Write in candidate to make sure y’all understand what I am doing here – I am avoiding the paperwork, expense, time, and energy it takes to be entered on the official ballot. I am not qualified, educated, or anything to be a Senator, but I am questioning #SenRonJohnson about several aspects of his politics and his relation to that whore monger, Pres. Trump. I am not really trying to be a senator, I am fearful of the minions of Pres. Trump coming after me or my family. We do not have the wherewithal to withstand abuse.
letter written by Art Nerig,
Pecatonica Valley Leadeer, 13 June 2024, Vol. 26, No. 40, pg.12
06/24/24
Dear Editor,
This is not a rebuttal of a previous letter written by Art Nerig, 3 June 2024, Vol. 26, No. 10. I find it hard to have a discussion with a piece of paper,or, for that matter a radio show, so I will just say that his reasons are faulty.
I am sure Mr. Nerig knows so much that is right and wrong with our government because of who he reads or listens to. I know a lot for the same reason, but it is mostly not as he says because I read & listen to people who disagree with the people he reads and listens to. I am of the mind that both sides are right or wrong on the same issue because the issues are complex & working out a solution will require a lot of negotiation.
His point was Mr. Trump will not “scrap” our democracy, Pres. Biden is doing that already. I do not agree with Mr. Nerig.
I have many thoughts about what he wrote, but mostly it comes down to he likes Mr. Trump & will vote for him. I think that Mr. Trump is a bad person – a philander, fraud, rapist, greedy,unethical, etc. Basically you can not trust him. He took an oath of office, just like he took a marriage oath, and treated it the same way. Vice-Pres. Pence was the one who stood up and took his oath of office and followed it, even though Pres. Trump was willing to have him killed for it.
Pres. Biden is a lawyer and a politician, so maybe you can not trust him either, but you can bet he will not break his oath of office win or lose the election.
David Brockert
Court cases
I see that the Supreme Court of the United States will decide if the justice department is stretching the law in some cases for someone to obstruct an official proceeding. I do not know the law they are referring to, but those insurrectionists/rioters sure did impede an official meeting of Congress. The insurrectionists/rioters refused to accept the will of the people because Mr. Trump lost, so they tried to get the situation changed to their liking by disrupting Congress. I would like to say they do not believe in truth, justice and the American way of life, but that might be stretching the concept. No matter how you feel about the election, those insurrectionists/rioters should be punished for doing what they did. It pretty much does not matter why the Supreme Court justices vote the way they do – politics, personal animus, legal theory, whatever – what would matter is that there are consequences for the insurrectionists/rioters actions on 6 January 2020, and do the justices even agree with that thought?
Ya, sure, I am cynical, but the past couple of years have not given me much reason to think that the Supreme Court will rule based on the law and the specific case solely. The justices have their political agendas to consider, ya know. The justice department has to prosecute these insurrectionists/rioters under some law as a way of punishing them. The court may rule that it is an overboard interpretation, or some such reason, making the insurrection not a legal problem of that nature and requiring the justice department to go back and retry a bunch of cases under another law. 😦
Then comes Mr. Trump with his immunity plea because he was president at the time of the insurrection. Again, I may feel it is beyond his role as president, and his actions were not in the line of duty, but the court may feel otherwise, like maybe they do not feel it was an insurrection even, so the Constitution and it’s amendments be darned!??. Again, it hardly matters what their reason will be, if they rule in Mr. Trump’s favor, there will be (useless) riots condemning the ruling. It will also pave the way for Mr. Trump to become president again (ya know, if you will not vote for a Democrat you have no choice but to vote for him), and, I have heard, he will somehow punish all those who he sees as enemies. It may not be torture and death as was done during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or as Pres. Putin does, but it will probably still be a serious wound for our democracy. I remember hearing that he was using the Justice Department for his political ends, and, unlike during Pres. Nixon’s time, the Congress is not condemning Pres. Trump’s actions.
A person can predict how the various justices will vote on the issues. The liberal ones will vote that the insurrection needs to be punished, and Mr. Trump is accountable. The other justices will probably vote with partly because their politics inform them, partly because they do not want to see Mr. Trump penalized for his actions/non-actions, partly because they do not want to agree with the liberals, partly because that is how they interpret the law for these cases, so the insurrectionists and Mr. Trump may win the cases. The election is another matter, yet maybe Mr. Trump will make that a irrelevant, too.
“The Book of M” by Peng Shepard, © 2018
This is such a strange story. I wonder how she developed it? It is like a Stephen King story – based in reality, yet with some magic or other weirdness included.
We begin the story with a couple, Ory and Max, very much in love, holed up in a resort hotel. You are then exposed to what has happened to the world, and the female, – many people have lost their shadows, and, gradually, their memories. It is like Alzheimer only worse – they lose all memory of what is harmful, at least I think that Alzheimer patients do not forget to not touch hot stoves, or that going into water can drown you. These people of this story do forget all that and more.
