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Yeah, I stole the title from John Ringo.  Who, by the way, has a great Facebook note up today about how even if Pence is a gay hater (which I frankly don’t believe, so let’s get that out of the way), he’s not the President. Trump is.  And even if Trump hadn’t already made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t give a particular damn who you sleep with, or who you worship (or not), or what color your skin is, “Trump has to have money to open Buchenwald.”  Which ain’t gonna happen.

Election’s over.  Conservatives are trying to get back to real life.  Liberals — particularly the radical progressives, but also the mush-brained college students and other camp followers — are freaking out, throwing tantrums, and wreaking property damage and other non-trivial forms of dissent in our cities.  In other words, business as usual.

And these are the people who were pissed when Trump said he wouldn’t automatically accept the results if he lost.

Jesus, people.  Your candidate CONCEDED.  She took too long to do it, but she still did it.  And Obama met with Trump yesterday for like 90 minutes, and the White House didn’t implode.

You say that we’re gloating.  (This is clearly a talking point, because I’m seeing it used everywhere by disgruntled leftards.)  Folks, we’re not gloating.  We’re just relieved.  What you’re calling gloating — which it isn’t — is simply what happiness tinged with distrust looks like.  Because we don’t trust him, either.

Most of us are actually being pretty nice about the whole thing, much as we were pretty nice about the two Obama elections — the argument wasn’t over his election, the argument since he was elected has been over the disastrous policies he set into place that we’re now watching disintegrate in slow motion, taking the economy and our lives with it.  Sure, we were pissed off that he parlayed his race and a general weariness with the war the Republicans had gotten us into (which is a fallacy in and of itself — Bill Clinton had Osama bin Laden’s head on a silver platter and chose to ignore him) into a sympathy vote for our First Black President.  Well, hell, I thought we already had that with Bill Clinton, but what do I know.

I would not have had a problem with our First Black President if he hadn’t made everything about race, after protesting throughout his campaign that he was the only candidate who could effect racial healing over the nation.  Not only was that bullshit, it was recognizable bullshit from the first time it crawled out of his mouth.

The would-be First Woman President claimed that she would do great things for women.  I guess.  Because most of what she advocated would actually harm them.  Expanding the ACA.  Australian Ban gun control.  Raising taxes.  You name it, none of these would have been good for women — or for men, either, but that obviously was the sub-text of her entire campaign.  And then there were the criminal investigations swirling around her.  Benghazi.  Clinton Foundation.  Pay-for-play at State.  All this shady shit going all the way back to her cattle futures windfall and the death of Vince Foster…and the mysterious deaths of other people who seemed to have failed her.  (Shades of Vladimir Putin.)  Yet none of this was enough to sway her true believers…even when they weren’t hers in the beginning.  (Anyone remember Bernie Sanders?)

Look, I was an early NeverTrumper — you can search this blog and find references to it, I’m not going to disappear them.  I’m still proud that I was a NeverTrumper, but once Cruz was eliminated, it made absolutely no sense to remain a NeverTrumper.  Yet, I know NeverTrumpers who wasted their votes on Gary Johnson.  Sure, in Indiana, it didn’t matter, Trump was going to win no matter what.  But look at the difference in the popular vote, with Trump still lagging Hillary, and tell me that the NeverTrumpers who stuck to their guns aren’t at least partially responsible for all the “dump the Electoral College” bullshit that’s flying around out there today.

Goddamn motherfuckers.  Grow the fucking fuck up.  This is real life, not just politics.  You are fucking with the lives of real people.

The video flying around Facebook today with the Brit who unloads on the left and blames them for Donald Trump is absolutely right the fuck on target.  Oh, here we go.

We get the candidates we deserve, and when one of them figures she’s entitled and can’t be beaten, and apparently doesn’t even manage to get the Democrat vote fraud machine up out of low gear, we end up with the guy on the other side who won a bunch of open primaries that were stacked by non-Republicans who were hoping he’d be nominated because he’d be “easy” for her to beat.

