Lonely German man
jumps into polar bear
enclosure to join lonely bear.
Thank god it’s Monday. I don’t know about elsewhere in the world, but here it seems to me that life begins again every Monday. Maybe if I went to church on Sunday? Naw, I’ve tried that. It’s horrible listening to all that drivel. Everyone should read Cenk Uygur’s piece in Smirking Chimp today about executing adulterers.
Well, apparently they are planning to do it. Who is they? The Pentagon. What are they planning to do? Double the number of American troops in Afghanistan. Is this insane? In my opinion, absolutely. I don’t know if this is being done with Obama’s blessing or not. He has said he wanted to increase our troops in that impossible situation. If they go through with this we will apparently have 60,000 troops fighting for a hopeless lost cause. We are not going to “win” anything in Afghanistan, at least not militarily. This is an absolute fool’s errand. I cannot believe Obama will go through with this. We should remove all our troops and replace them with peace corps volunteers (who would, of course, need at least some protection) who would seriously attempt to rebuild that shattered country, improve their standard of living, their schools, infrastructure, and so on. In fact, I believe this is what we promised to do in the first place, but like all our promises it faded away quickly in favor of more losing military adventures. No one has ever conquered Afghanistan, probably for good reason, it’s impossible and not worth the effort required. This will be Obama’s Vietnam, or at least a replay the Russian’s embarrassing defeat, and that is a certainty as far as a certainty can be. And we have no clear-cut goal in mind in any case. I pray (to the Great Mystery) that Obama will come to his senses in time to see this for the horrible mistake it is going to be.
I know this will strike everyone as even crazier than sending more troops to Afghanistan, but why don’t we send 60,000 troops to Gaza to protect the Palestinians from the Israeli genocide. They could force open the supply lines into that beleagured place and at least rescue some of the Palestinians from having to search the garbage dumps for food. What is happening in Gaza, to my way of thinking, is far more important, and much more urgent, than anything we can do in Afghanistan.
Bush/Cheney and several others should be arrested and tried for war crimes. Biden is totally wrong-headed when he says these things happened in the past and we should concentrate on the future. Biden’s statement is just plain silly, if it were true no crime would ever be punished. Of course I know we have terrible problems that need to be overcome, but I do not see why this should result in letting these terrible crimes go unpunished. Indeed, as I understand it, the failure to prosecute such crimes is itself a crime. Obama is a constitutional lawyer, he must be aware of this. Will he, too, just flaunt the Constitution as “just a goddamn piece of paper?” And let’s stop worrying so much about partisanship. Who cares what the Republican criminals think about partisanship? They certainly didn’t worry about it when they arrogantly and viciously shut the Democrats out for these long, miserable eight years. Obama’s “reaching across the aisles” threatens to hamper any positive changes that might be made, Republicans are not known for compromising. Indeed, at this very moment, instead of trying to cooperate in solving our monumental problems, they are union busting and even putting together a committee to investigate every move Obama makes. If Obama truly wants to make some important changes he should start by emasculating whatever Republican influence remains, not by inviting them in to sabotage his every move. Let them sit on their hands and twiddle their thumbs while they contemplate the terrible damage they have done to our great nation.
LKBIQ:
Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
TILT:
A standard snooker table is 12’ by 6’ with pockets on all four corners and one on each side rail.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Journey to the West (4)
Another dreary Sunday. It is cold, snowed a bit, and there seems to be little news of note. Sort of par for Sunday here in the U.S. And, as everything that happens elsewhere in the world is of little interest to our MSM, aside from an occasional earthquake or tidal wave, we no longer expect to hear about it. So on Sundays I amuse myself with "remembrances of things past," and continue to sketch out the general framework of my life. The beauty of doing this on Morialekafa is that it is easy and convenient and no one has to read it unless they wish. So here is the fourth installment:
Safely home from our summer trip, and preparing to enter the fifth grade, I spent the rest of the summer doing what ten and eleven year old boys did in those days: played cowboys and Indians, detectives, Robin Hood, kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, marbles, and whatever took our fancy. I became more and more aware of our small mining town and its place in the world and my life. Mining was by far the most important industry, although there was some timber as well. The silver, lead, and zinc mines for years had poured their waste directly into the river than ran through town. We referred to this as the “Lead Creek,” although it was actually the upper portion of the Coeur d’Alene River. Ugly gray milky water ran over boulders and assorted detritus of all kinds: old bicycles, bottles, tin cans, discarded refrigerators or other appliances, parts of old cars, whatever it was people no longer wanted. As the river was already so polluted no one seemed to care what went into it, including unwanted puppies and kittens. It was foul. No living creatures could survive in it and we did not play in or around it.
The town was built in a narrow canyon with many of the houses built on the side of a steep mountain on the south side. On the other side of the Lead Creek, between it and the mountain, ran the railroad tracks. The mountain on that side rose steeply from the tracks. There were no houses there, merely some scrubby pines and a lot of rock. There was little level space in our town and it was taken up by the business district and most of the better homes. One could walk to anyplace within the city limits in a relatively short time. Concentrated in the roughly four block business district were two small movie theatres, a bakery, two butcher shops, a candy store and fountain, a furniture store, a couple of novelty stores, a J.C. Penny’s, a hardware store, a newspaper, a couple of jewelry stores, a men’s store, and a stationery store that also sold books, along with two small grocery store and a pool hall. Most everything one could desire. I almost forgot to mention the numerous bars and four whorehouses. Actually, within the immediate environs there were something like thirty-two bars in all. The town was the county seat with a relatively small population, except on weekends, when the miners and lumberjacks came in from the surrounding hills for a good time. A few of the bars also featured gambling tables, mostly blackjack, poker, and pan. Only rarely could one find a crap game. The gambling and whoring was illegal, of course, but ours was in those days a boom town and money flowed freely, mostly in the form of silver dollars. I think I was probably ten or twelve years old before I ever saw a dollar bill. There was barely enough ground for a football field, bare of grass, and hard as cement. Our teams took pride in playing on such a field. The High School was next to the football field and across from the Elementary School. I could walk the four blocks from home to school and did so regularly, going home each day for lunch. There was also a Catholic School, but it was further away and built in a purely residential area. Most of us had no idea what went on there, except that it was run by nuns who had a reputation for severity. I think they lived on the third floor of the building. Children from the two schools did not mix. We also had two hospitals, one a Catholic one, built on a slope away from the business district, and another smaller secular one located at the very end of one of the main streets. Only the Catholic hospital provided any kind of surgery. I had my tonsils out there. I remember it well as in those days they used ether as an anaesthetic. You had to count from 100 backwards and always were sick afterwards. I thought it was a weird place, quiet, with nuns moving silently and slowly around the corridors and crucifixes hanging from the walls. Thinking of it now, "surreal" comes to mind.
There was only one road through town, going east to Missoula or kind of southwest to Spokane, but both places seemed far away over narrow twisting roads and we did not often venture to either place in our 1932 black Hudson sedan that looked like it should belong to gangsters in Chicago or New York. My father had traveled to Spokane with my uncle Parm (more on Parm later), a farmer in Post Falls, Idaho, bought the Hudson new, and learned to drive it while returning to Post Falls. He never became a very accomplished driver, which didn’t matter much as we seldom went more than a few miles from home. The highway between our town and Coeur d’Alene was a very narrow two lane construction that wound rather crazily along the mountainside above Coeur d’Alene Lake. The trip took hours and I inevitably became car sick. But as my mother’s family lived in Post Falls, we sometimes made the trip. It was somewhat colorful as we always passed a Regina Stand and had a root beer, then another place that had a chained bear that drank soda pop, and still another place built in the shape of a giant trout. Post Falls, in those days, could not have had more than perhaps 50 to 100 residents at most, nowadays there are thousands. From the time I was five or six I spent part of every summer on my Grandparents farm near Post Falls. When they died the farm was continued by uncle Parm.
Safely home from our summer trip, and preparing to enter the fifth grade, I spent the rest of the summer doing what ten and eleven year old boys did in those days: played cowboys and Indians, detectives, Robin Hood, kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, marbles, and whatever took our fancy. I became more and more aware of our small mining town and its place in the world and my life. Mining was by far the most important industry, although there was some timber as well. The silver, lead, and zinc mines for years had poured their waste directly into the river than ran through town. We referred to this as the “Lead Creek,” although it was actually the upper portion of the Coeur d’Alene River. Ugly gray milky water ran over boulders and assorted detritus of all kinds: old bicycles, bottles, tin cans, discarded refrigerators or other appliances, parts of old cars, whatever it was people no longer wanted. As the river was already so polluted no one seemed to care what went into it, including unwanted puppies and kittens. It was foul. No living creatures could survive in it and we did not play in or around it.
The town was built in a narrow canyon with many of the houses built on the side of a steep mountain on the south side. On the other side of the Lead Creek, between it and the mountain, ran the railroad tracks. The mountain on that side rose steeply from the tracks. There were no houses there, merely some scrubby pines and a lot of rock. There was little level space in our town and it was taken up by the business district and most of the better homes. One could walk to anyplace within the city limits in a relatively short time. Concentrated in the roughly four block business district were two small movie theatres, a bakery, two butcher shops, a candy store and fountain, a furniture store, a couple of novelty stores, a J.C. Penny’s, a hardware store, a newspaper, a couple of jewelry stores, a men’s store, and a stationery store that also sold books, along with two small grocery store and a pool hall. Most everything one could desire. I almost forgot to mention the numerous bars and four whorehouses. Actually, within the immediate environs there were something like thirty-two bars in all. The town was the county seat with a relatively small population, except on weekends, when the miners and lumberjacks came in from the surrounding hills for a good time. A few of the bars also featured gambling tables, mostly blackjack, poker, and pan. Only rarely could one find a crap game. The gambling and whoring was illegal, of course, but ours was in those days a boom town and money flowed freely, mostly in the form of silver dollars. I think I was probably ten or twelve years old before I ever saw a dollar bill. There was barely enough ground for a football field, bare of grass, and hard as cement. Our teams took pride in playing on such a field. The High School was next to the football field and across from the Elementary School. I could walk the four blocks from home to school and did so regularly, going home each day for lunch. There was also a Catholic School, but it was further away and built in a purely residential area. Most of us had no idea what went on there, except that it was run by nuns who had a reputation for severity. I think they lived on the third floor of the building. Children from the two schools did not mix. We also had two hospitals, one a Catholic one, built on a slope away from the business district, and another smaller secular one located at the very end of one of the main streets. Only the Catholic hospital provided any kind of surgery. I had my tonsils out there. I remember it well as in those days they used ether as an anaesthetic. You had to count from 100 backwards and always were sick afterwards. I thought it was a weird place, quiet, with nuns moving silently and slowly around the corridors and crucifixes hanging from the walls. Thinking of it now, "surreal" comes to mind.
There was only one road through town, going east to Missoula or kind of southwest to Spokane, but both places seemed far away over narrow twisting roads and we did not often venture to either place in our 1932 black Hudson sedan that looked like it should belong to gangsters in Chicago or New York. My father had traveled to Spokane with my uncle Parm (more on Parm later), a farmer in Post Falls, Idaho, bought the Hudson new, and learned to drive it while returning to Post Falls. He never became a very accomplished driver, which didn’t matter much as we seldom went more than a few miles from home. The highway between our town and Coeur d’Alene was a very narrow two lane construction that wound rather crazily along the mountainside above Coeur d’Alene Lake. The trip took hours and I inevitably became car sick. But as my mother’s family lived in Post Falls, we sometimes made the trip. It was somewhat colorful as we always passed a Regina Stand and had a root beer, then another place that had a chained bear that drank soda pop, and still another place built in the shape of a giant trout. Post Falls, in those days, could not have had more than perhaps 50 to 100 residents at most, nowadays there are thousands. From the time I was five or six I spent part of every summer on my Grandparents farm near Post Falls. When they died the farm was continued by uncle Parm.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Responsibilities of Government?
What are the responsibilities of government? According to the Constitution of the United States, they are as follows:
1. Form a more perfect union.
2. Establish justice.
3. Insure domestic tranquility.
4. Provide for the common defense.
5. Promote the general welfare.
6. Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Unfortunately, these do not really tell you very much. Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and provide for common defense seem pretty clear. Forming a more perfect union is very abstract and, I think, not entirely clear. In this respect it is similar to securing the blessings of liberty…It is "promoting the general welfare" that I believe is far too general, at least for me. For example, I should think that promoting the general welfare would mean providing health care for all. My view is apparently not shared by those in government as we have some 47 million citizens without such care. We do have medicare and Medicaid, begrudgingly given, and still not wanted by some. This is fine, but a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.
I should think promoting the general welfare would also include seeing to it that no one has to go hungry or starve. As I see ads all the time to help hungry children, and I am told that millions go to bed at night hungry, and so on, it seems our government does not interpret this the way I would. Why should I, without too many means, have to provide for hungry children in the richest country on earth? While on the one hand I feel guilty when I cannot personally solve the hunger problem, on the other I am angry as hell because I believe this should be a governmental responsibility. I am also informed, from time to time, that our elderly are sometimes reduced to eating dog and cat food, or having to choose between paying their rent and paying for their prescription drugs. It’s true we have social security, a blessing, but still hated by some who would like to take it away. Is this their idea of promoting the general welfare?
Similarly, I receive request all the time for donations to save the whales, the dolphins, the polar bears, the spotted owl, elephants, puffins, pygmy rabbits, sage grouse, etc., etc. etc. Why should it be my responsibility to save all these wonderful creatures? Isn’t looking out for them and insuring their well-being promoting the general welfare? Apparently not, our government chooses to promote the general welfare of huge corporations instead. This, too, leaves me very angry.
And what about maintaining and improving our infrastructure? While I do not get requests to personally contribute for this, I certainly have to pay taxes which presumably should be used at least in part for this purpose. But for more than fifty years it has not. Maintainting infrastructure, bridges, highways, schools, public buildings and so on clearly contributes to the general welfare. Where has government been?
Speaking of schools, one would think that a functioning democracy would only be as good as its informed citizens. But our citizens have been increasingly uninformed for years, with no emphasis placed on education and the affordability ebbing away even faster than ordinary inflation. We have become a nation of television addicts, with television programming so dismal for the most part that even semi-intelligent people cannot bear to watch it. Anti-intellectualism is rampant and even our beautiful language is being corrupted. Bush’s question, “is our children learning” sums it up quite well. While we used to lead the world in education, we have fallen badly behind in subjects that are absolutely crucial to survival in the modern world. Under the Bush/Cheney administration science has been replaced with religious fairy tales of one kind or another. Any society where a majority doesn’t believe in evolution is not going to survive for long in the 21st century, except perhaps, as a pitiful nation that once was a player on the international stage.
One only has to look at “providing for the common defense” to learn where our emphasis is and has been for a long time. We not only provide for our common defense, we revel in it, roll in it, overdo it to the point of absurdity, suck it up like catnip. With a defense budget larger than all the rest of the world combined we certainly provide for our common defense, and provide, and provide, and provide. This is so excessive, so insane, so obsessive, it seems to be designed for a science fiction “war of the worlds” rather than any realistic hostilities that could possibly happen here on earth.
Finally, our belief in free market capitalism, is basically opposed to promoting the general welfare of our citizens. Marx predicted long ago that under unregulated capitalism corporations and the wealthy would eventually cannibalize the workers. We have just witnessed the proof of Marx’s theory. Basic necessities like air and water and food and energy and transportation and health care are too important to be left to privatization and an unregulated market system. Let the capitalists concentrate on cosmetics and tobacco and liquor and such and let the rest of us try to live more sensibly. There are social democracies that work well while protecting their citizens from the greed and avarice of unregulated capitalism. They may have their flaws, but they, at least, are on the right track. We are not.
LKBIQ:
[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
Pat Robertson
TILT:
Cary Grant’s real name was Archibald Alec Leach.
1. Form a more perfect union.
2. Establish justice.
3. Insure domestic tranquility.
4. Provide for the common defense.
5. Promote the general welfare.
6. Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Unfortunately, these do not really tell you very much. Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and provide for common defense seem pretty clear. Forming a more perfect union is very abstract and, I think, not entirely clear. In this respect it is similar to securing the blessings of liberty…It is "promoting the general welfare" that I believe is far too general, at least for me. For example, I should think that promoting the general welfare would mean providing health care for all. My view is apparently not shared by those in government as we have some 47 million citizens without such care. We do have medicare and Medicaid, begrudgingly given, and still not wanted by some. This is fine, but a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed.
I should think promoting the general welfare would also include seeing to it that no one has to go hungry or starve. As I see ads all the time to help hungry children, and I am told that millions go to bed at night hungry, and so on, it seems our government does not interpret this the way I would. Why should I, without too many means, have to provide for hungry children in the richest country on earth? While on the one hand I feel guilty when I cannot personally solve the hunger problem, on the other I am angry as hell because I believe this should be a governmental responsibility. I am also informed, from time to time, that our elderly are sometimes reduced to eating dog and cat food, or having to choose between paying their rent and paying for their prescription drugs. It’s true we have social security, a blessing, but still hated by some who would like to take it away. Is this their idea of promoting the general welfare?
Similarly, I receive request all the time for donations to save the whales, the dolphins, the polar bears, the spotted owl, elephants, puffins, pygmy rabbits, sage grouse, etc., etc. etc. Why should it be my responsibility to save all these wonderful creatures? Isn’t looking out for them and insuring their well-being promoting the general welfare? Apparently not, our government chooses to promote the general welfare of huge corporations instead. This, too, leaves me very angry.