Max has not lost much of her memory, but they know it is only a matter of time, and she will. They have created some ways to protect her from doing things that would be bad, like notes on the door to not open when someone knocks without a special code they have between them.
The story breaks into parts with other people’s story told. You know they will all arrive at the same place in the end. It is that exposition that creates the dystopian world that has been created. I think I missed some parts that would add to the story because the ending has so many icons of a religious nature. I might try to read others reviews to get a handle on what I missed.
I remember listening to a recording a fellow made during a drive from one place to another with his dad, who has Alzheimer. I heard what sounded to me like a dreamscape his dad was talking about, just some stuff that would only make sense if you were dreaming, yet, to him, it was real. In this story the dreamscape can become real – the first paragraph has a deer with some wings for ears or something like that, and you think, “Well that is weird!” It happens throughout the story – reality changes as the shadowless forget. Thus the magic.
It is odd, but I remember parts of this story, like I had read it before, yet it is not that old. I remember reading about the wall of water around New Orleans, and some other things sparked memories, too. I did not write a book review, so I can not refer to that. One reason I write book reviews is to help me remember books I have read already, but, alas, I have failed to write many that I have read or listened to – my bad!
“A Perfect Pair: The History of Landjaeger in Green County, Wisconsin”
This is a general history and tour of the Green County butcher shops making Landjaeger. Mr. Brookstein is not a historian, or a travel writer, so his writing is genuine and from the heart. He is a food lover. He has been a part of some small breweries in Colorado, and so has some notion of what it takes to run a small business, and the culture of Germany and Switzerland, where both beer and landjaegers come from.
He tells of the word ‘landjaeger,’ where it comes from and speculates on what it would mean in English, mostly land ranger, warden or hunter. He writes of how landjaegers are made, and of the general impression of the ingredients. He keeps telling that the rules and ingredients he writes of are general because the specific shops have a vested interest in keeping their recipes to themselves.
In the next section he visits and interviews the various butcher shops and proprietors making the landjaegers. Asking about how they process the meat into the product, how long it takes, how big a part of the business it is, etc.
To my mind, it is so much ‘over the top’ trivia. I eat one and, yeah, it is good, but all the flavors they talk of are just part of the whole and I can not sparse any one thing from it. It was enjoyable to read.
The Fetus
Dear Editor,
How are you? I am fine.
I have trouble understanding all the hubbub about abortion. It is simply how much value you place on a fetus. A couple who have had two or three miscarriages place enormous value on a fetus that they create. A woman with five or six kids, who got raped and ‘knocked up,’ has so much less concern about the fetus, and it is not just the fetus, but the pre and post-natal care, as well as everything else in her life and the birth, never an easy event, to be attended to.
Of course you can always claim that women who get pregnant should carry to term the fetus because they should have been better prepared, or something. To be sure, rape is not the only reason women get pregnant and regret it (hindsight is twenty-twenty). But the result is that it is the woman who ‘pays the price.’ Without the choice of abortion, the woman has to go through with the pregnancy, birth, etc. Genesis 3:16 – “You will suffer terribly when you give birth.”
Fellows who cause the pregnancy, or just care for her, may be there to support her, and foot bills, and help however they can, but that is not dealing with morning sickness, or scheduling doctor appointments, or making sure their diets are appropriate for a fetus, etc. They also can not suffer the birth pains, or the wondering of ‘doing the right thing’ afterwards, whether it is caring for the child or adopting it away or something else. An abortion makes all of that go away. I have read that there was a study (I have not read – https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416421/five-years-after-abortion-nearly-all-women-say-it-was-right-decision-study) that showed that women who have abortions are not regretful of that decision, as some suggest they would be. Maybe some are, but this study says not so much.
It seems to me that decisions about a pregnancy are personal to the women or couple to make. Making abortion illegal out of hand is usurping their right to make a choice for themselves. It is like wanting to be vaccinated or not, who has the right to say you have to, or not?
Book Review – Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
A book of advice columns. It is more a philosophy of life in most every answer. I wanted to write something about most every answer, because her thoughts, or the question, or something, got me thinking about what I would be writing for an answer. It is an amazing book!!
A fan letter I wrote to Ms. Strayed – Dear Sugar/ Ms. Stayed,
How are you? I am doing fine.
I am reading your book of letters to Dear Sugar. I am writing another fan letter for you to read, or not, as the case may be. I do not expect that I will be chosen to be the next ‘Dear Sugar’ because of this. 🙂 I am writing this more for myself, but hope you will enjoy reading it as well. You see I am a philosopher type guy, ya know, a Sagittarius born, so your book inspires a lot of philosophical thinking for me.
