The Rest is Just Commentary

Tags

Extreme right-wing, tea patriots, teabaggers

As one rows through life, (apt analogy notwithstanding), one does, at least once, come to  what seems to oneself at least, an original conclusion about this or that flotsam that crosses the bow.

See, right there, I probably wrote a sentence that is unparalleled in human history, if not for its brilliance, then at least for its collection of words before unknown in such conjunction.

Yet, I am torn between the fact that we humans probably talk too much (ala Hillel and his oft quoted remark ““That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”) and my own creative genius, “no original thought has occurred since December 14, 1963.”

Put together, they form a perfect indictment that is hard to avoid the next time you decide to open your mouth and spew forth with some sort of “wisdom” meant for the ages. You’re just whistling Dixie as it were.

Yet, in my endless quest for truth, I stumbled across a word that seems to me, “new” and so perfectly fit for today, that it required a few tingling fingerprints across the keys to bring this dose of enlightenment to you, my dearest reader of all readers. Alas, but a cursory “google” proved that this “new” word was hardly new, but had been bounced around for some time, proving again, my only original thought.

(By the way, my original thought, occurred sometime after December 14, 1963, for it must be in a linear time progression, so it is perhaps better not to think to hard on the subject. The December 14, 1963 original thought was “Oh damn, the music died,” uttered by Dick “Night Train” Lane upon discovering the dead body of his beloved Dinah Washington, dead by her own “oops” overdose of barbiturates. Not to be confused with “the day the music died, in the song American Pie written about the untimely deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash on February 3, 1959.)

Back to the word.

The word was freedumb.

It seemed to encapsulate all that is Amerika these days. Dumbasses who spout “freedom” always with the slavering spittle of “I’ll die for it” flung from their lungs as their eyes cart-wheel and spin in ways that would make the average carny feel right at home.

Freeeeeee-dummmmmmb. Catchy no?

Ain’t nothin’ new under the sun as they say.

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun. (Ec 1:9)

Here’s a few notions ’bout freedumb you might have missed.

Don’t that just bring back fond memories? Old George was all about protectin’ them freedumbs from those A-rabs, when he wasn’t holdin’ hands with ’em. Lest we forget.

Damn facts as usual, getting in the way.

There was a man with a messed up head, fit for finger painting, which is where it all ended up.

It’s all been said so many times before.

It’s all be cried about, over and over.

It’s all frustrated the right good sense of the few, the proud, the thinking.

The word speaks volumes, leaving us the refrain, all else is commentary.

My latest entry?

Oh a someone who shall remain nameless who just posted one of those oh so obvious memes from Facebook that we all use because they say in few words what we think, even though often if looked at carefully, they are stupid? Those things.

It was a “oh, gosh, I feel so bad and so sorry for all those poor parents whose children were murdered by that awful kid who went on a rampage.” Except said person, had but a week or so ago, on MOTHER’S FREAKIN’ DAY, posted a meme of a purdy pink hand gun and at the ripe age of 65, moaned how much she wanted one of her very own.

How do your reckon with a mind that has warped itself into a slippery eel who no longer can tell head from tail? It has swallered its own head!

Such is the state of too much of Merika these days. Freedumb don’t begin to explain it.

In watching the badly done History channel’s marathon of the Great Wars, one noted that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, all managed to design and wear spiffy new “uniforms” to define themselves as something “new under the sun”.

The poor turds that banner themselves as Tea Patriots, will never see the demagogue coming, cuz, so far I ain’t seen Ted Cruz or Adam West, or any of the other high hyenas of crazy parading around in high boots and military garb. And ya know, that’s what demagogues wear. It’s a rule.

So much for sanity today. I’m all crazied out.

*Taking down the crazy, one stupid placard at a time*

Well, You Can Always Think About Sex Instead

Tags

critical thinking, democracy, economic systems, opinions, political systems, reading

See? I’m learning. Wanna get somebody’s attention? Mention sex in the title. Works every time. Just what does that crazy lady have to say about sex? Let’s see.

Nothing.

This is not about sex.

