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Author: Richard Kimball

THE BARBER BUTCHER

 The announcement was casually made in front of our living room mirror as Mom stroked my two-year-old hair, “We are going to get this cut.” The shock was instant. I was going to be “cut.” Cutting hurt and I had no reason to believe cutting my hair would be any less painful than cutting off fingers or toes.

 My protests, apparently laughable, were ignored, and I was unjustly packed into the family’s Packard and off we went.

 Entering the shop there he stood, as sinister a sight as any little boy had ever seen. He just stood motionless looking down at me. Recognizing my fear, that grim-faced, slick-haired, spectacled little man with the tiny mustache and stiff white shirt grimaced and looked up at my mom. I was doomed.

 My terror was splayed open for all to see as I took in the various fluid-filled jars containing combs and cutting devices, along with assorted objects plugged into electrical sockets behind him. And the chair, OH GOD that chair, what was it?  Huge with various handles and levers and a long leather strap swaying at its side. I lost it!

 Dismissing a child’s fears as simple childishness is so convenient to an adult who has long forgotten the traumas of their own first-time childhood horrors: the time you first got the needle at the doctor’s office, wobbled and crashed that first two-wheeler attempt, the dark that came at night, when you first rode The Hammer at the State Fair, or just the creaking noises in the closet when all were asleep. . . and a hundred other childhood traumas. 

 Most adults could easily revisit those fears by trying a bungee jump or first sky dive, taking a quick dip into a frozen lake or maybe a bit of harmless water boarding – all would likely do the trick and give a taste of what we have forgotten about first-time events. And you will never have so many first-time events as you did as a child.

 Anyway, I stood in front of the barber butcher, and he was going to cut me. For some incomprehensible reason the person I trusted most in life, picked up a box, placed it on the torture device and stuck me to it – then let the butcher have his way with his sharp pointy objects.  My fear was intense and real.  My mother, like all mothers, knew such fears absurd, but mine also had the presence of mind to see an opportunity for posterity and documented the event.

Richard Kimball

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A MOMENT OF CLARITY FOR LIBERALS

Biden pardons his own of crimes that deserved the due process all the rest of us agreed to live by and do whether we like it or not. 

As fortune would have it you do not have, I don’t have, none of us has a private President with the power to give you a “Get Out of Jail” free card.

If you are a liberal supporting this pardon and feel not at all responsible for the soils that grew a Trump and what is to come, Trump is the seed that you sowed.

Richard Kimball

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ESSIE

  I was sitting in my highchair looking out the window at my dad’s Packard when she set a bowl of soup in front of me. It had to have been the Campbell’s kind. I could see the bits of drowned vegetables and occasionally flaking cubes of chicken, but what caught my eye was the teensy weensy, perfectly round, shiny bits of oil that floated on the top.    I wanted to know what they were but was not yet far enough along in life to manage an inquiry. I was still having enough trouble managing a capture with my spoon.

  She stood behind me that morning, all round and dressed in white, but black. Her name was Essie, our maid and cook. My mother did not have her help often and I do not remember much about her other than the chicken she fried, great chicken my older brothers later assured me. Chicken that our mother, the German antithesis to fine dining, could never duplicate.

  A year or so later, I visited Essie’s house. She lived in a home very unlike our own.  My mother was bringing her some Christmas gifts, and I happened to be in the back seat. 

 We lived in a big house. I didn’t know it. We lived in the nicest neighborhood.  I did not know it.  As we turned onto Essie’s street the houses became tightly jammed, any half-dozen of which could have easily fit into our front yard.  As best I can recall, there were no driveways, and the yards were all barren dirt with a few broken toys, flat balls and scraps of various objects scattered about. Inside, where doors would be, there were hanging sheets and there was one stuffed tattered chair. The walls were unpainted with one wall having a large chunk of missing plaster which commanded my attention because I could not imagine the purpose of the wooden slats that were now exposed underneath. 

 Above all, I remember that Essie had a family; this was a very big surprise. It never occurred to me that she would be a wife, have children, a home, a life.  Essie was just our maid.

  I did not feel sorry, have any sense of pity, I was not old enough to know such things.  I only recall being confused, wanting to leave and being happy that my parents chose not to live that way.

  I would not see those kinds of living conditions again for 15 years, not until I stood in the dump three of my college buddies and I could afford and used to eat, sleep, drink, and smoke dope.

