The Left and media remain stuck on the “C” words…
The legal eagles among the punditry class kept reminding us that “collusion”, whatever that even really means in this Dem spin narrative, is not a crime. In the past few days, reports that Mueller’s report may be coming in the next week or so Schiffted the prevailing spin narrative, with Rep. Adam Schiff trying to pivot away from “collusion” and lay down a new spin bread crumb trail of more fact-free innuendo… Trump conspired with Russia and Trump is controlled by Putin.
Former FBI Deputy Director and acting Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe now entered the fray with a new book launch, replete with the requisite media book tour, offering up another version of events… that contradicts both James Comey’s version of events and, the IG Report, which found McCabe lacked candor (lied) when talking to investigators. On the right, Trump claims the Dems are conflicted and many of the Trump flame-throwers assert the Comey FBI and top Obama officials were trying to enact an illegal coup after the 2016 election.
Amidst this circus… I’m spending more time cooking and crafting with a clear conscience that even if the Mueller report drops soon, for the foreseeable future America will remain stuck in 2016 craziness…
Add in the Jussie Smollett hoax out, allegedly out of sheer cupidity over his salary, and it’s just so much constant crap, that I’ll soon be looking for a cliff here in the GA lowlands to toss my PC over…
Okay, I’ll cease this nonsense now, but never fear America’s SPIN info war still continues…
#No2016ClosureOrConclusionInSight
Yesterday afternoon, my choices were to spend time writing a blog post or cook. I made a casserole dish of stuffed bell peppers, of which most of it ended up going into plastic containers in the freezer for quick lunches for me later, since I’m the only one who will eat them. And I made baked salmon, fried potatoes with garlic and made some brussel sprouts for my husband to eat. I even had time to work on stitching another plastic canvas tissue box cover.
Last night I spent time stitching and watching more YouTube videos… landed on more cooking videos of dishes from around the world, which will likely be the subject of another blog post.
Cheers…
“A word used by Britons on any occasion, covering any meaning from ‘thanks’, ‘hello’, ‘no problem’, to ‘an alien just raped your chinchilla in the left corner of my blue garden shed’. Usually followed by the term ‘mate’, which is also 100% devoid of semantic content and meaning. This phenomenon is taken by some continental scholars as strong evidence that all Britons are telepathic.”
libertybelle diaries 
May’ve already bookmarked Peter’s site LB but I figured if not, it’s usually worthwhile to check in daily/frequently.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/
Thanks JK, I’ll have to check that site out regularly. The question of whether the world is getting better or worse and way too many people’s response reflect constant media fear mongering. This same “America in a state of “cold civil war” also is fed constantly by a steady stream of Flight 93 hype among Trump/neoreactionary type online punditry on the right and Resist/far-Left hysteria on the Left. Lots of doomsday thinking abounds on both sides. I personally think the loudest proponents on both sides spend too much time on Twitter politics and/or online political sites. When I see and chat with actual Americans in real life, they’re just cheerfully going about their everyday lives and here in GA, 99.9% of the people in public are unerringly polite and friendly.
Yeah LB I live in a county (region?) that’s, pretty roughly, 50/50 R’s and D’s … well mebbe more I’s than either of the two “more traditionals” and we seem to be getting along fine.
Matter a’ fact – I take a weekly drive up to the beer store (dry county courtesy of yesteryear’s democrats) and the guy always sitting aside me in the pickup is, nominally, a D (tho’ not like the D’s I watch on TV ’cause he owns more guns than I do) … Now we do enjoy “scenic” conversations some trips but so far he’s never said, “Pull over an’ let me out JK, I reckon I’m just gonna walk home.”
The intelligentsia smart set, from both polar extremes of our politics, seems to stew in existential crisis online juices 24/7. If one of their revered soothsayers pens a piece seeing some new threat to American “democracy”, within 24 hours, you’ll likely find a dozen more articles quoting that soothsayer and building the case for his/her dire prognostications.
It’s a very peculiar and potent form of online magical thinking, spread at a speed unknown with previous means of communications. One of the most alarming aspects of this online fear mongering is the two groups of people most likely to buy into, and act, on this faux “crisis” mindset are the news media and our political class in Washington. They have no filter, no sense of the real world outside their Twitter and social media interactions, and no awareness that the online bubble they live in is all self-propelled, self-fulfilling hysteria, not any generic grassroots political movement or reality-based metrics. It’s almost completely responding to online spin propaganda, imo.
Don’t know whether I mentioned LB, but over oh, maybe the last four years or so my area of the Ozarks has enjoyed a whole heapin’ helping of Amish immigration (thank God – it could just as well I suppose been Somalis like the far western reaches of Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma has “enjoyed”).
I have taken a few good chuckles in your latest piece over the points you’ve made with the clotheslines – I as a wee lad growing up hillbilly thought I knew something about clotheslines but my Grannys indeed probably extending back two maybe three generations of my hillbilly ancestors have been totally put to shame in comparison to Amish clotheslines technology.