It’s about dumbing down the conversation in the hopes that a certain bunch of yahoos might actually recognize that that thing attached to their shoulders actually can be used for deciding more than whether to have the spaghetti Lean Cuisine for dinner or the Salisbury steak.

Okay, so I said that wrong, and all the knuckledraggers I got to read at the mention of sex, now vaguely think they’ve been insulted and have clicked this off.

No matter, what follows is way over their comprehension level anyway. Only the bright bulbs will continue.

There’s a conversation that seem to be in the offing here, yet it’s not a good idea to say it too loud. The conversation revolves around the question: Is democracy the best choice in a modern world?

It’s a hard question, since there is pretty good evidence that we don’t have anything remotely like democracy, have never had anything remotely like it, and probably won’t have anything like it, so how to compare? Let’s not forget that at the beginning of this great adventure, the real argument was between state’s rights and the central government, and that in most places religion was state ordained, and the people who voted were property holders. Women? They voted only by the power of persuasion.

Basically power in a democracy is wielded by the “eligible” voter (who is eligible becomes rather significant wouldn’t you say?), either directly or through elected representatives who enact laws that are applicable to everyone in a just, fair, and equal way. Greece started the whole thing in Athens, but of course women and slaves were not part of that “eligibility” requirement there either.

So how democratic one is starts with who gets to be part of “the people”. Thus my statement that we have never remotely been  a democracy from the start.

People of course, (mostly the one’s who have already dropped out of this conversation) get democracy all confused with socialism, and all confused on top of that with communism, and theocratic states, and oligarchies, and monarchies, to name the most prominent of the “forms of government”. But not all these are actually forms of government. Socialism and communism are more properly economic systems, akin to capitalism or free market economies.

That’s the problem in a nutshell. We claim that communism is “bad”, but communism as practiced by Lenin and Stalin the late ungreat Soviet Union had little to do with Marx and Engel’s ideal which was a marriage of a communist economic system married to a democratic political system. Similarly, American Democracy joins capitalism with a representative “democracy”. For a good while France and England and others married a theocratic/monarchical political system to a feudal system of economics.

Today, in the US we have an acknowledged mess. Our economic system seems to have led us to a new animal called a corptocracy for want of a better word. An increasingly smaller and smaller number of corporations “owned” by a very few men and even fewer women, control larger and larger portions of the national and increasingly international economies. They “buy” politicians and direct them as to what legislation they wish, and how to vote. They often, through groups like ALEC, even write the legislation themselves. By controlling economies they effectively control politics, and thus are the heads of the political system.

Although the trappings of “democracy” remain, through elections, more and more those votes don’t really count. The corporate interests choose the candidates, and fund their campaigns. As studies show, they have the greatest of influence on the introduction and passage of laws.

Perhaps it is time to at least begin the conversation as to whether or not capitalism or free markets are at all compatible with democracy as we might wish it to be? This is the question asked in This is Not What Democracy Looks Like: The Long Slow Death of Jefferson’s Dream.

The problem with posing the problem, is that it presupposes that the average American can (1) recognize the importance of the question, and (2) critically discern the arguments to be made and choose one that is both logical and right.

And there is much that suggests that this is not possible. In an seemingly endless list of studies done at different universities by respected scholars, the answer remains the same:  If your belief is a necessary part of the your world view, then NO evidence no matter how stellar, no matter how obvious, no matter how unchallenged by any contrary fact, is going to change your mind. You will continue to believe as you always have, because it’s necessary to your psychological well-being. Actual facts to the contrary become merely “conspiratorial” insertions. You don’t have to prove them to be a lie, (because of course you could not), but you can dismiss them out of hand.

This is sad news indeed. It means that much of what I do, is wasted. The people I can convince are already convinced more than likely. Those I need to convince will never be, no matter what proofs I bring to the table.

It seems the new studies need to focus on how one convinces a stone that is about to get crushed by the boulder, that it should roll on down out of the way.

Which all leads to another piece of sad news I’ve come across lately.

I’m reading a book entitled “How to Read a Book“. Now before you laugh and say, oh, for starters, take the cover and bend it to the left, and then look for words, continue to move pages to the left until you find some, then read them. Before you do that, listen a bit.

