The world of course is of mixed opinion on what to do. The usual war mongers call for “all out war”, accusing this of being an existential threat. It is as if ISIS is determined to return to medieval times unless we turn our back on civilized responses and “wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Perhaps this is so. Others feel a more nuanced approach is better, arguing that we play into their hands by making it an East-West war of competing lifestyles.

Then again, the answer may lie somewhere down the middle. It is not as though it seems that “these people” can be rationally addressed. In utter frustration we seem to assume that we must obliterate rather than change minds.

As one might predict, the war of words has been impressive across social media, much of it loud and angry. This places in a newer context the issue of the mass exodus occurring in Syria as tens of thousands flee for their very lives before the spectre of violence that knows no end it seems.

We are in what is now sadly, prime time in our election cycle. Since most candidates are running virtually from the day they are elected, we are forced to endure the endless posturing of candidates (real or only imagined in their own minds) about every “crisis” real or imagined that might drum up a vote here or there.

Syrian refugees has become the new cause celeb to toss around as needed. Yes, toss around, for the individuals matter not at all here. They are en mass, “refugees” and as such the ball being tossed back and forth between competing sides.

Is it ironic that a nation that was built upon immigration now wars with itself over whether we should accept the tired, sick, terrified men, women and children of Syria? Our fair share at least?

I have heard such excuses. They can’t be properly vetted some say, having of course no idea what the vetting even entails or how long it lasts. They will bring disease, crime, and “use up our resources we need for our own unfortunate,” others claim, though we of course forget that when the refugees are not the issue, some fairly claim that the unfortunate in this country (if the takers, abusers, and lazy sorts are removed) are small indeed and can easily be handled by “charity”.

The more we negate these excuses, the more are made up, the hotter the rhetoric and surely someone is bound to ask, “why don’t you take them then?” as if this strawman argument helps them avoid the Christian constriction squeezing off their breathing.

Christian?

No, more properly Christianist.

For all major denominations have publicly called for taking in the refugees from Syria. It is the Christian thing to do.

It’s also the American thing to do. It is surely the moral thing to do. It may well be the human thing to do.

The Christianists don’t see it that way. And I can’t explain that.

It seems as clear as the nose on your face. Or mine. Jesus called all to care for the neighbor among us. And he defined neighbor in ways that left no doubt that he meant especially those that you don’t want to think of as neighbor. When we care for the “least of these” as he put it, we care for Him.

The old fiery God of the Hebrew Testament said pretty much the same thing. The stranger among you was to be treated with courtesy and respect. They were to be cared for. They were to be invited in for a meal and rest. Fields were to be left for gleaning by those weary road travelers.

The bible read literally or otherwise leaves little doubt what God wishes of us. And for those who hold no truck with the bible or faith, there is basic good old common morality to turn to. We know it’s the right thing to do, because we usually “feel” what is right, and feel embarrassed when we stray too far from it.

Yet, many people here in this country are saying no, and saying it loudly and unapologetically. They often say they are sorry, just before they shake their heads back and forth. “Just ain’t safe. Have to protect our own.”

And the damnedest thing is these folks call themselves Christians. And when you look at the array of those who are saying NO to refugees, damn near all of them proclaim themselves to be Christian.

They are not of course, because they cannot explain their position except to say that when people are trying to kill ya, well, God understands if we have to suspend that Jesus shit for a while.

They don’t actually say this of course, but that’s what it comes down to. They say their “heart tells them to help but their head tells them no.”

They are egged on by all those candidates who are so desperate to find a place in the sun for their dreams to come true. They spread the fear and the hate, all in the name of protecting the good citizens of Merika. They don’t mean it of course. It’s a useful tool.

“Gin up the base,” their stage managers scream. Rile ’em up and we will win next year. If there is a next year. And the masses, drunk on too much Sunday beer and football, nod, and rub their fingers down the barrel of their “piece of protection” and imagine being a “hero” in the neighborhood, something the Cruz’s and Huck’s and Rubio’s threaten might occur if we don’t beat back the hordes of semi-human evildoers.

Not even human to most of this ilk, the refugee is “other”, not American, not civilized, not Christian, or least ways not rightly Christian. Not Christian the way they are,  demanding that bakers and photographers be allowed to publicly refuse people who don’t sleep with the right sex. Not Christian the way they are, in promoting a full capitulation by women to men who “know better” how that pregnancy and new born should be cared for.

This is all wrapped in the flag and the bible now, this sludge that passes for Christianity among the “patriotic uber conservative right.” It is not real Christianity at all, but the sewer bilge that passes for truth among those who find higher education a waste of time when “common sense” is all we need.

These Christianists have defined themselves through the pages of a book such that they can do and believe exactly what they wish to, while their newly created God smiles benignly. Lock and Load for Christ! Yeah, that passage about, man being made in God’s image? You took that to mean that God was pretty much like you huh? WRONG.

There is good and bad in all faith systems no doubt. ISIS is but proof of what one small group can do to threaten the well-being of the beliefs of 1.2 billion people. Fundamentalists Christianists offer the same threat to actual Christians. Christianists are only occasionally violent in their acts so far, but by their rhetoric there is little doubt that the bloodlust is rising and they are ready and excited to do battle murdering the “other” as a means to secure their own power and prestige.