And what about maintaining and improving our infrastructure? While I do not get requests to personally contribute for this, I certainly have to pay taxes which presumably should be used at least in part for this purpose. But for more than fifty years it has not. Maintainting infrastructure, bridges, highways, schools, public buildings and so on clearly contributes to the general welfare. Where has government been?
Speaking of schools, one would think that a functioning democracy would only be as good as its informed citizens. But our citizens have been increasingly uninformed for years, with no emphasis placed on education and the affordability ebbing away even faster than ordinary inflation. We have become a nation of television addicts, with television programming so dismal for the most part that even semi-intelligent people cannot bear to watch it. Anti-intellectualism is rampant and even our beautiful language is being corrupted. Bush’s question, “is our children learning” sums it up quite well. While we used to lead the world in education, we have fallen badly behind in subjects that are absolutely crucial to survival in the modern world. Under the Bush/Cheney administration science has been replaced with religious fairy tales of one kind or another. Any society where a majority doesn’t believe in evolution is not going to survive for long in the 21st century, except perhaps, as a pitiful nation that once was a player on the international stage.
One only has to look at “providing for the common defense” to learn where our emphasis is and has been for a long time. We not only provide for our common defense, we revel in it, roll in it, overdo it to the point of absurdity, suck it up like catnip. With a defense budget larger than all the rest of the world combined we certainly provide for our common defense, and provide, and provide, and provide. This is so excessive, so insane, so obsessive, it seems to be designed for a science fiction “war of the worlds” rather than any realistic hostilities that could possibly happen here on earth.
Finally, our belief in free market capitalism, is basically opposed to promoting the general welfare of our citizens. Marx predicted long ago that under unregulated capitalism corporations and the wealthy would eventually cannibalize the workers. We have just witnessed the proof of Marx’s theory. Basic necessities like air and water and food and energy and transportation and health care are too important to be left to privatization and an unregulated market system. Let the capitalists concentrate on cosmetics and tobacco and liquor and such and let the rest of us try to live more sensibly. There are social democracies that work well while protecting their citizens from the greed and avarice of unregulated capitalism. They may have their flaws, but they, at least, are on the right track. We are not.
LKBIQ:
[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
Pat Robertson
TILT:
Cary Grant’s real name was Archibald Alec Leach.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Stupidity reigns
Michigan city bans being
annoying in public “by
word of mouth, sign or motions.”
It seems we are being inundated by stupidity. I said last night that I thought Obama’s choice of Rick Warren for his inauguration was more than merely a mistake, it was stupid. Today I believe it was even more stupid than I thought. It seems that Warren, in addition to being homophobic (which he hilariously denies), also does not allow gays to become members of his church. I’m not certain whether it is pedophilia or incest that he fears within his congregation. But what strikes me as really stupid is the fact that he apparently has people in his church who are attempting to “cure” people of being gay. Anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that being gay is not something that can be “cured,” and to believe otherwise is an indication of either ignorance or stupidity or both. As information on this subject is widely available, and presumably members of his church are literate, one can only conclude that in the case of Warren’s church it has to be some form of stubborn stupidity. Similarly, anyone who believes that evolution has not occurred is equally ignorant, stupid, or both. Warren apparently believes that the existence of homosexuality proves that evolution did not occur. I do not believe, with Obama, that we should reach out to such people when what they believe, and what they are teaching children, is not only false, but harmful to the future of our nation. To deny science in the 21st century is tantamount to national suicide. I thought when we got rid of Bush/Cheney we might actually re-establish our faith in science once again, and, indeed, Obama insists that he will follow science, but this pick of Warren does not indicate to me that he is going to do so. I am not only disappointed, I am disgusted by this stupidity.
If the stupidity of Obama and Warren is not enough, we can always depend upon Bush to further stupidity. Apparently his “right of conscience” movement was not quite stupid enough, now he has punted the auto problem to Obama, which probably was predictable, but he has appointed Paulson as the acting “car czar.” I guess he thinks that Paulson’s failure to bail out anyone but Wall Street is experience enough for him to be the car czar as well. Of course Bush has done so many stupid things it has almost become acceptable for him, the MSM has certainly never challenged any of them. Bush wears his stupidity like a badge of honor.
Then we have Dick the Slimy who apparently thinks we are all too stupid to ever hold him accountable for his war crimes, even though he has admitted them publicly. Unhappily, he may prove to be right. There is some doubt that the Obama administration is going to do anything to bring Bush/Cheney to justice, even though failing to do so will itself apparently be a crime, according to our Constitution (remember that “piece of goddamn paper”).
We also continue to pursue our failed and pointless “war on drugs,” at enormous expense that is little more than flushing money down the toilet. Most everyone nowadays knows this but it doesn’t keep us from stupidly carrying on. I would put the Afghanistan “war” right up there with all these other acts of stupidity. Our unconditional support for Israeli genocide is another case in point. The performance of our Congress in the past two years is also a textbook case of stupidity. There is no excuse for the failure to impeach Bush/Cheney who are continuing to damage our nation right up until their last second in office. This could have been, and should have been, prevented, but it wasn’t. So, I’m sorry to say it, but I believe these things are no longer understandable or tolerable as simply mistakes, they have been and are just plain stupid. I guess this is why I am so disappointed in Obama. Up until now I had not thought of him as stupid.
LKBIQ:
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Jeff Valdez
TILT:
William Faulkner was also known as “Gibby.”
annoying in public “by
word of mouth, sign or motions.”
It seems we are being inundated by stupidity. I said last night that I thought Obama’s choice of Rick Warren for his inauguration was more than merely a mistake, it was stupid. Today I believe it was even more stupid than I thought. It seems that Warren, in addition to being homophobic (which he hilariously denies), also does not allow gays to become members of his church. I’m not certain whether it is pedophilia or incest that he fears within his congregation. But what strikes me as really stupid is the fact that he apparently has people in his church who are attempting to “cure” people of being gay. Anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that being gay is not something that can be “cured,” and to believe otherwise is an indication of either ignorance or stupidity or both. As information on this subject is widely available, and presumably members of his church are literate, one can only conclude that in the case of Warren’s church it has to be some form of stubborn stupidity. Similarly, anyone who believes that evolution has not occurred is equally ignorant, stupid, or both. Warren apparently believes that the existence of homosexuality proves that evolution did not occur. I do not believe, with Obama, that we should reach out to such people when what they believe, and what they are teaching children, is not only false, but harmful to the future of our nation. To deny science in the 21st century is tantamount to national suicide. I thought when we got rid of Bush/Cheney we might actually re-establish our faith in science once again, and, indeed, Obama insists that he will follow science, but this pick of Warren does not indicate to me that he is going to do so. I am not only disappointed, I am disgusted by this stupidity.
If the stupidity of Obama and Warren is not enough, we can always depend upon Bush to further stupidity. Apparently his “right of conscience” movement was not quite stupid enough, now he has punted the auto problem to Obama, which probably was predictable, but he has appointed Paulson as the acting “car czar.” I guess he thinks that Paulson’s failure to bail out anyone but Wall Street is experience enough for him to be the car czar as well. Of course Bush has done so many stupid things it has almost become acceptable for him, the MSM has certainly never challenged any of them. Bush wears his stupidity like a badge of honor.
Then we have Dick the Slimy who apparently thinks we are all too stupid to ever hold him accountable for his war crimes, even though he has admitted them publicly. Unhappily, he may prove to be right. There is some doubt that the Obama administration is going to do anything to bring Bush/Cheney to justice, even though failing to do so will itself apparently be a crime, according to our Constitution (remember that “piece of goddamn paper”).
We also continue to pursue our failed and pointless “war on drugs,” at enormous expense that is little more than flushing money down the toilet. Most everyone nowadays knows this but it doesn’t keep us from stupidly carrying on. I would put the Afghanistan “war” right up there with all these other acts of stupidity. Our unconditional support for Israeli genocide is another case in point. The performance of our Congress in the past two years is also a textbook case of stupidity. There is no excuse for the failure to impeach Bush/Cheney who are continuing to damage our nation right up until their last second in office. This could have been, and should have been, prevented, but it wasn’t. So, I’m sorry to say it, but I believe these things are no longer understandable or tolerable as simply mistakes, they have been and are just plain stupid. I guess this is why I am so disappointed in Obama. Up until now I had not thought of him as stupid.
LKBIQ:
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
Jeff Valdez
TILT:
William Faulkner was also known as “Gibby.”
Thursday, December 18, 2008
A stupid choice
German man found with 1200
uncaged parakeets in small feces
and feather strewn apartment.
Thanks Bubblehead. My eye surgery went well and is a great success. In fact, to me it borders on the miraculous. Having been terribly nearsighted all my life I can now see better than I ever could before. I originally went to this ophthalmologist to have cataracts removed. I had been told by another doctor only three or four years ago that surgery would not completely correct my vision because it was so bad. Little did I know how far these guys have come in the last few years. I not only got rid of the cataracts, I had what is called intraocular surgery, in which they actually insert new lenses right in your eyes. And even more miraculous to me is the fact that this is done on an outpatient visit and takes only somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. So, having had my teenage years ruined by having to wear glasses, and having to struggle with contact lenses for about fifty years, I now have perfectly normal sight (you might say, now that it is too late, if you were adequately cynical). Of course there was 17” of snow in Spokane last night and trying to get home was a nightmare. But my wife is fearless.
Anyway, on to other things. I have been and remain an Obama supporter, and I have real hopes for the future now that we will be rid of Bush/Cheney and their Hole-in-the-head-gang. I have watched with interest while Obama has picked his cabinet and others. While I have had some doubts about some, and wondered about others, I never thought he had done something stupid – until now. His pick of Rich Warren for his inauguration I believe is so atrocious as to be fundamentally stupid. Warren is an active homophobe, but worse than that, he doesn’t believe in evolution or stem cell research, contraception, (or even science, apparently), and believes that non-Christians should not be permitted to hold public office. In short, he is nothing but another right-wing bigot who has been as divisive as Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, or any of the others of that ilk. When challenged on this mistake Obama said, “it’s the American way to reach out to others.” I must say I do not agree that it is the American way to reach out to right-wing bigots who are so uninformed and doctrinaire they don’t even believe in science. It’s one thing, perhaps, to be merely homophobic, but to compare homosexuals to incest and other vicious practices is beyond the pale of decency. Reaching out to him is not only a mistake and divisive at this moment in time, it is just plain STUPID.
But if Obama’s choice here was stupid, it pales into insignificance when compared with Bush’s latest policy, Right of Conscience. I have mentioned this before, but I must repeat that I believe this is probably the single stupidest policy I have ever seen. It just emphasizes once again that Bush probably doesn’t have a brain at all, or if he does, he never uses it for anything other than trying to please his completely nutty evangelical base. This is a policy so broad and so stupidly conceived that it will allow anyone who works in the health industry at any level or in any way the power to individually decide who will get health care and who won’t. If a similar right of conscience was given to any other industry it would immediately be seen as insane. But as it is primarily aimed at abortion, contraception, and such, he was able to get away with it (actually, he won’t ultimately get away with it as it will be rescinded very quickly under a new administration). In any case, this policy elevates stupidity to an entirely new level.
Dick the Slimy is sticking to his “right to torture” theme. He now says, with an illogic virtually unmatched previously by anyone, that it would have been immoral, unethical, and irresponsible not to torture. In other words, it was right to break our laws, and international laws, to use a technique that was known to be useless for anything other than causing unnecessary pain and suffering because it would produce information that was useless and, in fact, worse than that, because it led us off on all kinds of unnecessary investigations that were basically no more than wastes of time. I don’t think Cheney, like Bush, is stupid, merely evil personified.
LKBIQ:
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen
TILT::
My wife believes she is the only person on earth who knows how to drive. All others are idiots. However, in her defense, I must say she is an excellent driver and is unfazed by even the most hazardous weather conditions. It took us well over an hour this morning to drive the 32 miles from Spokane to Coeur d’Alene. Interestingly, once we were back in Idaho conditions improved.
uncaged parakeets in small feces
and feather strewn apartment.
Thanks Bubblehead. My eye surgery went well and is a great success. In fact, to me it borders on the miraculous. Having been terribly nearsighted all my life I can now see better than I ever could before. I originally went to this ophthalmologist to have cataracts removed. I had been told by another doctor only three or four years ago that surgery would not completely correct my vision because it was so bad. Little did I know how far these guys have come in the last few years. I not only got rid of the cataracts, I had what is called intraocular surgery, in which they actually insert new lenses right in your eyes. And even more miraculous to me is the fact that this is done on an outpatient visit and takes only somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. So, having had my teenage years ruined by having to wear glasses, and having to struggle with contact lenses for about fifty years, I now have perfectly normal sight (you might say, now that it is too late, if you were adequately cynical). Of course there was 17” of snow in Spokane last night and trying to get home was a nightmare. But my wife is fearless.
Anyway, on to other things. I have been and remain an Obama supporter, and I have real hopes for the future now that we will be rid of Bush/Cheney and their Hole-in-the-head-gang. I have watched with interest while Obama has picked his cabinet and others. While I have had some doubts about some, and wondered about others, I never thought he had done something stupid – until now. His pick of Rich Warren for his inauguration I believe is so atrocious as to be fundamentally stupid. Warren is an active homophobe, but worse than that, he doesn’t believe in evolution or stem cell research, contraception, (or even science, apparently), and believes that non-Christians should not be permitted to hold public office. In short, he is nothing but another right-wing bigot who has been as divisive as Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, or any of the others of that ilk. When challenged on this mistake Obama said, “it’s the American way to reach out to others.” I must say I do not agree that it is the American way to reach out to right-wing bigots who are so uninformed and doctrinaire they don’t even believe in science. It’s one thing, perhaps, to be merely homophobic, but to compare homosexuals to incest and other vicious practices is beyond the pale of decency. Reaching out to him is not only a mistake and divisive at this moment in time, it is just plain STUPID.
But if Obama’s choice here was stupid, it pales into insignificance when compared with Bush’s latest policy, Right of Conscience. I have mentioned this before, but I must repeat that I believe this is probably the single stupidest policy I have ever seen. It just emphasizes once again that Bush probably doesn’t have a brain at all, or if he does, he never uses it for anything other than trying to please his completely nutty evangelical base. This is a policy so broad and so stupidly conceived that it will allow anyone who works in the health industry at any level or in any way the power to individually decide who will get health care and who won’t. If a similar right of conscience was given to any other industry it would immediately be seen as insane. But as it is primarily aimed at abortion, contraception, and such, he was able to get away with it (actually, he won’t ultimately get away with it as it will be rescinded very quickly under a new administration). In any case, this policy elevates stupidity to an entirely new level.
Dick the Slimy is sticking to his “right to torture” theme. He now says, with an illogic virtually unmatched previously by anyone, that it would have been immoral, unethical, and irresponsible not to torture. In other words, it was right to break our laws, and international laws, to use a technique that was known to be useless for anything other than causing unnecessary pain and suffering because it would produce information that was useless and, in fact, worse than that, because it led us off on all kinds of unnecessary investigations that were basically no more than wastes of time. I don’t think Cheney, like Bush, is stupid, merely evil personified.
LKBIQ:
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen
TILT::
My wife believes she is the only person on earth who knows how to drive. All others are idiots. However, in her defense, I must say she is an excellent driver and is unfazed by even the most hazardous weather conditions. It took us well over an hour this morning to drive the 32 miles from Spokane to Coeur d’Alene. Interestingly, once we were back in Idaho conditions improved.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Cheney's confession
Woman kidnaps demented
old man, marries him, takes
him directly to his bank.
Dick the Slimy, in an interview with ABC, admits to his role in waterboarding (torture), and says Guantanamo should stay open until the end of terrorism (in other words, forever). Put more generally, he has admitted publicly that he is guilty of a war crime. Is he just daring someone to hold him accountable? Will anyone?
I thought Obama’s pick for Education Secretary sounded pretty good. But Greg Palast doesn’t think so and I have great respect for him. Similarly, I’m not too crazy about Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture. In fact I’m beginning to have some doubts about the entire cabinet. It’s true there are all pretty much heavyweights, and it’s also true there is a lot of diversity, which could be a good thing, but it occurs to me it could potentially be a bad thing. I am also beginning to have doubts about Obama’s Israeli policy (if, indeed, he has one aside from just placating Israel constantly, a la Bush). This idea of offering a nuclear shield to Israel (and even others in Clinton’s version) I find most upsetting and in my opinion an absolutely terrible idea. Furthermore, I do not like the continued paranoia with respect to Iran. They keep insisting Iran is a threat to take over the Middle East. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean simply gaining influence in Iraq? Or do they think Iran is going to move on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and etc., which seems to me far fetched. Anyway, I should think Iran has more legitimate interests in the Middle East than we do from 8000 miles away. If Benjamin Netanyahu becomes the next Prime Minister of Israel, watch out.
I have received Christmas cards from two of my oldest friends. When we were children we lived within about 100 yards of each other and played together almost every day. We are all still around and doing reasonably well, while most of our peers are gone. I have no explanation for this good fortune, just as I have no explanation for why I was born where and when I was, why I was born a Nordic, why I never had to go hungry, or fight in a war, or eat sheep’s eyeballs or hagis. Life, for me, has always been, and continues to be, a great mystery.
There will be no blog tomorrow night as I am having my second eye surgery. Hopefully, I will be able to see, perhaps not like an eagle, but maybe like a normal person.
LKBIQ:
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
Mark Twain
TILT:
George W. Bush is apparently immune to insults no matter where they come from.
old man, marries him, takes
him directly to his bank.