Richard Kimball

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Happy Thanksgiving

It was a grand Thanksgiving feast.  I had rented two enormous side by side beach houses able to bed a party of 20 along with my two dogs. My wife and I prepared a fabulous meal with all the standard sides of Potatoe, asparagus, muffins, cranberry’s, some of those God afoul jarred pearl onions and topped by the most scrumdiddleumpcious pumpkin and pecan pies. All centered of course by a turkey.

The turkey was my one and only responsabilty…..well along with the stuffing and giblet gravy I would make from its various entrails.

The bird I found was just magnificent. A 24-pound Butterball, 28 pounds if you count the crumbs, mushrooms, sausages, onions, garlic and seasonings I stuffed up its private quarters.

My meticulous care had me basting it with butter every half hour or so. Five hours later I had achieved golden perfection.

But I was not done.  The succulent, dripping deliciousness of my bird needed to sit for a bit before the devouring commenced.  So, I had a plan: Everyone on the beach for a few spectacular celebratory firework rockets I had planted in the sand.

Everything was perfect, planned for maximum effect and joy.

Then we went to eat.

I am not sure who first noticed it, but I do recall the looks on Madison’s face (my golden retriever) and that on Jefferson’s (my border collie).  They were expressions of the utmost joy and appreciation.

The slimy slick had crossed the kitchen floor a dozen times as they had competed in obvious efforts to both play with and devour my golden perfection.

Since that wonderful Thanksgiving pizza day, I have always given some turkey thanks to my dogs first.

Richard Kimball

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Mark Twain once suggested he wasn’t worried about death because a few billion years had passed before he existed, and it wasn’t “the slightest inconvenient for him.”

I do not believe there has been a wholly original idea since someone said, “I think I will stop using my arms as legs and stand the fuck up.”

Those of us thinking today flow from that original thought and have merely borrowed from it and wrinkled it into an incalculable number of permutations over the ages.

Everyone copies, plagiarizes, and hopefully grows the efforts of others. If there were other wholly original thoughts, they are now lost to us, buried under the passage of time and the infinite number of embellishments that were born by it.

As a plagiarist and absolute center of all that I know, of every experience ever had and the few that remain to be had, the diminishment of my aspirations seems unavoidable. Aging has settled me into a slowing dance between spasms of desperation and quiet resignation. I’ve never had an original thought. A few good tweaks were the best I could hope for.

My ego has become an uncomfortable thing. Un-stroked by recognition, awash with influence or at least a lot of cash, it gnaws as I age.

How can a life that began with extraordinary good luck, mostly happy and honest, surrounded by love, be unfulfilling? I think it must happen to many of us as our lives are stretched out in the rear-view mirror, and we see the attainability of so much more that now the loss of time and energy has rendered unobtainable.

As a six-year-old I knew time was short. It was on that birthday that one of my always wiser older brothers informed me that life expectancy was 60. Just ten more, six-year birthdays and it will all be over I was told. I am fairly certain not a day has passed in all the days that followed that I have not thought about the time I have left. Time now left? Well, that past none fourteen years ago.

I now live on lucky time. In my youth I responded to that calculation with a spasm of discomfort but would quickly recover and head out for some more play, always thinking that I would make my life worthwhile another day. When another day finally arrived, I would be 31 and about to be born again but not in any Christian sense.

Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine. No great drama, no epic events, no marks to be recalled by anyone but me. Telling your story in a way that would have anyone else give a damn seems farcical. I have no confidence that I will tell mine in a way you would give a damn, but it has some interest to me and there seems some value in thinking through all that has been me and imagining what might have been. So why not? Hell, now in the retirement I wish I had never attained, what else do I have to do?

In the end, what I see of human beings is what little it would have taken to make life so much better than it is for all of us. If only we would recognize and invest in the obvious, that one precious difference that sets us, as humans, apart from all other species: our ability to know.

In case you missed it, I am as close to a miracle as you will ever know, and so are you. If the teeniest difference in time or circumstance had changed in your line of ancestors from the very first time a cell split, 3.8 billion years ago, you would not exist. Having been given such a fantastically improbable chance, you would think we would make more of it.

Richard Kimball

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TRANSGENDERS DESERVE A GOLDEN ASTERISK

Courage: requires one to insist on what they know to be right even as others see it as wrong.

Fairness: requires equal beginnings.

One born with a child producing vagina the other only a dick, and that was not the only difference.

