Tag Archives: America

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the balance with life

For the first time this year, American deaths by drug overdose will overtake deaths by car accident.   If you loosely add in the suicides per year that can directly be traced to drug use as the primary causation, you enter an era where over 50K people a year are dying this way.  No other cause of death not related to old age or cancer (fuck cancer) even comes close.

In one of the mid-sized counties just north of mine, they have a sign on the way to the airport that logs death’s per year specifically from opioids / heroin.  It’s over 60 lives already this year.  That county is not that big, folks.

When it’s not playing psychotic referee to the sewer that is Washington politics, The Washington Post can actually output some high quality journalism.  They’ve run a multi-part series examining this issue in detail.  You should read each part, alongside a shorter but similar piece by BBC Magazine.

In many ways, I’m a freedom based lunatic.  And so for years I’ve been of the impression that the way to end the drug war is to legalize all drugs.  Let folks get high, whatever, tax it, and offer treatment.  However, I’m beginning to wonder if the growing drug lethality upends the game on this issue.

Science, reckless doctors, and pill companies have created drugs that are exponentially more powerful than what was available even 15 years ago.  Where it was once extremely difficult to get clean once you were hooked, it might now be nearly impossible to recover once you’d trained your brain to accept modern opioids.  When you add in the ultra vicious horror story drugs like fentanyl (which apparently is so lethal it can get into your blood if you even touch it), and whatever other death dealing nightmare synthetic drugs science will soon create, it seems we’re at a bit of a crossroads with all of this.

You can probably do a few lines of coke in your day, or smoke hundreds of joints, and come out mostly okay.  With this shit, you can literally die on the first hit, or after just a few months find yourself hooked for life without a way out.

When you add this to the already everpresent overmedication of anti-depressants, and whatever other societal ills you can think of, it becomes quite the balance with death.  It’s moments like this why I barely care about the presidential election.  Nobody has answers for these types of problems that are literally killing tens-of-thousands of Americans a year.  Neither political party is interested in proposing deep core type solutions to tackle these problems.  Instead, they’re chasing that sound byte.  Idiots.

I find more solace in those identified within these articles who are on the street, helping every day.  The elderly councilor aiding dozens in addiction classes, the local mayor putting his ass on the line to identify and fight the problem, a young man who lost his friend and now battles to save others.  When our national leadership is garbage, and the topic is as dark as this, it’s hopeful to know that folks are still fighting to save others with ferocity and compassion.

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Behold the potential cause of America’s downfall.

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Detroit – because work said so

Someday somebody way smarter than me is going to write a book where Detroit is a metaphor for all of America. You can trace the tale from the earliest French settlers, to British rule, frontier America, transition from an agrarian to industrialized economy, full blown dominance (Detroit probably single handedly out produced Nazi Germany), followed by collapse & depopulation, followed, by what?

Well, one would hope rebirth. Rather than continued slow decline. Since 1950 Detroit has lost almost 2/3 of its people. A similar trend stalks Cleveland, Milwaukee, and countless other Midwestern cities. Literally, Detroit used to be the center of the world alongside New York and London. Will it ever return to its former glory? Is it even possible? I’m not sure. So much of what drove this greatness no longer exists. What America is and does is so very different than in 1950.

Maybe I’ll try and write about it later on. But for now I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. Or at least to also offer that Detroit has some of the worst traffic I’ve ever experienced, which says a lot considering the parking lots I’ve driven in (Tokyo, Washington, New York, LA, etc). And also Detroit’s suburbs have some of the best Lebanese food on the planet, truly legit awesome stuff.

Work sent me to Detroit for all of three days. I only ended up snaking a few hours to drive around. Sadly I didn’t get to do anything reasonably fun. So I guess that means I’ll have to go on back on my own dime.

