Pinterest Madness

Tags

blogs, Humor, Pinterest

I am not insane.

I repeat, I am not insane.

When I first got wind of Pinterest, I thought it odd, stupid, and incoherent.

I thought that for a very long time.

Then, I got the notion that I might find some beading ideas there.

And so I went.

And then I went again.

And I swear, I never knew that I was being invaded by nano bytes. Insideous robots whose only aim in robotic life is to whisper, “go to Pinterest. There might be something new.” And one board leads to another, and another and like a black widow your synapses are painstakingly webbed with connections that all lead to another board of PINS!

Seriously I’m not that addicted. I have found some good ideas, and am presently making a this and a that.

I figure the problem with most crafters is that they think that anybody can do this. And thus you end up with some really stupid things. I figure coffee filter wreathes is a pretty stupid idea.

I’m rather suspicious I gotta say of the man I ran across who pins roaring twenties girls. That seems fairly weird.

But then I just learned something today. When the going gets weird the weird turn pro. Hunter Thompson said that, probably while higher than a kite, which is not all that high actually–a weather balloon would be a better analogy, but I guess such things were unknown when that phrase was invented.

Oops, my bad, the Thompson quote comes from A Pondering Mind. You should sign up if you haven’t, since there is much wisdom, much humor, and well, both are useful in any given day.

Along similar lines, do stop by Mostly Bright Ideas, a fella who has a good sense of humor and is kinda shotgun in his approach, and well, makes you smile, another useful thing to do in any given day. People who think like me realize that really really disparate ideas often have a common thread if you search hard enough, and are creative enough, and are well, strange enough to see the invisible connection. Mysterious no?

Any the way: here is another of those, “I’d rethink that idea before setting up a store to sell it in” items that somebody thought was a good idea on Pinterest:

Some people go a bit over the top with recycling.

I figure somebody will start up a tutorial on how to render dead bodies to make soap.

But I’m really glad to know how to make a dress from a man’s large t-shirt.

You don’t think that’s possible?

I beg to differ.

Without scissors or tape or even a pin.

You see?

And who can say they have not stayed awake at night dreaming (awake of course) of this:

Can you have TOO much duct tape?

Seriously.

I think I would go crazy with duct tape.

But not for the reasons they might think.

I go crazy about a lot of things.

Most of them are of interest only to me.

I realize that.

Do you know how many mirror frames I’ve seen made out of plastic spoons?

The woman who lives in the house belonging to this tree, needs help.

And who would want to miss this great tip:

I mean this is like a certified listing of people who need meds quickly.

And wow, I can’t wait to get in the kitchen with this idea:

Home cooking is so much better than any old junk you find in the supermarket.

But enough.

I recognize these  as crazy, therefore I am most sane.

While I’m at it, take a look at a couple of good blogs I’ve run into lately:

Evolving Thoughts has been doing some good writing on the human mind and how it can get so screwed up and how it can decide it likes it that way. This is a first article and there is another one, so go back to the home page and you’ll find it. How we learn, or how others don’t, is fascinating.

I was looking some stuff up for Facebook on Ted Cruz, dominionist and all-around nut, and found a great article by Jonathan Turley, super smart professor of law and all-around commentator on lots of things. His resume is impressive and so you might be interested in his thoughts. Mostly he talks about legal cases, but occasionally slips off into other areas, hence the post on Teddy the Tunnel Vision Turd.

You might want to take a look at OPED News as well, which is I find to give pretty good news well backed up with facts.

This is all connected by the way, but I’m sure not gonna tell you how.

And I have no idea why so many people are now following this blog. Over two thousand. Musta been something I said. But I have no idea which oddity it was. Pin on world!

The Quest Continues

Tags

brains, Christie, fundamentalists, GOP, high school, Huckabee, Politics, psychology, Women's issues

You’d think that I’d know pretty much all I need to know at my age.

I mean seriously folks, shouldn’t I just sit and chortle at all the younglings’ who are still running into things, unable to fathom that pace of life yet? Shouldn’t I know the BIG issues of life?

Why am I always surprised and puzzled?

Having just finished reading Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I should get that we are all just playing out the story of humanity in infinite forms, no? Can’t I leave it at that?

NO, apparently I’m forced to admit at my refined age, that I may be just a tad, just a tiny bit, miniscule actually, ANAL.

Case in point.

Or in several, but in POINT now.