I hope conservatives and NeverTrumpers were watching that video, too.  Because you flip some names and parties, and he’s talking to US, too.  WE don’t engage, either.  We go and vote for single issues just like the other side.  I voted for Trump primarily because Hillary was threatening to confiscate guns and emasculate the 2nd Amendment by appointing Supreme Court justices and other judges who would rule in her favor on gun cases like Heller.  Fuck the rest of it, you take the guns away, and we’re just Europe.  Take guns away and we are no longer free.  I’ve quoted the H. Beam Piper thing from Space Viking on this blog before, but it boils down to, “If your ballots aren’t secured by bullets, then your elections are a farce, and your freedom is an illusion.”  And you can believe that or not, but goddamnit, prove to me it’s not true before you wave it off in disgust.  And you can’t prove it, because disarming the population prior to enslaving or exterminating them has happened throughout human history.

Jesus, what a pack of assholes we ALL are in this country.  I sure hope we haven’t fucked ourselves with Trump.  Early returns suggest we might have lucked out.

The bitch about the future is we haven’t been there yet.  There are no reports from the front lines to help guide us.

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Where is your safe space now, infidel progressives?

(Posted separately to Facebook.)

Well, kind of like with the Cubs last week, I was lying there in bed considering the election as a Schrodinger experiment.  That is, so long as I didn’t pick up my iPad and start reading, a Trump or Hillary victory was just out there in the fog of probability.

But around 2AM, lying there unable to sleep, I went ahead and opened the box.

I’ve been saying for months I didn’t believe the polls, that I was sure there was a silent majority out there who were sick and tired of Obama and socialism, and whom the pollsters were either consciously ignoring or just simply missed in their blind liberal/progressive Clinton advocacy.

At 2AM it became pretty obvious that I was right. And Fox News later confirmed my suspicion.

The upshot of this election has to be that we as citizens take a hard look at how news is reported and polls are weighted. The media and the pollsters did not cover themselves with glory, this cycle, quite the opposite, and they need to be punished in some way for their overreach. It’s time for some real honesty to break out.

In the meantime, wow, the vitriol from the other side.

This came up from a person who’s been a friend of mine for 30 years.  She’s GenX, 13 years my junior.  A true sweetheart, I love her dearly.  And this is how she treats people she knows for the thoughtcrime of marking a ballot for Trump.

My response:

I then hid the post and turned off notifications.  If she unfriends me, Fluff-Busting Purity will let me know.  So far she hasn’t.  (Ah.  She just did.  Took the childish way out, too bad.)

The word “gloating” is being thrown around a lot at people on the right who are commenting about the Trump victory.  I don’t see the gloating, personally. I see a lot of people who are happy it didn’t go the other way, but who are still completely unsure about and distrustful of Trump (myself included). But I also see a lot of people who are absolutely freaking out that Hillary lost, like my friend above, personal friends of literally decades of acquaintance threatening to drop (and not just on Facebook) all of their Trump-voting friends for no more than a mark on a ballot.

And I find that sad. The election is over.  It’s time for people to find their objectivity and hold on tight to it.

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What a horrible ballot.  I literally came home and washed my hands after.  How appropriate that yesterday was sunny and mild and so will tomorrow be, while today it’s gloomy and threatening to rain.

I voted a straight Republican ticket; voter #249 in my precinct at about 10AM.  The Democrats have disqualified themselves in my eyes, having become nothing more than traitorous operators bent on turning this country into another worker’s paradise along the lines of Cuba or Venezuela.  The Libertarians don’t stand a chance.  Trump is disgusting but probably won’t get us into a war with Russia, and (big plus) he’s upset the RINO establishment.  So it goes.

Voted NO on all of the property tax increases.  Voted NO on the judges.  Scratched the school board, they’re all a bunch of asshole wannabes anyway.

Fuck this damn election.  Hopefully next time (if there is a next time), more qualified and morally-upright candidates will take a swing at this.

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I commented elsewhere a few days ago that the right rarely starts fights, but has historically almost always won them, generally with the use of disproportionate force.  At least up until the Second World War.  We have been oddly constrained ever since.*

As we run down the last 24 hours before polling begins in earnest, it looks to me like we are more and more likely to be slugging this one out in the House of Representatives.  Some Democrat elector from Oregon (I think it was) Washington State was reported to have said he would not cast his electoral ballot for Hillary, which, the way things were looking the other day, had the potential to result in a 269-269 tie or even a 270-268 win for Trump.  Either way, I fully expect weeks of contested BS in close states.  Hanging chads aren’t going to be the half of it.