For me, I have always thought the best of women brighter than the best of men, which has now resulted in my yearning to take my chances with the likes of the enlightened Jewish woman now running Mexico rather than the nitwitted male chosen as the best of us up north.

For me, the issue of Transgenders in sports, effects so few, and is so inconsequential that it lists somewhere in my second quadrillion.

But alas it has captured the attention and passion of the media and all those focusing on their muck.

Thus I offer a solution: A golden asterisk representing both courage and possible advantage.

Richard Kimball

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Merriam Webster

SELFISH: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself

Long, long ago in a world now far, far away, I was reading of an eighteenth-century Scottish historian who suggested democracy would always eat itself.  A people starting in bondage would develop great courage, he said. That would lead to liberty, in turn liberty would lead to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependence and thus back to bondage.

 I had thought him wrong then and gave much of my life to prove him so, but I would not now.   Age has given me clarity; a clarity I wish I did not have.  Selfishness takes primacy in all beings and is particularly evident amongst human beings. How else could it be that we have ended the existence of so many other species and now stand on the precipice of ending our own.

 Or as H. L Mencken, a devout conservative wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissist moron.”

Richard Kimball

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MY TRUMP DEFENCE

Well, the day has come!  Are you nervous? Are you looking forward to it finally being over, or like me, feeling anxious about what cometh?

For me, likely on some “enemies list”, well, I’ll be catching a plane into the Mexican Sierra Madres early in the morning and as I joke with my Trump supporting friends and family, I’ll be taking with me my old rusty Red Rider and a can of shot.

Could be that I’m just going on a vacation but I’m a bit relieved that I am. To parody the Woody Alan joke, “I’m not afraid democracy will die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens!”

My two simplistic takes on why this has all come to be:

  1. Declining support for Horace Mann.  It is possible you are not aware who that is, but almost a century ago he was the cutting edge that sliced open and exposed the need for public education if self-government was to survive.  He argued that it must be non-sectarian, embrace children of various backgrounds, taught using the tenets of a free society, that stability depends on a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals.

Public education has been under successful attack for decades, with civics education rendered almost non-existent resulting in the first measurable declines in civic knowledge and history, even as it must be clear to the most challenged amongst us that after thousands of years of bumbling, our country brought a democracy anchored in public awareness that exploded human freedom, knowledge and advancements throughout the globe making us and much of the world the brain blowing success that we are.

Discussion of public education, where we once led the world and now lead the decline has been non-existent for decades.

  • Entertainment: It has come to mind recently that politics may be the last forum to be overtaken by our culture’s desire for instant gratification, some other new worldly enchantment that gives a quick intoxicant of satisfaction.

So very many politicians, over the years have been manipulative, twisted truth, hollow promised this and that never to bees, that it bores the now cynical masses.

Along comes the jester, who magnifies the manipulations, lies and promises to such an entertaining, dreamy, cartoonist level that it imprisons the attention of every media news outlet and in turn each citizen, “What the Hell” many think, “He’s different!”

Anyway, I can be found crouching amongst the boulders high in the Siera Madras with my trusty Red Rider thinking of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and a couple of World Wars when America survived much worse.

Richard Kimball

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HARRIS WINS!

Beating both CNN and FOX NEWS, Kimball projects that Harris has won the 2024 Presidential race.

“With an impressive ground game to get out the vote, Harris overcame her ‘just another standard politician’ history, sweeping in gains in both the House and the Senate,” said Kimball.

A remarkably, premature projection, from a gifted researcher that has not accurately forecasted any Presidential race since his hero Jimmy Carter’s a half-century ago.

“I ‘am due, I ‘am due, this time I ‘am due,” insisted Kimball. “It cannot be that so many won’t fight for the righteous Grand Old Party by expunging this pretentious conservative pustule.”

Richard Kimball

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Liars?

If you are an honorable person, a lie is hard to excuse.  In fact, every single time you don’t tell truth, the slam on your conscience tells you all you need to know.

When any normal person lies, there’s no excuse, no “misspoken”, there is only the instant slump shoulder of depression.

That is of course if you are not running for office. Then, and only then, does a political conscience take the bench and find comfort in lies that might meet a desired end.

Today, lies take center stage and separates us on opposing sides of the truth, imagining there are opposing sides of truth.

All work in the murk of obfuscation. Curing that was the purpose of Vote Smart.

Richard Kimball

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THE SAME OLD SHIT OR GOD ARE YOU NUTS?