Michael Huckabee, once governor of Arkansas, a state lost between Noah’s ark and Kansas. Now our Huck as he is fondly called by many, was once upon a time (not a fairy tale) a preacher. A southern Baptist one, to be exact, and that means literally, literal, insofar as a fundamentalist can be literal, which is way a lot when they need to and way not all when it would be inconvenient to be so. Which makes him really a Christianist, one of those rather duplicitous individuals who sorta uses Jesus when needed and ignores him when not, although pretending to NEVER forget Jesus, i.e., sprinkling all talk with plenty of “thanks be to God” and Thank the Lord” .

So, Mikey as he is not fondly called, figured he would jump into the fray of the “war on women” being continuously waged by the GOP.

That that is clear to every human being save the GOP itself who continue to remain with head firmly inside butt is also clear.

And the trend has continued as we all know in 2012, 2013 and so on.

It is Republicans who are trying to restrict abortions and are, through phony laws, forcing PPH offices to close all over the country. Women are being denied reproductive care quite simply and that results in more women dying from reproductive disease, and more unwanted pregnancies, the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Republicans claim they are introducing such legislation for.

In pops the Huckster, who is starting to think that running for President might be a good thing, and off he goes with the mouth part:

“If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it,. . .”

So, old Mikey thinks that Democrats believe that women’s insatiable libido requires contraceptive care in the guise of Uncle Sugar?

Seriously, explain how he came to that conclusion, or is just simply the way dead-below-the-waist-Mike feels? Is his wife dragging him to bed every night and telling him to Viagra up or something? Is the old man tired of “gettin’ it up” and gettin’ going?

This after some dip wad in Virginia by the name of Black, who is running for Congress, suggests that there should probably be no laws against marital rape.

“How on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth, there’s no injury, there’s no separation or anything.”

Seriously, it’s just a he said, she said kinda thing, right? Boys will be boys. . . .or, I bet he’s the one in the nightie.

Are Republican men this utterly clueless. Is there no Republican woman around who can just tell them to SHUT THE F**K UP?

≠

Explain to me how any person can go to college for four years and become educated sufficiently to teach math, and still denies the truth of evolution?  How does a brain do that?

≠

By all accounts Chris Christie is a reasonably intelligent human being. I have learned that he was darned good at running for stuff in college and in organizing so that his “team” would win across the board in student elections. And we are most aware of his spectacular rise in New Jersey, a definitely blue state.

So, in looking forward to someday running for President, (and surely you know he’s always had that in his mind since he was 12 or so), wouldn’t you sorta know that thugs and others who did your dirty work and the people you intimidated all your life, would literally flood the plains of Jersey should they even SMELL a leak in the dike?

Is it just me or is this just the beginning of an avalanche of charges, and victims parading forth telling their story of how Christie thugs forced them to throw Grandma off the train? The Bridge and Hoboken are just the tip of the iceberg I suspect.

Why do people who don’t play by the rules always think nobody will find out?

Do the really believe in perfect crimes?

≠

Here’s one for ya.

I went to a typical high school. Maybe not so much as I thought.

A whole bunch of us started in kindergarten and graduated together. Over the years, cliques changed. Our group splintered into a good five groups or so. Some of us got hurt by being dumped. Some never aspired to group 1, probably most. We all dissed those below us, more or less. We gave what we got.

I’ve been to college, three times. I’ve worked for people and for myself. I’ve been in a ton of relationships, all of which obviously went sour for one reason or another, due to one thing or other, until the last one, which has lasted nearly 14 years. I’ve been screwed over by the best and worst of them, regarding all sorts of things. In that regard I am no different from any other human.

As my friend Jean said, all humans are flawed. We get to accept that about each other, and how our flaws blend enough to get along.

But, when I reconnected with high school classmates, I found this:

A friendliness that turned out to be all too superficial. Most of the lines remained drawn. A rather stunning realignment based on who agrees with who. Fundies gather together and chat like great friends when way back then, they never spoke and one would not be caught “dead” with the other. All the liberals now, however, were my friends back then. People I thought were smart turned out to be dumb, or as uninformed as a person could be and still walk. A whole slew are angry, very angry people, mostly those who stayed in the factory town that went belly up.  And although raised in a working class environment where the UAW was the norm in most households, most are conservative, hating folks, who blame unions, and the poor for being takers. And kids should be slapped around because “it was good enough for me”. They are “patriotic” as they define it, meaning they love “the troops” and the flag, but hate the President, and income redistribution, although surely they would benefit from that.