The clowns on the left who think that a Trump win will be the signal for a revolution, though, are forgetting who has all the guns.  That’s not a threat, by the way, it’s just a fucking fact.  Liberals have been trying for so long to suppress the individual right to bear arms that either a) they are true believers and possess no defensive firearms, or b) they’re hypocrites and either have guns or are protected by men and women who do.  Politicians and celebrities falling mostly into category b), of course.

The jokers on the right who think that arming and ammoing up and then refusing to relinquish said arms and ammo to the State after Hillary promulgates her Australian Ban Executive Order, well…can’t say I won’t be one of them.  I’ve pointed out on this blog before that a quarter of my family were taken from their homes in Austria and relocated to the camps, where they were exterminated, for no more crime than being Jewish.  But even before that, the Nazis had prohibited them from owning firearms for their own defense — so even those who might otherwise have been wolves were reduced to little more than sheep.  It’s such a large, sticking, and pustulent point that Alinsky — he of the 12 Rules for Radicals — made a point of insisting that the American public would have to be disarmed in order to put over his radical revolution.  So far the left hasn’t managed that, although Lord curse ’em, they’ve tried.

But the point is that I will never relinquish my right of self-defense.  What the government did not give, the government cannot take away.  The left pretends to believe (hell, it may believe, for all I know) that the 2nd Amendment “grants” the right to keep and bear arms (and we won’t go into the penumbral bullshit about the militia and the meaning of “well-regulated”).  The fact is that the Constitution only guarantees the right, by saying it shall not be infringed.  Meaning that the right is a basic human right that pre-exists governments of men.**  And the writings of the Framers consistently back up this assertion.

To remove from us that basic human right makes us slaves to whomever we place in authority (or to whomever seizes extra-legally the reins of that power).  If we cannot defend ourselves from governments, we are not free men.  Which is precisely what the left has been gunning for (pardon the pun) for the past century.

The left hates personal freedom because personal freedom means one may legally dissent from the “received wisdom” of the elites.  To the left, it is clear that elites must guide the ignoble unwashed citizenry to a higher plane of thought, i.e., everything you proles produce should be for the benefit of the State, viz., the left elites, and we will live high on the hog in Capital City while you work and starve and die and hope out in the Districts.  Huh.  Haven’t I read this novel before?

What’s scary about The Hunger Games is that the run-up to such a society is beginning to play out right in front of us.  Not unlike certain portions of Atlas Shrugged, which I have long thought was overstating the case — at least until the Clintons and their thugs and successors (including Barack Obama) came along, and the jokers on the right started slipping toward the center as the clowns on the left started slipping farther to the left.

The Tea Party was a response to that, trying to fill the vacuum on the right, but unfortunately I suspect that the “nice” Tea Party is going to be replaced by folks from the farther right of the spectrum as we edge closer and closer to real socialism.  All the BS about the soi-disant “alt-right”, which from what I’m reading appears to be no less than the left’s projection of a presumed resurgence of the John Birch Society (or worse), seems to be in response to that.  I can discuss the alt-right another day (maybe, depending on whether or not Hillary is elected and whether or not free speech is curtailed under her despotic rule — see The Last Centurion for the likely results of a Hillary Clinton administration), but it seems to me that projecting essentially left-wing ideology (the KKK, given that the alt-right is presumed to be full of white supremacists) onto the conservative right is just another Alinskyesque tactic of demonizing the enemy.

There is a long history in this country of the “silent majority” simply sitting by and waiting out the demagogues and the would-be dictators (like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt).  Unfortunately we have been so polarized by both sides (plus the bleacher bums shouting from the sidelines) in this election cycle that I don’t think the majority will remain silent much longer.  Certainly an administration that starts restricting or removing basic rights that have been guaranteed our citizens for over two centuries is going to find a lot of resistance coming from people who are no longer going to simply sit and take it.

There are 300 million guns in this country, and billions if not trillions of rounds of ammunition.

Come and take them, bitches.

From our cold dead hands.

