stood up against a "fellow officer".
   
   See? That's the problem, they are protecting the wrong guy.
   
   
3. A Mexican drug lord named Rafael Caro-Quintero has filed a plea argument in Federal District court in Mexico (Not here, we would laugh his ass out of the room) where he is claiming that he is too poor and too old and lacks a pension and he has no income and therefore because of that he should be "excused" from extradition to the US. He is wanted for drug trafficking and his involvement in the death of DEA agent Kiki Carmena.
   
   I have never seen someone claim they were too broke to be prosecuted or too old to go to jail (he is 60 years old). He was "mistakenly" let out of prison in Mexico and remains at large where he is hiding out in the mountains with his large drug cartel involved family. It's funny how these guys in Mexico keep getting "accidentally" released from prison huh?
   
   
4. There are reportedly hundreds of tunnels along the US-Mexican border used by drug traffickers to smuggle all kinds of drugs and other contraband across the border. Everything from weed to sex slaves has been intercepted in these tunnels. There are so many of them that they call it the "Cocaine Alleyway", and dozens of them have been found and closed in recent years.
   
   I have a novel idea. Let us use some of that spy gear stuff we have to locate every one of these tunnels of love and get rid of them all at once. We could put sensors in the ground all along the border and listen for digging and use some of those fancy-ass satellites to see the ground with ground-penetrating radar or some such high tech stuff and identify every one of those tunnels. Once we have identified them we tell Mexico to get every one of their citizens at least a mile away from the places where those tunnels are. We buy or condemn all the surrounding property and keep our folks away too and then guess what?
   
   Carpet bomb that shit with about 10 million dollars of bunker-busting precision munitions from an overhead B-52 and then keep bombing that shit until we are sure we have collapsed every single tunnel. Quit playing cops and robbers with this stuff. If its a war on drugs, then by god, let's have a war.
   
   I'll bet they stop using tunnels.
   
   
5. Since April 1st of this year, the US Navy and the US Coast Guard have been working together to stop narco drug trafficking on the open seas. Just in the last 6 weeks or so, they have reported stopping 3 Narco subs (not actually subs as they can't submerge completely), and have seized over 9,100 lbs of pure cocaine. I say step it up, guys, let's have a real war and go after where they build the subs in South America too. Use the same strategy as in my previous point.
   
   I'm sick of this crap. Quit fooling around and get to it.
   
   BigMike