Nobody, I suspect, would have believed that so many in the name of Jesus would deny Jesus so thoroughly with their rhetoric.

We, whether actual Christian or Agnostic or Atheist, most of us know what is the right thing to do. We are either an example of right to the world (something we have failed again and again at), or we are not. We cannot have this conversation at all and claim exceptionalism, except to admit with heads hanging that we are oh so not exceptional at all. Are we motivated by selfishness, or by our principles?

The ones who lead the charge to close the borders, deport, suspend, or ignore the Other are those who scream the loudest that our Christian principles are being ignored, trampled upon and secularized out of existence. How they can twist it all to come out against refugees (except perhaps those who can be proven to be Christians) is beyond the mind of a normal soul to figure out.

I am not a believer in hell per se, but there are times I wish God might create such a place. I have a list He might want to look at, of those that might deserve it. Surely those who wave Jesus banners and then spit in the face of moral behavior are prime candidates.

They thus function as shortcuts to long drawn out arguments, save us time in research, and let us feel sublimely satisfied that we have done our part to enrich the grey matter in thousands of heads.

Yes, we have wild dreams don’t we?

The trouble is, that like every shortcut, we try to use it all the time, even when we are going in the opposite direction, because we are en mass, lazy. Lazy breeds error Louise, or didn’t you know that. And if my meanderings through the Facebook hallways is any indication there is plenty of arrested thinking going on out there in the Internets.

Breaking News: ALL MEMES AREN’T TRUE, IN FACT PROBABLY MOST OF THEM AREN’T.

See, creators of memes are sometimes well-meaning people who look shit up and then save you the trouble of doing the same. They create these precious memes that say so much with so little. But not all creators are well-meaning. Some are just snotty kids with lots of time to screw around, and they too create memes. Except these memes aren’t vetted for accuracy. Their only point is to superficially make some “point” that is amusing, or anger provoking, or otherwise successful in making your nod your head in any direction as long as it’s vigorously.

And these memes, the gawd-awful not true ones create havoc among the mostly rusty and ill-experienced body politic. For some reason, I end up trying to correct this nonsense, at least as to those that piss me off the most.

And I end up arguing with idiots.

And that is boring, irritating, and not worth my time.

So for once and for all:

1. LOCAL MAYOR REFUSES TO REMOVE PORK FROM SCHOOL CANTEEN MENU AND EXPLAINS WHY. This meme goes on to explain in great detail that the mayor of Montreal received complaints from Muslim parents and a request to remove pork from the menu of the local schools their children attended. He basically told them, according to the meme, to adopt “Canadian values” or move some place else.

This was accompanied by a lead in that said, “This is what every country or city should feel and mandate!!”

Now folks. First of all, this meme is a hoax, a common problem on Facebook these days with fact being stranger than fiction. In fact the original hoax started with it being a Belgian mayor.

Several posters exuberantly agreed, however,  one explaining to me that “they should not impose their values on the majority of this country.” When I asked who “they” were, and what values she was speaking of, a huge silence ensued. I tried to explain that dietary laws of one’s religion are not “values” but actual laws, the same that Jews have engaged in for centuries.

Of course the meme is harsh, cruel, and would not seemingly reflect the beliefs of any thinking normal person, but thinking normal people aren’t posting and agreeing with it either. Non-thinking folks are, because they have bought into the Fox Noise scare machine.

Seemingly the poster and those who so happily agreed, forget that back in our time in the 60’s we all had meatless Fridays in the cafeteria at school year round because we respected the dietary laws of the Catholic church. Protestants went along even though their faith traditions carried no such restriction.

Somehow with Muslims it is different. The conclusion is obvious.

2. 

This one refers to “illegal aliens” or now refugees. It similarly is nonsensical.

There is no doubt that vets are being denied a good many benefits, but there is no relationship between that and either undocumented workers or refugees.

When we talk about veteran benefits, we talk about increases in pay, increases in disability pay, better services at VA hospitals and clinics, better educational opportunities, perhaps in grants and loans, better job opportunities such as preference in the job pool. We may talk about the availability of food stamps, something used by thousands of vets to get by. These issues have nothing to do with immigrants or refugees.

There are no benefits coming to either. Neither group is entitled to food stamps, assistance, medical health care insurance, or anything else.

It is a false dichotomy. When prodded, posters and those in agreement refuse to explain what veterans are not getting that these other groups get instead. That is because they cannot answer. They just find the meme soothing to their anger.

Their anger arises because they have bought into the hate machine that is Fox and other right wing fanatics who tell them that immigrants and “others” take their jobs, use up their tax money on free stuff the government gives them, and destroys their culture (meaning the way white folks like to do stuff). None of this is true of course, but Fox and right wing crazies depend on deflecting the real anger of how American operates back on victims of the system rather than the perpetrators (business oligarchs who control government).

The point is, the meme creator knew that using veterans in the meme would get immediate sympathy. We love to tout our love for the troops. We aren’t so good at touting our hatred of war as a solution but we sure wave flags at the wounded. So the veterans is the “victim” and the immigrant the “bad” guy as the meme creator intended.