This book was written by a college professor in the early 1940’s and he updated it in the early mid-70’s, and he now dead. I heard about it in another very modern book I read, whose author suggested that it had impacted him like no other he has read since. It changed how he read. On that note, I purchased it.

So far it’s proving to be both provocative and enlightening. It’s could well be titled today, “How to Read a Book Critically” for that’s what it mostly is designed to do. The author, Mortimer Adler announces that there are four levels of reading. The first, is what passes for competence upon finishing high school. It is akin to being able to read the words and get a basic understanding from the sentences in fairly simple things, like a job application, or reading traffic signs.

Yes folks, that is the level of reading you acquired in high school. You were not taught to read anything beyond the level of basic comprehension. You were not taught to understand the deeper meaning of an author’s arguments, see their flaws or their merits. You were not taught anything about judging the value of what you have read. You read simply for information and not for understanding.

And the sad thing, is that the levels 2 and 3 and 4 are not mastered simply by attending college. Adler posits that some graduate students are still struggling after two years with mastering level four reading, the ability to properly analyze and compare works on the same topic with each other.

Critical thinking is still by and large not taught anywhere.

But you can learn.

If you buy the book and read it.

And it is hopeless to conclude that much will ever change in America until enough of our people can read and think critically. Certainly they cannot now, for if they could, there would not be a Tea Party, there would be no creationists, and there would be no climate deniers. Such people as these would remain hidden in their closets with their goofy ideas. They would certainly not have media access to spew their garbled thoughts across America.

So, you might as well think about sex instead.

 

 

Don’t Run! It’s Me!

Tags

Autobiography, Blog, life in the foothills, truth

Every so often I feel the need to change things up a bit. I don’t do this to my other blogs by and large, but this one seems to change with time.

Mostly my interests are so diverse that occasionally I discover that I’ve struck a new course in a meandering sort of way, and now find myself quite unlike where I expected to be.

I am as they say,  a woman for all seasons, a renaissance gal, an eclectic, a head in the stars sort of lady.  I’m a foul-mouthed sailor on occasion if that can any more be said to exist apart from the general population’s proclivities toward sewer mouth. I’m a sexual tease, a damned old lady, eccentric in my heart (although my husband says a true eccentric must be rich and I’m not sleeping in a bed of hundred-dollar bills, though I do account myself quite wealthy by some standard I set for myself anyway), and an intellectual maven in my own mind at least. I’m so housewifey it makes me sick at times with another recipe always tempting and another craft to be mastered. I watch too much television, don’t read enough books, think too much of things I cannot know, believe in stuff that would stun a logical person, question almost everything, argue because it’s Tuesday, (or any other day of the week), and love fiercely, passionately, compassionately, empathetically, and with a child-like innocence.

I love any animal with fur, and dislike most anything without it.

I have a good grasp on what I don’t know.

I have a passion to know, and when I realized long ago that I could not possibly keep up with all the books I wanted to read, I felt like I should have a funeral. There was once a time when the average person could do so, albeit she would require a certain wealth to obtain the books.

I took forever to find women roll models but I have them, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Catherine of Siena,  and Hypatia of Alexandria, the latter being my most noteworthy mentor. She was at one time the librarian at the great library of Alexandria, and yes I mourn the loss of that institution still, along with Freddy Mercury from Queen. Go figure.

I think of libraries as sacred places.

As I enter the small city of Las Cruces many mornings and come over the last hill down into the town, the hillside to my left reminds me of the houses perched down the sides of the cliffs of the Aegean although there is no sea below. It’s the white/pink colors that remind me. I revere Athens and Plato and Socrates unlike hardly any other beings from the past, along with a string of Romans such as Livy and Cicero. Let us not forget Aristophanes, Ovid and Virgil either.

These people and places are my center.

I like old coke, potato chips and chocolate ice cream. I secretly play a few games of bingo every day. You wanna talk eclectic?

I am a good person, at times an awful one. I am selfish, and then extravagant in my giving. I love beautiful jewels and hate the diamond mines and the toll of human life they take. I hate that we are so rich and yet so poor in spirit and common decency that we are willing to allow cruel poverty to consume all too many in exchange for retaining a few hundred extra dollars a year in taxes.