Woodward & Guardian

One Woodward Avenue (left) and the Guardian Building – One Woodward was completed in 1962, note its applicable stale awfulness.  Guardian Building dates to 1929 and is apparently beautiful inside.   Also note the weirdo sky bridge which linked the two since the 1970s.  In 2012, Rock Ventures LLC bought One Woodward.  Rock Ventures owns Quicken Loans, a bunch of sports teams and casinos, and about a 100 other companies.  I suppose it’s an example of the types of companies that Detroit has to attract in order to rebuild.

 

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Ambassador Bridge & Downtown Detroit – The busiest border crossing in North America, the bridge carries 1/4 of all trade between America and Canada.  The separate Detroit River Tunnel carries rail traffic.  In a bit of weirdness the bridge is actually privately owned by a guy who appears to behave like an evil monopoly man cartoon caricature.  A second bridge is scheduled for completion by 2020.

 

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Detroit River & Windsor, Canada

 

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GM Renaissance Center – appropriately enchained behind a fence for GM’s cheating death off the backs of the taxpayer

 

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Ruins of the Packard Automotive Plant – Completed in 1911, it built cars until 1958.  By 1966 Packard had evaporated as a car company.

 

The next three shots are of ruined houses just a few blocks away from the Packard Plant.  Once upon a time, an American farm worker could move to Detroit and get an entry job at the Packard Plant.  Thirty years later he could retire as a supervisor with a decent pension, and go buy himself one of these beautiful houses to live out his days as a grandfather.  Now it’s all gone, the Plant, the house, and this very concept of employment as part of the American Dream.  I wonder if they could have ever imagined how bad it would get?  Understanding why this all came about, and where to go from here, is central to Detroit’s future.  And perhaps America’s as well.

 

House

 

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the saga of the waiting room

My work identification card expired today.  I knew this in advance, but just couldn’t get to it in advance.  And it didn’t matter because the last time I went in there to update it I showed up cold and it took ten minutes to get the new one.  Anyways, five hours later I got to consider the day a success just because I walked out with a new card.  A whole bunch of other people are going back tomorrow morning.  When life’s a mess, particularly the self-inflicted kind, your barometer of success is rather low.

Waiting rooms are some kind of weird portal into the insanity of humanity.  It’s like you’re having some out of body experience where a drunk wizard’s got the controls.

1) The security building proclaimed itself one of those zero energy wonder structures where all its power came from solar panels and a windmill on its roof.  It was also about 90 degrees in there.  They had a mid-sized box fan (which I can only assume was also zero carbon seeing as how it was plugged into their wall) just to keep the room somewhat tolerable.  But they still kept their promotional zero carbon tracker on one of the televisions upon the wall.  Except the interior temperature readings on the screen were conspicuously labeled as: “–“.  Apparently it’s always like that.  It was cooler outside, but the windows couldn’t open.  Have you ever wondered why all these newfangled climate computer controlled buildings don’t have opening windows, but then the place is always either too hot or too cold?  Get it right silly building, or give me back my open window option.

2) The other television had CNN on it.  I have not watched more then three consecutive minutes of CNN for years.  After five hours, I was ready to burn the building down.  Except it was already too hot.  Hey speaking of ISIS (CNN kept mentioning these guys and Trump; apparently there’s nothing else going on worldwide today), forget electric prods, truth serums, Justin Bieber, or any other manner of torture.  All those guys need to do is place me in a room with CNN or Fox News.  Within about seven hours they’d break my will.  And I’d even give up mine own dogs just to make it stop.

3) Humanity is an incredibly diverse group of people.  When you work with the same folks each day, you forget just how widespread we all are.  After five hours I got to see dozens upon dozens of people of every ethnic, religious, cultural, family background you can imagine.  I don’t know why this struck me, but it was neat.  Go us.  Show that room to ISIS as proof we will win, eh, some day.  We were all miserable people waiting there for hours, but we conducted ourselves nicely and with honor, and some of us even chatted for a bit.  Kiss our ass, ISIS.