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* “Fortune favors the bold” is not a particularly good motto in the nuclear age.  Something that Macarthur (perhaps my least-favorite American general) never understood, or he wouldn’t have advocated using the Bomb in North Korea.

** I’m less enamored of the Indiana Constitution’s Bill of RIghts, Article I Section 32, which states that “The people shall have a right to bear arms, for the defense of themselves and the State.”  “The people shall” smacks a bit too much of “The State giveth, and the State may taketh away.”  But I’ll take it, even if it should be up around Section 2, before all the other things the State purports to protect.  The Florida Constitution (my wife plans for us to retire in the Sunshine State) is somewhat better, closer to 2A, but unfortunately spoils it by giving the legislature the right to regulate the “manner of bearing arms”.

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(Non-sports fans, sorry.  I don’t usually do this in public.  I’ll wash my hands after, promise.)

108 years is a long time.  Longest drought in American sports history.  In my family, it spans three distinct generations — my father’s father, my father, and myself.  All of us Cubs fans.  And until yesterday, only one of us having ever seen the Cubs win a World Series.

Well, in fairness, Grandpa didn’t see it, and likely didn’t hear it, either; no commercial radio in 1907 and 1908.  The first baseball game broadcast was in 1921.  More likely he read about it in the Peru, Indiana newspaper a couple of days later (or was told about it; he was only 9 or 10 at the time).

Dad was born in 1925 and the Cubs appeared in the Series in 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945.  He probably read about the last one in Stars and Stripes, as I think he was in England at the time.

After that, nada.  Zip.  Zero.  Nothing.  Although they did participate in post-season play and won six division titles and had a couple of wild-card berths (the latest of the latter being just last year).  The received wisdom is that the closest they ever got to a World Series in these later years was in 2003, when the infamous Steve Bartman “incident” occurred — of which the less said, the better.

I am just a few years away from entering my seventh decade, and I had never seen the Cubs win so much as a pennant.  Like Wilford Brimley in The Natural, all I wanted was a pennant.  A Series win would be icing on the cake.  Just get me the pennant, Cubbie Bears.

When the Ricketts family bought the team in 2009, my ears perked up.  Because ownership of the team had been for so long held by faceless corporations who really didn’t care about baseball and who refused to put the time, effort, and (most important) money into building the team, any new thing was welcome.  And the first thing Tom Ricketts said when he took over was that he wanted to win.  That caught my attention.  And when Ricketts suited action to words and actually started building his team, that definitely caught my attention.

And now Mr. Ricketts has got himself a World Series title, after eight hard years of work, tirelessly building this young Cubs team of the future, never losing faith, and sticking to his program.

Fly that fucking W, Cubs fans.  Fly that fucking W.

I have extended family (well, my wife has extended family) in Cleveland.  The smack talk out of one of her nephews was almost too much to take.  This from a guy who dissed LeBron James when he abandoned Cleveland and then welcomed him back with open arms a few years later.  The impression I had was that Cleveland fans went into this thing assuming they were going to win it because they had the better team.  (Better team?  The Cubs won 103 regular season games.  Nobody else got even close this year.)  I mean, I get that you passionately love your team and want it to succeed, and when it wins the league pennant and goes to the Series, you naturally assume that you’re one of the best two teams in baseball, even if the regular season record doesn’t show that.*

To digress for a moment (and it will make sense), the most amazing thing about the win last night is that I haven’t thought about the election all day. Because the election isn’t important.

I don’t care who you are, for one shining moment, a whole bunch of Americans got together and watched that most quintessentially American sport, and for once it didn’t matter if you were backing Trump or Hillary or Johnson or Stein. It just didn’t matter.

Because prick the skin and draw some blood, and it turns out that we’re all Americans.

That’s why I can say, with complete honesty and absolutely no irony, congratulations to the Cleveland Indians and their fans. You fought hard and you nearly won. You were worthy opponents and I have no doubt you’ll get to celebrate a World Series championship in the near future. And you’ve been gracious in defeat (from what I’ve been reading). You play great ball. You’re a credit to the sport.

The people out there who say that sport isn’t important and denigrate it as a waste of time and little more than a distraction are just plain wrong. Sport creates, builds, and maintains communities of disparate people. Somewhat like fraternalism, it brings people together who might otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance. There is something to be said for non-political activities that pull us together like sport does. It’s much healthier than politics, if you ask me.