Dick the Slimy, in an interview with ABC, admits to his role in waterboarding (torture), and says Guantanamo should stay open until the end of terrorism (in other words, forever). Put more generally, he has admitted publicly that he is guilty of a war crime. Is he just daring someone to hold him accountable? Will anyone?
I thought Obama’s pick for Education Secretary sounded pretty good. But Greg Palast doesn’t think so and I have great respect for him. Similarly, I’m not too crazy about Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture. In fact I’m beginning to have some doubts about the entire cabinet. It’s true there are all pretty much heavyweights, and it’s also true there is a lot of diversity, which could be a good thing, but it occurs to me it could potentially be a bad thing. I am also beginning to have doubts about Obama’s Israeli policy (if, indeed, he has one aside from just placating Israel constantly, a la Bush). This idea of offering a nuclear shield to Israel (and even others in Clinton’s version) I find most upsetting and in my opinion an absolutely terrible idea. Furthermore, I do not like the continued paranoia with respect to Iran. They keep insisting Iran is a threat to take over the Middle East. I don’t know what that means. Does it mean simply gaining influence in Iraq? Or do they think Iran is going to move on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and etc., which seems to me far fetched. Anyway, I should think Iran has more legitimate interests in the Middle East than we do from 8000 miles away. If Benjamin Netanyahu becomes the next Prime Minister of Israel, watch out.
I have received Christmas cards from two of my oldest friends. When we were children we lived within about 100 yards of each other and played together almost every day. We are all still around and doing reasonably well, while most of our peers are gone. I have no explanation for this good fortune, just as I have no explanation for why I was born where and when I was, why I was born a Nordic, why I never had to go hungry, or fight in a war, or eat sheep’s eyeballs or hagis. Life, for me, has always been, and continues to be, a great mystery.
There will be no blog tomorrow night as I am having my second eye surgery. Hopefully, I will be able to see, perhaps not like an eagle, but maybe like a normal person.
LKBIQ:
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
Mark Twain
TILT:
George W. Bush is apparently immune to insults no matter where they come from.
Monday, December 15, 2008
The Shoes of Wrath
Four-year-old breaks into
toy store at 3:00 a.m
to play with toys.
By now everyone must have seen the shoe throwing incident at least a hundred times, and it has been analyzed and discussed ad nauseam. No one seems to have focused on what I heard Bush say, which I thought was revealing. I think I heard him say, “I don’t know what his beef was. It must have been weird.” How could Bush not know what his beef was? Does he really believe he is a hero in the eyes of Iraqis? Similarly, whatever his beef was, why would it have been weird? It would seem to me to be perfectly obvious what his beef was, and it was not in the least bit weird. He even said, I believe, this is for the women and children (you have killed). And even when it was explained to Bush that throwing your shoes at someone in Iraq is considered the ultimate insult, Bush said he didn’t feel insulted. Now that is weird.
In the excitement about Obama’s election, the transition, the auto bailout fiasco, and who the cabinet and the new Senators will be, everyone seems to have lost sight of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. This has been likened to some of the worst of the apartheid events in South Africa. The U.N. has condemned it (but, like, who listens to the U.N. these days). The U.S., of course, is complicit in this illegal and horrible attempt by the Israelis to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza because they have the audacity to lob a few primitive missiles, mostly harmlessly, into Israel. So the Israelis have decided to punish all million and half Palestinians they have trapped in Gaza. They refuse to even let U.N. sponsored goods into that beleaquered place, have turned off their power supply and other necessities, refuse to let in reporters so the world would know of this atrocity, and so on. No one, least of all the U.S., seems willing to intervene in this clearly criminal treatment of Gaza. There is something very wrong with human beings that just stand by and watch this cruelty. And when you realize that Hamas is the legally elected government in Gaza, chosen in an election sponsored by the U.S. and others, the hypocrisy is inescapable. The election didn’t turn out as we wanted so we label Hamas as terrorists and refuse to support them. Democracy in action.
Most everyone seems to agree that we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan to “win,” whatever that is supposed to mean. So the solution is going to be to send in another 20,000 troops. This is clearly not going to be enough to “win” either. So will we send in another 20,000, and then another 20,000, and then as many as we sent to Vietnam? Short of perhaps an army of a million or more, equipped with all the latest stuff, and maybe even more than that, we are never going to “win” in Afghanistan. I think we should try a different strategy.
The Republicans continue their attempt to find some inappropriate relationship between Obama and the crazy Governor of Illinois, even though it is pretty obvious now that no such relationship exists. Attorney General Fitzpatrick asked Obama to not release his report on this for another week (a report that exonerates Obama and his staff), thus giving the Republicans more time to spread their slanderous accusations through their media empire. It’s like a Whitewater maneuver all over again. Even John McCain has suggested this is a time for cooperation to help solve all the many problems we are facing, but partisanship is so deeply embedded in his party they will not be persuaded. This is just further proof that most Republicans don’t care a whit for the country, only what’s good for them and their wealthy corporate benefactors. I don’t think they’ll be getting many votes out of Michigan for a very long time. They are being brought down by their own apparently endless greed.
LKBIQ:
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.
Lao-tzu
TILT:
After the assassination of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius were forced to leave Rome. Mark Antony took control.
toy store at 3:00 a.m
to play with toys.
By now everyone must have seen the shoe throwing incident at least a hundred times, and it has been analyzed and discussed ad nauseam. No one seems to have focused on what I heard Bush say, which I thought was revealing. I think I heard him say, “I don’t know what his beef was. It must have been weird.” How could Bush not know what his beef was? Does he really believe he is a hero in the eyes of Iraqis? Similarly, whatever his beef was, why would it have been weird? It would seem to me to be perfectly obvious what his beef was, and it was not in the least bit weird. He even said, I believe, this is for the women and children (you have killed). And even when it was explained to Bush that throwing your shoes at someone in Iraq is considered the ultimate insult, Bush said he didn’t feel insulted. Now that is weird.
In the excitement about Obama’s election, the transition, the auto bailout fiasco, and who the cabinet and the new Senators will be, everyone seems to have lost sight of the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. This has been likened to some of the worst of the apartheid events in South Africa. The U.N. has condemned it (but, like, who listens to the U.N. these days). The U.S., of course, is complicit in this illegal and horrible attempt by the Israelis to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza because they have the audacity to lob a few primitive missiles, mostly harmlessly, into Israel. So the Israelis have decided to punish all million and half Palestinians they have trapped in Gaza. They refuse to even let U.N. sponsored goods into that beleaquered place, have turned off their power supply and other necessities, refuse to let in reporters so the world would know of this atrocity, and so on. No one, least of all the U.S., seems willing to intervene in this clearly criminal treatment of Gaza. There is something very wrong with human beings that just stand by and watch this cruelty. And when you realize that Hamas is the legally elected government in Gaza, chosen in an election sponsored by the U.S. and others, the hypocrisy is inescapable. The election didn’t turn out as we wanted so we label Hamas as terrorists and refuse to support them. Democracy in action.
Most everyone seems to agree that we do not have enough troops in Afghanistan to “win,” whatever that is supposed to mean. So the solution is going to be to send in another 20,000 troops. This is clearly not going to be enough to “win” either. So will we send in another 20,000, and then another 20,000, and then as many as we sent to Vietnam? Short of perhaps an army of a million or more, equipped with all the latest stuff, and maybe even more than that, we are never going to “win” in Afghanistan. I think we should try a different strategy.
The Republicans continue their attempt to find some inappropriate relationship between Obama and the crazy Governor of Illinois, even though it is pretty obvious now that no such relationship exists. Attorney General Fitzpatrick asked Obama to not release his report on this for another week (a report that exonerates Obama and his staff), thus giving the Republicans more time to spread their slanderous accusations through their media empire. It’s like a Whitewater maneuver all over again. Even John McCain has suggested this is a time for cooperation to help solve all the many problems we are facing, but partisanship is so deeply embedded in his party they will not be persuaded. This is just further proof that most Republicans don’t care a whit for the country, only what’s good for them and their wealthy corporate benefactors. I don’t think they’ll be getting many votes out of Michigan for a very long time. They are being brought down by their own apparently endless greed.
LKBIQ:
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.
Lao-tzu
TILT:
After the assassination of Caesar, Brutus and Cassius were forced to leave Rome. Mark Antony took control.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The Journey to the West (3)
It’s Sunday. Here is the third installment of my “sort of memoir.” This is to be the basic skeleton that could be fleshed out with much more detail, should I ever desire to write an autobiography, which is unlikely. Having been an avid reader of biographies and autobiographies, as well as a collector of life histories, I know that a truly factual and completely thorough autobiography is an impossibility. First of all, no matter how mundane one’s life might have been, it would be far too detailed to be book-length. Second, and more important, the writer would have to be willing to share moments of his or her life that would almost certainly be too embarrassing to admit. Even beyond that, one would almost certainly be privy to the secrets of others, their parents, lovers, and friends, that no honorable person would expose. Thus writing a complete and honest account of one’s life is, in a sense, the ultimate challenge a writer could face, a test of courage far beyond any other literary form. If I live long enough perhaps I will attempt it, but for now I am engaged in merely outlining my Journey to the West.
The end of the fourth grade, and the summer that followed, continued my predetermined journey to the west. I learned that school was more serious than I had previously believed (or even thought about). This was so because one of my closest friends, Donald, was held back and not permitted to move with the rest of the class to the fifth grade. Although we thought it was peculiar that Donald could still not tell time, we didn’t think that was a sufficient reason to fail him. Looking back, of course there were other reasons. Donald was a clown and a bit of a troublemaker. But it was a sobering moment for all of us.
That summer my mother decided to take me with her to Los Angeles to visit my eccentric Uncle Otto. There will be more on Uncle Otto later, but for now, let me just say he was building his own sailboat, a 35 foot cutter, and said he was going to sail it around the world. This was somewhat unusual in that Uncle Otto and his German wife, Ilse, had never sailed. But Otto, who did not like his first name, and insisted he be called Harold, was undaunted. He had a degree in engineering from Stanford and was also a master mechanic and builder. So Harold and Ilse became part of my life and, being the romantic I was, I immediately idolized them. I learned to use Otto’s drafting instruments and spent the summer designing boats of my own, swimming off the dock, and in general having a good time. Otto even arranged for my mother and I to take our first plane ride, in an old biplane above the city of Los Angeles. It was wonderful. I saw my first TV. In fact, it may well have been the first TV. It was in a window and crowds stopped to ogle it even though it produced mostly a kind of patterned static. Otto took us for rides around the city and the harbor. I wondered what he meant when he said, “they’ll be sending that back to us soon,” as we passed some freight trains loaded with scrap metal destined for Japan.
I also learned to read while I was visiting Uncle Otto. I mean I learned for the first time that what you read might be as important as the fact that you could read. I had always been an avid reader. I don’t know how this came about as I do not recall my mother or father ever reading to me. But I learned quickly and exhausted books in our elementary school library so quickly the librarian suspected me of lying about it. I especially liked a series of children’s books on American Indians. Anyway, at the time I was reading a Big Little Book. These were five cents apiece and were about four inches by two or three inches and were mostly just cheap adventure stories. One day Uncle Otto picked up my book and began reading it out loud: “Bang, the slender young cowboy jumped to his feet! Crash! He buckled on his six-guns! Boom! He leaped aboard his trusty horse…” and like that. Even I immediately understood that I was reading crap, and from that moment on I actually began to pick and choose more carefully.
I experienced one of my most traumatic moments, however, when Harold and Ilse took us to lunch one day. We sat at the counter and everyone ordered from a menu that was posted on the wall above the counter. Uncle Otto asked me what I would like. I said I couldn’t read the menu. He became somewhat upset and asked me again. Then he told my mother that she had to take me to an eye doctor as soon as we returned home. It turned out, of course, that I was extremely myopic and had to wear rather thick glasses. This totally turned my life around as I could no longer play the rough games we played or engage in athletic encounters, and so on. And I was teased, “four-eyes” and all that (see Morialekafa, January 1, 2005). I have no idea why neither my parents or my teachers had not discovered this. As for me, I guess I had assumed that everyone saw the world as I did.
Mother and I returned home by way of Seattle where we visited and stayed with Ausman and Annie. I have never understood just who they were or what their relationship was to us. But they were very nice. Ausman was a longshoreman and they lived in a small comfortable home in Ballard where they had a marvelous cherry tree. I spent the greater part of a day in the tree eating cherries. It never occurred to me there might be worms in them. Ah, the innocence of youth. My youthful innocence was beginning to disappear rather quickly. I stayed up late one night with Ausman listening to the radio. It was sometime in June of 1940. The announcer said that Italy had joined the war against England and France, on the side of Germany. Ausman tried to explain this to me, and although I didn’t understand it very well, I knew it was a terrible thing. I was going on eleven. I had to share a bed with my mother. For the only time in my life I wet the bed. Excruciatingly embarrassing. Fortunately my mother had not heard of Freud.
The end of the fourth grade, and the summer that followed, continued my predetermined journey to the west. I learned that school was more serious than I had previously believed (or even thought about). This was so because one of my closest friends, Donald, was held back and not permitted to move with the rest of the class to the fifth grade. Although we thought it was peculiar that Donald could still not tell time, we didn’t think that was a sufficient reason to fail him. Looking back, of course there were other reasons. Donald was a clown and a bit of a troublemaker. But it was a sobering moment for all of us.
That summer my mother decided to take me with her to Los Angeles to visit my eccentric Uncle Otto. There will be more on Uncle Otto later, but for now, let me just say he was building his own sailboat, a 35 foot cutter, and said he was going to sail it around the world. This was somewhat unusual in that Uncle Otto and his German wife, Ilse, had never sailed. But Otto, who did not like his first name, and insisted he be called Harold, was undaunted. He had a degree in engineering from Stanford and was also a master mechanic and builder. So Harold and Ilse became part of my life and, being the romantic I was, I immediately idolized them. I learned to use Otto’s drafting instruments and spent the summer designing boats of my own, swimming off the dock, and in general having a good time. Otto even arranged for my mother and I to take our first plane ride, in an old biplane above the city of Los Angeles. It was wonderful. I saw my first TV. In fact, it may well have been the first TV. It was in a window and crowds stopped to ogle it even though it produced mostly a kind of patterned static. Otto took us for rides around the city and the harbor. I wondered what he meant when he said, “they’ll be sending that back to us soon,” as we passed some freight trains loaded with scrap metal destined for Japan.
I also learned to read while I was visiting Uncle Otto. I mean I learned for the first time that what you read might be as important as the fact that you could read. I had always been an avid reader. I don’t know how this came about as I do not recall my mother or father ever reading to me. But I learned quickly and exhausted books in our elementary school library so quickly the librarian suspected me of lying about it. I especially liked a series of children’s books on American Indians. Anyway, at the time I was reading a Big Little Book. These were five cents apiece and were about four inches by two or three inches and were mostly just cheap adventure stories. One day Uncle Otto picked up my book and began reading it out loud: “Bang, the slender young cowboy jumped to his feet! Crash! He buckled on his six-guns! Boom! He leaped aboard his trusty horse…” and like that. Even I immediately understood that I was reading crap, and from that moment on I actually began to pick and choose more carefully.
I experienced one of my most traumatic moments, however, when Harold and Ilse took us to lunch one day. We sat at the counter and everyone ordered from a menu that was posted on the wall above the counter. Uncle Otto asked me what I would like. I said I couldn’t read the menu. He became somewhat upset and asked me again. Then he told my mother that she had to take me to an eye doctor as soon as we returned home. It turned out, of course, that I was extremely myopic and had to wear rather thick glasses. This totally turned my life around as I could no longer play the rough games we played or engage in athletic encounters, and so on. And I was teased, “four-eyes” and all that (see Morialekafa, January 1, 2005). I have no idea why neither my parents or my teachers had not discovered this. As for me, I guess I had assumed that everyone saw the world as I did.
Mother and I returned home by way of Seattle where we visited and stayed with Ausman and Annie. I have never understood just who they were or what their relationship was to us. But they were very nice. Ausman was a longshoreman and they lived in a small comfortable home in Ballard where they had a marvelous cherry tree. I spent the greater part of a day in the tree eating cherries. It never occurred to me there might be worms in them. Ah, the innocence of youth. My youthful innocence was beginning to disappear rather quickly. I stayed up late one night with Ausman listening to the radio. It was sometime in June of 1940. The announcer said that Italy had joined the war against England and France, on the side of Germany. Ausman tried to explain this to me, and although I didn’t understand it very well, I knew it was a terrible thing. I was going on eleven. I had to share a bed with my mother. For the only time in my life I wet the bed. Excruciatingly embarrassing. Fortunately my mother had not heard of Freud.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Perusing cookbooks
Strange drunken woman on his
roof refuses to come down
unless he gives her more beer.
Obama opened a web site to elicit questions from American citizens. Was the most asked question about the war in Iraq? No. Was it about the economy? No. Was it about gun control? No. Was it about gay marriage? No. Give up? It was, will you consider legalizing marijuana? It appears that a lot of Americans are fed up with our ridiculous laws respecting marijuana and want it legalized, grown and sold, taxed, and decriminalized. Obama’s staff is supposedly preparing answers to the questions. I can hardly wait. Can we at least hope that the new “car czar” will know more about cars than our drug czars have known about drugs?