And I don’t get most of ’em. A few who were a year or two behind me or ahead, I get. They escaped the hate thing somehow. They are good people, who have worked hard, but avoided blaming those who have less for what they don’t have.

And the real point here, is that, all those people from college and work situations and relationships that didn’t do unto me as I think they should? I have long ago forgotten them and their transgressions because, hey, we are all flawed. But the angers from those old high-school slights still linger and still seem rawer than they should.  And I have a couple of those classmates who don’t participate in group discussions and I think they are  so much smarter than I. They are not wasting their time on stupid.

Which all goes to say that I delight a bit too much in telling old X and Y what utterly stupid people they became. Ain’t that funny? Or sad in a funny sort of way?

The first cut is the deepest. Thank you Rod Stewart for reminding me.

It Must be My Fault, For She is Without Fault

Tags

gorgeous men, MLK, patriarchy, stupid men

For those following Downton Abbey, these words were uttered by Mr. Bates, valet to Lord Crawley about his wife Anna who has suddenly turned cold to him. Anna was raped by a visiting valet to another Lord, and is sure Mr. Bates would kill the man and be executed by the Crown, thus she refuses to divulge her secret, but now considers herself unworthy of her husband’s affections.

When Lord Crawley senses some sadness in Mr. Bates, he inquires if all is right in his marriage, to which Mr. Bates replies that it is not, but that he has no clue what he has done wrong. Crawley suggests perhaps it is not his fault to which Bates replies, “It must be my fault, for she is without fault.”

I think that’s the truth. Women are without fault.

Men should realize that. It would make the world a happier place.

Which all goes to say that I find men strange at times. Especially those who cling to patriarchal notions that women should behave in a certain way, normally so as not to impinge on the superior notions that some men have of themselves. You know the type, men who snicker with each other about who has the best “trophy” and brag about their wives “still looking as young as they day we married” rather than bragging of her talents in her profession or hobby or so forth.

As a woman who practiced in a field still tilted toward maleness, I’m only too aware of being told I was “pushy”, “opinionated”, a “ball-buster” and so forth over the years, usually by men who had lost an argument to me or were in that process. I’ve become adept at spotting these types and avoid them as soon as I do so. This recently led to the he-man in question accounting himself the “winner” of a debate that never began, because my refusal to participate could surely only mean that I had no argument to make that I could back up with facts. They call it shooting blanks I believe.

Such men try to set the parameters of a debate at the start to favor their “evidence”. In this case, a self-proclaimed atheist demanded that there could be no evidence of the death of Jesus outside of the actual words of the Bible, a book, I might add, that he suggested could be understood by the most basic average intellect. He claimed as his background, “study in philosophy and linguistics” although his Facebook page turned out to admit that he was “self-taught” because formal education was nothing but “brainwashing”.  I refused to participate.  He shall continue to believe that Jesus was murdered by the Jews, and I shall continue to know better. He will continue to believe that I am “a con, a humorless bully who talks much and proves nothing”, and I will continue to yawn at silly men who flex muscles in the hopes that this will substitute for a brain.

Speaking of brains, most of the extreme Right is still without one functioning one. Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, should you have forgotten.

The picture at the right is one of my favorite, and a larger version of it hung in the courtroom of a dear judge and even dearer friend of mine from Detroit.

As you probably know,  the Extreme Right is fond of re-writing history to conform to their notions of freedom and so forth. Given their lily-white composition, they are always searching for suitable Negroes to deflect the charge that they are what they are: seriously infested with a multitude of racists.

They find a few here and there, men and women who wish to shortcut the climb to national importance by becoming the trained monkey for the Extreme Right. They do and say the right things, as the Master expects, all to gain that fame and hopefully fortune that they don’t wish to really work hard for legitimately.

That is bad enough, but when they attempt to take as their own a hero of the Left, well, it is absurd and well, downright immoral.

The litany as regards MLK, from the crazy Right’s point of view is that MLK was a Republican. Period. Yes, they think that says it all. They of course do point out, rather self-importantly, that the Dixiecrats were the ones who opposed civil rights. As a second offering, they regurgitate about the only phrase they have been taught: “Someday all God’s children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

And as we all know, good character is not dwelling on that past in which white people lynched black people, and it certainly doesn’t remind people that racism is still rather rampant in America today.

