What a glorious Christmas it was!
I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was everything I hoped it could be.
I’ve been hoarding and growing… peace. One needs to! Modern society is as irrational as it is corrosive. You have to take care.
So I attended to my health, enjoyed the world around me, and stayed unplugged. This seasons feels so much more sweet after fate rattled my cage last summer. For Christmas I rode out a head cold and instead of being pissed at the interruption I was thankful that fluids and rest cured it.
I also made merry, though not too much. There’s a time to party like a rock star. There’s a time to contemplate in quiet satisfaction. Now is the latter. I enjoyed every minute with family. I was happy ever moment I was with Mrs. Curmudgeon. Even the new kitten played a role. He kept me occupied by alternating between cute fluffy sweetheart and actively trying to kill me. (I’m not a cat person, but I like that our kitten has the heart of a lion and the mind of a butterfly.)
Mostly, I had a lot of gratitude and basked by my woodstove. Couldn’t have been happier. I didn’t do much over New Years. This too, was all I hoped it could be.
Then, like a lightning bolt, the new year was a real thing. No holiday lasts forever. Like everything else in our unbalanced world, it was full of surprises. Not bad surprises, good ones. I’ve seen a lot of… correction. (I feel or hope there’s going to be a lot of that in 2026.)
Literally hours into the new year, the oppressed people of Venezuela breathed a little freer. I didn’t see that coming. Who did? Folks can debate geopolitics but all I care is that more people are more free now than were free a month ago.
I’m glad it happened but I’m reluctant to wallow in the politics of the day. I wrote a post about it. I shelved it. Nobody needs nor cares what I think about the global stage. A wise man seeks the maturity to let things pass without comment. (I don’t always succeed but I try.)
After Venezuela what more could I hope for? How about a figurative broom sweeping the turds of Minnesota sidewalks? Inconceivable!
A week into 2026, the people of America, seemingly all at once, noticed obvious, continuous, and well known corruption orbiting certain activities in Minnesota. Why did they not notice before? I have no idea. I feel like millions of people worked very hard to preserve their ignorance. I have no special investigative authority, yet I knew. If a wandering forest creature such as myself knew, how could anybody not?
Regardless, that which was unthinkable was publicly acknowledged. One more corruption iceberg in the sea of icebergs is now on our radar. I have no idea what threshold was crossed, only that it was.
Tim Walz, the nation’s would be VP and Minnesota’s embarrassing mincing retard of a Governor, shocked me by bowing out of his re-election campaign. Now? After all these years? Imaging watching a toddler who’d been trying to stick it’s feet in its mouth suddenly grow to a full human and act accordingly. I’m shocked and impressed. (Yes, I know he didn’t do much and only under duress and he’s still the governor. But who expects change will come to a man who seemed to have a mind of Play-Doh? Take time to appreciate it!)
Such is the wonder of seeing a moron gone to seed. Who among us hasn’t seen some politician or CEO flame out and thought “how did that wingnut ever get that far?” Regardless, be thankful. A city that self-immolated in 2020 might stabilize in 2026. (It might not. There’s months of faffing about that still must happen. But I can hope.)
Also, don’t misread me. I’m not expecting a sudden outbreak of competence. Whomever steps into the Walz’s void will probably be another complete blithering moron. The Peter Principle cannot be denied. And, I’m sure the election will be ugly, tainted, and gross. But where there’s change there’s the possibility of improvement.
Anyway, two things happened that I perceive benefit humanity. Surely some, steeped in their own biases as I am mine, are fuming over both events. I wish them well. The best I can say is I didn’t cause either, so I don’t want to hear any bitching aimed at me. If you’re pissed off, take it up with the Universe. I control nothing.
Alas… nothing is clean.
I’ve been wondering what gross, incestuous, circular firing squad, bullshit will taint one of the two events. Call me cynical but when corruption is stopped (or in these two cases noticed) I start wondering what isn’t as it appears. It’s been years since I took for granted that a crime could happen without the FBI (or someone) using my taxes to cause it. Since I already knew most Minnesota corruption was Federally funded, I turned my eye to Venezuela.
What’s the ugly secret nobody’s talking about? Drugs? Oil? Commies being commies? Zoo animals on the BBQ? I doubt it. All that stuff I already knew.
Something is going to come to the surface that I don’t know or in a scale I didn’t imagine. It almost has to be so. If something good has happened for the people of Venezuela (or Minnesota) there almost certainly is some further layer of degradation I’ve not yet considered. To quote from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:
“Things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when they have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get”
What is missing about Venezuela? Idly, and with no malice whatsoever, I remembered a factoid from the past; Smartmatic.
I knew (as anyone who isn’t trying hard to not notice) that Venezuela’s elections were sketchy. Let’s not freak out when I state the obvious. We’re all adults here. Our election are sketchy too. I’m required by tradition, humor, and lawfare to state that Joe Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history. But if Georgia’s behavior in 2020 was squeaky clean, they sure worked overtime to make it look dirty.
As far as I know there’s two election software / hardware companies. Dominion and Smartmatic. I’m 100% sure that both are perfect. Both should have a halo hovering over each machine. Etc…
As far as I know (and I don’t know much) Dominion seems to be the biggest player in USA. Smartmatic seems bigger in South America but I’m not sure about that either.
It would be awesome if nothing weird happened to unfairly give both honest and transparent systems the slightest appearance of taint. I’d sure like to live in a world like that. But this is what went down in 2020 in Venezuela:
Almost 50,000 voting machines and 582 computers used in the country’s elections went up in flames…”
Ah there it is.