I don’t know about you, but I find thumbing through cookbooks and cooking magazines to be terribly frustrating, for a variety of reasons. My wife works as a sous chef and has a lifetime interest in cooking. As a result she is a truly excellent chef/cook and has a large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines. I cannot claim to be much of a cook, but I love to eat and even thinking about eating. Mind you, what I am about to say here is not to be taken as complaining. No, indeed, I count my blessings every day about how lucky we are to get such terrific organic food here in our remote corner of the world, both animal and vegetable. The problem is that what we can get is somewhat limited. It is the things we can’t get that annoy me. For example, in a recent magazine, dedicated to the art of roasting, I came across a recipe for a six rib veal roast. Alas! Your chances of finding a veal roast here are fewer than being struck twice by lightening in the same week. Not only could you not expect to find one, unless you are very rich indeed you wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. The picture in this magazine just sits there making me drool while I am completely helpless to do anything about it. First of all, people here don’t eat veal. There seems to be no tradition of eating veal in this neck of the woods. When our Supermarket first opened they had veal a couple of times. No one bought it. I don’t think this was because it was too expensive, but that no doubt had something to do with it. If we go across the border into Canada we can sometimes find veal, but only thin veal cutlets. I have never solved the mystery of what happens to the rest of the veal. I guess they must send it someplace where people can afford it. The other problem with veal is that we cannot bring it into the U.S. when we buy it in Canada. Mad cow disease, you know. Of course it is common knowledge that a cow has to be three years old before it can have mad cow disease, but that doesn’t matter to those who control these things.
There are apparently no wild boars in North Idaho. I find this rather strange, given that they are exceedingly numerous in places as heavily populated as Germany and Italy. So the delicious boar recipes I read cannot be used. Once in New York City, walking down the street, I saw whole wild boar displayed in a window. What a lovely sight! I’ve never forgotten it. We do, of course, get venison, but you can’t buy it. We have friends who hunt and the deer here are so thick they are basically just pests. Venison is not considered a delicacy.
We don’t get much in the way of seafood either. This is partly understandable due to our distance from the ocean. But the fish we can get are limited, and the market doesn’t go in for anything that might be considered exotic. For instance, again, when the market first began, they once had squid. It was wrapped in cellophane so it was visible. The woman at the check-out stand refused to touch it and professed to not even know what it was. I was apparently the only person to want to buy it. They have never had it again. They do occasionally have clams and mussels, but never octopus or cuttlefish or geoduck or snails or anything remotely of that ilk. Once in a while we can get arctic char in Canada, and lately we can sometimes find frozen smelt (imported from Peru!). Mostly however, around here, it’s just salmon and halibut, salmon and halibut.
Strangely, at least it seems strange to me, they don’t eat rabbit here either. I have never seen rabbit for sale here in our town. We can travel to Canada and buy rabbit once in a while, but they want $25 for a single frozen rabbit. I cannot understand this. I know rabbits are easy, even eager to breed, and I also know they are not hard to dress (or undress as the case may be). So why the exorbitant price? I have no idea, but it is maddening..
Until just this past year it was also very unusual to find lamb here. There was apparently no tradition of eating lamb, just beef and pork. Lately we can get lamb, but of course it is expensive. One year, around this time of year, one of our butchers ordered some lovely racks of lamb. That was three or four years ago. He has never ordered them since. I innocently asked him once why not. He became noticeably upset and told me it was because no one would buy them until he had marked them down so far he was losing money. So we don’t enjoy rack of lamb very often, only when we buy a whole lamb and have it butchered, which we now do every year. We have had quite an influx of new people moving here in the last few years. I think this explains why we now see lamb in the market.
When you read about all kinds of wonderful food but can’t have it, it is upsetting. This is not my only problem with cookbooks, however. For example, I do not consider chicken breasts to be an edible substance. While there are literally hundreds of chicken recipes every year, you would be amazed at how many of them start out with skinless chicken breasts. I now just skip these after the first mention. There also seem to me to be a plethora of recipes for things like grits, okra, and eggplant, People tell me they actually eat these things, but personally I wonder why they even bother to include them. Of course I most usually only read the seafood and meat recipes anyway so I guess this doesn’t matter too much. Happily, here we never run out of pigs’ feet, pig hocks, sidepork, liver, heart, gizzards, drumsticks, tongue, ox tails, and other such staples. Things are not all bad. Pigs, especially, are our friends.
LKBIQ:
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett
TILT:
W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield. He died on Christmas Day, 1946.
roof refuses to come down
unless he gives her more beer.
Obama opened a web site to elicit questions from American citizens. Was the most asked question about the war in Iraq? No. Was it about the economy? No. Was it about gun control? No. Was it about gay marriage? No. Give up? It was, will you consider legalizing marijuana? It appears that a lot of Americans are fed up with our ridiculous laws respecting marijuana and want it legalized, grown and sold, taxed, and decriminalized. Obama’s staff is supposedly preparing answers to the questions. I can hardly wait. Can we at least hope that the new “car czar” will know more about cars than our drug czars have known about drugs?
I don’t know about you, but I find thumbing through cookbooks and cooking magazines to be terribly frustrating, for a variety of reasons. My wife works as a sous chef and has a lifetime interest in cooking. As a result she is a truly excellent chef/cook and has a large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines. I cannot claim to be much of a cook, but I love to eat and even thinking about eating. Mind you, what I am about to say here is not to be taken as complaining. No, indeed, I count my blessings every day about how lucky we are to get such terrific organic food here in our remote corner of the world, both animal and vegetable. The problem is that what we can get is somewhat limited. It is the things we can’t get that annoy me. For example, in a recent magazine, dedicated to the art of roasting, I came across a recipe for a six rib veal roast. Alas! Your chances of finding a veal roast here are fewer than being struck twice by lightening in the same week. Not only could you not expect to find one, unless you are very rich indeed you wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway. The picture in this magazine just sits there making me drool while I am completely helpless to do anything about it. First of all, people here don’t eat veal. There seems to be no tradition of eating veal in this neck of the woods. When our Supermarket first opened they had veal a couple of times. No one bought it. I don’t think this was because it was too expensive, but that no doubt had something to do with it. If we go across the border into Canada we can sometimes find veal, but only thin veal cutlets. I have never solved the mystery of what happens to the rest of the veal. I guess they must send it someplace where people can afford it. The other problem with veal is that we cannot bring it into the U.S. when we buy it in Canada. Mad cow disease, you know. Of course it is common knowledge that a cow has to be three years old before it can have mad cow disease, but that doesn’t matter to those who control these things.
There are apparently no wild boars in North Idaho. I find this rather strange, given that they are exceedingly numerous in places as heavily populated as Germany and Italy. So the delicious boar recipes I read cannot be used. Once in New York City, walking down the street, I saw whole wild boar displayed in a window. What a lovely sight! I’ve never forgotten it. We do, of course, get venison, but you can’t buy it. We have friends who hunt and the deer here are so thick they are basically just pests. Venison is not considered a delicacy.
We don’t get much in the way of seafood either. This is partly understandable due to our distance from the ocean. But the fish we can get are limited, and the market doesn’t go in for anything that might be considered exotic. For instance, again, when the market first began, they once had squid. It was wrapped in cellophane so it was visible. The woman at the check-out stand refused to touch it and professed to not even know what it was. I was apparently the only person to want to buy it. They have never had it again. They do occasionally have clams and mussels, but never octopus or cuttlefish or geoduck or snails or anything remotely of that ilk. Once in a while we can get arctic char in Canada, and lately we can sometimes find frozen smelt (imported from Peru!). Mostly however, around here, it’s just salmon and halibut, salmon and halibut.
Strangely, at least it seems strange to me, they don’t eat rabbit here either. I have never seen rabbit for sale here in our town. We can travel to Canada and buy rabbit once in a while, but they want $25 for a single frozen rabbit. I cannot understand this. I know rabbits are easy, even eager to breed, and I also know they are not hard to dress (or undress as the case may be). So why the exorbitant price? I have no idea, but it is maddening..
Until just this past year it was also very unusual to find lamb here. There was apparently no tradition of eating lamb, just beef and pork. Lately we can get lamb, but of course it is expensive. One year, around this time of year, one of our butchers ordered some lovely racks of lamb. That was three or four years ago. He has never ordered them since. I innocently asked him once why not. He became noticeably upset and told me it was because no one would buy them until he had marked them down so far he was losing money. So we don’t enjoy rack of lamb very often, only when we buy a whole lamb and have it butchered, which we now do every year. We have had quite an influx of new people moving here in the last few years. I think this explains why we now see lamb in the market.
When you read about all kinds of wonderful food but can’t have it, it is upsetting. This is not my only problem with cookbooks, however. For example, I do not consider chicken breasts to be an edible substance. While there are literally hundreds of chicken recipes every year, you would be amazed at how many of them start out with skinless chicken breasts. I now just skip these after the first mention. There also seem to me to be a plethora of recipes for things like grits, okra, and eggplant, People tell me they actually eat these things, but personally I wonder why they even bother to include them. Of course I most usually only read the seafood and meat recipes anyway so I guess this doesn’t matter too much. Happily, here we never run out of pigs’ feet, pig hocks, sidepork, liver, heart, gizzards, drumsticks, tongue, ox tails, and other such staples. Things are not all bad. Pigs, especially, are our friends.
LKBIQ:
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett
TILT:
W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield. He died on Christmas Day, 1946.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Union busting
In domestic dispute, she puts
ex-boyfriend’s clothes in storage
locker, sets off $100,000 fire.
It’s hard to beat Idaho Republicans for dumb. Republican Canyon County Commissioner, Steve Rule, compared Michelle Obama (in her red and black dress) to a frightful black widow spider and added that she was going to be in (infest?) the White House. When criticized for this he said, “Apparently some people were offended…” Apparently? I am offended by pig pucky, Mr. Rule, you should try to squirm your way out of it.
It’s no secret, the Republicans are out to break the unions, specifically the UAW. They see the current crisis as their opportunity to further the Reagan revolution and do away with unions for all time. They are demanding, among other impossible demands, that the UAW bring their wages and benefits in line with those of Toyota, Nissan, and the other Japanese manufacturers that have set up non-union shops in Southern states (with the benefit of generous tax breaks and such). So let me ask a naïve question. Why should American auto workers be told they have to lower their standards to match those of their Japanese competitors? Why should the Japanese car makers not have had to establish their standards to match those of Detroit in the first place? Why were these foreign companies allowed to come in and benefit from lower wages and benefits? Better yet, why are Republicans so against American workers having decent wages and benefits? They are, and have been ever since FDR. Do they not remember how it is that unions won their rights through rioting and battles with strikebreakers over a long period of violent and bloody battles. The UAW and other unions do not enjoy a 40 hour workweek, retirement and health benefits through the generosity of management. The strikes around the turn of the century and into the 1930’s were terrible things, but the conditions that workers had to endure were worse. Are we to begrudge them decent wages and benefits? Should we just return to the days of the robber barons and the sweatshops? Is this really what the Republican party wants? Obviously it is. How else can one explain that wages for workers in the U.S. have actually declined over the past few years. How do you explain the obscene disparity between the pay of CEO’s and the hourly wages of those who actually work to produce things. The inherent self-destructiveness of free market capitalism has finally come home to roost. This is precisely why we are now in this terrible situation we find ourselves in. Republicans not only want to keep it this way, they apparently want to make it even worse. By their actions the other night to kill the bailout of the big 3 automakers, and thus put some 3 million people out of work, they have now signed their own death warrant. Just as it took decades for them to recover from the Hoover disaster, so it will take them probably the same amount of time to recover from the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush fiascos. I believe this will happen unless the famous short-term memory of the electorate somehow comes once again into play. I don’t believe this will happen this time. People are too poor at the moment to worry about gay marriage and gun rights and abortion and the “war on Christmas.” The war on their Christmas pleasures has become all too real. Even their own Dick the Slimy warned the Republicans against voting against Detroit. And Bush will now have to temporarily bail them out and pass the problem on to Obama. The past few years of Republican rule have been an absolute disaster in ways we might not have thought even possible a few years ago. This is not to say they haven’t been aided by Democrats, whose behavior hasn’t been much better. It remains to be seen if Obama can really change things, or if we are now doomed through our own stupidity and greed to continue on our current path to third world membership.
Now we are being told by those in authority what we already knew. The torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was not merely the work of “a few bad apples,” but was orchestrated from on high. Rumsfeld is being labeled as the one chiefly responsible for this horrendous and disgraceful chapter of our history, but there can be little doubt who also approved this policy. Hire some lawyers to change the definitions to match what you would like to do, then do it and claim that it was legal, because your lawyers told you it was. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice and a few others apparently believe we are all stupid enough to fall for this. Perhaps we are. No one has yet been found accountable, and there is some doubt that anyone ever will be. Under Bush/Cheney we have apparently ceased to be a nation of laws. What are we supposed to do now, just shrug and say, “stuff happens.”
Truly I love you
above all else that exists,
laughing, smiling son.
Morialekafa
TILT:
This morning the ground was bare. Currently this evening we have 8” of snow.
ex-boyfriend’s clothes in storage
locker, sets off $100,000 fire.
It’s hard to beat Idaho Republicans for dumb. Republican Canyon County Commissioner, Steve Rule, compared Michelle Obama (in her red and black dress) to a frightful black widow spider and added that she was going to be in (infest?) the White House. When criticized for this he said, “Apparently some people were offended…” Apparently? I am offended by pig pucky, Mr. Rule, you should try to squirm your way out of it.
It’s no secret, the Republicans are out to break the unions, specifically the UAW. They see the current crisis as their opportunity to further the Reagan revolution and do away with unions for all time. They are demanding, among other impossible demands, that the UAW bring their wages and benefits in line with those of Toyota, Nissan, and the other Japanese manufacturers that have set up non-union shops in Southern states (with the benefit of generous tax breaks and such). So let me ask a naïve question. Why should American auto workers be told they have to lower their standards to match those of their Japanese competitors? Why should the Japanese car makers not have had to establish their standards to match those of Detroit in the first place? Why were these foreign companies allowed to come in and benefit from lower wages and benefits? Better yet, why are Republicans so against American workers having decent wages and benefits? They are, and have been ever since FDR. Do they not remember how it is that unions won their rights through rioting and battles with strikebreakers over a long period of violent and bloody battles. The UAW and other unions do not enjoy a 40 hour workweek, retirement and health benefits through the generosity of management. The strikes around the turn of the century and into the 1930’s were terrible things, but the conditions that workers had to endure were worse. Are we to begrudge them decent wages and benefits? Should we just return to the days of the robber barons and the sweatshops? Is this really what the Republican party wants? Obviously it is. How else can one explain that wages for workers in the U.S. have actually declined over the past few years. How do you explain the obscene disparity between the pay of CEO’s and the hourly wages of those who actually work to produce things. The inherent self-destructiveness of free market capitalism has finally come home to roost. This is precisely why we are now in this terrible situation we find ourselves in. Republicans not only want to keep it this way, they apparently want to make it even worse. By their actions the other night to kill the bailout of the big 3 automakers, and thus put some 3 million people out of work, they have now signed their own death warrant. Just as it took decades for them to recover from the Hoover disaster, so it will take them probably the same amount of time to recover from the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush fiascos. I believe this will happen unless the famous short-term memory of the electorate somehow comes once again into play. I don’t believe this will happen this time. People are too poor at the moment to worry about gay marriage and gun rights and abortion and the “war on Christmas.” The war on their Christmas pleasures has become all too real. Even their own Dick the Slimy warned the Republicans against voting against Detroit. And Bush will now have to temporarily bail them out and pass the problem on to Obama. The past few years of Republican rule have been an absolute disaster in ways we might not have thought even possible a few years ago. This is not to say they haven’t been aided by Democrats, whose behavior hasn’t been much better. It remains to be seen if Obama can really change things, or if we are now doomed through our own stupidity and greed to continue on our current path to third world membership.
Now we are being told by those in authority what we already knew. The torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was not merely the work of “a few bad apples,” but was orchestrated from on high. Rumsfeld is being labeled as the one chiefly responsible for this horrendous and disgraceful chapter of our history, but there can be little doubt who also approved this policy. Hire some lawyers to change the definitions to match what you would like to do, then do it and claim that it was legal, because your lawyers told you it was. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice and a few others apparently believe we are all stupid enough to fall for this. Perhaps we are. No one has yet been found accountable, and there is some doubt that anyone ever will be. Under Bush/Cheney we have apparently ceased to be a nation of laws. What are we supposed to do now, just shrug and say, “stuff happens.”
Truly I love you
above all else that exists,
laughing, smiling son.
Morialekafa
TILT:
This morning the ground was bare. Currently this evening we have 8” of snow.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Revisiting Vietnam and Whitewater
Embarrassed man handcuffs wife
to bed during intimate moment,
has to call police to free her.
