BLOG ON SEMI-HIATUS (Sticky Post)

I have left St. Louis for job in Cologne, Germany.

This blog is in a state of semi-hiatus, as of September 4, 2018.

I’ll write posts here every once in awhile, just to update you all on how I’m doing, and my thoughts on whatever big news breaks. Our favorite doggy will chime in every once in awhile with his own guest posts. Other than that, expect posting around here to be not that frequent going forward.

I’ll be more frequent on Gab, Minds and Twitter.

Reading material:

My Labor Day 2018 farewell post — My final post from St. Louis for awhile, perhaps ever.

My post from July 26, 2018, announcing my departure.

The preview of my Summer 2018 travelogue that I’ll probably never get to write in full.

My long and frequently updated post on my condition and recovery — A recovery which for all intents and purposes is complete as of December 14, 2019.

And as of December 14, 2019, I am engaged to be married.  You can read about how it happened and eventually future updates in that stead on my RHOC Series.

Why Pelosi Is Stonewalling

Washington, D.C.

Why is Nancy Pelosi gumming up the works to get the Covid-19 stimulus bill passed?

There’s the obvious reason:  Whenever there’s a big important bill that is going to be signed, everyone and their brother and sister who happened to win one of 535 certain elections is going to load it down with their pet rhinestones.

But there’s another reason, which points to political psychology and positioning, in light of what will theoretically happen in November.

The moment Trump inks the bill, he will have instantly moved to the left of Joe Biden, and as left wing as Bernie Sanders, on economic issues and other adjacent issue bases.  Which means that, no matter where you look on the political spectrum, with the exceptions of the most extremes of the right and left, Trump will at least partially fill the atmosphere.

Pelosi knows that her letting go of the bill will mean that whatever tiny chances her party’s nominee to had to win in November, (if November happens in the way it normally should), are kaput.  So, she’s going to use the opportunity to get as much as possible for her individual caucus members, and the House Democrats’ collective interests.

Christmas Cheer.

Guest post by Puggg

That 102.5 station is spending this weekend raising our spirits here in the coronavirus times by running the same 20 Christmas songs into the ground that they normally do every November and December.

But, since there were snow flurries this morning, it seemed like good timing.

Census 2020 in 13 Languages.

Guest post by Puggg

I got my Census fill out form in the mail today.  But it was just two sheets, because it’s an online form.  The first sheet has the web address and the unique pin or security code.

The second sheet has brief instructions on the front side, then the help phone number on the back side.  It has those things in 13 languages:  English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Tagalog, Polish, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese and Japanese.

I’m sure all of you will have lots of fun with that in the comment section below.  If nothing else, it’ll take our minds off the grind of the non stop corona virus news.

Timing Is Everything

Your Blogmeister’s German Desk

It’s a damned good thing we got married when we did, this past Saturday.

If we would have waited as much as one week, then none of the six people from back in St. Louis who came, including my quasi-uncle slash best man, would have wanted to come, out of fears that they wouldn’t have been able to go home, or that they would have had to have gone under mandatory quarantine once they got back.

I’ll go into more detail later, but, while I was anticipating my quasi-uncle slash best man as the only one of my people there, he wound up surprising me by bringing along five other people:  His wife, his older sister slash my aunt by way of being the ex-wife of my youngest and as of June late blood uncle, their daughter who is a first cousin of mine, the only actual blood relative of the bunch, the retired pastor of my boyhood Lutheran church whose daughter is a high school classmate of mine, and our very own Puggg.  After being so surprised, I soon got to work, working in the second-to-last into the ceremony, and making the last my second best man, and of course, he fully anticipated being asked to do that.

Considering that I had tempered and realistic expectations based on how short order was this ceremony, and that it wasn’t an insignificant trip from Cologne, things turned out even better than my most optimistic expectations.  Again, I’ll elaborate later.

But, back to the matter at hand, all six of them are going to get tested for COVID-19.  The first four are all at least 69 years old, my cousin and Puggg were both born in the first half of the 1970s.

Note:  While COVID-19 hysteria hasn’t affected my job, as of this morning, Frau. Blogmeister’s workplace has been shut down for the rest of this week and at least all of next, in one of the two ways she does it.  In the other way she does it, she can and is still doing that.

 

“Hell, Yes”

Dallas

Biden brings on Skateboard D00d to run the point on gun control.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t much care about this story, especially at a time like this, when I’m burning a two-ended candle at three ends, getting ready for Saturday.

But I wanted to note this previous quote from Skateboard D00d, and then follow it up with a profound powerological prediction.  (Say that ten times in a row really quickly.)