4) I still don’t get the smartphone thing.  I had a magazine, which took me three of said five hours to finish cover to cover.  I dabbled on my smartphone for about ten minutes otherwise.  But almost everybody else in the room always had the phone in hand.  Constantly.  I only saw two others reading a physical paper book and/or magazine.

5) Next time, make an appointment, if able.  [points finger at self]

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we duel MacArthur and Patton

Patton selected his .357 Magnum and a baseball bat. MacArthur chose an original Model of 1911 and a bolo knife. I met their ghosts at dawn at a nondescript grassy plain somewhere alongside the Hudson River. After a bit of friendly but restrained banter, I outlined the rules of the day.

And …, wait, hold on. [shuffles papers] [unintelligible muttering] I know, hold on. [throws papers] Yeah, okay, that didn’t happen.

But what did happen is a long while back I visited MacArthur’s ivory skeleton box.

So for whatever reason I decided to rewatch Patton and then watch MacArthur the whole way through for the first time. Then I decided to compare the two, because why not. For those who have seen both movies you know how this is going to end. But this is all for fun, so why not.

All the pieces were in place from the start. Patton pulls a decent director in Franklin J. Schaffner who made some good films beyond just this one and also served in combat in said war. They got some c-grade hack named Francis Ford Coppola to write the script.

MacArthur gets stuck with some guy named Joseph Sargent and a writer known as Hal Barwood who you all will surely remember as the guiding hand behind the Oscar nominated video game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Oichalcum plot twists my ass, Hal, what the hell were you thinking? Indy wasn’t like that. [throws chair]

MacArthur also pulled a budget 1/4 less even though it was made seven years later. For whatever reason MacArthur’s creators then decide to compound the impending misery by covering a span of ten years instead of Patton’s three, all with a running time 40 minutes shorter than Patton.

In terms of MacArthur, I think a bunch of producers got together and decided to shoehorn a Patton clone, they somehow got Gregory Peck involved, and figured even though they were setting it up for failure that it’d somehow all work it and still make a bunch of gold. It didn’t.

MacArthur made a fraction of Patton’s money, lives with justifiably poor reviews, and just leaves you with sense of apathy. When you’re done with Patton you get the idea you’ve just watched something powerful. When MacArthur’s over you shut off your television and go get another beer.

Peck, who remains one of my favorite actors, touched on this:

I admit that I was not terribly happy with the script they gave me, or with the production they gave me which was mostly on the back lot of Universal. I thought they shortchanged the production.

No kidding. Yet for some reason Peck would still go on to say this was one of his most favorite roles. Maybe because MacArthur was a victorious general, famous and mostly beloved, and Peck got to do a whole bunch of long monologues.

A good example of the disparity is that Jerry Goldsmith did the music for both flicks. You can hear Patton right now, picture the light notes of the trumpet across the North African desert. You know that music. It will live forever. Now you go ahead and try and remember one note from MacArthur. You can’t because Jerry phoned it in. So did everybody else.

MacArthur is just going through the motions, they portray MacArthur’s evacuation of the Philippines in the first ten minutes of the film. It’s one of his most controversial and gut wrenching decisions and we see it immediately with no buildup, no time to establish the film. It’s jarring how quickly this scene shows up.

Conversely the movie is nearly an hour long by the time we see Patton confront his inability to keep his mouth shut and the ever eternal slapping of one of his men. These scenes have power because the movie has taken its time to build a character and story.

The crazy thing about Patton is that so many of the memorable parts we take as genius, thus making MacArthur look silly, almost never happened at all. Nobody wanted to go with the opening flag speech scene. George C. Scott wanted nothing to do with it. So Schaffner just lied to him and said it’d be filmed at the end.

Says Coppola on the commentary tack, “All you young people, bear note, that the things that you are fired for are, are often the things in later life that you are celebrated and given lifetime achievements for.