Here we go again. Obama’s Vietnam is beginning. General Petraeus, who apparently believe his “surge” worked in Iraq, now is calling for a similar surge in Afghanistan. There is some doubt as to how well the surge in Iraq contributed to the decrease in violence in that unfortunate land. Even if it could be proven that it did work, will it also work in Afghanistan, where the situation is quite different? I admit to having no expertise in these matters, but as my brain still functions at least a bit, I cannot help but wonder what sense any of this makes. As I understand it, some 72% of the country is now controlled by the Taliban. They are said to be slowly encircling Kabul, the capital. Afghanistan is a large country of exceedingly rough terrain with few decent roads, most of which is controlled by various warlords. What can another 20,000 troops do in this situation? Apparently the plan is to protect Kabul and President Karzai, and to protect the citizens from the Taliban, establish schools, protect women’s rights, and so on. If there is some other goal for our being in Afghanistan it is no longer mentioned. It appears to me that we are apt to have another airlift as we did previously in Berlin, as the Taliban are actively cutting off our supply routes and slowly winning the “war.” Does this make sense? I cannot believe that 20,000 more troops can do much of anything other than protect Kabul. So, unless we come to some other plan, like sending even more and more troops as we did in Vietnam, the best we can hope to achieve is some kind of stalemate. Is that what we are going to do? Keep an insufficient number of troops in Afghanistan to try to prevent the Taliban from capturing Kabul? This would provide some kind of victory? This is crazy, as near as I can tell. It is our continued presence there that seems to be uniting the country behind the Taliban and against our occupation. Rather than sending more troops, which will inevitably lead to sending more troops, we should seek some way of getting out as gracefully as possible. While it might be a bitter pill to swallow, we are not going to “win” in Afghanistan, not without a million or more troops and some kind of full scale invasion. Obviously that is not going to happen, so why just send more sacrificial troops on a lost cause? Then there is Pakistan. Are we going to end up going there also? And then Iran? Obama had better rethink American Foreign Policy, and do it quickly, before it is too late to salvage anything out of the Middle East.
Not only does Obama have to face a dangerous Vietnam moment in Afghanistan, he now is also facing another Whitewater moment. Even though he is obviously innocent of having anything to do with the scandal in Illinois over his vacant Senate seat, the Republicans are going to try everything they can to link him to the crazy Illinois Governor. And the MSM are going along with this nonsense as usual. David Schuster, who is proving to be a poor replacement for David Gregory, just keeps on insisting there are important questions that need to be answered right now about Obama’s links to this episode of corrupt Illinois politics. Even when his own commentators tried to politely wave him off, he just kept on insisting there has to be something questionable involved. It is obvious that Obama is “clean” in this respect, and was not involved in picking his replacement, and, indeed, went out of his way to stay out of it, the Republicans and their media toadies are going to keep at it, in the most picky detailed way they can, just as they mercilessly pursued the Clintons. When Obama was asked what was wrong with Illinois politics he reportedly said something to the effect that when politicians are in politics for what they can do for themselves instead of what they can do for the country this is what happens. Is that not a perfect description of how the Republican party has acted for the past few years? Can anyone say they have done anything positive for the country in the past eight years? Name just one thing they have done for the country instead of their party and their corporate cronies. Now they are continuing along the same disastrous path. When I was a boy I was told that the Republicans were for business, whereas the Democrats were for laborers. This has not changed in my lifetime, except that the stakes have grown higher, the tactics more sleazy, the greed more apparent, morality more absent, ethics abandoned, and the common good ignored in favor of the wealthy, who have become now the obscenely wealthy, and still want more and more. And our pretense of democracy has been exposed for the lie it has become.
LKBIQ:
“What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the company.”
Charles Wilson
TILT:
Cats have been associated with humans for at least 9,500 years.
to bed during intimate moment,
has to call police to free her.
Here we go again. Obama’s Vietnam is beginning. General Petraeus, who apparently believe his “surge” worked in Iraq, now is calling for a similar surge in Afghanistan. There is some doubt as to how well the surge in Iraq contributed to the decrease in violence in that unfortunate land. Even if it could be proven that it did work, will it also work in Afghanistan, where the situation is quite different? I admit to having no expertise in these matters, but as my brain still functions at least a bit, I cannot help but wonder what sense any of this makes. As I understand it, some 72% of the country is now controlled by the Taliban. They are said to be slowly encircling Kabul, the capital. Afghanistan is a large country of exceedingly rough terrain with few decent roads, most of which is controlled by various warlords. What can another 20,000 troops do in this situation? Apparently the plan is to protect Kabul and President Karzai, and to protect the citizens from the Taliban, establish schools, protect women’s rights, and so on. If there is some other goal for our being in Afghanistan it is no longer mentioned. It appears to me that we are apt to have another airlift as we did previously in Berlin, as the Taliban are actively cutting off our supply routes and slowly winning the “war.” Does this make sense? I cannot believe that 20,000 more troops can do much of anything other than protect Kabul. So, unless we come to some other plan, like sending even more and more troops as we did in Vietnam, the best we can hope to achieve is some kind of stalemate. Is that what we are going to do? Keep an insufficient number of troops in Afghanistan to try to prevent the Taliban from capturing Kabul? This would provide some kind of victory? This is crazy, as near as I can tell. It is our continued presence there that seems to be uniting the country behind the Taliban and against our occupation. Rather than sending more troops, which will inevitably lead to sending more troops, we should seek some way of getting out as gracefully as possible. While it might be a bitter pill to swallow, we are not going to “win” in Afghanistan, not without a million or more troops and some kind of full scale invasion. Obviously that is not going to happen, so why just send more sacrificial troops on a lost cause? Then there is Pakistan. Are we going to end up going there also? And then Iran? Obama had better rethink American Foreign Policy, and do it quickly, before it is too late to salvage anything out of the Middle East.
Not only does Obama have to face a dangerous Vietnam moment in Afghanistan, he now is also facing another Whitewater moment. Even though he is obviously innocent of having anything to do with the scandal in Illinois over his vacant Senate seat, the Republicans are going to try everything they can to link him to the crazy Illinois Governor. And the MSM are going along with this nonsense as usual. David Schuster, who is proving to be a poor replacement for David Gregory, just keeps on insisting there are important questions that need to be answered right now about Obama’s links to this episode of corrupt Illinois politics. Even when his own commentators tried to politely wave him off, he just kept on insisting there has to be something questionable involved. It is obvious that Obama is “clean” in this respect, and was not involved in picking his replacement, and, indeed, went out of his way to stay out of it, the Republicans and their media toadies are going to keep at it, in the most picky detailed way they can, just as they mercilessly pursued the Clintons. When Obama was asked what was wrong with Illinois politics he reportedly said something to the effect that when politicians are in politics for what they can do for themselves instead of what they can do for the country this is what happens. Is that not a perfect description of how the Republican party has acted for the past few years? Can anyone say they have done anything positive for the country in the past eight years? Name just one thing they have done for the country instead of their party and their corporate cronies. Now they are continuing along the same disastrous path. When I was a boy I was told that the Republicans were for business, whereas the Democrats were for laborers. This has not changed in my lifetime, except that the stakes have grown higher, the tactics more sleazy, the greed more apparent, morality more absent, ethics abandoned, and the common good ignored in favor of the wealthy, who have become now the obscenely wealthy, and still want more and more. And our pretense of democracy has been exposed for the lie it has become.
LKBIQ:
“What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the company.”
Charles Wilson
TILT:
Cats have been associated with humans for at least 9,500 years.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Christmas Carols
Three young ladies fired
from KFC for bathing
in oversized kitchen sink.
Perhaps I’ve just grown too old, but I confess I do not like Christmas Carols. I’m not certain I ever liked them, except for the fact that they symbolized Christmas which I do like. It seems to me you could not possibly find another collection of songs so insipid. I have reached the point where I cringe when I am forced to listen to them, and of course at this time of year you cannot possibly escape. I mean, like, the lyrics are absurd, at least many of them. What am I to make of “round yon virgin?” If she is that round it doesn’t seem credible to me that she is also a virgin. Then there are lyrics where the night wind talks to lambs, and the lambs, in turn, talk to the shepherds. I don’t believe in talking lambs. There are other lyrics that I cannot make head or tail of: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb,” does nothing for me, and it certainly doesn’t cheer me up for having a jolly good time. “Bruise in us the Serpent’s head” I don’t get either. An almost ubiquitous feature of these annual noises is the sound of angels singing, “sing, choir of angels,” or “Angels singing through the night.” Frankly, if I ever hear angels singing I’m heading for the nearest psychiatrist.
Also, this time of year, if you don’t like the religious carols, where can you turn? How about those old standbys like “Jingle Bell Rock,” a real musical treat. Then there is “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” a song so ridiculous it made Gene Autrey a millionaire. Of course “Frosty the Snowman” is a catchy little tune, especially if you are interested in anthropomorphic snowmen. “Must be Santa” is so dumb I guess it has universal appeal. I’ve always rather liked “Jingle Bells,” although there is a line that I wonder about: a gent drives by and the lyric goes, “He laughed as there I sprawling lie but quickly drove away.” As this is a Christmas song I assume this doesn’t mean that he just left the guy there to freeze to death. He must have just thought it was funny to see someone sprawled out in the snow. At least I hope that is the gist of the matter. Years ago I tried to pretend that I liked all these dreary or ridiculous songs but I’m old enough now so that I don’t even have to pretend to like them. So bah, humbug!
It has certainly been a great Christmas season for the financial industry that received a 700 billion dollar gift, no questions asked. There were other huge generous gifts as well. Today the House voted to give 15 billion to the Big 3 auto makers, but those Republican scrooges in the Senate may not agree to it. In any case, the 15 billion is apparently going to come with so many strings attached, along with a “car czar,” the bulk of the money will probably be eaten up by administrative costs before it ever gets to the auto makers. Seven hundred billion to the financial industry who got us into this mess in the first place, no strings attached. Fifteen billion begrudgingly to the auto manufacturers, many strings. This fits in beautifully with the Republican belief that the way to make money is to have money. They don’t believe in work, and believe that actually working with your hands to actually produce something is beneath them. They point to their Japanese auto plants in the South as examples of successful auto-making. But they don’t mention the huge subsidies they have given these companies in the form of tax breaks and etc., probably to the tune of billions. If I didn’t know just how much Republicans loved labor unions I might suspect there is a bit of union busting involved. I have a suspicious mind.
LKBIQ:
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis
TILT:
The late Studs Terkel was named after Studs Lonigan, a fictional character in a trilogy by James T. Farrell.
from KFC for bathing
in oversized kitchen sink.
Perhaps I’ve just grown too old, but I confess I do not like Christmas Carols. I’m not certain I ever liked them, except for the fact that they symbolized Christmas which I do like. It seems to me you could not possibly find another collection of songs so insipid. I have reached the point where I cringe when I am forced to listen to them, and of course at this time of year you cannot possibly escape. I mean, like, the lyrics are absurd, at least many of them. What am I to make of “round yon virgin?” If she is that round it doesn’t seem credible to me that she is also a virgin. Then there are lyrics where the night wind talks to lambs, and the lambs, in turn, talk to the shepherds. I don’t believe in talking lambs. There are other lyrics that I cannot make head or tail of: “Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, Sealed in the stone-cold tomb,” does nothing for me, and it certainly doesn’t cheer me up for having a jolly good time. “Bruise in us the Serpent’s head” I don’t get either. An almost ubiquitous feature of these annual noises is the sound of angels singing, “sing, choir of angels,” or “Angels singing through the night.” Frankly, if I ever hear angels singing I’m heading for the nearest psychiatrist.
Also, this time of year, if you don’t like the religious carols, where can you turn? How about those old standbys like “Jingle Bell Rock,” a real musical treat. Then there is “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” a song so ridiculous it made Gene Autrey a millionaire. Of course “Frosty the Snowman” is a catchy little tune, especially if you are interested in anthropomorphic snowmen. “Must be Santa” is so dumb I guess it has universal appeal. I’ve always rather liked “Jingle Bells,” although there is a line that I wonder about: a gent drives by and the lyric goes, “He laughed as there I sprawling lie but quickly drove away.” As this is a Christmas song I assume this doesn’t mean that he just left the guy there to freeze to death. He must have just thought it was funny to see someone sprawled out in the snow. At least I hope that is the gist of the matter. Years ago I tried to pretend that I liked all these dreary or ridiculous songs but I’m old enough now so that I don’t even have to pretend to like them. So bah, humbug!
It has certainly been a great Christmas season for the financial industry that received a 700 billion dollar gift, no questions asked. There were other huge generous gifts as well. Today the House voted to give 15 billion to the Big 3 auto makers, but those Republican scrooges in the Senate may not agree to it. In any case, the 15 billion is apparently going to come with so many strings attached, along with a “car czar,” the bulk of the money will probably be eaten up by administrative costs before it ever gets to the auto makers. Seven hundred billion to the financial industry who got us into this mess in the first place, no strings attached. Fifteen billion begrudgingly to the auto manufacturers, many strings. This fits in beautifully with the Republican belief that the way to make money is to have money. They don’t believe in work, and believe that actually working with your hands to actually produce something is beneath them. They point to their Japanese auto plants in the South as examples of successful auto-making. But they don’t mention the huge subsidies they have given these companies in the form of tax breaks and etc., probably to the tune of billions. If I didn’t know just how much Republicans loved labor unions I might suspect there is a bit of union busting involved. I have a suspicious mind.
LKBIQ:
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
Don Marquis
TILT:
The late Studs Terkel was named after Studs Lonigan, a fictional character in a trilogy by James T. Farrell.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
The magical "if"
“Butt bandit” gets 13 months
for leaving greasy naked
butt prints on store windows
Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich has apparently taken political corruption to a new low (or high?). As four of the past seven Illinois governors have ended up in big trouble for corruption, this must have taken some doing. It appears that Obama had the good sense to keep a great distance between himself and this latest Chicago crook masquerading as a politician. As we will no doubt hear about nothing else for days I am not going to comment at this time.
I am more interested at the moment in considering the powerful, magical “if.” If is a word that carries a tremendous burden in peoples’ lives. Among other things, it allows us to believe in magic even when magic fails. When a magical act fails we say, well, if I had used a better doll and/or more pins, it would have worked. Or, if only I had used a more powerful witch doctor it would have worked. Or, if my ingredients had not accidentally got wet, it would have worked perfectly. Or, if I had obeyed the taboo on sex before casting the spell, it would have worked. But you get the point, the “if” allows one to continue to believe even in the face of failure. It allows magic to continue to flourish no matter what.
Interestingly, the “if” word also allows criminals to continue to believe in crime. If only that off-duty police officer hadn’t stumbled by at the wrong moment, or, if only the getaway car had started, or if I had wiped off my fingerprints, or if Jimbo hadn’t squealed on me, or if the alarm hadn’t gone off prematurely, or if…It’s magical, the “if” word. It allows one to rationalize failure time after time, and thus allows one to continue a life of crime no matter how many failures one may have.
We all use the “if” word all the time. Usually this occurs in relatively unimportant situations that require no particular emotion or significance. If we hadn’t taken the wrong turn we’d have been here sooner. Of, if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had any eggs. Or if I had dressed more appropriately I would not have been so cold. Or, if I hadn’t stopped to buy the beer I could have seen the sunset. And so on.
But the use of the “if” word, or especially its overuse, can have much more sinister implications. It can, I believe, in some individuals, lead to a full blown mental illness (although you won’t find any “if psychosis” listed in the Diagnostic Manual of the Psychiatric Association). It is when one starts to dwell on the “ifs” of one’s life that it can turn pathological. If my parents had been wealthy instead of poor, and if I had been born in a different time, and if I could have had a better education, and if we had known more influential people, and if I had had a better start in life, and if I hadn’t had to get married when I did, and if my wife was more understanding, I might have been able to get a better job and not be stuck here on the garbage truck. When one regards oneself as a relative failure, and begins to dwell obsessively on the “ifs,” it can become a genuine problem. Granted these are extreme cases but I know of a couple people pretty much like this.
Then there are all the political “ifs.” Think how different things would be if Al Gore had been elected President. Think what it would be like if Sarah Palin should ever be elected President. Think what might have been if the Democrats had impeached George the Dull, or Dick the Slimy. Think how better things would be if we had universal health care. Better yet, think how things could be if we had a Congress that had any interest in looking out for the public interest. Think of how little evil there would be in the world if there were no human beings. Think if there is any symbolic significance in the fact that live spelled backwards is evil. But if you think too much or too deeply on the human condition you may go mad. Yes, it’s getting that bad.
Desolation,
is the path of the Victors,
but also their shame
Morialekafa
TILT:
It is still Google 100%, Morialekafa 0. Alpowa is a word that does not appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it does appear on Google. I’m trying.
for leaving greasy naked
butt prints on store windows
Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich has apparently taken political corruption to a new low (or high?). As four of the past seven Illinois governors have ended up in big trouble for corruption, this must have taken some doing. It appears that Obama had the good sense to keep a great distance between himself and this latest Chicago crook masquerading as a politician. As we will no doubt hear about nothing else for days I am not going to comment at this time.
I am more interested at the moment in considering the powerful, magical “if.” If is a word that carries a tremendous burden in peoples’ lives. Among other things, it allows us to believe in magic even when magic fails. When a magical act fails we say, well, if I had used a better doll and/or more pins, it would have worked. Or, if only I had used a more powerful witch doctor it would have worked. Or, if my ingredients had not accidentally got wet, it would have worked perfectly. Or, if I had obeyed the taboo on sex before casting the spell, it would have worked. But you get the point, the “if” allows one to continue to believe even in the face of failure. It allows magic to continue to flourish no matter what.
Interestingly, the “if” word also allows criminals to continue to believe in crime. If only that off-duty police officer hadn’t stumbled by at the wrong moment, or, if only the getaway car had started, or if I had wiped off my fingerprints, or if Jimbo hadn’t squealed on me, or if the alarm hadn’t gone off prematurely, or if…It’s magical, the “if” word. It allows one to rationalize failure time after time, and thus allows one to continue a life of crime no matter how many failures one may have.
We all use the “if” word all the time. Usually this occurs in relatively unimportant situations that require no particular emotion or significance. If we hadn’t taken the wrong turn we’d have been here sooner. Of, if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had any eggs. Or if I had dressed more appropriately I would not have been so cold. Or, if I hadn’t stopped to buy the beer I could have seen the sunset. And so on.
