29 January 2019 – Tuesday

488 down; 242 to go.

Only 22 scaramuccis to go. My bunkmate Burgos (Christian?) leaves today. Lucky bastard. He speaks hardly any English and I know absolutely no Spanish, so I didn’t really get to know him at all. He seemed like an OK guy though – except he only spoke Spanish at very high volume, even as people were sleeping. Good luck to him.

Last night and this morning, the news was showing a story about a convicted murderer that was on work release here at the center who walked away from the center on Sat. His name is Anthony Gafford. They showed an old picture of him, but I think I do recognize who it is. Wonder why he’d risk his near-freedom position to walk-off early and start a new sentence. Probably for sex or drugs, I guess.

1011 News has some retarded guy that does the remote reporting: Eddie Dowd. He is weird and not a great speaker – he’s not beautiful either and yet I find him kind of attractive. I would not kick him out of bed for eating crackers.

I think the dirtyrottennebraskans.com would be a good website. From there I could collect stories about other corrupt and degenerate citizens of this horrid state.

Jeff Flake is doing a CBS series. Interesting turn of events from a possible presidential run. Maybe that’s a good results for the democracy. He wrote a book, too, I think. Was it called “Common Ground”? or maybe he was just talking about finding common ground. Common ground; common good; common sense. Wonder if there are any interesting insights at the intersection of those three concepts.

I consider myself a liberal, but really that requires definition because liberal means different things to different people. The word comes from Latin “liber” meaning freedom. The 18th century freedom movements, especially in the US and France were called “liberal revolutions” and produced “liberal democracies”. In the context of change or particular issues, liberal can mean “looks to the future or to novel ideas” for solutions, as opposed to conservative, which in this context shows a preference for solutions from the past that have already been proven and preserves the status quo as much as possible. This paradigm does not require a person to be one or other at every issue, though it is common to lean one way or another over a broad range of issues. It seems that a person would be liberal when it comes to issues and ideas where there have not been historically good solutions or fairness and conservative toward those that have been working fairly well for vast numbers of people; however, for a variety of reasons, that is not always the case (or at least people do not identify themselves as liberal or conservative by issues). It is in this context that I identify as mostly-liberal.

The other context for liberal and conservatives is the derogatory (often) one that each camp gives the other. Conservatives of this category define liberal as welfare-loving, wealth-redistributionist, crime-tolerant, drug-using people. Liberals consider conservatives to be Bible-thumping hypocrites, greedy, self-serving, false-moralizing, and authoritarian-followers. These versions of the labels are (or seem) more in common use since modern times, but are the least accurate for most of the people they are applied to and part of the divisive politics and civic discourse.

Burgos left. I switched to the BN locker. The officer that directed the move said that he would “remember to come right back with the combination” (that was around 9:30am). Of course, he’s a Nebraskan, born to be a liar. By 3:30 I was still locked out of my locker and had missed my after-lunch pill.

Canteen manager replied back that she would order the Dorco razors and cartridges again for Feb 7. The case manager replied back that she might be inclined to make the Feb 24 pass exception, but needs to check with the new permanent case manager. Scdoris replied back regarding “computer jobs” on detail that she would “let me know”.