I hate stupid. I hate ignorance, and I hate most of all people who are content to be both because it’s easier to believe the lie that brings comfort to their otherwise miserable lives. I hate people who cannot face themselves or their shortcomings. I hate people who blame others instead of themselves.

I love truth.

I love it because it is all that we have in the end. Without it, we live lives of delusion and cling to what cannot endure. Truth is enduring though it may well change as we learn more. Truth in reality never changes, but our understanding of it does. But seek it we must, for all solid ground is ultimately based upon it.

You can believe the earth is 6,000 years old and God will somehow never let earth fail, but it won’t stop the truth. Believe what you may, true will have its way. Better to accept truth and perhaps then the light can shine on how we have misidentified God. Is it not better to know God for what God is rather than as we desire God to be?

The logic seems irrefutable to me.

So here we concentrate on truth.

We always have, but it bears stating it out, and naming it as our goal.

We welcome discussion, we welcome dispute, but we will never sacrifice truth for what feels good here.

I expose my underbelly with no small reluctance, but still I do it because truth is the only thing that in the end will help another to cope with their own demons and despair. You are not alone, we are all in this together.

So nothing is changed much, except that we have prettied our self up in a new dress  and new name. And hopefully we will use truth as our walking stick, always aware in whatever we say and do, that we cannot hide it, deny it, or pretend it is not. It walks beside us, is firmly gripped by us, and seeks the firm ground as we walk forward into this and every day.

 

 

 

I Kinnah Unnerstan Thees Pepal

Tags

Extreme right-wing, History, revolution, tea party

God knows I try.

But it seems an impossibility. It’s like Jesus is said to have said, to gain your life you gotta lose it.

To understand the Tea Party People, ya gotta lose your mind.

It’s not that I’m such a great student of history, though I know my fair share. Not so much the dates and stuff, but the general threads of causation. I get the big picture.

The Tea Party is filled with deliberately false history. I mean that. It’s “history” designed to support the meme of the party, however that might be defined.

Let’s start with the “tea party” label. Who is a tea party person?  Well, the Koch’s envisioned a “populist” groundswell of people who hated government. Why would they do that? Oh because they are struggling economically and paying taxes has never been popular. So the Koch’s lassoed that common feeling, and then fed the flames that most of the taxes were going to the wrong places: i.e. poor “takers” who were not pulling their weight because the Democrats had found an endless supply of voters by giving them “stuff”–like food.

The Koch’s were willing to accept that a lot of these angry folks brought a lot of ideas of their own about how things should be run, and since the Koch’s vision doesn’t include them every running anything, they allowed for their anti-gay, anti-free choice, anti-immigrant, anti-not-white, pro-fundamentalism stuff to play in the mix. The Koch’s themselves? Who knows what they think beyond accumulating all the money in the world.

So basically the Tea Party contains a collection of economic super conservatives and/or social super conservatives. They can be all one or the other, or some mix of both. A bunch of grifters always rise to the occasion when they smell a mark. And the folks like David Barton step up and decide they will now call themselves “historians” and rewrite it to suit their new audience of gullible angry people.

We all know from a lot of studies that have been done, that to a degree, one is kinda born conservative or liberal. The latest entries in this growing body of work are Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, and Predisposed: Liberals and Conservatives and the Biology of Political Differences. No doubt these predilections are not written in stone, and environment probably has much to do with it as well. However, it does mean that we enter the world with a certain “world view”. If we get the “liberal” gene we are predisposed to be curious about the world, open to new things, willing to explore changing our minds and our way of doing things. If we get the conservative gene, we are more frightened of the world, see it as dangerous, think it’s best to stay with what has proven good in the past, and stick with our “own kind”.

When the extreme Right decided on adopting a logo and meme to describe who they were and are, it was no doubt comforting to align themselves with the history of the country. Yes, it made sense to see themselves as much like those brave souls who gambled everything to stand against the Mother country and strike for independence. They became Tea Party Patriots, self-described. They took to wearing three-corner hats dripping with tea bags as their costume.

