Two posts in a week --wow

I once was a supporter of the Patriots Act and much that it included.  Recent events in my life have made me pretty cynical.  Without being too specific I have really become worried about the Homeland Security people. 

I am old enough to remember that there was a lot of resistance at the founding of the FBI There was a Constitutional argument about a national   police force vs local law enforcement so when the FBI was carefully limited to interstate crime, violation of Federal rather than local or state law, etc.  Any watcher of television has seen the tension arise between local law enforcement and the FBI when the FBI takes over a case that began in local jurisdiction (as well as the occasional relief felt by local law when the FBI has assumed jurisdiction when a case is going badly or when a serial killer is involved.

Homeland Security was sold to the public as an agency designed to protect the country from terrorists, spies and that sort of thing..

We are beginning to find Homeland Security involved with totally domestic crime and they are clearly not as careful of how they operate as are the local and state law enforcement.   Beyond Homeland Security, we see from the recent events in Nevada the Bureau of Land Management seems to have swat teams or military groups enforcing law with the appearance of military attack on US citizens.   WE have a Posse Comitatus (my spelling is down the tubes) that keeps the US army from enforcing the law within the borders of the US. but it seems  that the Federal Government is by passing the historical and constitutional basis of law enforcement and oozing toward a National Police Force of some kind or kinds.  When I think of a National Police Force it brings to mind the Gestapo or the NKVD….  Iiiiick  

Back again, back again jigety jigl

I haven’t posted for almost a year.  It isn’t that I havent’ had things to say, but I found myself doing something that I considered “whineing”, talking about my ailments and stuff like that.  I shifted over to face book and mostly commented on things that my former students and family had to say.  The other day I reflected on the reason I started the blog and remembered that it was an attempt to talk about the things that happen as one piles on the years—some of them funny some of them scary  and some, just stuff.

Among the things that have happened is that my typing skills have deteriorated a lot.  My hands get off the base keys and if I am not watching the screen as I type, up comes gobbledygook.  You may be faced with a decoding task.  Of course, as long as it has been since I posted, there is probably no one out there to read (which makes some of my weird thoughts safer)  

At any rate, I will be eighty in a couple of months, and neither the body nor the mind are as frisky as they were just a little while ago .  My various doctors are medicating me and testing me to see how fast and where my body and mind are going.   Everybody has memory lapses, but when you can’t remember the name of the person you called on the phone it is scaryl  The other day, I took out my upper plate, cleaned it in hot water, put it in its little case with a cleaning disk and went to bed.  When I got up in the morning, I went in the bathroom and found that the hot water was still running and we had no hot water for showers.  That sounds funny on the face of it, but what if I had been boiling eggs instead of washing teeth.  I could have burned down the house.   Things like that bring one up short.

I spent much of Tuesday this week up at the Medical College in Augusta having an MRI of my brain.  The neurologist is trying to find out if the problems in my brain come from atrophy, entropy, or have a physiological base. I am taking Chinese medicine pills  from my acupuncturist, and two kinds of pills from family doctor that are supposes to help the brain dead or dying.

I feel like I am in a dangerous world (think of Crimea and Russia and remember the parallel with Germany and Czechoslovakia and one wonders how long before world war III.)  I have no more shoulder rotator cuffs so my wife had to help me put on a coat or shirt,  with my neuropathy I can’t feel my feet and my balance is crummy so I fall down if I try to do much without a walker, but I am still married to the most wonder woman in the world,  five of my six children are living, and I have seven grand children and five great grandchildren. so it aint all bad.