The fact that there is no logical nexus between the two is irrelevant. A statement is made and hopes to find fertile ground in the untilled soil of the average non-thinking American.

3. Perhaps the silliest of them all is the perennial “war on Christmas”always resurrected in November of each and every year and harped on by Fox and the rest of the right wing babblers.

A string of seemingly defiant posters and commenters all shout dramatically, “Merry Christmas” and feel that they have done as much as anyone who hid a Jewish person in their attic during World War II.

Except folks, it’s all in your imagination.

The first question I ask is “who is telling you you can’t say Merry Christmas”? Silence.

“They are trying to change our values.” Who? Silence.

Who has ever objected to your use of the phrase Merry Christmas? “Someone has. . . .”

Silly folks, this crap goes back to the late 50’s and the John Birch Society. It rose again under the tutelage of Foxy Noise and is brought up every year.

The truth is that SOME businesses find it PROFITABLE to use more generic terms (INCLUSIVE?) to refer to the holidays in the hopes of engendering a BROADER clientele who will come shop for the “holiday”. Unless you work for them and are constrained in how you speak to customers so as to abide by this PROFIT DECISION, you are not similarly constrained.

You may shout Merry Christmas all day and night and the secular police won’t be knocking at the door. There is no secular police. There is no “they”.  There are no “values” at stake here.

So take your Starbucks cup and paste on some fake snowflakes and tell yourself that now Jesus is happy and shut the fuck up.

Look, memes are fun. They can be informative. But they can be both misleading and deceiving. We all make mistakes. We live in a world where truth is stranger than fiction oftimes and insane memes can sometimes be absolutely true. We have all been caught by hoaxes. We all must be more diligent.

There are serious issues that confront this country and this world. Poverty in all its ramifications stifle the best that humanity has to offer in favor of the few who live easily and can devote their time to discovery. Climate change threatens us all. The rule of oligarchs endangers every so-called democratic system. We are woefully under-educated in other people, other places, and other ideologies and faith systems. We need thinking meaningful conversations on these and many other issues.

We don’t need to waste time on hating the OTHER. We don’t need to waste time on non-existent dangers. We need to focus our meagre free time on information that is truthful and enlightening.

Take a moment to think before you post. Cuz I’ll be foaming at the mouth and leave nasty remarks if you don’t.

See, I can’t seem to learn the concept. I heard a bit about the returns last night of some of the elections. I figure, well, that ups the ante. More like fifty percent of the damn country is so damn crazy that they are fit for tie-down jackets.

Kentucky, home of the 4 times married, childed by various men, new princess of Christianity, Kim Davis, can bite me.

After all that we have shown to be the GOP mantra of give to the rich, take from the poor, and hate every blessed thing that is not white nor male, this is what we get? Then to top it off, Rethuglicans revel in the bliss of plain old adultery, with dirty gay sex on the sly while protesting that them sexual perverts belong in jail, and screaming “one man one woman” while whispering, “in any quantity you like.” Have a mistress? Pregnant? Oh, tell her to abort, and then turn on a dime and decry single mothers who can’t keep their vaginas in check. Need a man for that huh?

So Kentuck hires itself a loon who is tea drunk and promises to roll back the Medicaid increase from Obamacare and thereby throw out up to half a million people back to being “uninsured.”

I think you all deserve each other.

Hey I’m the first to accept that reality is often a shade or two off what any of us thinks, but shit, this is insane.

Vitters hasn’t been set on a rowboat at the mouth of the Gulf and given a franc should he be lucky enough to float there without a paddle.

You all are nuts.

I’ve decided.

I recall some years ago, reading a first hand account of a woman who was able to extricate herself from a dangerous fundamentalist church. Her guts told her that the pastor’s propensity to wale on kids to “beat the love of God into them” was wrong. But the pastor continued to terrorize her with visions that her “gut” was in fact Satan who was whispering that evil in her mind.

She eventually got free of the church, but she said the little voice of doubt was still there.

See, no matter what you believe or think is real, there is always somebody out there rainin’ on your parade. There is always that doubt.

Folks, that doubt is what politics thrives on. Fox Noise is expert at planting, watering, and fertilizing that doubt EVERY DAY. It never wilts, that doubt.

There are a hell of a lot of folks who are calling for the death and defeat of ISIS.  Hell there are a lot of folks who are calling for the death and defeat of all Muslims. That’s what fear does. It causes you to lose your humanity. Fear becomes the intractable determination to end the subject of your fear.

You don’t stop to examine the validity of the fear.

You just fear. And then you hate. And then you twist it all around until it becomes justified by whatever the hell you believe in.

My anger is volcanic at this point. I am tired of arguing with people (and I do use the term loosely), who can’t get past their high school civics class in terms of actual knowledge. I’m tired of arguing with people who wouldn’t know introspection if it tore their leg off.

I just realized something.

I’m 65 1/2 years old. Soon I’ll be, God willing (no I don’t believe that at all but it always sounds good), 66. It does not matter much to me what most of y’all do about most anything. I won’t live long enough to see it impact me negatively.

I got a husband, a great home, loving pets, a great city to live in, friends abound, just enough in all the right places. I got money. I got brains that still function mostly normal most of the time. I have curiosity that knows no limits. I have the ability to create stuff that makes me happy.