F’instance there’s one household about halfway between where I reside and the beer store I weekly visit. That “homeplace” is situated at the foot of, I reckon, a moderately sloping hillside runs about 400′ foot to the top. “Fairly gentle slope” … (meaning a mule could probably canter clear to the top but a horse would definitely have to “step keerful” lol) … Anyway, out one of the back ‘sheds’ of the house proper lays a year round creek and I reckon that shed is a laundry/washroom (of sorts) and stretching from that wash shed clear to the top of that hill goes a clothesline. We buy our cantaloupes and tomato juice from “that family’s” … uhm, ‘for selling?’ garden which lays toward the front of the house so I really ain’t been in the backyard to get a clear indication of how the contraption works but I think, what they must have is something like a pulley system rigged up with maybe a mule walking one of those sorghum mill circles – if you know what I mean – anyway, no way in hell can I figure out how human power could lift 400′ foot of wet clothes up that dadgone hill! First time my girlfriend and friend Greg hollered for me, “Turn around what the hell?!!!” because they’d noticed it rolling plainly wet clothes up and blowing dry back … the road is very crooked and hilly so I, the usual driver ain’t got the luxury of any sightseeing much as I gotta keep my eyes on the road so I don’t hit either a deer or worse, a hog or a cow … Anyway they couldn’t figure out what it was but onct I got turned around and back to the buggy parking lot it was plainly a clothesline.
Anyway LB, I mainly stopped by to share a link – I think this Mr. Hoh feller shares the same sort of feeling for General Jack as you and me do:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458394-1/qa-matthew-hoh
Thanks, for the link, JK. I was thinking about that link to General Odom talking about leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, that I posted a ways back. The gist of it, if my memory serves me, was that leaving would likely lead to some terrible things happening, but staying will lead to even more terrible things happening to our military and damage to America. He didn’t see any benefits to staying to prevent bad things happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kabul govt will likely fall. Iraq might fall more under Iranian influence, but our American presence is a constant recruiting tool, an incitement, but worst of all our troops are a constant target. I try not to watch cable news, so I don’t see much of Gen. Jack.
Almost all of my ancestors are PA Germans, I think, but none that I am aware of were Amish. Mine were almost all Lutheran/Reformed, as far as I know, and lived secular lives. That German work ethic is the same as the Amish though and a lot of the food.
Thanks to my blog post, JK, you’ll never be able to ignore clotheslines again. My mother would not have let a small hill… or a danged mountain. get in the way of getting her laundry done… and she had rules for how everything had to be folded and which stuff had to be ironed. She would not have been wasting time making a video for the whole world to see and hear her lamenting about how she can’t keep up with her laundry. My mother raised 6 kids, kept up with her laundry, cleaned constantly and she always worked full-time as a RN.
My mother was raised in a house with no indoor plumbing and a wood stove to cook on. I can’t imagine buying over a dozen acres of land in rural MO and not having the sense to put up some sturdy clothesline to dry your clothes, if you don’t have an electric dryer… and the father said he worked in a home improvement store…
My mother’s upbringing was the same pretty much. Matter of fact first couple of years after me’n Mom and Dad’n my sister after me moved back (well Mom’n Dad rightly speaking moved back, not so much Sis at least, me having no memory early speakingwise of my birth in Arkansas …) Anyway when we ‘moved back’ to Arkansas from Dad’s last active posting on a USMC duty post …
Sorry to in’trupt the flow. Anyway first two years of me in Arkansas Mom’s parents lacked both plumbing and electricity – imagine that! 1964 and no electrical anything! – And sharing the privy in the warmer months with the waspers and dirt daubers and a big ol’ rat eatin’ black snake and in the cold no sharing with critters a’cept there was that pecker shrinkin’ ever to the bone cold. The memory of the privy sticks to me the most but as you may follow a’cause there weren’t sparky for a space heater in the privy there weren’t no sparky in the house for making biscuits and gravy neither.
Moving Grandma into the house Mom’n Dad arranged fer ’em to move in to weren’t hard but where Granddad was concerned he had to be practically hog-tied and with the hep of Mom’s brothers and sisters on the rope Dad was a pullin’ he was finally managed into the modern world too.
I don’t think Granddad ever rightly ever settled in comfortable though. I do remember he never to his dyin’ day allowed sparky anywhere near the medicinal whiskey makin’ machinery. Or the smokehouse.
My grandmother was an odd mix of old-fashioned and new-fangled, where I suspect large outlays of cash determined how much modernity came into her home.
My grandfather died when I was very young and my grandmother continued running their makeshift family gas station, where they had two gas pumps in front of the house and the front part of the house was their gas station business. She had electricity. She had freezers there and sold ice cream treats and a long glass counter filled with candy and such. I remember late 60s she had two pinball machines and gave use change to play. We also could help ourselves to candy and ice cream. She fed her grandkids more of that stuff than she sold.
The spring by her house was not safe drinking water, so she always carried water from a mountain spring a ways in the woods. A few years before she passed in ’72, my uncle put in a small restroom with a sink and toilet.. with a sign warning not to drink the water. Think that had to do with some state law about public restrooms.
She also was sold on frozen sandwiches that customers could heat in a little toaster oven, which a vendor provided. She loved using that toaster oven for heating all sorts of stuff.. but she still used her kitchen wood-burning stove until the day she died. We grandkids also ate more of those frozen sandwiches than she ever sold, I suspect. I loved heating those sandwiches in that toaster oven, lol.