I do not like Kamala. She represents the kind of politics that I have railed against my entire life…changing positions for political expediency, cloaking positions that a citizen struggling to self-govern is required to have to do so successfully.

But I HATE TRUMP. As I said privately to friends when he inexplicably became President in 2017, “Get me into the Oval Office, I can kill him, and all I would need is a pencil.” 

Condemn me as you will, but as with the rise of Hitler or Atila the Hun, I would have willingly slammed the breaks on the evil that from time to time grabs a grip on the discontented and leads them into the darkness trashing kindness and lives.

It is unlikely that you have lived the horror that vindictive tyrants can bring to your world and that is how from time to time they repeat themselves.

Welcome to your moment in history with nothing more than a pencil on November 5th

Richard Kimball

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The Wizard!

It must be evidence of my aging; I am just not able to register the seething hate broiling under so many that Trump has exposed and tapped into.

Why don’t I get it?

Why am I not one of those captured by whatever it is that Trump has or says?

Why am I not primed to revolt?

Why don’t I get it?

I have no answers, no excuses, no understanding.

So many are unfamiliar to me, foreign, other worldly.

My bewilderment must find aspiration and anchor in faith and then hope that my hero was on this one occasion wrong:

        “Having faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true.” Mark Twain

Richard Kimball

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Some Final Thoughts – Chapter 66:

Today, no one is a greater danger to Americans than Americans.

 American’s worry each other, don’t trust each other, blame each other, condemn each other because there is no common ground for truth. 

 We are fully capable and with immense ease able to turn this around. “Everyone has a right to their own opinion but not their own facts,” an old, dead boss of mine once said.  All it takes is a place for facts, one untainted source, one unopinionated source simply a factual accounting of what was, or precisely what Vote Smart once attempted.

 Great changes, important movements that change civic culture and destiny almost always take place when people are in pain, either physical or fiscal pain.  They do not happen when people are clothed, housed and fed or at least not until now, when the people’s slightest misgivings are kneaded into anger amongst their greatest good fortunes.

 Long ago when I was a State Senator, I opened a letter, and a .44 caliber slug dropped out. Without a note, return address, or any sense of what I was condemned for, it seemed such a silly threat I saw no need to report it.

 Today, fear sells. Fear-peddling politicians, Hollywood producers, the media, all get paid if we pay attention. And nothing gets our attention like screaming FIRE in the theater of anywhere.

 Vote Smart’s worries were consumed with what was happening to us from within, most acutely by the changing character of the politicians trashing truth we had to select from. It has been an inferior crop of candidates, less distinguished, less principled, less devoted to the nation than to themselves.

 Every generation of Americans has had some battle to sustain freedom.

 Know it is this slowly chewing cancer dinning on truth and reality, where every fact is twisted and tortured for selfish gain that is our generation’s challenge.  It was why we were building Vote Smart.

 All politicians today, rant about our horrible world, and how much worse it’s going to be if their opponent wins. All while we wallow in lives that would be the envy of our grandparents and every generation of beings going back through all millennia.

 How is it that we can be so whiny, holding this year’s long party of grievance. A party that has harvested most of the fruit grown by past American generations along with the buds that would have belonged to future generations.  What the Hell, if we are going to do it, don’t we have some moral obligation to enjoy and party instead of complain?

 Or, OR, we could do a simple thing, create a trusted source of just facts, facts without interpretation, in the dream that most, both conservative and liberal, will again find footing in truth and extend this glorious “experiment” that has brought so much advance to the world.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder 1988

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LOOKING TOWARD DEATH

 If you are getting on in years, do you worry about having a bad ending, a long and painful one. Does it trouble you that you cannot find a peaceful means to pass on, on the internet?  If you look, what you will first find is some message that amounts to “Don’t Do It!” followed by a jaw droppingly number of (cover my ass) equivocations, and finally a listing of the two gruesome options most of the 49,000 annual U. S. suicides are funneled into: blow your brains out or hang yourself.

This is due to the power of cults or what we think of as religious leaders.  A power given by most of us seamlessly devoted to those claiming to be God’s representatives on earth, all of whom insist that regardless of your agony you suffer through it.

So silly is the notion that God is all powerful but cannot get it up to talk to each of us without some self-anointed mediator.

I for one hear God’s messages every day:  pleasure, guilt, contentment, misery, happiness, sadness, anxiety, longing, pride, humility, jubilation, terror, sorrow, hope, on and on. Messages bounce off me like my tennis ball on the backboard.