Of course they never learned neglect to remember that King died while marching with union members demanding fair wages and working conditions, and that he often spoke of the inequality in the distribution of income in this country, both of which are anathema to the average tea-guzzler. And of course they conveniently forget that all those Dixiecrats, after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid 60’s, all did what they said they would never do, they voted Republican and then (shock and horror) BECAME Republicans, as the only party in the South who was sympathetic to their “whites only” melancholia.

And if you would like to take a trip down memory lane with REAL facts, read this history lesson from Salon which takes us along that dark road of “how do we stop this crap from happening to our lily-white land?”

And as much as I love Las Cruces, it is not a hot bed of liberality regarding the Catholic Church. Our own Cathedral church, Immaculate Heart of Mary, just saw fit through Father Bill to fire the pianist who had first of all the audacity to be gay, but second to marry legally in the state of New Mexico. Father Bill operates not in the spirit of our new Pope Francis it seems, and that sickens me, and makes me quite ashamed. And I do believe that the Church would do things much differently regarding this and other “sex” issues, were more women involved in running things.

So, that about sums up my week of thoughts. Except that thug-bully Chris Christie may be getting what is due him, and that’s all good.

And if it seems that I’m down on men in this post, well, you would be right, except for the Contrarian who continues to be the best husband/person I know, and Johnny Depp who continues to be the best eye candy ever invented by a loving God.

And so it goes.

 

I Wish I Could Work THERE!

Tags

business, workers rights

No, I’m not saying I wish I could work at Google.

But plenty of people do.

In fact, Google won the top spot for “best place to work” in Fortune’s annual list just released today.

Now, I don’t know that much about Google, except that I pretty much like their search engine, and I like their Images search engine. I didn’t care so much for Chrome, but hey, you can’t hit the jackpot on everything.

They were interviewing someone from Fortune who announced this years top 10 this morning on Morning Joe. The question was inevitably asked: what do all the companies in the top ten have in common. The interviewee responded immediately: they care about their employees, actually they put employees first.

Now we have all heard that the mantra of any company is supposed to be “the customer is always right” which essentially means that customers come first. We know that this is a lie mostly, unless there is fierce competition. But the first goal of most companies seems to be to destroy the competition so you can force the consumer to take what they are offered because there ain’t no alternative. It was surely Rockefeller’s goal that if you wanted kerosene to light your lamps, it’s was either his or sit in the dark, so pay what he demanded.

Those of us not in the top 1% have long known that the real power and the real value in business is the employee. Ideas are essential to the success of any business, but in the end, it is the employees who make it happen. They produce the “product” whatever that may be, and they interact with the public however that is defined. So it is in the end a no brainer: happy employee = successful business (all other things remaining equal of course).

Fortune and others who study this sort of thing seem to agree. Robin Hartman, who helps companies achieve “a great place to work” gives a list of things a good company does:

• They treat employees like grown-ups. They share information with employees, listen to their ideas (or better yet, actively seek out and act upon their ideas) and assume they are responsible enough to manage their own time.

•  They treat people fairly. They pay people decently and give them good benefits, including not only decent healthcare but other even rarer essentials, like paid parental leave. And they use lay-offs as a last resort.

•  They help employees with their careers and understand that not all careers are built the same. They have strong training programs, reimburse tuition for education outside of work, have active, well-thought out platforms for mentoring–especially for women and minorities–and provide pathways for non-traditional career paths.

•  They understand that people have lives outside of work, and that these lives might sometimes impinge on (or even take over) their time and attention. They realize that allowing for some work-life give and take means not only that they won’t waste time and money on unnecessary turnover, but that they’ll build loyalty and commitment. They know it’s give and take, not give or take.

•  They see fun, humor and relaxation not as the enemies of hard work, but as its allies.

•  They have a purpose — a mission — that everyone understands. Even better, every employee can tell you the role he or she plays in achieving that purpose.

•  They are good citizens of their communities and of the world. Not just according to their P.R. campaigns, but for real. They think about their carbon footprint, they come up with creative ways to support local projects or small businesses, they actively promote volunteerism among their employees.

Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project has his own list.