Patton also has to deal with the enduring reality that it was made without Patton’s input, family, diary, notes, and thus relied heavily on Omar Bradley. I can say what I want about MacArthur’s poor film execution, but the content at face value is likely almost entirely accurate. The same cannot be said of Patton.

If you ask me, the most controversial aspect of the film is not Patton himself but Bradley’s presence. It’s open to interpretation just how much of Scott’s portrayal of Patton’s personality is a mythical creation inside Bradley’s mind. It makes for wonderful movie, but maybe perhaps not the look Patton himself would appreciate. From my end, I think this is how Patton was, some of the time, as in an act. A deliberate act of leadership. The rest of the time he was likely the thoughtful military professional his writings depict, but that which does not make for entertaining movie.

In the end, the best part of these two movies though is that I think that bizarrely, both Patton and MacArthur got the movies they would have personally wanted. Patton got to be played by George C. Scott and seen forever as an eternal warrior monk badass. And MacArthur gets Gregory Peck, who gives a bunch of cool long speeches for two hours. In this sense, they both win the duel. As always, in their own way.

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Gentlemen! I will now count off the paces. No General MacArthur, I do not know the current exact time of day. General Patton, please wait till my countdown is completed before you wield your bat. General Patton!

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you have to live with it

Ponder if you will, this simple scenario.  It takes one hour for a normal cardiologist test to check your heart for the detrimental presence of alien spores.  But your particular cardiologist (we’ll call him Gil) says it’ll take him at least three hours to test you.  And his error rate for the test is north of 90%.  So you’ll just have to take his word for it.  You of course reject all of this, and decide to go to another cardiologist.  Until Gil starts cracking up and delightfully informs you that he’s the only cardiology practice on the planet.  You have no choice.  You have to live with it.

We’re regular TSA haters on this degenerate blog.  Partially because I fly a minimum of a dozen times a year, usually nearly double that.  In that time I’ve seen some real, real anger inducing stuff.  I’ve seen the TSA aggressively frisk a well dressed grandmother, scream at a small child, allow a person without an actual passport past the international checkpoint, and on and on and on.

For what?  Kindly take a moment to gaze upon the latest saga in a 15 year journey of incompetence.   If you’re flying out of Chicago, the TSA needs you there three hours early to do something that traditionally only took one hour.

There are the usual troubling nuggets in this article:

– Apparently after all this time they still can’t process the concept of peak season travel numbers.  This is their business.  This is what they do for a living.  But nobody seemed to bother to write on a napkin the number of booked tickets verses the number of screen personnel and do some simple math.  After all, it’s just your life, so whatever.

– The TSA continues to pound TSA Pre as the solution to all of your problems.  As before though, you’ll still have to pay $85, get fingerprinted, and conduct a formal interview with a TSA bureaucrat who’s undoubtedly fully qualified for the job of determining whether or not you’re a vicious terrorist.  So TSA Pre is the answer to the problem of the TSA’s removal of your time and money.  And thus the solution is for them to take more of your time and money (and your privacy).  So you can get back what they already took from you.  In any other construct not government, that’d be called theft or blackmail.

– All of this might be worth it if the TSA actually did the task assigned to them.  But as the article reminds us, the TSA fails at its mission well over 90% of the time.  In fact, the article actually mentions the raw numbers which I’ve never seen before:

undercover security operatives managed to smuggle 67 illegal weapons or simulated bombs past TSA security on 70 tries last year, that TSA officials were unable to properly vet 73 aviation employees who had links to terrorism, thereby allowing them access to secure areas,  and that senior managers have a long history of bullying whistleblowers who identify potential problems.

In 15 years the TSA has never successfully stopped a single terrorist act.  They’ve never caught a guy at the checkpoint.  But if you play devil’s advocate to try and make the argument about deterrence, all I can say is with a failure rate of 90%, if an actual terrorist had actually tried, he’d probably have succeeded.

So what’s all this been?  For 15 years?  Smoke and mirrors.  Power, money, and the bureaucratic inertia survival of an organization, no matter how incompetent or rude or unfair to you, the citizen.