But I digress. All I asked the internet was a simple answer to what are the most peaceful methods for ending one’s own life should one enter terminally agony.

NO! I have no interest in taking my own life, but many suffering do, and I may one day.  Many elderly, such as I wonder about it, think about it and worry about it for a multitude of unselfish reasons.  Do you know the answer?

Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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 Tiananmen Square?        

Some weeks ago, following Waltz’s performance at the Democratic Convention I unfortunately wrote this:

“It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke.  There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it.  It is a thing no human can counterfeit. So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just can’t counterfeit.”

Then as so often, disappointment and embarrassment set in. My endless need to find purity in someone, anyone in politics found my shoulders adjusted and now slung low:

WALTZ:  “As the events were unfolding, several of us went in (to Tiananmen).”

WALTZ: “Donald Trump’s asking for a nationwide abortion ban.”

WALTZ: “When (Trump) left office, we had more people unemployed, percentage-wise, than the Great Depression.”

  1. Waltz was nowhere near those heroic people.
  2. Trump has said for months that he wants abortion policy to be set by each individual state, not set by the federal government for the whole country.
  3. The unemployment rate was 6.4% when Trump left office while the unemployment rate was above 20% during the Great Depression.

Waltz did not “misspeak,” he was not taken out of context or confused.  He had simply been swallowed by the whale that has become the accepted, even required deportment in the politics of our day.

Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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My position on abortion depends on how I wake up.   

Some days I wake up and answer with a very big NO!  I am the kind of guy that catches indoor spiders to set them free outdoors. So, I don’t want to play a part in the ending of any living thing. 

On other days, I wake up and answer with a very big YES! Abortions should be required of every pregnant woman and post-birth abortions should be the law of the land for anyone not obeying.  Only in that way can we rid the earth of this human befoulment.   Now I know, on those YES days, all people are aghast at my position, but I feel confident that every other life form on the planet would stand in ovation.

Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder

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Your Companions!

In politics, as in all life your fans can become your biggest maligners.

You do not know what people really think of you until you are seen as used, vulnerable and expendable, which gives courage and makes bold those that were never at your side.

But also, for those lucky enough to have them, there stand naked are your friends.

Richard Kimball

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Where do you cut it off?

Back 40 years ago, when I was a State Senator and had something meaningful to say about abortions, I was a knee jerk.  That is to say, I believed it was none of my business, even on the Senate issue I am currently recalling (should a teenager seeking an abortion be required to tell her parents) I was a NO as long as the rules set by Row vs. Wade, (the wisdom of its day) were applied.

Now a half century later, knowledge (wisdom) has adjusted somewhat. And now, as then, I turn to those in the business of knowing for a knowing of what to believe and a what to do.

Most involved in prenatal medicine believe there’s clear evidence that a fetus – a developing baby in the womb – can’t feel physical pain until after the 24th week (6th month) of pregnancy. But many others say it’s possible for a fetus to feel pain as early as 12 weeks (3 months) into its development.

Today 93% of abortions were done at or before 13 weeks. While 5.5% were done between 14 and 20 weeks and less than 1% were performed after 21 weeks.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG), say that a fetus isn’t capable of feeling pain until at least 24-25 weeks.

The conclusions say these lifelong experienced, in what I know nothing about is:

  • The cortex, the outer layer of the brain thought to be largely responsible for consciousness, and the thalamus, which relays sensory information (like pain) to the cortex, develop only after 24 weeks.
  • Just because a fetus has other brain structures that process pain doesn’t mean the connections that can cause it to feel pain are working yet.
  • The nerve connections that allow a fetus to tell the difference between a harmless touch and a painful one don’t develop until late in the third trimester. 
  • When a fetus under 28 weeks seems to respond to “noxious stimuli” (actions an adult would perceive as unpleasant), it’s a reflex or hormonal reaction.
  • While doctors may use pain-relieving drugs during fetal surgery, it’s mostly to keep the fetus from moving or prevent long-term damage from stress.

Today 93% of abortions are done at or before 13 weeks. While 5.5% are done between 14 and 20 weeks and less than 1% are performed after 21 weeks.

The lack of consensus is as confounding for me, as it is for the “experts.”

Bottom line: Where do you draw that line between life’s urge to fornicate and the growing life that results?

It has become harder for a thoughtful someone, anyone, even me who is careful not to step on an ant not to sympathize WHEN two bodies share the resources of one. WHENEVER that is!

How about you?

Richard Kimball

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