1. Commit to paying every employee a living wage. To see examples of how much that is, depending on where you live, go to this site. Many companies do not meet that standard for many of their jobs. It’s nothing short of obscene to pay a CEO millions of dollars a year while paying any employee a sum for full time work that falls below the poverty line.
2. Give all employees a stake in the company’s success, in the form of profit sharing, or stock options, or bonuses tied to performance. If the company does well, all employees should share in the success, in meaningful ways.
3. Design working environments that are safe, comfortable and appealing to work in. In offices, include a range of physical spaces that allow for privacy, collaboration, and simply hanging out.
4. Provide healthy, high quality food, at the lowest possible prices, including in vending machines.
5. Create places for employees to rest and renew during the course of the working day and encourage them to take intermittent breaks. Ideally, leaders would permit afternoon naps, which fuel higher productivity in the several hours that follow.
6. Offer a well equipped gym and other facilities that encourage employees to move physically and stay fit. Provide incentives for employees to use the facilities, including during the work day as a source of renewal.
7. Define clear and specific expectations for what success looks like in any given job. Then, treat employees as adults by giving them as much autonomy as possible to choose when they work, where they do their work, and how best to get it accomplished.
8. Institute two-way performance reviews, so that employees not only receive regular feedback about how they’re doing, in ways that support their growth, but are also given the opportunity to provide feedback to their supervisors, anonymously if they so choose, to avoid recrimination.
9. Hold leaders and managers accountable for treating all employees with respect and care, all of the time, and encourage them to regularly recognize those they supervise for the positive contributions they make.
10. Create policies that encourage employees to set aside time to focus without interruption on their most important priorities, including long-term projects and more strategic and creative thinking. Ideally, give them a designated amount of time to pursue projects they’re especially passionate about and which have the potential to add value to the company.
11. Provide employees with ongoing opportunities and incentives to learn, develop and grow, both in establishing new job-specific hard skills, as well as softer skills that serve them well as individuals, and as managers and leaders.
12. Stand for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work.

Interestingly, Schwartz’s list was compiled in 2012, and he stated that no company can do all of these perfectly, but Google probably does the best job. Hence, Google‘s number one position in the Fortune list appears to be no fluke.

All this is mildly interesting, for in fact, those of us who have been mostly employees rather than employers already know all this stuff.

But in a world where we are told that employers are “job creators” and thus should expect everyone else to cut them all the monetary slack they need to get on with that job, we are reminded anew that we, the worker is what really counts. Make no mistake, business is still in the business to make money, but the surest way to get there is to create a happy work force, not just with “gifts of money and benefits” but to be cherished as part of a team, and valuable for their brains as well as their brawn.

We all know that Wal-Mart and McDonald’s can pay a living wage. We know they can but won’t because nobody has yet forced them to. Jobs are so scarce that people hold on for dear life those puny jobs that force them to apply for food stamps in order to feed their kids. They continue to call these jobs “entry-level” for which there somehow is supposed to be low remuneration in return for the “gift” of a job at all. That is nonsense. There is no greater learning curve to flipping a burger than there is to learning how to integrate into a company’s bookkeeping framework. One is called “entry-level” the other surely not.

Little by little, we are educating the public to what they used to know. Workers matter.

 

 

 

 

We Be Dumb, But We Survive–So Far

Tags

critical thinking and reading, how to think, humans, intelligence

Throughout the years we have been tapping these keys, much of what has passed here for political discourse have involved relating in details the insane but often comical activities of fellow humans.

We are a motley lot, we homo sapiens sapiens species.  We range from brilliant gems of intellectual super nova to hard, dense white dwarfs. We are all else in between.

A couple of things I’ve come across in the last week or so have careened around inside my head, trying to find attachment to this or that theory of behavior. I have struggled mightily to understand my fellow brothers and sisters in humanity, and often come away thinking that I seem to have more in common with the average horny toad or muskrat, than I do with some of them.

I have often spoken of the “tenacity of life” and I admit that I find something Godlike in that, although it is not necessary I suspect. The woeful common dandelion bursts forth as a seedling and seeks the sun, finally finding a small possibility in the crack in the sidewalk. Up it marches, sending forth its flower, opening wide, being blessed by rain and sun and some small measure of nutrient. If lucky, and it must be surely luck, it goes to seed and blows it’s progeny forth, most of which will die, but a few of which will find purchase in some speck of soil and begin the process again.

As metaphor the dandelion is apt. For lichen struggles on the tundra as do microscopic organisms under the polar ice cap. Life just is hardy. And that provides an answer of sorts as to why we human who act in such awful ways, manage to continue.

It just ain’t that hard.

We are ostensibly at top of the food chain, the possessors of superior brains, able to build Space stations and microscopic computer chips. But such abilities are not required quite obviously, since we would not be here if they were. The amoeba carries on quite nicely, thank you very much, with no “brain” at all. Genetics promote those things that are conducive to life, and discard those that aren’t. Dogs and dinosaurs, the great evolutionary pinnacle. To a point.