But don’t worry, Congress is all over this, solving the problem like they typically do:

On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) called on TSA Administrator Peter V. Neffenger to resign if the long wait times at airports such as O’Hare and Midway are not resolved by Memorial Day.

Senator Kirk seems to think wait times are the reason to clean house.  Senator Kirk is thus burning his day sitting under one tree, surrounded by flies, scratching his head, completely unaware that he’s in the middle of a whole forest.  Bravo.

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all hail the bunny

So let’s say it’s 1673, and you’re guzzling Reinheitsgebot beer at a pub in the Duchy of Westphalia. It’s a few days before Easter. Your buddy Carl leans over, wasted, and he’s like, “Hey, you know what, we should get some eggs and color them.” You don’t say a word, because beer is tasty, and you’re not sure if you just heard Carl correctly. And in any case, beer is tasty, so who cares. But then Carl continues, “but the eggs have to appear from somewhere, so a rabbit should bring them to the kids.”

You have no idea where Carl’s brain is, but seeing as how you can’t say nothing, you start with the simple, “Rabbits don’t lay eggs.”

“Right, right, but they can carry them, right?”

Your head hurts, “Rabbits can’t carry things, they don’t have opposable thumbs, and they hop around.”

Carl’s getting frustrated, he pulls on his stein, he needs you to understand the genius that’s at work here, “Okay, okay, but it’s all for fun, so if I say the rabbit can carry eggs, then he’s carrying the freaking eggs.”

“Okay.”

“But the eggs are colored, see,” Carl drinks again, “so that way they’re neat and colorful and you can find them easier.”

You’re barely listening at this point. You motion to the barkeep that you’d like another. But remember, Carl’s your buddy, so you have to play along to some degree. “What was that, about kids?”

“Well, kids get to find the hidden colored eggs.”

“So the rabbit hides eggs?”

“Right.”

“So that kids can then find them?”

“Exactly!”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter, because the rabbit wants to, he’s a hopping happy rabbit, or whatever, doesn’t matter. And all the kids search for the eggs, and they’re happy. Because kids like wonderful bright colors, and they like to run around, and play, and find things,” Carl starts chuckling uncontrollably.

Your next beer arrives, you desperately want to drink it, but you take a moment to furrow your brow in frustration. “Okay, okay Carl, so, uh, why would we do this?”

“Because it’s Easter!” Carl shouts as he raps his fist on the bar.

“WHAT do a rabbit, colored eggs, kids have to do with that Jesus guy rising from the dead?”

“Who cares! Everybody will love this.”

“Okay friend, okay.” And because it’s 1673, you put that next beer back in about 30 seconds, and you’re off. As you depart, Carl’s already shouting his idea to somebody else at the bar, who like you, couldn’t care less. And you’re quite certain Carl should have stopped at five beers.

But then it’s 1698, and eggs, bunnies, and color are everywhere. Kids are playing, everybody’s hiding eggs in bushes and under cobblestones, and it’s become an Easter tradition, full of spring joy and life.

Meanwhile, Carl’s made millions off his egg decorating business. And you’re still a day laborer at the local mill. But at least, every time you’re at the pub, Carl offers to buy all your beers.

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Oh the joy of irrational youth, where my parents could dismiss us from the room and tell us to come back in ten minutes.  And then we’d get back, and Dad would defiantly state the Easter bunny had just stopped by, and hid a whole bunch of eggs in the backyard that we had to find.  We’d just missed him, honest.  Go get the eggs now.  And so we did.

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what’s this Irish thing anyways?

Just about a whole bunch of people are wearing green in the office today. I’m not exactly sure why, I don’t get it. Genetics-wise, I’m about 50% Irish, and I still don’t get it.

I mean in the old days you would get pinched if you weren’t wearing green. So you had to wear green. But those were the good old days. Nowadays pinching somebody on Saint Patrick’s Day would speedily result in a sexual assault conviction and/or lawsuit.