Thusly:

It does not matter to me if you all want to vote away your health care.

It does not matter to me if you want to vote away your right to control your bodies.

It does not matter to me if you all want to work for the MAN living in his shacks at the edge of the factory, and buying from the company store.

It does not matter to me what you do in regards to gay rights, marijuana, transgender rights, income inequality, help for the poor, protection of the arts, the environment.

None of it matters to ME. I ain’t gonna live long enough.

I’ve fought the good fight for better than ten years. I’m tired. Nobody listens, nobody cares, because stupid shit like “positive mantras” about how to get more sales in your job are vastly more important than clean drinking water or whether whales should be held in captivity no matter how benevolent captivity is made to appear.

You care about how much you pay in taxes and only barely care where it goes, unless directed to hate some group of people for making them higher and for the “wrong things” like other people.

More people in this country claim allegiance to Jesus while condemning “welfare queens” and people who might be lazy. They nary bat an eye while telling me they will pray for my sick soul as they divorce their third wife and avoid child support cuz it’s hard to make it with a new family and all.

You elect people who candidly tell you they hate the job, go as little as possible, but beg you to install them in a job that takes twenty-four hours a day just to keep even. And they are pretty sure you will oblige.

One asshat tells you that he learned more from God about the inner workings of the human body than from the physiology  class he obviously ignored. He is considered by the very savvy electorate to be the most trustworthy of all the candidates, while Politifact wonders when he will tell his first TRUTH about ANYTHING.

Another candidate did this all for a lark and found himself at the top of the heap. Now he’s taking it serious. Seriously?

Another is a Dominionist intent on turning Merika into a new theocratic state, something the Pilgrims were hot to do, but were prevented eventually by a few elite men who figured their goose might be cooked with that sort of government.

The list is lengthy. In fact if you check into those “waiting in the wings” there is no limit to how stupid candidates have become.

How does one jerk in the House convince another jerk in the House that he can be speaker if the entire party gives up any intent to engage immigration reform? Write off the entire Hispanic population in one fell swoop. Not worth it, since of course the first jerk and probably the second, would love to deport ’em all were it feasible, and even if not.

Not that they personally give a rat’s ass. They don’t. But they found it profitable for running a campaign on. Them wetbacks–stealing your jobs, using up your taxes, making everyone all brown, with their Spanish, with their Customs, with their kids who will make my white privilege kids not so privileged? I mean there are memes going around that blame whatever is perceived as  lacking in “veterans rights” on “illegals” who are I guess getting it instead.

Which brings me to the last point, or not.

Memes.

Do you actually read them? I know they sound all smart and all. But if you actually think about it, about 10% of them are not even logical. Yet when I try to explain that to you, you get all huffy, and tell me that that’s my opinion.

My opinion?

Which makes yours, what equally right?

‘Fraid not, bozo.

And if you don’t know why, I sure ain’t explaining obvious no more…Loll around in your stupid.

We live in a culture where what feels right is right contrary to every piece of evidence. It remains right, because you need it to be so, because you poor deluded asshat, you can’t live in a world where it isn’t true. You don’t have the guts or fortitude to push on and figure out what is true.

So, I’m done with it.

It’s making me angry. My husband keeps asking, “what can I do?”

Nothing. Because nothing can fix stupid.

I just need to stop wasting my preciously dwindling time trying to bring coherent thought to those who haven’t ever experienced it.

Not that I’m a genius. I can prove that I’m not. I just have a brain that connects to my heart, and all this stupid stuff hurts. That’s the rub. It hurts because we know what is truth in general, yet we can get none of the brain dead to see it. And they never will.

If I were younger, I’d study work-arounds. I’m old, so I’m just opting out. You know. hippie style. Gonna just make me a garden and smile at the flowers. I live far enough inland that the rise in sea level won’t affect me.

And then again, in a week, I may feel better…

Don’t count on it.

I’ll write, but of what?

Now I have to admit. it was full of all the boring nonsense one would expect but it had its moments. I rather thought that notes were being passed among the contestants: Please guys, don’t beat up on each other. It’s Hillary who is the enemy!” Most forgot, usually because it was so much easier to attack the silliness that passed for policy among the “I just wanna be President” crowd.

My thoughts?

You care?

Well, if you insist.

Let’s start with the undercard, where the refuse from the wars have gathered to lick their respective wounds of NOBODY CARING and pontificate as if at a child’s tea party, of what “might have been.”

For the life of me, I can’t remember half of the four that graced the screen, dressed up in their Sunday best, with every cowlick plastered down. I do remember Bobby (not my real name) Jindal, and his protestations that one need look no further than Louisiana to see the fine results of Republican economic policy. I was forced to agree with Bob that, yeah, I had not seen an uptick in suicide rates in Louisiana, so he must be right. All was well in Louisiana.

A tiny thing called facts, tend to dull Jindal’s luster however, as Louisiana is floundering economically and is especially in trouble when it comes to health care and education. But no matter, Jindal assures us that it’s really all just smoke and mirrors and all is really really okay.

But the real star was Ms. Lindsey, who wants to be president like more than getting a new puppy even. He told us so repeatedly all night. “Please make me your president!” he shouted at every opportunity.