Although studies do show that overall, those who identify as Republicans are a bit more educated than Democrats, this has little to do with intelligence if anything. It merely suggests that to a slightly greater degree, Republicans in general have more education. They also tend to be grossly more white, and older.

Clearly it seems to education has not served them well as regards the history of their own nation. One has but to remember Sarah Palin’s famous explanation of Paul Revere’s ride:

“He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

While Palin was sorta right about warning the British (Revere was actually stopped by the British, and had his horse taken from him, and he did tell the British that they would make a mistake if they marched on Lexington, he this was not the purpose of his “ride”.), she added in ringing bells and warning shots, which have nothing to do with the story.

Similarly, Michele Bachmann helped us understand our founding by explaining our “founding fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery” and that our “founding father John Quincy Adams would not rest until he had eradicated it.”

Of course this was not true. Slavery was written into the Constitution, several of the Founding Fathers owned slaves themselves, and John Quincy Adams was a mere child at the time of the revolution, was not a founding father, and died well before slavery was abolished.

No matter that this sort of thing is common with the Tea Party, they also as we have said, claim to be of the same genre as those patriots. And this is odd indeed.

For if one were to conclude anything from studying that period of our history, one would conclude that the men who pursued independence for this country were anything but conservatives. They were men who were well read in the new theories sweeping Europe based on the writings of John Locke, Montesquieu,  and Voltaire, and scientists such as Isaac Newton who brought us to a new way of understanding the world around us. These men were not conservatives, but just the opposite, they were men of the Enlightenment, that amazing time when there was a burst of new ideas and new thinking.

One of those new ways of thinking was a serious questioning of theocratic and monarchical forms of government. Britain represented both, and those soon-to-be Americans who supported the conservative position were holding with the Brits were called “loyalists” or “Tories”. They were the conservatives of the day, while Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin and those who declared for independence were liberals.

Our Tea Party adherents are not in any way aligned with the kinds of thinking that motivated the Founding Fathers. To claim such a joining is simply intellectually indefensible. Frankly I suspect the average Tea Bibber of today has no clue, has never thought seriously about any of this, and would be shocked if you tried to explain it. They seem to be satisfied that their willingness to argue against taxation automatically puts them in league with the Founders.

That might work if we didn’t have pages of subsequent history to prove otherwise. Those who decided to bring armed rebellion against the new country in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion soon found that the 2nd Amendment was used, not to insure their private right to bear arms against the government, but for the government to put them down as an illegal rebellion against a duly passed law.

I suspect this is all too confusing for the average Tea Bagger. It’s just feels better to wave “Don’t tread on me” flags and feel that you are in the tradition of such great men. Alas, that ship won’t float.

 

The Dirty Little Secret

Tags

Autobiography, family

I’ve spoken once or twice about my failed relationship with my parents. Both of them. The trifecta of dysfunctional. It is probably not possible for two dysfunctional people to raise a third who is not also dysfunctional.

That would be me. But I take great comfort in the fact that I became aware that I was dysfunctional quite early on, and took a lot of steps to fix me. I did a good job. In fact, I have to say that that I’ve been “evaluated” and found to be quite sane, and quite functional. (Nowadays when you are considered for entry into the convent you get a psych evaluation, and you also get a copy–so I know of what I speak).

I’ve talked a bit about my mother and father, and how odd it seems to me it is that two people who BOTH functioned on the basis of conditional love would marry. But they did. I’ve explained something about what that is about, and I don’t intend to delve into that all again. It was what it was. They were who they were. Both were emotionally wounded themselves and given that, they presented as fairly normal as most people go.

I certainly am not suggesting that my life was any living hell. It was not. I was not physically abused. I received corporal punishment as was common among all the kids I knew, but no more so than most. My parents were emotionally abusive though I’m quite sure they would never have suspected that what they did was damaging or wrong. People who are emotionally abusive raise kids with all sorts of issues about self-esteem. It impacts what they seek, how they seek it, and how they evaluate their own success in life. It all leads to a bad end  of, I think, revolving abuse, if you aren’t lucky enough as I was to identify it, and fix it.