Altruism is part of the natural world, although no animal or fish sees it that way. They are driven by forces that compel them to act as they do, sacrificing themselves in some cases for the “good of the rest”. Penguins gather in large “herds” to keep warm, and those on the outside bear the brunt of the cold and wind until they can take no more and force their way toward the warmer middle, others take up the perimeter in their “turn.” A mother moose will fight, including giving her life, to protect her calf from the wolf pack. Male lions will fight, sometimes to the death, to gain the right to father the next generation. None does it because it suits their own personal interest. Self-interest gives way to the greater interests of all or some.

We are different. We have the same genetic urges no doubt, for they have proven themselves essential to species survival. But because of those big brains, we can think. We can access dangers, and pluses and minuses to our behaviors and we can CHOOSE. And this is where it gets ugly.

We can choose to do what is right for our personal survival, at the cost of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others. We can be selfish in a way that animals usually are not.

We are not so stupid as humans not to survive, for that would make us less than those who preceded us in evolution, and that logically cannot be. Dolphins and coyotes, rainbow trout, and mosquitoes do NOTHING to actively destroy their species. Only humans can do that. Only humans can orchestrate in some blindly stupid set of decisions the elements of their own destruction as a species.

Our ability to decide between the well-being of ourselves versus the well-being of others can be our undoing.

Any fair reading for instance, of the bible, makes it most clear in both the Hebrew Testament and the New Testament, that the over-riding concern of God and Jesus, as related by the writers, is concern for the poor, the disenfranchised, the widow, the orphan, the stranger. We are told time and time again that in the end we will be judged by how we treated the “least of these”. Yet, many among us choose to read all sorts of caveats into that, and turn much of the bible into a framework to work out one’s personal “salvation”, without reference to the rest of humankind. At least that humankind is of no concern other than its necessity to provide the “bodies” for which we offer our “charity.”

Thousands, if not millions of us “believe” that giving the rich tax breaks, cutting off the poor from government assistance, and bombing anybody who doesn’t heel to our needs, is somehow “right”. Tens of thousands ignore the plain face of history and capture people who ideologically share almost none of their values, and make them their own, i.e, Martin L. King, Jr., being a Republican “like us.”

I could go on.

Look at the this.

What in the world is this about?

Seriously, READ this.

See, we aren’t stupid, but we are ignorant. We are wildly ignorant.

Most of us are so ignorant that we should stay locked inside our homes, never venturing forth lest the rest of the world take note of our ignorance. Except that out there in the world, we find kindred spirits everywhere.

We have decided that an opinion is every bit as good as a fact.

Look to your education in high school, because most people don’t go any further. Do you still remember than Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? What the hell does it matter? Do you still remember the names of the ships? The Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria? What the hell does that matter?

That’s what we were taught.

We were not taught by and large anything about the morality or lack of same in entering a foreign land, peopled by others and forcibly taking it from them, and essentially committing genocide upon them.

I can tell you, how many members there are in the House of Representatives, and how many Senators there are. I might even be able to tell you how a bill becomes a law.

Was I ever taught about what representation ,should mean? What is government service meant to be? Was it explained to me what sorts of things justify asking other men and women to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the “good of America?”

I can tell you the basics of dissecting a frog, but I don’t remember any discussion about the ethics of life support systems, euthanasia, when life begins, what constitutes life, what is meaningful life?

What about the right to kill others of our kind?

What about the “right” to lock them up? For what and for how long? To kill who and for what reasons?

We were not educated to think. We were educated to be dutiful citizens, law-abiding for the most part, voting for elective offices at least the big ones, and raising children to do the same, all the time being “patriotic” which means being willing to sacrifice when the government asked us to.

So we don’t even know how to ask the right questions, and we don’t know how to evaluate the answers we get. And so we end up with a whole bunch of folks who believe that people who get food stamps are “lazy” and people who are receiving unemployment will go get a job when they can’t get it any more, and health care is a privilege, and that business is in business to “create jobs” and not get rich.

And it’s all just sad and frustrating.

Donald Trump made a joke about climate change, because “obviously” it isn’t happening, because it’s so awfully cold right now. The Donald may know better, but he may not. Ignorant people make lots of money some times. There is no correlation between the two.

We don’t read. We don’t learn. But we sure have opinions.

Just most of them aren’t worth the paper they aren’t printed on.

The point? I don’t really have one. I don’t really have one.