Quite randomly, I’ve been on a bit of an Irish haul lately. This last weekend I binge watched (in between working both days) Peaky Blinders. Without ruining the plot, the 1919-1922 pivotal years of Irish history are intrinsically tied to what’s going on throughout the events of this otherwise English gangster saga. This series is pretty good, I thought the first season was just awesome. Unfortunately the second season degenerates into a mix of Godfather, Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire. It’s decent, watchable stuff, but it’s all been done before. They even take certain themes shot-for-shot from these other series. But at least you get Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill, who are so entertaining you could get them on screen watching third tier soccer in a bar and it’d be entertaining.

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“As a villain, I’m so fucking awesome.”

Cillian Murphy is also in another Irish themed saga of this era called The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Depending on who you ask, this movie made Murphy’s name. As you can tell from its high-minded title, it’s not a lightweight journey. People love this movie, they shout it to the horizons. I however, didn’t quite care for it. It was preachy and predictable. It devalued an incredibly complex civil war into the usual, brother fights brother tale, where one dude is the romantic and the other guy plays it straight. Likely Peaky Blinders, it’s imminently watchable stuff, but it’s all been done before. I know I’m definitely selling this flick short, but as emotional as you’re supposed to be, by the end, I didn’t feel, like, things. I didn’t care what happened to either of these guys. Maybe that says something about me? Anyways, I wonder how many folks wearing green today have even heard of the Irish Civil War though?

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Hmm, based on how they’re dressed, I wonder which one is going to end up Anti-Treaty and the other Pro-Treaty?

I’m currently reading my Granddad’s copy of A Bridge Too Far, which by some miracle I’ve never read before. The lead element of the Allied ground advance for Market Garden was the Irish Guards. Which despite their name, were recruited only from Northern Ireland. While most of the rest of Ireland essentially sat out World War II, despite the many individuals who volunteered for British units, or the limited clandestine help the Irish government provided. Which, I kind of get, given what the Irish people would have thought about the English. But to which I’ve always found troubling, because it’s like, “Hey, uh, you do know, what Hitler would have done to Ireland, had he won? Right?”

But then you also have to step back and consider that Saint Patrick’s Day isn’t typically about Ireland or the Irish, but rather the Irish diaspora. So unless folks happen to hail from Puerto Rico, or Lebanon, or the Philippines, then I’m not quite sure any similar national concept applies. Except that, by raw numbers, there are probably more German descendants in America, than Irish. But there’s no rough Duestch equivalent to Saint Patrick’s Day, that’s so widespread, so known. The recent Oktoberfest craze is too new, is not just one day, and is in case nowhere near as big.

So what’s this Irish thing anyways? Perhaps it’s simply not enough for some, to just check the American block and call it a day? That they need / want a deeper connection that predates 1607?

Or is to wear green and play crazy, wacky dress up, like Halloween?

Or is to find an excuse to go drink with friends on a weeknight?

Or how about to celebrate and enjoy a non-standard event that still binds people together across all walks of life in an increasingly separated, smartphone divided world?

How about all of the above.

None of these are bad ideas. If they bring people together, and don’t result in people getting too many beer steins cracked over their heads.

So leaving aside the deeper thoughts, I guess I’ll simply say, drink up, have fun. Enjoy Saint Patrick’s Day, folks.  Cheers.

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Obama nominates amorphous lifeform to Court

Let’s face it, nobody knows who this guy is.  It’s like Obama rolled around in a nondescript black van from Peter’s Opulent Tea & Unlimited Shoppe (POTUS), and just grabbed some dude off the street at 3am as he was walking back wasted from the bar.

