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If I had found myself abandoned in the wilds of the US, oh say, four hundred years ago, I would surely have perished. I was not “the fittest”. Nor even close.

To what do I refer? Well, please keep the secret, but I am one of those people genetically challenged when it comes to sight. I couldn’t hit the side of the proverbial barn as they say. Without technological assistance that is.

So with bow and arrow, I would have missed the target, and no doubt starved to death.

I started wearing glasses in the fourth grade. Year by year my eyes deteriorated until I was close to the “coke bottle” syndrome. I switched to contacts, but a badly shaped eyeball made them difficult at best.

Finally, I trucked off to Canada and got the Lasix treatment where they rearrange your focal point by some voodoo magic light, and voilá, I could see, sans glasses.

That has pretty much been it for nearly seventeen years. But alas age catches up with all of us.

Which is nothing more to say than that the Contrarian and I (as part of our departure stuff) went off to get our eyes tested and glasses ordered. We have gotten to the point that watching anything written on the TV screen, requires both of us to read it. We figured we might miss New Mexico all together and end up in the Grand Canyon by mistake. I do mean IN it.

So that was yesterday.

And I’m telling you all this, simple because there are no rules of the road here, and I can tell you whatever I choose, and you can read or not as the mood or time strikes you.

♦

As we were driving and I was trying hard to ignore the fact that one is never quite sure where one will end up when driving with the Contrarian at the wheel, we got to talking about Brandy. The sorrow is still there, but we can talk with laughter now.

Anyway, we were talking about how she went so easy and we were not forced to make that decision to “put her down”, a thoroughly strange way of avoiding “ordering her killed.”

It came to me, that we as humans are adjudged “humane” for putting down an animal that is in pain and with no real way to correct the condition. If we were to do the same thing for a human being, we would be adjudged more often than not, a murderer. A human is required to die in misery if that be the medical situation, no matter how long it takes. ‘Course, they often don’t. I understand doctors often “over dose” with pain killers, knowing that death will ensue.

Still, we wouldn’t judge it humane to put a human being out of their misery. Except if you were Doctor Kevorkian. He judged it merciful.

♦

I wonder how it will play?

Democrats: lets build roads, repair schools, fix bridges. (translate: hire construction companies which then hire more workers, and all the supply companies (concrete and so forth). Job creation: immediate. Results: workers make some money, start buying crap at Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart starts hiring more workers. Two tiered job creation.)

Republicans: cut taxes, eliminate regulations. (translate: corporations have more cash. HOPEFULLY they will expand worker pools. Hard to see why they would when nobody has any money to buy their shit.)

Does the American public at large have the brains to see this? I wonder.

♦

Did ya hear? Sarah Palin is heading off to Korea in a month or so to speak at a “World Knowledge conference.” I mean, oxymoron or what? What on earth could she possibly be speaking about? Is she gonna ask for help? A book list maybe? Or just pooh-pooh the notion that In_tEYE-lec-tuls are necessary in a world where everything can be decided using just good old common sense.

♦

Did anybody catch that Rudy Giuliani did it again? He said he will make a decision about running for the GOP nomination but not until after the 9/11 events. He does always get that 9/11 reference into everything he says doesn’t he?

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I’m just about done with Atlas Shrugged. She really is a pretty awful writer. She actually had some interesting characters but she’s buried them in so much political rhetoric that you have to wade through pages and pages of it, to get back to the story line.

I just finished “John Galt’s” radio broadcast. It went on for about forty pages of non-stop explanation of why enterpreneurs were good and everybody else was bad. This quote sums up her thinking about all of “us”.

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom, who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

The rich man is the victim you see, and the worker is the exploiter of the rich man’s intellect. Why, Rand claims, all the things the worms at the bottom have, are the product of the genius of the top. The worms could never create a car if their life depended upon it.

This is ADMITTED mindset of the Cantors and Ryans, the DeMints and the Pauls. This is their concept of “survival of the fittest.”

Have a nice day!