The quote:

During one of the many Democratic debates when he was still in the race, O’Rourke stated, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

My PPP:

Here’s how gun confiscation will quasi-legally happen in the United States:

It will involve two factors:

(1)  Court packing

(2)  Writ of Replevin

You lawyers reading this have already figured out the rest.

So now, I’ll explain it in plain English terms for everyone else:

(1)  Once the Democrats get the WH-Senate-House troika, they’ll pass legislation which will vastly and greatly expand the size of all levels of the Federal judiciary, and then immediately fill those with the Democrat President’s picks, and obviously the Senate will confirm them.  This will, in practically an instant, undo decades of judiciary-based work on the part of the Federalist Society, and before them, the right-of-center activist space focused on the judiciary.

Imagine a Supreme Court that has just gotten 30 new justices, and they’re all Ruth Bader Ginsburg clones.

(1a)  Soon after, there may be a “rehearing” and obviously a reversal of Heller and MacDonald, but there probably wouldn’t have to be.

(2)  This is where the Writ of Replevin comes in.  A Writ of Replevin is a judicial motion that you file to have property that some public agent illegally confiscated from you to be returned.  However, it’s hardly an inexpensive process, and it’s just not worth it to do it unless it’s a lot of property or very expensive property.  And it’s hardly worth the time and money to do if the illegally confiscated property is your grandpa’s thirty-aught-six.

President Biden, Skateboard D00d and all like them either have already realized this, or will soon, and will use this to their strategic advantage.

See where this is going?

And, just in case anyone does want to file a WoR after President Biden and Skateboard D00d order the ATF or FBI to bust down your grandpa’s front door summarily to take his thirty-aught-six, realize that it will be fed into a suddenly packed and stacked against him Federal judiciary.  Meaning that, as futile as it would be in terms of time and expense to file a WoR in a favorable or neutral judicial climate, it will be even less worth it to do it after President Biden is done packing it.

I can also predict that a President Biden (or Sanders, or Bloomberg, or Ocasio-Cortez) will issue a silent backdoor ultimatum, that any small arms manufacturers that do any kind of business with the NRA (funding, advertising, etc.) will be totally cut out of being able to bid for Pentagon and Federal law enforcement contracts, and via carrot-and-stick mechanisms, state and local law enforcement contracts.  Just the American Federal government (military and domestic) alone is the largest buyer in the world for small arms, while the American civilian domestic market is the third largest in the world.  Biden (or whoever) will know that they’ll all gladly throw the third largest market under the bus to keep the first largest market.  It’s just business, after all.  From there, the NRA will shrivel like a raisin in the sun.

And don’t accuse me of giving them ideas, because, if I’ve thought of it, then I’m sure someone in some Democrat/left think tank has thought of it.

Still, I scare myself sometimes over how cold I am at this ish.  Imagine the career I could have had if I had absolutely no conscience.

Just a Hunch

Volkmarsen

I’ve made it to my undisclosed location (not Volkmarsen) safe and sound.

But I just wanted to chime in really quickly on this Volkmarsen incident, in northern Hesse, the car driving into a Carnival crowd.

From things I’ve been hearing and reading, my hunch is that the suspect, 29-year old “M. R.,” is a non-Muslim but non-white, who did it for racial reasons.

Hamburger Helper

Hamburg

I was going to write this my post on the election outcome for Hamburg city-state the day after, and my associated thoughts over the past two weeks, but since the outcome and the resultant consequences look to be pretty predictable and drama-free, I’m doing it now on Saturday morning.  Late tomorrow or Monday, I’ll fill in the actual results and any additional commentary if necessary, as a comment to this post.

***

When I was a mere tourist in this country, we spent two days in this city, June 9 and 10, 2018, to be precise.  On the first day, I saw Black Lives Matter window signs (in English) at two different points.  That’s all I needed to know what kind of city Hamburg is.   I already knew from experience that BLM signs are the province of the pathologically altruistic virtue signaling white liberal.

So when I actually moved to Germany that fall, I dreaded the idea of coming back here, even though I knew I would have to at some point.  By more than a year ago, I already knew that I’d be here now, Good Lord willing and the crick didn’t rise, (apropos, because the Elbe River at Hamburg is well over flood stage right now), for the election cycle for the city-state of Hamburg (“Freihansestadt” meaning “Free Hanseatic City”) this month, with actual voting being tomorrow.