Baseball will outlive the current unpleasantness, just like it always has. And in a year, we’ll be wondering what all the fuss was about.

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* This is one of the reasons I hate the playoffs.  Before 1969, it was just the best records in the two respective leagues facing off against each other.  The division series (which later turned into the LCS when MLB further split things into three divisions per league) did nothing but dilute that.  Because in any series, it’s entirely possible for one team to get cocky and the other team to take advantage of that cockiness.  Hell, it nearly happened any number of times to the Cubs this year.  Hell, I remember when Reggie Jackson was crowned “Mr. October”, and people bitched because the Series was stretching out of September into October.  There’s really no damn excuse to be playing baseball in November — except for the greed that calls itself TV money.

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A friend of mine posted very concernedly today on Facebook something to the effect of, “What will you do if you can’t get into the polls next Tuesday?  Do you have a plan to vote?”  The upshot of which was, “Skip the line, get in by tomorrow and early vote.”

My friend is a liberal, of course, and is all fired up about making sure your (democrat) vote counts and you don’t just sit at home and go, “ah fuck it”, or get to the polling place and encounter a long line that might make you have to stand and wait for an hour or two, which you might not be able to do because $WORKBOSSKIDSLAZY$.  And he and his wife have four small kids.  And his polling place is not nearby and if he had to walk to it, he’d have to walk on a busy road, like, if his car broke down.  (Seriously?  Uber?  Call a friend?  Read a website that explains, among other things, how you can get a ride to the polls?  Christ.)

I countered with, well, gee whiz, my parents and grandparents manged to vote at the polling place on Election Day long before we ever had early voting.  I managed to vote at the polling place before we had early voting, although one year I did vote absentee because I expected to be out of town on Election Day — but in those days it required appearing downtown at the Election Board office and filling out the ballot there.  I guess as I recall that event, I could have requested a mail-in ballot, but then as now, I don’t trust the mail.

My friend said bully for them, but he’s got four kids and he’s not going to take them for what might be a long wait.

I bit my tongue at that point before I said I guessed he’d never heard of a babysitter.  Or maybe his wife staying home while he went to vote, and them him staying with the kids while she went to vote.  (Obviously either one of them stays home all day with them, or they both work and have a day care arrangement, which is why I can’t really give much credence to his whining about having to have the kids tag along.)

But the more I thought about this, the more I thought about the real reason for requiring citizens to show up to cast a ballot in person back in the bad old days.  The reason wasn’t because the election board said “vote here and at this date and time, or don’t vote”, but because voting is an exercise in community-building.  You go to vote and you meet your neighbors, and maybe their kids who are tagging along, and you talk and make connections, and your knowledge of who lives around you and who is maybe a shady character who has no business hanging around increases markedly.  You feel better about opening your door to strangers at Halloween, because they’re not really strangers anymore.  If your neighborhood has a civic group, you might think about attending a meeting or two to find out about the neighborhood watch and complain about the crappy job the city is doing removing trash, or snow, or repaving your potholed streets.

Voting is one of those things that can cascade into building healthy communities, unlike “community organizing” as popularized by such as our current Chief Community Organizer, which is essentially political in nature and does little to solidify a community past enraging it against the establishment.  And every time someone early-votes, or sits home, or sends in an absentee ballot, we lose a chance to engage that person in the local community.

The atrophy of local communities is most evident when residents start taking liberties with the rules.  Rules like zoning laws.  For instance, we have a civic league in our neighborhood, originally started to keep the black man out (which is why my parents never joined it), but in recent years it’s been revamped to handle neighborhood watch and that sort of thing.  It has no power (there are no covenants or CC&Rs here) but it’s at least a place to take a gripe, I suppose; I’ve never been to a meeting on general principle.  (If they’d change the name I might reconsider.)  And when a resident (or possibly his tenant) a few blocks down the street started turning the property into a lawn care business, with three sheds wired for electricity and a dirt turnaround churned into the front yard with trucks parked there overnight, the civic league…

DID NOTHING.