You see, Ms. Lindsey is very upset. Ms. Lindsey was a JAG officer way back when, and spent a bit of time in Germany, defending hapless GI’s who found themselves at the wrong end of military justice. After that he joined the Guard, and rose to Colonel. Still the fly boys ridiculed the hapless not-homosexual soldier with his lack of “combat” duty, so of course Lindsey became a flaming Hawk, joining forces with Angry Old Man McCain, to bitch and moan about how things should be done in their “man’s army.”

Based on this understanding, Lindsey popped up at every question with some version of “PLEASE MAKE ME PRESIDENT AND I WILL STOP THIS CRAP”, crap being defined as whomever seems (in Lindsey’s estimation) to be kickin’ our butts. What remained unsaid, but was clear was what he really meant, “PLEASE MAKE ME PRESIDENT SO I CAN KILL SOMEBODY, ANYBODY, AND STOP THE SOLDIER BOYS FROM RIDICULING ME! I’LL SHOW THEM!”

Moving upstairs to the main event, well, the hilarity ensued, the face palming was inevitable, and we knew from the beginning we would get our moneys worth. Would Trump attack Carson? Would Carson be awake? Would Jeb strut naked and show his balls off? Would Huck plead for Ms. Davis to be vindicated? Would Christie bellow and look Mafia-ready? Would snot come from Theodore’s nose when he snickered? Would Marco tell us all over again about his “family story of arriving in Nirvana on the good ship Freedom?

We waited.

We were not disappointed.

They say that no politician quits a campaign for any reason except the money is gone. Well that’s not entirely true, but close enough. Kasich we must assume has reached that point. He took on both Carson and Trump, calling their candidacies essentially crazy. He didn’t just say they were unqualified, he said they were crazy. He is not crazy he insisted. He’s done stuff. All the stuff that needs to be done, he’s done. But then everyone says they have done stuff up there on the stage.

Kasich led the charge of attack against fellow combatants. The others looked on hopefully but with a careful non-committal face, waiting to see how he did. The punches glanced off both of the crazy duet, and Kasich made reservations for his “holiday to get over losing”.

Now that “sorta establishment character” Kasich was disposed of, Jeb, licked his lips and thanked mother again for her words of wisdom, “dammit, Jeb, can’t you be a man like your brother?”, and leveled his eyes at brother Marco and let him have it. “If you can’t do your job in the Senate, maybe you should just resign!” Jeb! grinned and waited for all the pets to come his way, “good boy Jeb!”

Alas, Marco had his prepared retort at the ready. You never complained about John Kerry or Barack Obama when they too off time from their Senate duties!” he whined. Jeb! blinked. Mom never told him what to say next. So he blinked again. Marco smiled, and snuck another lick of his lollipop.

By now the others were getting restless. Theodore was prancing in the wings waiting to impress the hell out of no one with a rendition of “I was proud to lead the fight. . . .” NOT noting that he lost every battle. He got attention by yelling at the commentators who seemed an odd collection of forest creatures brought forth to “outdo Fox”at being Fox.

Theodore shook his mighty finger at the panel of questioners, and cried, “Foul! You ask mean questions!” he pouted. “Why if our answers seem insane, it’s not our fault. It’s your crazy questions that are the problem.”

Fear captured the crowd. You could hear the whispers among the handpicked stupid, who had all clearly admitted by oath in front of people that they were Republicans. “It’s just like Fox says, the MSM is just all in the pocket of the left. Can’t trust them. Can’t listen to their demon lies.” Theodore grinned, his job complete.

But what captured me utterly last night was one question and one answer. I doubt it did others, but it struck me so hard that I was literally jaw-slacked gobsmacked.

Ben Carson.

Question: There’s a hedge fund manager that bought the rights to a drug and then upped the price by 700% because he can. Do you think the government should step in, and how, to rectify this?

Ben gave some answer, that reflected his limited understanding of market economics. Mostly he shied from endorsing that anything should be done.

Well, that’s not what I expect from a doctor. Surely not one who engaged in some of the most delicate and serious of medical procedures–operation on the brains of infants.

What should I expect from a doctor?

This:

“You know, I’m a doctor. For many years I operated on the brains of very small children. I entered medicine so I could help people, and I found helping the most vulnerable among us very rewarding. It’s no exaggeration to say that I have literally held a person’s brains in my hands. The idea that any person would deliberately deny a human being, a child, a life-saving drug because their family could not afford it, is an obscenity to me. I’m not sure how we should regulate such behavior, but I know that nobody should ever not receive a life-saving drug or procedure because they can’t pay for someone’s desire to become rich.”

That’s what a normal person would say wouldn’t they?

Ben Carson is not normal. He’s not even close. There is something very very wrong with that man. I’m not sure too many saw that.

My take on it all?