Nothing looks clean and above board like a unexpected event that happens at exactly the right time. I’m not saying Smartmatic was up to hinky shit in Venezuela. I’m not saying Dominion was up to hinky shit in Georgia. I’m saying I’d prefer a world where nobody even looks like they’re up to hinky shit.
I’d like a world where oppressed people could be freed simply because it’s good to be free. Then again if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.
Take care of yourself. It’s a good time to be alive. It’s going to be a hell of a year! America is about to have it’s 250th birthday, I got a “free” kitten, and gas is cheap. Don’t ignore things crawling in the shadows but don’t despair. If you didn’t crawl up your own ass in 2020, you’ll ride out 2026 just fine.
A.C.
P.S. Even if you see the truth you don’t have to admit to it. Just “don’t notice”. For your own entertainment, ponder the phrase “we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed. It was a violation of the rule. … We don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.” That’s just a boring thing said at a State Election Board Hearing. Don’t worry about it. There’s no question that Joe Biden was totally legit, won fair and square, and got more votes than any other candidate ever. I believe that with all my heart because I live in a nation that had political prisoners. However, if you’re rebellious enough to “notice” things, ponder the following two sentences. That 315,000 ballots were improperly counted is no longer contested. That the margin of victory was 12,000 votes is a matter of record. Now quit noticing. Everything is awesome, nothing weird happened, and voting machines in places like America and Venezuela are flawless.
The thing I keep coming back to and just can’t seem to keep out of my mind is the fact that Venezuelans freely elected Hugo Chavez to be their ruler. He was running as a socialist and had already been convicted of and served a prison term for attempting a coup.
They elected him under his promise to take the property of those evil capitalist exploitative Americans who’d had the audacity to invest billions of dollars in their country to “exploit” the oil and mineral wealth that rightfully belonged to the Venezuelan people. He promised to take all that from the people who built it and give it to all the people of Venezuela.
Worked out about as well as one would expect.
So, my question is, have the Venezuelans learned the lesson? I’m doubtful. They’re human beings who grew up absorbing the propaganda of the left all their lives. My guess is they’ll promptly start electing more Socialist strongmen under the premise that they’ll do socialism right this time.
I hope I’m wrong. I’m probably not.
Side note. I had an Uncle who’s an escapee from Bulgaria back when it was a satellite of the USSR. When he was a teenager he committed some egregious offense (I don’t remember exactly what…tearing down a communist poster…saying bad things about the local commissar…don’t remember now, but it was pretty terrible) for which he was probably going to spend the rest of his life in the gulag, so he ran. Made his way to Greece, worked his way across the Atlantic as a crew member of a freight hauler, asked for and received Asylum, learned the trade of carpet laying, made his way to Chicago and started his own business and got his US citizenship. He met and married my Aunt while she was in Chicago for something or another.
OK…backstory out of the way, I worked for him laying carpet for a couple of summers in my teen years. He was very vocal about how the socialist system was so superior to capitalism, it was so unfair that he could work as hard as he did and still be “middle class” while those rich fat cat bankers could sit in their cushy offices and make millions and if we’d just institute socialism the “correct” way all those injustices would be solved. To the day he died he was driven by envy over the fact that some people had more than he did, even after having had to flee the socialist country he grew up in, building a successful business and making a comfortable living under the capitalist system.
Some people just can’t or won’t learn…They’ve been too thoroughly indoctrinated for them to even grasp the obvious lessons of their own lives.
We’ll see if that’s the case for the majority of Venezuelans or if they take this opportunity and run with it.
Time will tell, but I’m not hopeful. Most human beings will accept chains and misery for the false hope that they’ll be kept safe and secure over the promise of freedom that comes with no guarantees.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in Venezuela. It’s possible the people are dumb enough to go socialist again. Much like the residents of New York City seem to desperately hope for a fate similar in direction if not scale. I suppose we’ll just have to watch the show.
What’s new is that I’m doubting my existing notions of many things. Is almost everything true hidden in layers of bullshit? Did the Venezuelan people really elect Chavez? Would that be exactly like the American people turning out in record numbers (literally an all time record!) for Biden? Imagine someone from Venezuela reading the papers and thinking “why did the American people chose such a path?” Did we? Did the icy farmlands in the middle of the continent birth a huge and near unstoppable voting block from the African coastland because Scandahoovian corn farmers wanted that? Recently the cost of unearthed Federal corruption is mind boggling but is it because we made bad choices? One of the richest nations on earth created the largest financial debt ever to exist in the history of mankind. Did we vote for that? Both here and all over the world, how many things that are clearly doomed to go bad happen not with popular support but despite it?
“He met and married my Aunt while she was in Chicago for something or another.”
In 1996 I was assigned by the Peace Corps to a Bulgarian ‘family house’, the grandparents lived on one floor and the two brothers and their family lived on the two other floors. The wife of one brother got a visa to go to the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA. When the games were over I asked how she had liked seeing them and I was told that she did not go she was still in Chicago. It seems that there was a ‘sweat shop operation’ run by ex-pat Bulgarians in Chicago that she went to work for. She could not get a visa for her young son because there was too many children that were being abandoned by their parents in the US thinking they were better off there than in Bulgaria.
On the 2020 election: I looked up the facts about those tapes, and what caught my attention was that it took over five years for them to acknowledge those errors. I’m sure, as AC must be, that it’s just a coincidence that the story came to light after the vote had been verified up to the supreme court, and the term had run out. Another thing was this little tidbit:
“In another blow to the county, last week, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney sided with the State Election Board and ruled that the county must turn over documents to the board, including scanned ballot images from the 2020 election, immediately. The county had been fighting the release of those documents for well over a year.”
Som since all parties want to ensure a free and fair election, why in the world would the county fight the release of election documents?