Now, this was a major zoning violation.  Granted, my dad ran a business out of our garage for years, but he didn’t make a mess of the place and his truck was just a plain old pickup truck.  That other property was an eyesore and had to be making surrounding property values plummet.

So after a few months of driving past it every couple of days, I decided I’d had enough; you let one property owner get away with that kind of shite, and the next thing you know, everybody’s doing it.  So I wrote an anonymous letter to the county zoning commission, outlining all of the violations I’d seen (including failure to obtain permits; you can look that up online these days).  I wrote it anonymously because, yeah, I’m a coward that way, but I also didn’t want a bunch of angry Hispanic yard workers burning my house down in the middle of the night.

It took about a month, and I honestly don’t know if my letter had done any good or if the landlord had simply come by and had a fit over the property destruction, but that home-based business vanished overnight and all the damage (including to the lawn) was repaired.  (The sheds are still there, but nobody seems to be using them.)*

And it made me wonder about why the civic league couldn’t have done something about it, nipped it in the bud when it was just starting up.  To which I applied the assumption that, if more people actually got out and met their neighbors, maybe the civic league would have a little more punch when it came to such things.

Tocqueville said that Americans were unique in that we created voluntary associations.  His point was that we tended to self-organize for the betterment of the community.  It’s something we don’t seem to do well anymore; Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone suggested that we tend to do a lot more things individually that we used to do in groups (more people bowling than ever, but a decline in league participation).  Is it because we don’t have time?  Too many other things happening in our lives?  Too much TV?  Are we simply depressed as a nation because our horrible political class has made our future seem bleak?

I don’t actually know the answer to that.  I can vouch for his assertion that fraternal organizations are shedding members like mad, but in fairness, as a fraternal insider who has done some research on that problem, it’s fairly simple to see why if you understand the fragile dynamics of how fraternalism became so huge to begin with.  That doesn’t seem to translate, though, to the declines in other types of memberships or activities, or even into the decline in the numbers of those who arse themselves to vote.

But one of the insidious methods that has been employed to destroy communities over the years is, to me, early voting, which relieves the citizenry of the supposedly-onerous duty of actually showing up at the goddamn polls once or twice a year to exercise their franchise and mingle with their neighbors and fellow citizens.

There have been suggestions that Election Day should be a national holiday when businesses close and everyone participates in the great American experiment.  I used to be against that; I didn’t believe that voting should be that easy (an attitude I picked up from my father).  It should be somewhat of a sacrifice, a sacrifice upon the altar of American civic virtue.  But I am less and less convinced that closing things down for a day for elections would be a bad thing.

Perhaps my soul is too old.  But as I wrote that, I thought of bunting, and picnic tables, and people mingling and eating and engaging in free discourse before and after they voted at the nearby polling place.  (Yeah, I know.  It’s November.  Maybe it could be in the church basement.  I dunno.)  I thought of citizens acting like citizens for a change, instead of citizens yelling at other citizens and damning them for rotten traitorous bastards because we’ve become so damnably polarized as a people.

We actually can all get along.  But we have to rebuild our communities in order to do that.  And part of rebuilding our communities is getting to a place where we are forced to deal with our fellow citizens.

Putting a stop to early voting is just one thing we could do to effect that.

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* Edit to add:  I ran an online check a little later, and lo and behold, the property was indeed cited about a month after I sent the letter for several zoning violations.  The source of the complaint was “Mayor’s Action Center”.  I did look at my copy of the letter, too, and noticed that I sent it to Code Enforcement, not the Zoning Commission; my error, above.  “Mayor’s Action Center” is a catchall for all inbound complaints, so my letter may very well have had an affect.

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and we have only a week till our great national nightmare either ends or begins, depending on your outlook.  (I’m still rooting for SMOD, but will be casting a vote for El Donaldo as the lesser of two weevils.  And yes, you must always choose the lesser of two weevils.)

Yeah, I’ve been reading The Books again.  Nothing like them for a bit of escapism during the stupid season.