But the use of the “if” word, or especially its overuse, can have much more sinister implications. It can, I believe, in some individuals, lead to a full blown mental illness (although you won’t find any “if psychosis” listed in the Diagnostic Manual of the Psychiatric Association). It is when one starts to dwell on the “ifs” of one’s life that it can turn pathological. If my parents had been wealthy instead of poor, and if I had been born in a different time, and if I could have had a better education, and if we had known more influential people, and if I had had a better start in life, and if I hadn’t had to get married when I did, and if my wife was more understanding, I might have been able to get a better job and not be stuck here on the garbage truck. When one regards oneself as a relative failure, and begins to dwell obsessively on the “ifs,” it can become a genuine problem. Granted these are extreme cases but I know of a couple people pretty much like this.
Then there are all the political “ifs.” Think how different things would be if Al Gore had been elected President. Think what it would be like if Sarah Palin should ever be elected President. Think what might have been if the Democrats had impeached George the Dull, or Dick the Slimy. Think how better things would be if we had universal health care. Better yet, think how things could be if we had a Congress that had any interest in looking out for the public interest. Think of how little evil there would be in the world if there were no human beings. Think if there is any symbolic significance in the fact that live spelled backwards is evil. But if you think too much or too deeply on the human condition you may go mad. Yes, it’s getting that bad.
Desolation,
is the path of the Victors,
but also their shame
Morialekafa
TILT:
It is still Google 100%, Morialekafa 0. Alpowa is a word that does not appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it does appear on Google. I’m trying.
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Jounrey to the West (2)
For those thousands of readers who were waiting so eagerly for the second installment of "The Journey to the West," my "sort of memoir," that was supposed to have appeared yesterday (Sunday), I apologize. I was called unexpectedly to Seattle to perform a thankless task. We returned just now, within the half hour, with our ancient Dodge pickup ("Big Blue") so overloaded with miscellaneous furniture, computer gear, books, clothing, dishes, desk, bed, and uncounted videotapes, cd's, and miscellaneous, it would have made you believe the Joads actually traveled by limousine. We wanted to celebrate the success of this unpleasant mission with a bottle of champagne, but, alas, not a single bottle was to be found here at Sandhill. In any case:
The Journey to the West (2)
I do not recall being particularly traumatized by starting the first grade. It was only after it began that I suffered from a kind of identify crisis and experienced the full forces of peer pressure and conformity. My mother was a University graduate and somewhat older than most of the other mothers, and she had somewhat higher aspirations for her only child than most. As a result of this she dressed me for school in short pants and made me wear those neckties held on by elastic. As all of the other boys wore long pants, and neckties were unheard of for the sons of mostly miners and laborers, I was immediately perceived as someone even more sissified than Little Lord Fauntleroy. I was not helped much by my name either, Lewis LeRoy Langness. Being a reasonably bright little tyke I removed my necktie upon entering the school, left it in my desk, and soon had a large collection. And I pressured my mother about the short pants, pointing out that no one else wore such things. Of course I eventually prevailed, conformity was achieved, and I began to take my place in the schoolyard as well as our little town.
I do not have very strong memories of most of my life. But I remember well, even to this day, elementary school. I think this is because your humiliations may be etched more deeply into your memory than your occasional successes. One such mishap occurred when I was drafted into our first grade play. I have no idea what it was all about. But I remember being dressed up in some ridiculous costume, given a small toy tin trumpet, and instructed on delivering my one and only line. I was to come on stage, blow a blast on my trumpet, and announce, “Her majesty, the queen.” During rehearsals this went very well. But on the night of the first performance, when I emerged on the stage, although I blew mightily, no sound emerged from the trumpet. Undaunted, I returned to the wings, made a new entrance, blew a mighty blast, and announce, “Her queen, the majesty.” The audience, composed almost exclusively of parents, thought this was very funny. I did not. In the second grade I played a man with a hoe so enthusiastically I was castigated for damaging the hardwood floor. Then, in the third grade, I was dressed up in an absolutely absurd medieval fluffy costume and made to sit behind a open picture frame, pretending to be some famous painting (I know not which). I was made to do this while one of my least favorite girls, Sarah Jean, dressed in baggy long stockings, played some awful screechy tune on her violin. By some clever mugging I managed to upstage her, much to the chagrin of the director. By the fourth grade I had endured all the humiliation I could stand from our attempts at thespianism. I rebelled, completely, stubbornly, forcefully, absolutely, and thus ended my career as an actor forever.
Also, I recall, on the very first day of the second grade, the teacher went around the room and asked every child to sing. I guess she wanted to start some kind of choir or something. Anyway, having never sung much of anything, I tried, but was a dismal failure. She said to me with disdain, “you can’t sing.” Again, I was humiliated, to say nothing of angry, as I had never claimed to be able to sing, didn’t want to sing, and couldn’t understand why in the world she wanted me to sing in the first place. I determined, then and there, that adults, even teachers and parents, have little or no respect for children.
Although I was very young when I began school, five just turning six, I found myself attracted to the opposite sex. At least to one member of that universe. Her name was Eline, and I think I was drawn to her because she was somewhat more dark complexioned than the other girls. She wasn’t an ethnic of any kind, just slightly darker than the sea of white faces that surrounded me on all sides. I thought she was pretty (she did not grow up to be pretty). I sat several desks behind her and watched her sort of worshipfully from a distance. It took my mind off Velma, who sat across the aisle from me, and wet her pants faithfully almost every day. Velma was very poor, lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and soon disappeared from my life. I have no idea what happened to her, but I did not miss her.
We were a pretty happy bunch in elementary school, especially during recesses. We scrapped and played games and giggled and tried hard to please our teachers and parents. It was our world and we thought about nothing else except the reality of everyday life in a small town and small school. Thinking back on it now, it was sort of an idyllic time. Things became more and more serious as we grew older and older. One final note here on humiliation: I was the only child in my fourth grade class to fail to win a Rice Penmanship Award. Sigh.
The Journey to the West (2)
I do not recall being particularly traumatized by starting the first grade. It was only after it began that I suffered from a kind of identify crisis and experienced the full forces of peer pressure and conformity. My mother was a University graduate and somewhat older than most of the other mothers, and she had somewhat higher aspirations for her only child than most. As a result of this she dressed me for school in short pants and made me wear those neckties held on by elastic. As all of the other boys wore long pants, and neckties were unheard of for the sons of mostly miners and laborers, I was immediately perceived as someone even more sissified than Little Lord Fauntleroy. I was not helped much by my name either, Lewis LeRoy Langness. Being a reasonably bright little tyke I removed my necktie upon entering the school, left it in my desk, and soon had a large collection. And I pressured my mother about the short pants, pointing out that no one else wore such things. Of course I eventually prevailed, conformity was achieved, and I began to take my place in the schoolyard as well as our little town.
I do not have very strong memories of most of my life. But I remember well, even to this day, elementary school. I think this is because your humiliations may be etched more deeply into your memory than your occasional successes. One such mishap occurred when I was drafted into our first grade play. I have no idea what it was all about. But I remember being dressed up in some ridiculous costume, given a small toy tin trumpet, and instructed on delivering my one and only line. I was to come on stage, blow a blast on my trumpet, and announce, “Her majesty, the queen.” During rehearsals this went very well. But on the night of the first performance, when I emerged on the stage, although I blew mightily, no sound emerged from the trumpet. Undaunted, I returned to the wings, made a new entrance, blew a mighty blast, and announce, “Her queen, the majesty.” The audience, composed almost exclusively of parents, thought this was very funny. I did not. In the second grade I played a man with a hoe so enthusiastically I was castigated for damaging the hardwood floor. Then, in the third grade, I was dressed up in an absolutely absurd medieval fluffy costume and made to sit behind a open picture frame, pretending to be some famous painting (I know not which). I was made to do this while one of my least favorite girls, Sarah Jean, dressed in baggy long stockings, played some awful screechy tune on her violin. By some clever mugging I managed to upstage her, much to the chagrin of the director. By the fourth grade I had endured all the humiliation I could stand from our attempts at thespianism. I rebelled, completely, stubbornly, forcefully, absolutely, and thus ended my career as an actor forever.
Also, I recall, on the very first day of the second grade, the teacher went around the room and asked every child to sing. I guess she wanted to start some kind of choir or something. Anyway, having never sung much of anything, I tried, but was a dismal failure. She said to me with disdain, “you can’t sing.” Again, I was humiliated, to say nothing of angry, as I had never claimed to be able to sing, didn’t want to sing, and couldn’t understand why in the world she wanted me to sing in the first place. I determined, then and there, that adults, even teachers and parents, have little or no respect for children.
Although I was very young when I began school, five just turning six, I found myself attracted to the opposite sex. At least to one member of that universe. Her name was Eline, and I think I was drawn to her because she was somewhat more dark complexioned than the other girls. She wasn’t an ethnic of any kind, just slightly darker than the sea of white faces that surrounded me on all sides. I thought she was pretty (she did not grow up to be pretty). I sat several desks behind her and watched her sort of worshipfully from a distance. It took my mind off Velma, who sat across the aisle from me, and wet her pants faithfully almost every day. Velma was very poor, lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and soon disappeared from my life. I have no idea what happened to her, but I did not miss her.
We were a pretty happy bunch in elementary school, especially during recesses. We scrapped and played games and giggled and tried hard to please our teachers and parents. It was our world and we thought about nothing else except the reality of everyday life in a small town and small school. Thinking back on it now, it was sort of an idyllic time. Things became more and more serious as we grew older and older. One final note here on humiliation: I was the only child in my fourth grade class to fail to win a Rice Penmanship Award. Sigh.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
The auto business
I am hopelessly confused (either again or as usual, I’m not sure). It’s this auto business that I simply do not understand, and I’m not certain it even is understandable. I saw today an article in which a UCLA economist has suggested that GM’s problems could be served by letting them be taken over by Toyota. His primary argument seems to be that as Toyota is a successful company, they should be able to take over GM, incorporate it, and thereby solve the problem of GM’s pending insolvency. This would be accomplished by the private sector without the U.S. government being involved. Whether this is a good idea or not I do not know. But it raises questions for me that simply exacerbate my feelings of ignorance about such matters. I have always wondered, for example, how it is that Toyota, Nissan, Subaru, all Japanese companies, could operate plants in the U.S. making a profit while our own auto companies were busily outsourcing and complaining about things. Some have suggested that this is simply because the Japanese make better cars. Others have said that it is because the Japanese companies are not unionized and thus do not have the same expenses for retirement, health care, and whatever. Leaving aside the question of who makes the better cars for the moment, why are Japanese companies operating in the United States, and hiring U.S. workers, allowed to operate by apparently different rules in the first place? Is it merely an accident of history that they are not unionized?
More importantly, to me anyway, is the question of a domestic auto industry. One of the arguments for bailing out our homegrown auto industry is that it is important to have a domestic industry. Toyota, et al, although they operate on U.S. soil and hire U.S. workers are not considered domestic. So what argument is there for having a domestic auto industry? Is it because if we were attacked by some unknown enemy we could not depend upon Toyota or Subaru to manufacture for the national defense? If this is so, why do we allow them here? As this seems to me to be kind of far-fetched, perhaps we just need a domestic auto industry for national pride, and to insure employment for so many of our citizens. But going by what is happening, national pride would not seem to be much of a consideration. And jobs could be provided just as well by these interlopers, if we could depend on them. But that is the basic question, could we depend on them if they are foreign owned and operate seemingly under different rules?
Anyway, if the Japanese companies are doing so well, and if our own auto companies are not, are, indeed dinosaurs as some claim, why should we bail them out instead of letting them just fail along with the dinosaurs? If it is true that we need a domestic auto industry whey should we not nationalize it and protect it from unfair competition? This is not a case of auto manufacturers building cars overseas with cheap labor, they are building them right here with the same labor the domestics use, but apparently without having to pay as much because of the non-unionization. In other words, I guess this means that unions are bad things and that workers should not be able to organize for their best interests. This seems to me very anti-American, but if it is acceptable I should think Republicans would be all for it, they’re constantly harping about the evils of unions.
One other question that comes to mind is what about the overseas businesses of Ford, GM, and Chrysler? Do they operate at similar disadvantages there? And if so, why? It’s not as though they are purely “domestic” themselves. They are every bit as international as are Toyota and the other Japanese companies so why should they play by different rules? If Toyota, whose sales are slumping along with GM’s, are not asking for a bailout, why should GM. If they were asking for a bailout who would they be asking? The Japanese? But why would the Japanese want to bail out a company employing U.S. workers? If things got really bad for them why wouldn’t they just withdraw to Japan?
See, I told you I was hopelessly confused. My instincts tell me we should not bail anyone out. My national pride tells me we need our own auto industry. My humanitarian urges insist we cannot let millions more go unemployed. My sense of fair play insists we should make all the auto companies play by the same rules. My sense of outrage tell me we have been betrayed by our own government and the corporations, acting in tandem, for a long time. We desperately need some dramatic changes, probably more dramatic than Obama will provide, but at the moment, he’s the only game in town.
LKBIQ:
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen
TILT:
Alan Dundes, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkley, received death threats for an article he wrote about homoerotic aspects of American football.
More importantly, to me anyway, is the question of a domestic auto industry. One of the arguments for bailing out our homegrown auto industry is that it is important to have a domestic industry. Toyota, et al, although they operate on U.S. soil and hire U.S. workers are not considered domestic. So what argument is there for having a domestic auto industry? Is it because if we were attacked by some unknown enemy we could not depend upon Toyota or Subaru to manufacture for the national defense? If this is so, why do we allow them here? As this seems to me to be kind of far-fetched, perhaps we just need a domestic auto industry for national pride, and to insure employment for so many of our citizens. But going by what is happening, national pride would not seem to be much of a consideration. And jobs could be provided just as well by these interlopers, if we could depend on them. But that is the basic question, could we depend on them if they are foreign owned and operate seemingly under different rules?
Anyway, if the Japanese companies are doing so well, and if our own auto companies are not, are, indeed dinosaurs as some claim, why should we bail them out instead of letting them just fail along with the dinosaurs? If it is true that we need a domestic auto industry whey should we not nationalize it and protect it from unfair competition? This is not a case of auto manufacturers building cars overseas with cheap labor, they are building them right here with the same labor the domestics use, but apparently without having to pay as much because of the non-unionization. In other words, I guess this means that unions are bad things and that workers should not be able to organize for their best interests. This seems to me very anti-American, but if it is acceptable I should think Republicans would be all for it, they’re constantly harping about the evils of unions.
One other question that comes to mind is what about the overseas businesses of Ford, GM, and Chrysler? Do they operate at similar disadvantages there? And if so, why? It’s not as though they are purely “domestic” themselves. They are every bit as international as are Toyota and the other Japanese companies so why should they play by different rules? If Toyota, whose sales are slumping along with GM’s, are not asking for a bailout, why should GM. If they were asking for a bailout who would they be asking? The Japanese? But why would the Japanese want to bail out a company employing U.S. workers? If things got really bad for them why wouldn’t they just withdraw to Japan?
See, I told you I was hopelessly confused. My instincts tell me we should not bail anyone out. My national pride tells me we need our own auto industry. My humanitarian urges insist we cannot let millions more go unemployed. My sense of fair play insists we should make all the auto companies play by the same rules. My sense of outrage tell me we have been betrayed by our own government and the corporations, acting in tandem, for a long time. We desperately need some dramatic changes, probably more dramatic than Obama will provide, but at the moment, he’s the only game in town.
LKBIQ:
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen
TILT:
Alan Dundes, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkley, received death threats for an article he wrote about homoerotic aspects of American football.
Friday, December 05, 2008
Prohibition lives!
She throws his drink out
of the car, he smashes her
face with his cheeseburger.
Seventy-five years ago today Prohibition officially ended (1933). Prohibition, you no doubt have heard of our 13 year total failure at trying to legislate morality. With prohibition otherwise law-abiding Americans by the millions were turned into criminals, or would have been had the enforcement of prohibition been much more effective than it was. Bootleggers flourished, stills cropped up everywhere, people made gin in their bathtubs, and some of the booze was so bad it actually caused people to lose their vision. Prohibition also gave us our famous gangster culture with the likes of Al Capone and many others. The crime rate soared as did the murder rate as gangsters fought each other over lucrative turfs and forced saloonkeepers into buying their product rather than a competitors (which might well have been a superior product). It was a wild time indeed, with flappers and the Charleston, and short hair and skirts and cigarettes for women, the jazz age, the roaring twenties, and the whole bit, pretty much summed up in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby.
But alas, prohibition lives! We don’t call it prohibition these days, and it has nothing to do with drugs like beer and wine, whiskey and gin, rum and vodka, and the hundreds of other alcoholic beverages that can now be purchased legally. We call it “the war on drugs” and it has to do with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, morphine, and many derivatives of those actually quite useful products, especially when used by the medical profession. We apparently learned nothing from our earlier attempts at legislating morality. We now have gangs killing each other over turf, illegal smuggling and manufacturing, murders by the score (5000 drug related deaths in Mexico alone last year), and hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, often for relatively minor drug offenses, particularly involving marijuana. As I recall (from reading and hearing about it – I’m not really that old), FDR started ending the failed experiment by first legalizing 4.2 beer. We have perhaps a parallel right now in that there are some places that have legalized marijuana that may be a similar first step in the right direction. If marijuana, which is much less harmful than alcohol, was legalized it would greatly reduce our prison population, could be sold legally and taxed, and the U.S. would be a much better place for it. Of course as marijuana is so easy to grow and use, the drug companies would resist its legalization (as they have for years). But legalizing marijuana would be a great step forward in the war on drugs and would help us to eventually eliminate spending useless billions each year tilting at the windmills of drug problems. I don’t know how many times one should have to repeat the obvious: drugs and drug abuse are medical problems, not political problems, drugs should be legalized and controlled by prescription just as most other drugs are. It is simple, in spite of our attempts to make it complicated and difficult in order to protect pharmaceutical and liquor interests. Countries that have legalized drugs have had very good results and there is little doubt any more that such programs work (think of the Netherlands and Switzerland, for example). I have little doubt but what marijuana will be legalized relatively soon (along, by the way, with same-sex marriage) and I look forward to that happy day. In fact, I’ll drink to it.