This all comes up because yesterday was Mother’s Day, and as you might expect, Facebook was just chock full of pictures of everyone’s mom and lots of laudatory things to say. I don’t quarrel with any of that, and in fact, I bless everyone who was lucky enough to have a good relationship with their mother and/or father as the case may be. Father’s day of course is coming up next.

I recognize that a whole lot of people say they “love” their mother, and they “honor” her in many ways, but if you probe a bit, you find that the relationship they had with Mother was anything but loving and supportive. In fact, books galore are written about the difficulties in parent-child relationships.

Which means really that people think that it’s wrong to admit that their relationship with parents simply sucked. It’s the same way mostly with “do you believe in God?” A whole lot of folks will say “yes” because they don’t want to face what they think will be the reaction if they say “no”. People react automatically to “don’t you love you mother?”  They say “yes” because the opposite is unthinkable.

And a ton of folks, bite the bullet as required every year, every month, or whatever, making the journey to mom’s or picking up the phone. But as they do it, their stomach tightens and they try to get prepared for what is to come. When the encounter is over, they feel mostly relief. They go home and lick their new wounds, or bandage up the old one’s that have been torn back open. Tell me if you don’t know people like that?

Yet, it’s somehow better to “put up with” mom’s snide remarks, badgering about the grandchildren she doesn’t yet have, you’re failure to live up to her expectations, and so on and so on. It’s better to put up with it than to remove yourself from a toxic situation that is causing you pain and trouble. Somehow you “owe” it because after all they “had you”.

Well, the dirty secret is that there are a lot of adult children out there who have cut the cord, saying enough is enough. I’m going to get healthy and stay that way. Mothers aren’t always “there for you”, they aren’t always “on your side”. They don’t always have “your best interests at heart”. Sometimes they have their own, and no doubt they are not even aware.

I recall many years ago a discussion with a group of nuns I was spending a weekend with. They were talking about the necessity to vision God in not just male terms. God needs to be what God is, non-gendered. The reason is that there are people out their who have been abused by men, and calling God “father” is jarring to them and makes it difficult for them to feel safe in God’s love.  I realized the importance of that idea, and it carries over to such holidays as Mother’s and Father’s day.

For those of us what have found it necessary to move on from these relationships, such days are reminders of what others have that we don’t. Or more correctly what many of those others profess to have because they are afraid to utter the words, “I don’t want a relationship with you any more.”

Someone posted this on Facebook and I went and read it, and was surprised at how viscerally some of these things hit me. It’s entitled, 13 Things No Estranged Child Needs to Hear on Mother’s Day.

No one should feel ashamed or more importantly feel called upon to explain or defend their decision. We are all born of someone. We do not “owe” them anything for that. We exist. We have a right to try to make our lives as happy and complete as we desire. Nobody should be forced to endure misery because “they’re your parents”.  I am sad that I did not have the relationship I envisioned.  I hold no anger that I did not. I have let all that go long long ago.

I have found the mentors I needed and they were happy to be there when I needed them. I don’t consider my story unusual or myself particularly brave or special.  I suspect there are a lot more out there who don’t desire to be open about their own journey of estrangement. They have every right to talk or not about it as they see fit. I’m just willing to let others know that if they are like me, they are not alone. Not by a long shot.

It’s about truth.

Maybe we need, a day of honoring all those people who have helped us become those things we admire in ourselves. A “You’re a Good Person Day”.

Perhaps it would mean more than  words spoken in hollow obedience to society’s “norms” that I fear is all too often the case.

 

 

 

It Doesn’t Make Sense

Tags

crap I learned. Crap I will never learn, Humor, satire, the far far Right.

I live in perpetual confusion.

I’m pretty certain that it’s the best place to be.

My mind is never at loose ends, with nothing to think about.

I have a long list of confusing things I can call upon at a moments notice to occupy the time.

I’m not sure I’d want to not be confused. It would mean I was a fundigelical (fundamentalist/evangelical). They are not confused about anything they tell me. They are quite sure all the answers are in one book, and they find it not the least confusing.

But it’s not because the book (the bible) is not confusing, for it is and has been for as long as it’s been deemed a “book” to all the people who actually are paid to figure it out and have prepared for years to be knowledgeable about all the stuff one needs to know to well, know.