So to recap, it looks like Mr. Comey finally rooted around long enough and found his balls — either that or he released his news last Friday to forestall the news being leaked by the lower echelons, and/or to prevent a mutiny at the FBI (mutiny being one of those things Lucky Jack Aubrey avoided in the volume I just finished, so it’s timely for me).  Anyway, it appears that Hillary didn’t have Comey’s cojones in a lockbox, so maybe it’s all good.  Guess maybe she might really get the Weiner stuck to her; but will it be enough to lose her the election?  One can only hope.

And as if the Apocalypse isn’t already nigh, the lovable stumblebums of Wrigleyville managed to wriggle(y) out of ignominious defeat in five games the other night, and they’ll take it to the Mistake on the Lake to try to even it up.  The question now is whether or not they will gum it up.  I give them even odds of tying the Series, and then who knows what will happen in game seven, if played.  Personally I expect four horsemen to appear in the outfield in the bottom of the ninth, Cubs up one, two outs, nobody on, and strike two called.

I’m somewhat concerned about what the markets are going to do next week.  The lady wife and I just crossed a nice milestone in our retirement savings, and all it will take is a Clinton victory to wipe most of it out, I fear.  And since Social Security will be wiped out by 2030, a Clinton win doesn’t give us much in the way of retirement income, particularly since I’m sure one of the first things on her list after destroying what’s left of our medical insurance system is to nationalize everybody’s private 401(k).

But I figure at some point this will all be sorted out.  Probably with gunfire, tar, feather, rails, and rope.  I hope not, but it wouldn’t be the first time we had a revolution in this country.

And you smug Libertarians out there — why do you keep aiming for the top job when you haven’t even begun to fill the lower offices?  I mean seriously — what good would it do to elect Gary Johnson (who is not a good candidate, by the way, which is why even in this ballot-load of clowns, he is only polling around 4%) without having Libertarians in statehouses and Congress to back up his program?

It doesn’t do any good to have a Wookie as president if all he can do is hoot and menacingly shake his bowcaster while Congress blocks everything he tries.  The hell of it is, if you’d quietly started filling the lower offices thirty years ago, we might be in a position to let the Wookie win.

And that’s all for now.

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We’re going all upscale and shite with a Facebook page, see https://www.facebook.com/fuzzycurmudgeon/ .

For those of you who have trouble commenting here (which is just about everybody; this site is SO DAMN SLOW and I need to find new hosting), you can comment there if you like.  Fresh posts will always be on the blog first, though; I don’t trust Failbook as far as I can throw it.

Twitter?  Don’t ask.  Waste of time.

I demitted from a lodge I helped found tonight.

Mumblety-teen years ago, there were four of us who decided that our fraternal interests would be well served by a lodge that did things differently than most.  A lodge that would be small, formal, and would inculcate the true lessons taught by our ritual and philosophy.  A gentleman’s lodge.  So we and about 30 other men formed that lodge, and I was its charter secretary for about 13 years.

The lodge ebbed and flowed; at one point it got down to fewer than 10 members, and then it started to grow again and is a vibrant lodge where everybody knows everyone and people come because it meets only five times a year and always has something educational (as well as a good restaurant-cooked meal).

As I’ve gotten older in both physical years and fraternal years, I’ve decided to back off of some of the things I do.  Particularly as a secretary.  I counted up the “secretary-years” of all the groups I’ve served in that capacity over my nearly two decades in the fraternity, and it’s now up over 50.  (At times, I’ve been secretary of five or six bodies at a time.)  So among my other “retirements”, I retired from the secretary position in this particular lodge two years ago.

Regrettably, I haven’t been to a meeting of that lodge since.  I’ve been to one of the festive dinners, when a friend and brother from Virginia addressed the lodge, but that’s it.  And because the lodge is predicated on mandatory attendance (which is admittedly honored more in the breach than otherwise), and because I’m tired, and have a life membership in another lodge, and because frankly I have better things to do with the dues money, I went over tonight and handed in my request to be dismissed from plural membership.

The few brothers I discussed it with were at first a bit shocked but then they understood.  I hope.  And I left before the meeting started, because I didn’t want to be sitting there in lodge when they read my letter — just because I didn’t want to see the disappointment I imagine was engendered when they heard that the second-to-last founding member was leaving.

They’ll be fine.  And I’ll have more time to do other things without feeling guilty that I missed the meetings.

It’s not meant to interfere with our usual vocations, you know.