George W. Bush gave a speech today, I gather as part of his attempt to put a positive spin on his accomplishments, especially in Iraq. I am still unable to decide whether he knows what happened and knows that he must lie about it, or if, in fact, he really doesn’t know and continues to live in an absolute fantasyland. Certainly his description of our recent history (what I call the nightmare years) and my understanding of what happened could hardly be further apart. I think it is interesting that Bush, Cheney, and others now deny that they ever said certain things, when they have actually been taped and filmed saying precisely what they have denied. Have they just not caught up with technology, or do they just lie with no regard for the consequences? How many generations of politicians will we have to go through before they begin to realize that bald-faced lying is not as easy as it used to be? I think that in the future, if asked anything about the nightmare years, I might take the position that there was no initial decade at the beginning of the 21st century, it actually didn’t begin until 2010 (I like to start over when the beginnings of something go so wrong). I’m sure I will not breathe easily for the next 44 days, until Barack Hussein Obama is safely installed as the 44th President of the United States.
LKBIQ:
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Jung
TILT:
At least half of the American public did not read a book last year.
of the car, he smashes her
face with his cheeseburger.
Seventy-five years ago today Prohibition officially ended (1933). Prohibition, you no doubt have heard of our 13 year total failure at trying to legislate morality. With prohibition otherwise law-abiding Americans by the millions were turned into criminals, or would have been had the enforcement of prohibition been much more effective than it was. Bootleggers flourished, stills cropped up everywhere, people made gin in their bathtubs, and some of the booze was so bad it actually caused people to lose their vision. Prohibition also gave us our famous gangster culture with the likes of Al Capone and many others. The crime rate soared as did the murder rate as gangsters fought each other over lucrative turfs and forced saloonkeepers into buying their product rather than a competitors (which might well have been a superior product). It was a wild time indeed, with flappers and the Charleston, and short hair and skirts and cigarettes for women, the jazz age, the roaring twenties, and the whole bit, pretty much summed up in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby.
But alas, prohibition lives! We don’t call it prohibition these days, and it has nothing to do with drugs like beer and wine, whiskey and gin, rum and vodka, and the hundreds of other alcoholic beverages that can now be purchased legally. We call it “the war on drugs” and it has to do with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, morphine, and many derivatives of those actually quite useful products, especially when used by the medical profession. We apparently learned nothing from our earlier attempts at legislating morality. We now have gangs killing each other over turf, illegal smuggling and manufacturing, murders by the score (5000 drug related deaths in Mexico alone last year), and hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, often for relatively minor drug offenses, particularly involving marijuana. As I recall (from reading and hearing about it – I’m not really that old), FDR started ending the failed experiment by first legalizing 4.2 beer. We have perhaps a parallel right now in that there are some places that have legalized marijuana that may be a similar first step in the right direction. If marijuana, which is much less harmful than alcohol, was legalized it would greatly reduce our prison population, could be sold legally and taxed, and the U.S. would be a much better place for it. Of course as marijuana is so easy to grow and use, the drug companies would resist its legalization (as they have for years). But legalizing marijuana would be a great step forward in the war on drugs and would help us to eventually eliminate spending useless billions each year tilting at the windmills of drug problems. I don’t know how many times one should have to repeat the obvious: drugs and drug abuse are medical problems, not political problems, drugs should be legalized and controlled by prescription just as most other drugs are. It is simple, in spite of our attempts to make it complicated and difficult in order to protect pharmaceutical and liquor interests. Countries that have legalized drugs have had very good results and there is little doubt any more that such programs work (think of the Netherlands and Switzerland, for example). I have little doubt but what marijuana will be legalized relatively soon (along, by the way, with same-sex marriage) and I look forward to that happy day. In fact, I’ll drink to it.
George W. Bush gave a speech today, I gather as part of his attempt to put a positive spin on his accomplishments, especially in Iraq. I am still unable to decide whether he knows what happened and knows that he must lie about it, or if, in fact, he really doesn’t know and continues to live in an absolute fantasyland. Certainly his description of our recent history (what I call the nightmare years) and my understanding of what happened could hardly be further apart. I think it is interesting that Bush, Cheney, and others now deny that they ever said certain things, when they have actually been taped and filmed saying precisely what they have denied. Have they just not caught up with technology, or do they just lie with no regard for the consequences? How many generations of politicians will we have to go through before they begin to realize that bald-faced lying is not as easy as it used to be? I think that in the future, if asked anything about the nightmare years, I might take the position that there was no initial decade at the beginning of the 21st century, it actually didn’t begin until 2010 (I like to start over when the beginnings of something go so wrong). I’m sure I will not breathe easily for the next 44 days, until Barack Hussein Obama is safely installed as the 44th President of the United States.
LKBIQ:
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Carl Jung
TILT:
At least half of the American public did not read a book last year.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
News?
Romantic proposal turns tragic
when tiny woman is suddenly
swept to sea and vanishes.
C’mon Britney, do something bad or stupid, or both, and please hurry, the MSM is in danger of running on empty. They are being forced to continue to deal with trivia, or just speculate wildly on what might or might not happen. Of course the car companies are good for sopping up a lot of time, even though no one knows at the moment whether they will get bailed out or not. As of this evening it looks like they might not.
Sarah Palin, you know her, our dear Sarah, she of the expensive wardrobe furnished to her by the RNC, along with clothes for her entire family. It turns out that she may have received an additional $30,000 worth and lots of people are really upset about it. On the other hand, there are lots of people upset about the people that are upset about it. Somewhere on the web today I stumbled upon one piece about this, followed by a great many comments. I didn’t realize this was such a big deal. I also didn’t realize how much hatred seems to be wrapped up in the comments about it. Those who like Sarah see nothing wrong with her receiving this largesse, and they tend to turn the discussion into their hatred of Obama (I find this very strange). People who like Obama tend to dismiss Palin as a rather garrulous idiot. Many Republicans seems to believe that she single-handedly won Georgia for Saxby Chambliss (he seems to think so as well) by some 15 points. She clearly is becoming a Republican super-star Many people (including myself) don’t care one way or the other if she got these clothes or not, or if she is giving them back or not, or what will happen to her husband’s silk underwear. But the MSM loves this. For them it’s NEWS.
When not using up space for Sarah’s wardrobe, the MSM seems preoccupied with speculation. On the one hand there are those who insist Obama is going to govern from center-right, but there are others who insist he is going to govern from center-left. To me these are pretty meaningless descriptions so I cannot take them seriously. I bet Obama will govern from the center (as most everyone always does). But, again, it gives the media something to write about. Frankly, I don’t care he he governs from outer space as long as he can help us get out of all the messes Bush/Cheney have left us. I suspect Obama’s Presidency will be over in the eyes of the media before he even gets inaugurated. The Supreme Court is to take up the question of Obama’s birth tomorrow as there are those who are still trying to make an issue of it. I guess they have abandoned their attempt to prove he was not born in the U.S. and have shifted to a somewhat more sophisticated argument: as his father was a Kenyan and his mother an American he supposedly has dual citizenship. They apparently believe this might disqualify him from the Presidency. Who arranged for this to be discussed at all? Why, Clarence Thomas, remember him? I rather doubt the Constitution speaks directly to this.
Then there is Governor Rendell’s statement that Janet Napolitano, being unmarried, can devote 9 or 12 hours a day to her new appointment as head of Homeland Security. This is being tossed around the news like it actually amounts to something other than a mere statement of fact. She is known to be a hard and dedicated worker, just as Rendell himself is. But many women think this was really insulting and terribly sexist. It is perfectly obvious that it was not intended to be a sexist remark but, hey, it takes up a lot of news time (this 24/7 business is tough).
Also, as I mentioned last night, the MSM took Bill Clinton’s statement that if Obama asked him to perform some task he would do it, and converted it into “Clinton eyes Obama’s White House.” They love to try to stir up as much trouble as possible. It’s news, you know.
It will be most interesting to see how much the MSM will aid Bush in rewriting history. Bush seems to be embarked upon a mission to create a legacy (apparently oblivious to the fact that he already has one). So far, as expected, Bush was not responsible for anything that happened in the past eight years. Interviewing Bush seems to me something like trying to interview an amnesiac about what he did during the past few years. If Bush actually remembers at all he tends to distort it, and if he doesn’t remember it’s because he had nothing to do with it. So far I can’t tell for certain if Bush even knows what went on during his Presidency, or if he’s just pretending not to know. I wonder if he will be surprised if anyone tries to bring charges against him, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or anyone. So far his Attorney General says there is no reason for Bush to pardon anyone because what they did was legal. I find this a fascinating argument. You hire lawyers to write laws the way you want them, thus allowing you to actually break the law (because you changed it to suit yourself) , and then you defend yourself by saying you were merely following the law. If they can get away with this I fully expect to see pigs fly and snowballs in hell.
LKBIQ:
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
Lois McMaster Bujold
TILT:
Portuguese explorers believed they had located Prestor John in Ethiopia.
when tiny woman is suddenly
swept to sea and vanishes.
C’mon Britney, do something bad or stupid, or both, and please hurry, the MSM is in danger of running on empty. They are being forced to continue to deal with trivia, or just speculate wildly on what might or might not happen. Of course the car companies are good for sopping up a lot of time, even though no one knows at the moment whether they will get bailed out or not. As of this evening it looks like they might not.
Sarah Palin, you know her, our dear Sarah, she of the expensive wardrobe furnished to her by the RNC, along with clothes for her entire family. It turns out that she may have received an additional $30,000 worth and lots of people are really upset about it. On the other hand, there are lots of people upset about the people that are upset about it. Somewhere on the web today I stumbled upon one piece about this, followed by a great many comments. I didn’t realize this was such a big deal. I also didn’t realize how much hatred seems to be wrapped up in the comments about it. Those who like Sarah see nothing wrong with her receiving this largesse, and they tend to turn the discussion into their hatred of Obama (I find this very strange). People who like Obama tend to dismiss Palin as a rather garrulous idiot. Many Republicans seems to believe that she single-handedly won Georgia for Saxby Chambliss (he seems to think so as well) by some 15 points. She clearly is becoming a Republican super-star Many people (including myself) don’t care one way or the other if she got these clothes or not, or if she is giving them back or not, or what will happen to her husband’s silk underwear. But the MSM loves this. For them it’s NEWS.
When not using up space for Sarah’s wardrobe, the MSM seems preoccupied with speculation. On the one hand there are those who insist Obama is going to govern from center-right, but there are others who insist he is going to govern from center-left. To me these are pretty meaningless descriptions so I cannot take them seriously. I bet Obama will govern from the center (as most everyone always does). But, again, it gives the media something to write about. Frankly, I don’t care he he governs from outer space as long as he can help us get out of all the messes Bush/Cheney have left us. I suspect Obama’s Presidency will be over in the eyes of the media before he even gets inaugurated. The Supreme Court is to take up the question of Obama’s birth tomorrow as there are those who are still trying to make an issue of it. I guess they have abandoned their attempt to prove he was not born in the U.S. and have shifted to a somewhat more sophisticated argument: as his father was a Kenyan and his mother an American he supposedly has dual citizenship. They apparently believe this might disqualify him from the Presidency. Who arranged for this to be discussed at all? Why, Clarence Thomas, remember him? I rather doubt the Constitution speaks directly to this.
Then there is Governor Rendell’s statement that Janet Napolitano, being unmarried, can devote 9 or 12 hours a day to her new appointment as head of Homeland Security. This is being tossed around the news like it actually amounts to something other than a mere statement of fact. She is known to be a hard and dedicated worker, just as Rendell himself is. But many women think this was really insulting and terribly sexist. It is perfectly obvious that it was not intended to be a sexist remark but, hey, it takes up a lot of news time (this 24/7 business is tough).
Also, as I mentioned last night, the MSM took Bill Clinton’s statement that if Obama asked him to perform some task he would do it, and converted it into “Clinton eyes Obama’s White House.” They love to try to stir up as much trouble as possible. It’s news, you know.
It will be most interesting to see how much the MSM will aid Bush in rewriting history. Bush seems to be embarked upon a mission to create a legacy (apparently oblivious to the fact that he already has one). So far, as expected, Bush was not responsible for anything that happened in the past eight years. Interviewing Bush seems to me something like trying to interview an amnesiac about what he did during the past few years. If Bush actually remembers at all he tends to distort it, and if he doesn’t remember it’s because he had nothing to do with it. So far I can’t tell for certain if Bush even knows what went on during his Presidency, or if he’s just pretending not to know. I wonder if he will be surprised if anyone tries to bring charges against him, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or anyone. So far his Attorney General says there is no reason for Bush to pardon anyone because what they did was legal. I find this a fascinating argument. You hire lawyers to write laws the way you want them, thus allowing you to actually break the law (because you changed it to suit yourself) , and then you defend yourself by saying you were merely following the law. If they can get away with this I fully expect to see pigs fly and snowballs in hell.
LKBIQ:
I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.
Lois McMaster Bujold
TILT:
Portuguese explorers believed they had located Prestor John in Ethiopia.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Smorgasbord
Engraved class ring, missing
for 21 years, turns up in belly of
eight pound Texas Bass.
Well, I guess it’s to be farewell to the pig farm (I mean the “ranch”) Bush bought to deceive people into believing he was a down-to-earth cowboy rather than a wealthy, Ivy-league Northeastern snob. It seems to have worked. Bush bought what I understand had been a 2000 acre pig farm, and pretended to convert it into a ranch. There were no cattle, no horses, and I guess no livestock of any kind. But he went regularly to his beloved ranch in Crawford to exercise his apparent passion for cutting brush and photo-ops. But now that the charade is over, Laura is looking for a house in Dallas, claiming that the Crawford place was all Bush’s. It apparently was all Bush’s because it was convenient for his image. I doubt he will miss cutting brush, but I bet he will miss the photo-ops.
Would someone explain to me what is so precious about cluster bombs that the U.S., Russia, and China refuse to give them up? Some 100 nations signed an agreement to eliminate such weapons and help clean up areas already contaminated with them. With all the weapons in their arsenals, why do some cling to these bombs that are known to kill and maim innocent children on a regular basis and long into the future. To me, this seems too absurd for words, indeed, even downright ghoulish. Are we expecting to counter Russian and Chinese cluster bombs with ours? This is disgraceful.
There is a new report, just issued, that claims we are vulnerable to attack by either nuclear or biological weapons sometime in the future. We are said to be more vulnerable now than we were previously. I don’t know how much money was spent on this report, or who precisely was responsible for it, but I could have told them this for free quite some time ago. I guess they believe that worrying about being run over or otherwise killed by an automobile, or being killed by lightning, or blown up in an airplane, or being poisoned by bad food, or contracting lung cancer from cigarettes or having a heart attack from high cholesterol or obesity, or falling victim to rogue elephants, or being preyed upon by cougars and grizzly bears, to say nothing of vicious wolves, is not enough for us to worry about. Although I have no confidence whatsoever in Homeland Security, I refuse to worry about being nuked or gassed. I’m too busy worrying about where my next meal might not be coming from, or what my next medical bill is apt to be, or other more mundane and realistic fears.
A judge in Kansas has ruled that the execution of a man convicted of multiple murders in 1988 has to be postponed because “he needs more time” to appeal. I do not believe in capital punishment, and I don’t think this guy should have been sentenced to death, but really? Twenty years is not a sufficient time for him to appeal? This just emphasizes how ridiculous the whole system is. If keeping someone on death row for 20 years is not cruel and unusual punishment, what is? Oh, I guess keeping people in Guantanamo for seven years with no charges against them at all, no provision for lawyers, no contact with the outside, no rights at all, including habeas corpus, and so on, probably qualifies. But who would do a thing like that?
In keeping with the usual absurdity of the MSM we are now being told that Bill Clinton is “eyeing a position in the Obama White House,” or “angling for a position in the Obama administration,” giving the impression that he is trying to insert himself into this coming administration. I saw the interview from where this idea came: when asked what he was going to do, Bill Clinton said clearly he would give some advice to Hillary sometimes. When asked again what he planned to do in the future, he said he didn’t know, but that if Obama asked him to perform some task he would do so. Now the MSM has converted these simple straightforward, modest statements into his attempting to sneakily worm himself into a position. I think the MSM should hire a fleet of white Broncos, and a bunch of drivers, and have them chase the Broncos 24 hours a day to insure they would be able to cover some “news” every moment of the 24/7 blatherathon.
How I hope Chris Matthews will try to run for the Senate against Arlen Spector! He is such a dim bulb he will surely lose, but we won’t have to listen to him trying to pontificate on MSNBC anymore. I can just hear him every day crying out “Gee, this is so exciting.” And he’ll probably be able to speak non-stop for hours on end without even pretending to ask someone else a question.
LKBIQ:
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
Frank Leahy
TILT:
I apparently can think of nothing that I cannot find on google.
for 21 years, turns up in belly of
eight pound Texas Bass.