No, it’s because they don’t have a confused gene in their brain. See, we regular folks have a confusion gene. It enables us to know that two things don’t add up and thus are C O N F U S I N G. See how that works? A gene in DNA enables you to discern that shit don’t go together. Like gasoline and a match or like a cliff and the continuation of a road. It’s an important gene, for it helps us survive.

I’m not sure how fundigelicals survive. That confuses me a lot.

Another thing that confuses me is that many of these fundigelicals think that poor people are lazy. Now, that is not true for the most part, as most of us know, but fundigelicals insist that it is, and they sure aren’t confused about that. I think they found it in that book some where, or they think they did. In any event, they want poor people to get jobs.

Well, that logically follows I guess.

Except that these same fundigelicals don’t want employers to have to pay a fair and living wage. They are, mostly at least, very much against raising the minimum wage to a “living wage”, meaning a wage that allows a person to pay their bills and ya know, eat, and take care of their families. The fundigelicals say that this impinges on a employers right to pay what they want. And they add that some jobs aren’t worth a “living wage”, they’re just starter jobs, ya know, to wet your toes on.

So the logic  goes at least.

Ya see, a job is a hard thing to learn. Any job it seems. And it seems that even though every job requires very different things such as placing a round thing in a round hole, or screwing something into something else, or making change, or painting between the lines,  reading and finding errors in a manuscript, or taking out a heart and putting in a new one (well not new actually, but newer at least). See? Lots of different things.

But somehow, there are “universal” things about jobs that need to be learned, and no employer, so the theory goes) should be asked to pay much for this learning curve. The first employer gets stuck with teaching these “things” and he should get a break for doing so.

I guess that’s what it means.

What are these “things”?

Let me see.

Get up on time?

Maybe, but getting to school/the bus stop/the car pool required that as children.

Getting dressed properly?

Yep, but mostly we learned that stuff in school too. Wearing the wrong things got ya sent home, or mom scurried to school with the “right” clothes.

Doing your own work?

Ummm, teachers usually took care of that with various forms of discipline.

Not talking about non-business related subjects during work time?

Kinda like not talking in class when the teacher is talking.

Oh I got one. Learning to punch the clock!

Yep, that takes wow, better than 30 seconds if you go through it twice.

What to do with a paycheck?

Well, if you’re not sure, pin it to your pocket and give it to mom like at school.

See? I’m out of “things” to learn on the job, other than the SPECIFICS OF THE ACTUAL JOB WHICH HAS TO BE TAUGHT AT ALL OF THEM.

So I’m confused, by why you don’t want people to get a living wage.

Since you want them to work to avoid being on the dole, so doesn’t it MAKE SENSE that it actually be ENOUGH TO NOT BE ON THE DOLE TOO?

Which is what Wal-Mart does, not pay a living wage so better than one half of their employees work there and STILL have to use government assistance.

So, you don’t want to give people food stamps, and you do want them to get a job, but you don’t want to pay them enough not to need food stamps?

You see my confusion?

I’m told there is this thing called a “smart gun”. Through some magic, it won’t work except for the person who bought it and owns it legally.

It would seem that if all the guns were eventually of this type that trafficking in illegal guns wouldn’t work. You couldn’t buy a working gun “off the street”. You couldn’t break into somebody’s house and steal their gun cuz it wouldn’t work. If you disarmed a homeowner defending his home against your intrusion, you couldn’t use it against them, except to hit them with it. If your kid found your gun, he couldn’t shoot himself or his best friend by mistake.

It seems like a good thing.

The NRA is having babies of hysteria over this thing.

They are the people who claim that the only way to deal with bad guys with guns is for good guys get guns. So they want to sell all the “good guys” guns.

Except they don’t want any checks of any sort to determine that good guys are actually good. Wouldn’t it make some sense to know that first?

And they don’t want smart guns that only fire for the good guys.

I’m really confused about this one.

I guess Wayne La Pee Pee LaPierre doesn’t have the confusion gene either.

So, anyway, I could go on. Reams later, I would only have scratched the surface of stuff that is confusing. Time dilation could take days all by itself. So, I’ll just stop here.

For today.

I hope you are confused now.