And the guy’s in the back of the van screaming, pinned to the floor by a half-dozen Secret Service agents.  Then Obama, smoking, leans down and whispers.  And the guy, drunk as he is, knows it’s the Prez, so he quiets down.  Obama: “Howdy.  How’d you like to be my Supreme Court pick, buddy?”  [pulls on cig]

Okay, I guess, if you happen to be a part of the ruling legal / political / media establishment of DC, you knew who Merrick Garland was before this morning.  But the rest of us don’t.  Is this dude qualified?  I have no idea.  Neither do you.  Perhaps the ruling legal / political / media establishment does?  I have no idea.

But it’s like Obama picked the most faceless wonder you could imagine.  Why did he do that?  Who knows, clearly there must have been some political calculation, I guess.  But I’ll tell you what, both sides are going to paint these next few months like Garland’s holding the keys to a vault that possesses the souls of 16K cute kitties and puppies.  It’s going to be absurd.  It’s going to be sad.

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Garland: “I uh, promise, to uh, be a good judge.  Yeah, yeah, the best judge.  On that Supreme of all Courts.”  [Obama pulls on cig]

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Milwaukee – for just a few hours

I’ve pretty much gotten to the stage where I’m beyond planning anything for travel not dictated by those who employ me.  This is just about the exact opposite from a decade ago where I had a tour book, ledger, and a timeline.

I wish I could say this was part of some kind of mystical theoretical journey where I’ve cast off the toolbox shackles of a younger age, but truly it’s just because I don’t have enough energy to care.  It’s the mentality of, eh, it’s just for fun, whatever.  Show up, and see what happens.  I like this, it takes less effort.

For those of you unfortunate enough to be a regular reader of this degenerate blog, I now end up traveling to Chicago regularly now.  But I usually fly into Milwaukee for this is cheaper to the bottom line.

A hint perhaps, for those of you looking to head to Chicago.  If you fly into Milwaukee both in terms of flight cost and rental car, you’ll save at least $100.  And your trade is about $8 in interstate tolls and an extra hour’s drive.  You decide if this is worth the tradeoff.

Anyways, I usually have zero time, and so turn south from Mitchell Airport bound for Chicago.  This last week though I had a few hours since I got there very early in the morning.  So instead I turned north and decided to spend a few hours in Milwaukee.

With zero upfront planning I ended up in downtown, parked, and just walked around for a few hours.  This was a good idea.  However, it didn’t help that I felt terrible that entire day, but there was nothing I could do about that.  So I decided to carry on.

First I walked around like a lunatic until I could find breakfast, I ended up at a local Greek diner:

Mykonos Gyro & Cafe

1014 North Van Buren Street

 

This was a wise, fortunate, rendezvous.  They do two things I’ve never seen before, they put gyro meat in an omelet, and you get tzatziki in a squeeze bottle.  Both of these are wise decisions.  But be warned, for about $8 you’ll get enough food that you feel compelled to walk it off for hours.  So in other words, this was a huge win.

Then it was few blocks east down to the Lake.

 

Lake Michigan

Lake Michigan from the bluffs of Juneau Park.  As is typical for Eastern or Mid-Western cities, those damn highways are in the way of water views.  If you didn’t know, this was a deliberate decision of city designers in the early car era.  Highways, or parkways, were put along the water to give casual driver’s a good view.  This is the lunacy of getting fully dressed up and going on a drive in the 1930’s, because that was considered recreation.  My Granddad used to chuckle about that, you would go on a drive for fun.  So back then, having the road along the water was an advantage, now they just kill our view.

 

Soloman Juneau

Soloman Juneau.  First mayor of Milwaukee, and it seems an all around decent guy.  An explorer, trader, and trailblazer of the American West who seems to possess a rarity in that he has little or no blood on his hands.

 

Bad Day

At the base of Juneau’s statue.  At first I was like, “is this some type of weird local offering to Juneau’s ghost?”  But in reality, I came to the conclusion that this was somebody’s really, really bad day.

 

Then it was  a short walk to the East Side of downtown, separated from the West Side by the Milwaukee River.