When I started college the major I chose was philosophy. It was for naught since I did not graduate, but the interest in philosophy is still in me.
As I read your answers to the letters, I am constantly writing to you – my own take on the answer and the issue, each and every letter. My wife bought the book for me because she saw it (impulse buying?), and knew I had sent off an answer (the one about whether or not to have a baby) you made to a friend because of the philosophy imbued in it. I just now came across this –
“At age 17, she was rejected from college.
At age 25, her mother died from disease.
At age 26, she suffered a miscarriage.
At age 27, she got married.
Her husband abused her. Despite this, her daughter was born.
At age 28, she got divorced and was diagnosed with severe depression.
At age 29, she was a single mother living on welfare.
At age 30, she didn’t want to be on this earth.
But, she directed all her passion into doing the one thing she could do better than anyone else.
And that was writing.
At age 31, she finally published her first book.
At age 35, she had released 4 books, and was named Author of the Year.
At age 42, she sold 11 million copies of her new book, on the first day of release.
This woman is J.K. Rowling. Remember how she considered suicide at age 30?
Today, Harry Potter is a global brand worth more than $15 billion dollars.
Never give up. Believe in yourself. Be passionate. Work hard. It’s never too late.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=…, and I had just read your answer to Elissa Bassist, who is now also a published author :). Maybe, thanks to you, she persevered and became what she wanted to be!!
Another one was the 1st letter about a lady who suffered a miscarriage. While reading it I remembered a cartoon about grief, so I looked it up, and could not find it. I did see another one whose author had suffered a miscarriage as well. In it she mentions that she felt guilty that maybe something she did caused it, just as your letter writer mentions as well, though for different reasons. This spurred my thinking, and I realized that that is what happens with domestic/sexual abuse victims as well – they feel like they did something to cause wwwwwwww to happen, so they suffer in silence.
I hope your income has increased, and you are able to not work another job to make ends meet. Keep it up.
Sincerely
Dear Sugar:
I stole this from her. I found it in her book of the same title, buy the book, she will make more $$$$ if you buy the book, not an e-book, and she needs the money as much as any of us. It is too beautiful not to share:
DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #64: Tiny Beautiful Things
By Sugar
February 10th, 2011
Dear Sugar,
I read your column religiously. I’m twenty-two. From what I can tell by your writing, you’re in your early forties. My question is short and sweet: what would you tell your twenty-something self if you could talk to her now?
Love,
Seeking Wisdom
Dear Seeking Wisdom,
Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.
In the middle of the night in the middle of your twenties when your best woman friend crawls naked into your bed, straddles you, and says, You should run away from me before I devour you, believe her.
You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.
When that really sweet but fucked up gay couple invites you over to their cool apartment to do ecstasy with them, say no.
There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
One evening you will be rolling around on the wooden floor of your apartment with a man who will tell you he doesn’t have a condom. You will smile in this spunky way that you think is hot and tell him to fuck you anyway. This will be a mistake for which you alone will pay.
Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.
You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
One hot afternoon during the era in which you’ve gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She’ll offer you one of the balloons, but you won’t take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You’re wrong. You do.
Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.
When you meet a man in the doorway of a Mexican restaurant who later kisses you while explaining that this kiss doesn’t “mean anything” because, much as he likes you, he is not interested in having a relationship with you or anyone right now, just laugh and kiss him back. Your daughter will have his sense of humor. Your son will have his eyes.
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.
Say thank you.
Yours,
Sugar
P. T. Barnum
P. T. Barnum or Mr. trump – https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2022/12/26
abortion
Mr. Trump wants to be president
| It occurs to me that if Mr. Trump wants to be president again, he will have to have his minions act like the Roman Praetorian Guards when they had someone they wanted to be emperor. They killed and tortured whoever was opposed to their choice, and so should the scammed of Mr. Trump. It probably would not take a lot of killing and torturing to get his way, but some would be necessary to show he, and they, are serious. I am pretty sure that that will start a civil war, but, ya know, the ends justifies the means. On 6 January 2020 they were on the right track but they chickened out when Vice-President Pence usurped the Commander -in-Chief’s power and called in the National Guard. Of course he saved his own neck and others, but it was still usurping power that was not his. But then again, Mr. Trump does not think much of our system of government, after all because of it he was not elected president in2020, and probably will not be elected president in 2024, so a civil war would be a good thing to his mind. Now I see this: “But we cannot ignore recent developments. Only a few days ago, Greene took the stage in formal attire at the New York Young Republican Club gala and said, “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that”—the January 6 insurrection—“we would have won.Not to mention, it (we) would’ve been armed.”” (https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/the-republicans-need-a-reckoning/672452/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20221213&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily) What was I saying about civil war? |
write in David Brockert to replace Sen. Ron Johnson 