1. Kasich is just waiting for the money to run out. He took his shot and it had no effect.
2. Huckabee is in this for reasons other than winning. He knows he has no chance. His only hope was the “I pretend to be a Christian because it helps cover up my ugly underbelly of beliefs” crowd and they all seemingly belong to Ben.
3. Jeb! is toast. He looks increasingly dazed, bored, cranky, and befuddled. He always thought he was smarter than his brother, and the notion that he’s not, is very hard to bear.
4. Rubio had a good night because he’s good at rapid fire “sincere” answers, but frankly his lack of experience is showing. He appears a bit childish and pouty, and his “personal story” is getting a bit old. He’s like a very energetic puppy who gets so excited his steps in his own doo. He will not prevail as Hillary would eat him for lunch.
5. The Donald had an okay night, said nothing outrageous, seemed largely above the affray and was given the win by  those who vote on such things. I have no idea why.
6. Benjie becomes more horrifying with each minute. His answers have you jumping between silly and scary. Ultimately although he’s a good spot to hide your bigotry behind, his responses are so repulsive that smarter heads will prevail, unless of course they are overwhelmed by the slow-thinking base who find him an answer to prayers.
7. Carly always sounds good at first, but the staccato delivery wears thin rapidly as we see that it’s all rehearsed, and the words never change. Her determination to just say no to any contradiction will leave her friendless in the end.
8. Theodore, did okay but this never seems to make much difference. He waits impatiently with Huck for Carson to collapse. Theodore is evil personified, but has the indignant arrogance to make the stupid think he cares. He cares only about being king. The rest of the world knows him for the wretch he is.
9. Christie the donut man, is a master at “straight talk” which is really very crooked talk, dressed up with bravado. He will continue to go nowhere, but he’s good for a line or two in the press.
10. Randy? Who?

Fervent Wish: That Ms. Lindsey gets a hand up and gets in the adult debate next time. I wanna hear more of his “PLEASSSSSEEE make me President!”

So what was your impression?

REFRESHER COURSE ALERT!!!

Recently I got a friend request from a dude I recognized immediately as a nut. His Facebook icon was “Ted Cruz in 2016.” As I said, a nut.

Now, I should know better, but I could hardly turn down the chance to tell him he was an idiot before he unceremoniously “defriended” me could I? So I hit, the friend button and began a rather torturous journey into  lala land or the land of the not-quite-right-in-the-head folks.

I picked up a good half dozen to eight “defenders of the stupid” and proceeded to get into a number of fights immediately. As one would expect, all the trite Fox/crazy right memes came to the fore. Since most of the arguments were on gun rights, I got the usual, “guns don’t kill people”, and criminals aren’t gonna obey the laws, and variations on those themes.

After lengthy logical argument and citing of actual facts, I was confronted with the usual right wing nothingness. One guy just posted funny pictures and called me Sherry McMoron and quote, “liberish”, as if that sealed the deal on my inconsequentialism.

And the point is, that when people are “out there in the ether” there is no point in argument. They aren’t capable of arguing, except for a “you stupid troll” between burps from the beer guzzling.

When you see somebody who is absolutely clueless, beware. You think you can patiently start at A and proceed slowly and deliberately to Z and when you are finished they will smile, and say, “I get it now. Thank you, I’m going to read more carefully from now on.”

But they don’t. They say, “you stupid troll,” and scratch their nether regions, smile and the mini thrill and reach for another Budweiser.

This will always happen no matter your level of debate and logic skills. And the reason is simple, if not understood by most. It’s not you. It’s not your argument. It’s their brain.

Study after study shows that the conservative brain is a brain that lives in fear of the bad world it is surrounded by. It cannot make sense of it all, and it feels threatened. Simple answers that package their fear and put it away is what they yearn for and gravitate toward. The are frightened and they are insecure in this big world. Small and simple answers that assure them that all will be right, captures them faster than any fact or logical deduction ever could.

They will cling to what is familiar, reassuring, and safe every time over logical argumentation that leaves them feeling insecure and unsure. It is not how they want to think, it’s how their brains function. It’s called compartmentalization. It allows the victim to ignore all contrary information and when necessary isolate contradictory beliefs behind walls that keep the conflict at a minimum. (I believe in creationism, while at the same time encourage my niece to get gene therapy for her cancer diagnosis, never bringing to the fore that gene therapy is a result of evolutionary biological research.)

Eventually we all come to realize that “there is no point” in arguing with such types, but we continue, at each new juncture, and with a different right wing nut case in the cross hairs, we fall victim to trying again. And we get the same result.

Lest we be declared insane for trying to get a different result from the same activity, we have to finally admit that such is a waste of time.

EXCEPT THAT. . . .

Facebook is a unique forum. We all have friends on Facebook, and they exist in a variety of forms–relatives, old old friends we have moved far from, new friends, eternal friends, coworkers, associates, church friends, organization friends, and the list goes on to infinity. These myriads of “friends” bring forth a variety of individual talents.

I am graced with some great Facebook friends and I owe them a debt of gratitude. They have taught me so very much. Their passion, while not necessarily mine, has served to inform me on many a subject I would be unaware of without them.

I would never know how cruel and awful housing small whales and dolphins  in small tanks is, alone and without their families. I would never know about the issues regarding Monsanto, and Tyson and other vile corporate entities that endanger our health in the chase for the almighty dollar. I’ve had my theological foundation firmed, and loosened by a couple of theologians I know.

I could go on for a couple of pages. You see, I know all sorts of people in the Facebook way, and by and large, I’m enriched from the experience. The people I disagree with, remain small, but more importantly they are vehicles for dissemination.