Really, it’s the only sane place to live.

 

 

Weeping For Joy

Tags

1 st Amendment, judiciary, tea party

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

There are times in life when the universe slaps you in the face, not out of spite or meanness, but to be most sure that it has your attention.

This is a good thing.

Such a thing happened to me.

It often does, I have to admit.

This, I ponder, may not be the case with most of humanity, it’s hard to say. I can only speak for myself. But it is a regular occurrence for me, I assure you.

If one believes, as some do, that the universe is a vast sea of intelligence, and we are but threads in the great tapestry that is the universal brain, then one is required, or so it seems to me, to respond promptly to its nudge, or slap as the case may be. Perhaps to the more aware it is a nudge. As I said, to me it seems a good healthy slap, one that stings for a few seconds, leaves a pink echo upon my cheek, but no lasting imprint.

The prompting today seems directed at reminding me that there is much to this thing called humanity, this thing of being human. In fact, there is so much diversity along the spectrum of human to not so very, as to suggest that some of us many not be exactly of the same species at all. This of course could figure quite prominently in those circles where UFO’s and alien meddling are believed to be involved in so-called human evolution. A helping hand to Darwin so to speak.

What I mean to say is that, well some of us seem not to play by the normal rules of logic. You know the drill. Two plus two equals four. Rain falls down unless carried by wind in some not gravity direction. You know, basics.

It is undoubtedly what makes it nearly impossible for rational normal people to get facts across to people of the TeaSwillin’ party. Which is a whole failure of logic in and of itself, since of course said party is not really known for its tea swilling at all, rather for its Bud delight I would generalize. Yet it clings to an appellation, their collective minds conclude,  that suggests  a willingness to “give the last full measure” for an America they have dreamed up at back yard barbecue meets during lazy Saturday nights.

The following is but an example.

There was a time, long ago and in a universe perhaps far away, when the public at large looked up to those of great learning. Such were judges, who were given a reverence seldom accorded politicians at least. Wearing archaic uniforms of flowing robes, they dispensed justice from on high. They did this by reasoning from old and rather dusty tomes of ancient writings which consisted of “precedent” or the honor given to past pronouncements from similar men dressed similarly.

But I must say, that no longer can we accord such men, or women if they exist, with this presumed pedestal right.

Alas, they too have proven to be of mere clay.

Fine you say, the likes of Thomas, Alito, Scalia have made that case  for some time now.

Yes, you would be right, but, no I speak of one so low as to commune with pond scum.

That man would be Chief Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, a state always in the running for title as location of the world’s stupidest people.

Yes, THAT Roy Moore, the fool who refused to remove the 10 commandments from a courthouse under order from a Federal Judge. For that he was unanimously removed from the bench by other jurists of that state. But, yes, you remember don’t you? The good but stupid people of Alabama sent him right on back.

Roy was no doubt a stellar student at Alabama University but must have slept through most of his Constitutional law courses. This seems plausible, since Roy admits that his tenure as company commander of a MP unit in Vietnam was, shall we say, problematic. Known for his strict adherence to rules and interpretation, he became known as Captain America. This was not an endearing name, and poor Roy took to sleeping upon sandbags should his men decide to lob a grenade under his cot. So he might well have been in need of sleep during those years after in stuffy constitutional law classes.

In any case, Roy has developed a rather unusual interpretation of the First Amendment in its entirety. It seems, or so Roy says, that the darn thing only applies to Christians, since as he says, Buddha did not make us, and he is unaware of any copy of the Koran having come on the Mayflower.

If you don’t know this, then Roy invites you to “get back and learn your history”.

Roy expounds on life itself, saying that it’s clear that life begins “when the baby kicks, not when it’s head comes out!” Common sense found at the bottom of a cracker jack box folks.

Now if all this sounds somewhat different from what you learned, well, you don’t inhabit Roy’s jello brain.

See the universe is trying to tell ya something here folks. Not all humans are created, well quite human. Some of us are imposters. Roy proves that.

Aren’t you glad you don’t live in Alabama?

Get out there and look for the aliens among us…If you smell tea, you are on the right track.

Source: The Raw Story

Roy on vacation