Milwaukee Federal Building

Milwaukee Federal Courthouse.  Once a regular federal office building, is now a place where dreams are destroyed.  A classic piece of late 19th, early 20th century city building architecture.  I hate new office building designs, all glass, all stale awfulness.  At least back then they built things they looked like they actually cared.

 

The Pfister

The Pfister, one of the oldest hotels in Milwaukee.  A broader American hotel icon, and recent setting in Space Cop.  An interesting note is the property on the right-side street corner is for sale.  Their pitch in the window is it hasn’t been available for purchase since, “The Dow was at 500 points.”  I don’t know what year that was, but that’s a pretty awesome sales pitch.

 

Milwaukee River

Milwaukee River.  It wasn’t as cold as it looks, but it usually is, apparently.

 

Milwaukee Public Market

Milwaukee Public Market, in the historic Third Ward.  An awesome place.

 

At this point, that I felt horrible, and that stole the rest of the journey out of me.  So I briefly had lunch at this place, another win:

The Wicked Hop

345 North Broadway

 

And then I had to basically get out of there, drive south, and find a way to get to bed early.  It helped because I felt better in the morning for work.  But it’s only left me wanting to go back to Milwaukee again soon, and get more in depth, to a city that has a lot of offer, but who’s surface I’ve just barely scratched.

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when do you send in the army?

So if you were a citizen of Brussels, then at this point you’ve been robbed of a whole week of your life earlier this year and now, all of New Years.  Why?  Terror threats.

Well, what is that?  Apparently it’s whatever somebody says it is.  Just ask your Los Angeles school district neighbor.  I’ve already ranted about this without purpose, it is what it is.  You just need to read the remarks of Belgium’s leader to understand what happened here, he cancelled all of New Years because of:

“…information we have received.”

How long do leaders figure their people are going to just put up with this?  How long are the average working folks of Brussels going to put up with having their lives altered because of information their leaders have apparently received?

With this kind of weak leadership, it is any wonder folks are turning to new fringe political parties and leaders?

I have no idea.  Neither does Donald Trump or Francois Hollande.  I just would think, at a certain point, that your normal average human would eventually get aggravated to the point that they’d expect something to be done about it.  Instead of doing what Europe does best: muddle through.

For now, the European answer, and I suspect the American answer is you just put the army on the streets.  Europe’s armies now guard the streets.  And the American police are mostly armed and equipped the same way as European armies, so it’s all the same to me.

And armies now guard museums, government buildings, mosques, synagogues, and the freaking zoo.

If you live in Brussels, and the Islamic State is responsible for ruining your life, when do you draw the line and demand your leaders deal with the problem at the source?

I fear, the answer is, you don’t.  You muddle through.  Particularly because as it stands, Belgium virtually has no deployable army.  Which is sad when you look at what they did in 1940.

So you’ll say, well, I’m a lunatic.  True.  But where do you draw the line?  If you honestly prefer a life where every public occasion you attend with your family requires a cop / soldier armed with an automatic rifle?   Just say so.  Tell me you want to live like that.

But I’m wondering if the lesser evil to the West’s freedom is a brief army of say 100K troops, mostly American and French, who carve a swath against the Islamic State for about 3 months and destroy it.  Then everybody wags their fingers and says, “Don’t do that again.”

And then you leave the Middle East to figure out the wreckage on their own terms.  And if they screw it up, and the Islamic State emerges again, you do another 3 month invasion all over.

Do you think this is a shit idea?  Maybe.  My idea might suck.  But at least it’s an idea.

The only idea on offer from idiots like Trump is to expel an entire religious group. The only idea on offer from all the leaders of Europe is to cancel New Years.  I’ll stand by the lunacy of my idea.  It’s better than anybody else’s.

belgian police

What’s really creepy about this shot, is that the Belgian police are all wearing masks while inside their own capital city.  And, look closely, the BBC has blurred the faces of those cops who aren’t wearing masks.