What?

Here’s where I tie this all together. . . .

While it is unprofitable in general to get into discussions with right wing crazies en mass, isolated encounters in otherwise  friendly terrain, does serve a purpose. And that purpose is, they give one the excuse to lay out all the arguments that you can muster on an issue.

Why?

Rather than be the usual waste of time that we have encountered in large groups, in small ones, you don’t get overwhelmed. Much like big corporations make it hard to be sued by “papering” the opposing counsel with so many requests, demands, depositions, discovery, endless motions and so forth, when six or eight people are all ganging up on you, well, most people don’t have TIME to respond properly.

Responding improperly does more harm than good.

Why does this matter?

Because in every group, there are outsiders, people who live on the fringe, reading but almost never uttering a word. They are not crazies, but they aren’t politically aware either. They are busy living their lives, and barely bump into most of the political and social issues of our day. They do however, at leisure, read posts and comments, blogs and so forth.

They are not ideologically motivated. They are bright people, normal in every sense of the world except they aren’t much interested in the body politic or how it functions. Until it waylays them personally (and many it never will), they don’t get involved.

But, they do read. They do comprehend. They do get logic, and they do check out links. They will listen to a cogent argument and if not offset by superior information going in the other direction, they will agree with you.

They won’t deliver fliers in their neighborhoods or make phone calls for a candidate, but they will vote (if not too inconvenient) and they will vote consistent with the facts as they have come to understand them.

They are your audience always.

You have to trust that they are there. They are, I assure you. Every once in a while  I get a message or email from one of them, telling me they have “lurked” for some time, and agree or have been led to agree to this idea or that.

Those are the people you are writing and talking to. They don’t have time to do the research you do, but they appreciate it. They can tell the difference between your citation to reputable sources and the other sides reliance on “common sense”.

They recognize that common sense to the right wing is akin to “what I want to believe is true because it makes me feel better.”

Your efforts are thus not offered in vain. Remember that you talk not only to who is directly before you, but all those who are within eye or earshot.

What it means for me personally, is to try to remember, (no matter how angry I often become at intransigent thinking), that calm, factual offerings are much more successful that bombast and snappy retorts that serve to explain only how loathsome the right wing fanatic can be.

So I thank all those who have taught me so much on Facebook. And I am thankful for Facebook which provides that unique platform allowing me a cornucopia  of “friends” that insure a range of opinions, talents, passions, and hard facts.

The post is powerful, more powerful than you think. So do be mindful of the audience out there, ephemeral as it may appear. This is your job. They depend on you for accurate information on an unimaginably wide source of things. Surely you can offer your services on a few of them?

Make a difference!

It’s all well and good to disagree on things, but when lives are on the line, well, stupid really gets on your nerves.

You can imagine the fun I’ve had arguing with gun nuts. Always the same story.

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE.

Hello? This means exactly what?

Guns provide the mechanism for killing people for people hell bent on killing people. Especially if they want to kill a lot of people very very fast. Your stupid notion that the gun is the not the problem, is just that. . .stupid. You can’t discern the difference between a person who kills someone with a knife and someone who uses a semi-automatic weapon to mow down twenty people.

THE ANSWER TO A BAD GUY WITH A GUN IS A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN.

Yeah? Except that isn’t really true.

See this photo? A good six of the men around Reagan were armed. Hinkley pulled a gun and started shooting. Not one of the armed defenders shot their weapon. Hinkley was wrestled down.

Pulling a gun during a shootout doesn’t work well especially if you are not in a uniform that designates you as a good guy. People don’t want to be mistaken for the shooter, so guess what? They don’t pull their guns much.

WE THE PEOPLE ARMED WITH THE 2ND AMENDMENT ARE ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN US AND TYRANNY.

This little gem comes direct from the NRA, who have rewritten history in an attempt to turn an amendment meant to insure state militias, turned into a personal right to have any and as many guns of lethal force as you wish.

Read Steven’s dissent in Heller if you want to know the truth. The purpose of the 2nd amendment is made clear by the opening clause: A WELL-REGULATED MILITIA BEING NECESSARY TO THE SECURITY OF A FREE STATE, THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

We are hear talking about the rights of a state to insure its own security by being able to raise a militia of local citizens to BEAR ARMS for the state. The first time the amendment was invoked was by President Washington to put down a local rebellion of citizens against paying a whiskey tax. They were with violence prohibiting the federal agents from collecting the tax.

Washington called upon the governors of a few state to call up their state militias under the second amendment and to enforce the collection of the tax.

In addition, REGULATION is in the text. regulate means that the government can quite obviously pass laws and and rules as to how the amendment actually works.

Madison in a earlier draft of the amendment, included a “conscientious objector clause for those who object on religious grounds to doing military service. Of course Scalia didn’t care about such things.

THIS IS JUST THE FIRST STEP TO TOTAL CONFISCATION.

No it’s not. You have no evidence of this whatsoever. The NRA doesn’t even believe this, but it’s proven to be a useful tool to sell more guns.

Buy them now, before we run out. A local gun store owner in Oregon happily informed us that she had just placed another order for the gun owner favorites: the AK type weapons that are beloved by the nuts. She noted, there is only a small window after one of these shootings and they must take advantage.