And I already knew in my bones, even before being told this before coming here, to expect a lot of logistical problems, due to the city’s political climate.  I was told to expect a situation where events that were/are some combination of open, public, pre-announced, would have to be held outside the city limits, while events that were/are some combination of private, ad-hoc, could be held in the city.  And that certainly came true.  Both today’s public pre-election rally and tomorrow’s watch party will be held outside the city, on the Schweig-Holstein side.  Just about all of Hamburg that matters is north of the Elbe, on the same side as SH;  South of the river is the state of Niedersachsen (“Lower Saxony”).  It’s like Washington, D.C. is on the “Maryland” side and Virginia is on the other side of the Potomac.  The public events that can’t be held in the city itself are better held in SH rather than NS, because you don’t have to cram across a bridge to cross the river.  Hamburg traffic is bad enough, as it is — It’s the worst normal daily basis traffic I’ve ever experienced.

Not helping matters was that, during the latter half of this past week, Antifa mildly, but thankfully not severely, vandalized the private residences of two different AfD candidates on the ballot.  Wouldn’t be Hamburg without ’em.

***

But, through it all, and in spite of all that, I’m going to leave this city on Tuesday not quite hating it to the red hot level that I did two weeks ago.  It’s because I got to see its normal sane side, its sensible people, and its well kept secrets.

Still, if my choice is “go to Hamburg” or “X,” then I’m picking “X” about 99.99% of the time.   It’s just that, when I do have to come back again, I don’t be dreading it as if I was having to undergo dental surgery without numbing drugs.

***

One day during this past week, I had some free time, and, being an old math nerd from way back, just not good enough ever to be a professional mathematician, I took a day trip upstream along the Elbe, but in a long cut because flooding closed the riverfront roads at various points, to the town of Dannenberg.  I already told you that, and I said that I did it to make John Derbyshire jealous.  None of you got it, so I’ll fill in the blanks — Nearby Breselenz is the native city of Bernhard Riemann, of the Riemann Hypothesis.  Of course, John Derbyshire wrote the definitive book about the as-yet unproven Riemann Hypothesis for the non-nerd.  There is a monument to him on the grounds of a Calvinist church in the village, and the church’s official address is along a street name for him, Riemannstraße.

It’s something I figured I’d better do, while I was in the neighborhood.

You may be asking:  How can someone who got a perfect 800 on the math SAT not be good enough to be a professional mathematician?  I’ll explain it this way:  Get everyone who has ever aced the math SAT in a room.   Then give them an even harder math SAT.  On that test, I wouldn’t get a perfect 800, but among those that do, split them out and get them into another room.  Then give them an even harder math SAT, and the ones among them that get a perfect 800 can be professional mathematicians.  Or, to put it another way, only the nerds’ nerds’ nerds can work at Google.  Alternatively, read this.

In spite of me leaving math behind a long time ago, the Riemann pilgrimage stirred up some nerdy memories.

***

Now, back to more pedestrian mathematics, the party brass has 10% as our realistic ceiling.  However, with the baselines of 6.1% in 2015’s city-state, 7.8% in the 2017 Federals, and 6.5% in last year’s MEPs, anything that beats 7.8% is going to be satisfying.  Whatever our team’s gain is from five years ago, we’re anticipating that about half will come from CDU bleeding out, the other half from new voters.

Currently, Hamburg’s government is an SPD+Green coalition.  Five years ago, the SPD got 48%, the Greens 12%, so that was the easy coalition.  It looks like, as has been the recent trend all over this country, the SPD will bleed out to the Greens a whole lot, but both combined will still get a majority, albeit a closer to 50 than 60 sort of thing.  However, it means that the Freihansestadt will still have an SPD+Green government.

***

These electoral affairs determine who gets to govern in one of my very favorite buildings of public administration from an architectural standpoint, that being Hamburger Rathaus, aka Hamburg City Hall.

I might also add that, because Hamburg is both a city and a state, the issue base for these elections is predictably way more urban-centric than a usual sort of state.  Pollution, the environment, green space, and as far as the AfD’s case, linking that to immigration-driven population growth.  Like I said, Hamburg’s is the worst daily basis traffic I’ve ever experienced, and while all state governments deal with traffic, it’s a bigger political thing here, and of course, immigration makes it worse.  Beyond immigration, it’s so bad because it’s the most dense major German city over the urbanized footprint.  Also for the fact that Hamburg is, like I said, a city far more for the white liberal pandering crowd, rather than for mystery meat immigrants themselves.  In spite of the fact that you may remember that a big chunk of 9/11 was planned here.

***

Humorous note:  The geographical license plate code for Hamburg is HH, meaning Hanse Hamburg (“Hanseatic Hamburg”).  Of course, you know what else it means, and I’ve already told you that it on a license plate ruffles some feathers.  I’m therefore wondering how much longer HH will be permitted, especially since “H” is not currently used.

***

Housekeeping note:  Expect no posting here for awhile, and activity my social feeds to be rather sparse.  After I leave here on Tuesday, I’ve got some very important personal business at hand, pun fully intended.