Well, I guess it’s to be farewell to the pig farm (I mean the “ranch”) Bush bought to deceive people into believing he was a down-to-earth cowboy rather than a wealthy, Ivy-league Northeastern snob. It seems to have worked. Bush bought what I understand had been a 2000 acre pig farm, and pretended to convert it into a ranch. There were no cattle, no horses, and I guess no livestock of any kind. But he went regularly to his beloved ranch in Crawford to exercise his apparent passion for cutting brush and photo-ops. But now that the charade is over, Laura is looking for a house in Dallas, claiming that the Crawford place was all Bush’s. It apparently was all Bush’s because it was convenient for his image. I doubt he will miss cutting brush, but I bet he will miss the photo-ops.
Would someone explain to me what is so precious about cluster bombs that the U.S., Russia, and China refuse to give them up? Some 100 nations signed an agreement to eliminate such weapons and help clean up areas already contaminated with them. With all the weapons in their arsenals, why do some cling to these bombs that are known to kill and maim innocent children on a regular basis and long into the future. To me, this seems too absurd for words, indeed, even downright ghoulish. Are we expecting to counter Russian and Chinese cluster bombs with ours? This is disgraceful.
There is a new report, just issued, that claims we are vulnerable to attack by either nuclear or biological weapons sometime in the future. We are said to be more vulnerable now than we were previously. I don’t know how much money was spent on this report, or who precisely was responsible for it, but I could have told them this for free quite some time ago. I guess they believe that worrying about being run over or otherwise killed by an automobile, or being killed by lightning, or blown up in an airplane, or being poisoned by bad food, or contracting lung cancer from cigarettes or having a heart attack from high cholesterol or obesity, or falling victim to rogue elephants, or being preyed upon by cougars and grizzly bears, to say nothing of vicious wolves, is not enough for us to worry about. Although I have no confidence whatsoever in Homeland Security, I refuse to worry about being nuked or gassed. I’m too busy worrying about where my next meal might not be coming from, or what my next medical bill is apt to be, or other more mundane and realistic fears.
A judge in Kansas has ruled that the execution of a man convicted of multiple murders in 1988 has to be postponed because “he needs more time” to appeal. I do not believe in capital punishment, and I don’t think this guy should have been sentenced to death, but really? Twenty years is not a sufficient time for him to appeal? This just emphasizes how ridiculous the whole system is. If keeping someone on death row for 20 years is not cruel and unusual punishment, what is? Oh, I guess keeping people in Guantanamo for seven years with no charges against them at all, no provision for lawyers, no contact with the outside, no rights at all, including habeas corpus, and so on, probably qualifies. But who would do a thing like that?
In keeping with the usual absurdity of the MSM we are now being told that Bill Clinton is “eyeing a position in the Obama White House,” or “angling for a position in the Obama administration,” giving the impression that he is trying to insert himself into this coming administration. I saw the interview from where this idea came: when asked what he was going to do, Bill Clinton said clearly he would give some advice to Hillary sometimes. When asked again what he planned to do in the future, he said he didn’t know, but that if Obama asked him to perform some task he would do so. Now the MSM has converted these simple straightforward, modest statements into his attempting to sneakily worm himself into a position. I think the MSM should hire a fleet of white Broncos, and a bunch of drivers, and have them chase the Broncos 24 hours a day to insure they would be able to cover some “news” every moment of the 24/7 blatherathon.
How I hope Chris Matthews will try to run for the Senate against Arlen Spector! He is such a dim bulb he will surely lose, but we won’t have to listen to him trying to pontificate on MSNBC anymore. I can just hear him every day crying out “Gee, this is so exciting.” And he’ll probably be able to speak non-stop for hours on end without even pretending to ask someone else a question.
LKBIQ:
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
Frank Leahy
TILT:
I apparently can think of nothing that I cannot find on google.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
"Rights of Conscience"
Teenager caught stealing
earrings, swallows them,
is betrayed by x-rays.
Rights of conscience, what an absolutely super idea! You may have heard about Bush’s lame duck proposal to establish something termed “rights of conscience.” This is meant to apply to doctors, nurses, and other health professional and basically says they do not have to participate in procedures that offend their consciences. Abortion is, of course, the main target here but there seem to be no precise limits. One interesting thing about this proposal is that you apparently do not suffer any consequences of any kind when you refuse to provide the service. If you claim that it offends your conscience, that’s it. This is unlike any other act of conscience that I know of. For example, to use one from Rachel Maddow, if you are Amish, and your religious beliefs do not allow you to drive, that is your right, but you will not be hired as a bus driver. Or, more importantly, if you are a conscientious objector, you may exercise your moral right, but you may end up in jail, or at least forced to perform other duties that you may not like. In other words, while you can insist on your conscientious objections, you expect to pay some kind of price. This is apparently very different from what Bush has in mind. But I think rights of conscience is a great idea if, that is, we are allowed to apply it more broadly. My conscience tells me that I should not have to pay taxes when I know they will be used for military purposes. If we had the same rights of conscience that Bush is proposing for the medical profession I could do this with no fear of jail, fines, or whatever. Similarly, if I had such rights of conscience like those Bush is proposing I could simply refuse to serve in the military with no fear of any consequences. Or, say my conscience did not keep me out of the military, but did not allow me to handle weapons. I could refuse and not have to worry about being put on latrine duty or permanent dishwashing or some other punishment. What if my conscience forbade me from wasting water by watering my lawn? The neighbors wouldn’t like that. What if a mechanic refused to work on the cars of Republicans? You see here, I hope, the endless range of possibilities if we all just had these rights of conscience. Just think how smoothly society would function if no one ever had to do anything their conscience denied them with no fear of the consequences? We wouldn’t have to have either cultural prescriptions or proscriptions, a simply delightful anarchy would prevail. You have to hand it to Bush, he’s a real thinker. You may say, well, such rights only apply to the medical profession. But that would be discriminatory in the extreme. The ACLU would probably never stand for such a thing. There would be lawsuits, except, of course, for those whose consciences would not allow them to hire lawyers. Then, too, it might be hard to find a judge who would take on such cases because of his conscience. And what would happen to those, like Bush/Cheney, who apparently have no consciences at all? (alas, we already know where that leads). What if my conscience told me not to bring an infant into the world that was clearly unwanted, and would probably be uncared for and even abused, would the doctor’s conscience automatically have priority over mine? Perhaps if there are medical personnel that are unwilling to perform legal medical procedures they should be retrained for other professions, like monks or nuns. Aw, shucks and gee whillikers, it’s just too complicated for me. I guess we should just leave it up to the lame duck, he’s got a long while to go, I’m sure he can come up with further even more idiotic ideas.
Speaking of our lame duck, he seems to be in full denial mode. Nothing that has happened in the past eight years is his fault. Of course there is some doubt that he even knows what has happened in the past eight years. The world’s greatest serial loser, and the worst President ever. He’s leaving the White House with his head held high (he says). Perhaps that will distract everyone from the tail between his legs.
They love sleaze in Georgia. Republican Saxby Chambliss won re-election to the Senate, beating out his Democratic opponent by a sizeable margin. You remember Chambliss, he was elected to the Senate by defeating Democrat Max Cleland, a triple amputee war hero, in one of the slimiest, rottenest, most dishonest, unethical, and disgusting campaigns in American history. It must have been tough for those Georgians to have to pick between a Republican sleazebag and a bona fide war hero. But how could he have lost this time with the omnipresent, dynamic, and brilliant Sarah Palin campaigning for him? I don’t think it’s the “crackers” that do it, maybe it’s too many overly fermented peaches? How I want her to be the Republican candidate for President in 2012!!!
Favorite short poems:
FOG
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
TILT:
Some of the finest chef’s knives are made specifically for the left or right handed.
earrings, swallows them,
is betrayed by x-rays.
Rights of conscience, what an absolutely super idea! You may have heard about Bush’s lame duck proposal to establish something termed “rights of conscience.” This is meant to apply to doctors, nurses, and other health professional and basically says they do not have to participate in procedures that offend their consciences. Abortion is, of course, the main target here but there seem to be no precise limits. One interesting thing about this proposal is that you apparently do not suffer any consequences of any kind when you refuse to provide the service. If you claim that it offends your conscience, that’s it. This is unlike any other act of conscience that I know of. For example, to use one from Rachel Maddow, if you are Amish, and your religious beliefs do not allow you to drive, that is your right, but you will not be hired as a bus driver. Or, more importantly, if you are a conscientious objector, you may exercise your moral right, but you may end up in jail, or at least forced to perform other duties that you may not like. In other words, while you can insist on your conscientious objections, you expect to pay some kind of price. This is apparently very different from what Bush has in mind. But I think rights of conscience is a great idea if, that is, we are allowed to apply it more broadly. My conscience tells me that I should not have to pay taxes when I know they will be used for military purposes. If we had the same rights of conscience that Bush is proposing for the medical profession I could do this with no fear of jail, fines, or whatever. Similarly, if I had such rights of conscience like those Bush is proposing I could simply refuse to serve in the military with no fear of any consequences. Or, say my conscience did not keep me out of the military, but did not allow me to handle weapons. I could refuse and not have to worry about being put on latrine duty or permanent dishwashing or some other punishment. What if my conscience forbade me from wasting water by watering my lawn? The neighbors wouldn’t like that. What if a mechanic refused to work on the cars of Republicans? You see here, I hope, the endless range of possibilities if we all just had these rights of conscience. Just think how smoothly society would function if no one ever had to do anything their conscience denied them with no fear of the consequences? We wouldn’t have to have either cultural prescriptions or proscriptions, a simply delightful anarchy would prevail. You have to hand it to Bush, he’s a real thinker. You may say, well, such rights only apply to the medical profession. But that would be discriminatory in the extreme. The ACLU would probably never stand for such a thing. There would be lawsuits, except, of course, for those whose consciences would not allow them to hire lawyers. Then, too, it might be hard to find a judge who would take on such cases because of his conscience. And what would happen to those, like Bush/Cheney, who apparently have no consciences at all? (alas, we already know where that leads). What if my conscience told me not to bring an infant into the world that was clearly unwanted, and would probably be uncared for and even abused, would the doctor’s conscience automatically have priority over mine? Perhaps if there are medical personnel that are unwilling to perform legal medical procedures they should be retrained for other professions, like monks or nuns. Aw, shucks and gee whillikers, it’s just too complicated for me. I guess we should just leave it up to the lame duck, he’s got a long while to go, I’m sure he can come up with further even more idiotic ideas.
Speaking of our lame duck, he seems to be in full denial mode. Nothing that has happened in the past eight years is his fault. Of course there is some doubt that he even knows what has happened in the past eight years. The world’s greatest serial loser, and the worst President ever. He’s leaving the White House with his head held high (he says). Perhaps that will distract everyone from the tail between his legs.
They love sleaze in Georgia. Republican Saxby Chambliss won re-election to the Senate, beating out his Democratic opponent by a sizeable margin. You remember Chambliss, he was elected to the Senate by defeating Democrat Max Cleland, a triple amputee war hero, in one of the slimiest, rottenest, most dishonest, unethical, and disgusting campaigns in American history. It must have been tough for those Georgians to have to pick between a Republican sleazebag and a bona fide war hero. But how could he have lost this time with the omnipresent, dynamic, and brilliant Sarah Palin campaigning for him? I don’t think it’s the “crackers” that do it, maybe it’s too many overly fermented peaches? How I want her to be the Republican candidate for President in 2012!!!
Favorite short poems:
FOG
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
TILT:
Some of the finest chef’s knives are made specifically for the left or right handed.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Universal Health Care
Upset by her driving, he rear-ends
woman at 100 mph, says God told
him He wanted her off the road.
Sometimes I guess I have to remind people that this is a blog, not a scientific treatise. It deals mostly with opinions, mine and others. It is based on my reading on the internet and elsewhere, as well as on conversations and correspondence with others. Then, after some thought an opinion is reached. If you disagree with my opinions you are free to comment. I promise not to confuse you with facts if you promise not to complain about the lack of footnotes and precise references. With this in mind, let me comment on the subject of universal health care:
I read today in a couple of places that a consensus might be growing for universal health care. I believe this may be true. The main reason I think so is because I believe our corporations, especially in the automobile industry but others as well, have learned that having to pay for their employees health benefits makes them less competitive. So what better solution for them than having the taxpayer foot the bill for health insurance? Thus I think it is pretty likely that we will see some form of universal health care fairly soon. The price we are going to pay, however, is going to be dear. This is because we will have to include the Insurance industry, along with the pharmaceuticals and medical profession, and everyone else involved that will have to profit from the plan. In other words, it is to be a for-profit scheme. While this may make sense and be fair for the doctors, nurses, and even the drug industry, it certainly should not have to include the insurance industry. Anyone I know about who has studied this universal health care problem knows that the most efficient and economical system would be a single-payer plan without the insurance people involved. After all, why should the insurance people be involved in medicine at all? Why should a patient be at the mercy of some insurance bureaucrat telling him and his doctor how he should be treated and for how long and etc.? It makes no sense at all. But we are unlikely to get a universal health care plan without the insurance people. Neither Obama nor Hillary suggested a plan that would bypass insurance. And the insurance lobby is so powerful they can probably block any plan that does not deal them in. When they once asked the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks, he replied “that’s where the money is.” This is the same (and probably only) reason the insurance business should muscle into the health care business. This is every bit as bad, and perhaps worse, than Congress being involved in the drug business. Drugs, and drug abuse, are medical problems, not political ones, but our politicians seem unable and unwilling to admit it, the result of which is thousands of non-violent drug offenders clogging up our prisons and engaging in criminal acts that could easily be reduced.
Along these lines you may have noticed that Switzerland has legalized their program for heroin users. After a 14 year experiment they have reduced heroin crime related problemes by 60%, allowed many heroin users to pursue their employment, and are in general quite pleased with this program. The Netherlands, too, has experimented with legalized drugs successfully. Canada, Mexico, and other countries are or will be legalizing marijuana (and quite likely other drugs as well). Of course we couldn’t be expected to learn anything from other countries.
In any case, universal health care is certainly worth doing, even if it does involve the insurance companies. Perhaps after trying it for a while everyone will realize we could do it much less expensively by changing to a single-payer plan. Of course we’d have to overcome our ridiculous fear of (dare I even mention it) socialism. This is one really nutty country we are living in. There is always hope.
LKBIQ:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Krishnamurti
TILT:
In 1943 the movie, For Whom the Bell Tolls, received 9 academy award nominations. Only Katina Paxinou won for Best Supporting Actress. Akim Tamiroff probably should have won Best Supporting Actor.
woman at 100 mph, says God told
him He wanted her off the road.
Sometimes I guess I have to remind people that this is a blog, not a scientific treatise. It deals mostly with opinions, mine and others. It is based on my reading on the internet and elsewhere, as well as on conversations and correspondence with others. Then, after some thought an opinion is reached. If you disagree with my opinions you are free to comment. I promise not to confuse you with facts if you promise not to complain about the lack of footnotes and precise references. With this in mind, let me comment on the subject of universal health care:
I read today in a couple of places that a consensus might be growing for universal health care. I believe this may be true. The main reason I think so is because I believe our corporations, especially in the automobile industry but others as well, have learned that having to pay for their employees health benefits makes them less competitive. So what better solution for them than having the taxpayer foot the bill for health insurance? Thus I think it is pretty likely that we will see some form of universal health care fairly soon. The price we are going to pay, however, is going to be dear. This is because we will have to include the Insurance industry, along with the pharmaceuticals and medical profession, and everyone else involved that will have to profit from the plan. In other words, it is to be a for-profit scheme. While this may make sense and be fair for the doctors, nurses, and even the drug industry, it certainly should not have to include the insurance industry. Anyone I know about who has studied this universal health care problem knows that the most efficient and economical system would be a single-payer plan without the insurance people involved. After all, why should the insurance people be involved in medicine at all? Why should a patient be at the mercy of some insurance bureaucrat telling him and his doctor how he should be treated and for how long and etc.? It makes no sense at all. But we are unlikely to get a universal health care plan without the insurance people. Neither Obama nor Hillary suggested a plan that would bypass insurance. And the insurance lobby is so powerful they can probably block any plan that does not deal them in. When they once asked the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks, he replied “that’s where the money is.” This is the same (and probably only) reason the insurance business should muscle into the health care business. This is every bit as bad, and perhaps worse, than Congress being involved in the drug business. Drugs, and drug abuse, are medical problems, not political ones, but our politicians seem unable and unwilling to admit it, the result of which is thousands of non-violent drug offenders clogging up our prisons and engaging in criminal acts that could easily be reduced.
Along these lines you may have noticed that Switzerland has legalized their program for heroin users. After a 14 year experiment they have reduced heroin crime related problemes by 60%, allowed many heroin users to pursue their employment, and are in general quite pleased with this program. The Netherlands, too, has experimented with legalized drugs successfully. Canada, Mexico, and other countries are or will be legalizing marijuana (and quite likely other drugs as well). Of course we couldn’t be expected to learn anything from other countries.
In any case, universal health care is certainly worth doing, even if it does involve the insurance companies. Perhaps after trying it for a while everyone will realize we could do it much less expensively by changing to a single-payer plan. Of course we’d have to overcome our ridiculous fear of (dare I even mention it) socialism. This is one really nutty country we are living in. There is always hope.
LKBIQ:
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Krishnamurti
TILT:
In 1943 the movie, For Whom the Bell Tolls, received 9 academy award nominations. Only Katina Paxinou won for Best Supporting Actress. Akim Tamiroff probably should have won Best Supporting Actor.
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