One fool explained that when the President pointed to both Australia and Britain as places with no mass shootings like ours,  he was hinting at his intent to confiscate “all our weapons”. I was invited to be one of those who will come knocking and demand your guns. How would I like that job, he deflected.

¶¶¶

It’s all so awful. You ask them for their solutions. They have none, except to buy more guns and wear more guns, and caress more guns. A new tack is to round up unemployed vets and send them into schools to protect the littluns.

Really?

We want vets, many who are suffering from mental issues of their own to work the hallways of our elementary schools? DO WE REALLY WANT OUR BABIES TRYING TO LEARN IN SUCH AN ENVIRONMENT? Do we want weapons in our classrooms? Do we want to accept the ensuing accidents that must happen?

Is this the best YOU can do?

It’s not the best I can do by a long shot.

I once lived in Detroit. I had windows covered with bars, and an alarm system. I looked around carefully before I went out after dark. I did not dally going to my car in the driveway (I stopped parking in my garage when I opened it one more and four teen boys ran out, I having interrupted their theft).

When I moved out of Detroit, I realized quickly that fear was not normal.  I no longer had to lock everything. I no longer had to jump at the “wrong” sound at the “wrong” time of the night. I was no longer subject to sirens and helicopters with search lights. Police running down my sidewalk happened no more.

And I discovered something.

Living in fear under lock and key, was no way to live. Moreover, it was not the way that MOST people lived. I’ve lived nearly twenty years in four different locations since then. I have lived without fear. I live normally.

IT IS NOT NORMAL AND WE SHOULD NEVER ALLOW IT TO BE NORMAL TO HAVE ARMED CIVILIANS WANDERING AROUND “TO KEEP US SAFE.”

The facts are simply this. Crime in the US is at an all time low. We all can recall some anecdotal story that suggests that we are not safe, if we go back enough years. But the reality is that what was once common (the house break-in) is a fairly rare occurrence today. For instance, in 1970, the rate of burglary was about 1,085/100,000. That was down to 670/100,000 by 2012.

You probably don’t need a gun at home to defend it. And if you did, more than likely you would be so excited, scared, and confused at the time that you would not use it successfully anyhow. Why? Because you are not trained to handle such a situation.

Something like 2/3 of the American population doesn’t have a gun. But there are more than 300 million guns. The statistics are clear, those who have guns (white men, over 55, high school graduate only, once married at least, are the most likely to be involved in gun violence. More guns means more violence essentially.

Yes, we are exceptional all right.

In all the ways that no one wants to be.

]]> https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/the-exceptionalism-of-the-united-states-of-america/feed/ 4 9180 spiritmeadow 105616_600 081114-CC-Reagan-thumb-995xauto-75680 gun-ownership-vs-gun-deaths_2 https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/09/25/can-we-stop-with-the-illegals-shit/ https://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/2015/09/25/can-we-stop-with-the-illegals-shit/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:26:54 +0000 http://afeatheradrift.wordpress.com/?p=9177 Continue reading →

Ben Carson says we are drowning in a sea of “political correctness.” Which seems to mean nothing more than that being POLITE and RESPECTFUL interferes with his ability to appeal to the racist, nativist needs of his constituency.

No doubt, some will see my appeal to stop using the terms “illegal” or “illegal aliens” as an attempt to “pretty up” a bad situation by alluding to people’s sense of decency.

Well I am in some ways doing just that. I’m trying to appeal to your sense of decency, if such a thing is still to be found in the body politic of twenty-first century America.

I come by this opinion honestly, meaning that it is not something that I have suddenly acquired, but rather it is the product of a lifelong interest and pursuit of what it means to be an immigrant in America. It starts out in one of those silly situations of life that appear meaningless–being a teen.

We hung out with a bunch of boys from another high school, one more racially diverse than our own, which boasted no African-Americans and as far as I can remember, no notable members of any other ethnic group either. We were all pretty much white folk of one variety or another. Anyway, with my other friends, I was from time to time exposed to “others”. One of them was a kid named Valentine Rodriguez. I can’t remember a thing about him, nor what he looked like, (other than CUTE), but his name I never forgot. I found him as exotic as his name.

Being a resident of Michigan it was not unusual at certain times of the year to see trucks full of brown-skins moving from farm to farm, picking crops. As a lawyer, I also came in contact with migrant workers from time to time as they fell victim as do we all, to various driving infractions that required a court appearance.

When I was in serious  examination as to whether I should continue with my entry into the Dominican Order, I contemplated and talked with people from various organizations in D.C. and locally about possible ministries I might engage in once I had reached that point in the convent. I wrote on the topic of Hispanic issues and thrilled to one of the more enticing of theologies–liberation theology, which had developed in the Medellin Conference in the 50’s led  by such notable theologians as Gutierrez, Sobrino, and Boff. I devoured their books.

Ultimately I ended up retiring with my husband to Las Cruces, New Mexico, I small city on the southern border of New Mexico, one where the population is fairly evenly split between Anglos and Hispanics.

From all such experiences I have learned a great deal, and my passion, respect, and enjoyment of Hispanic culture in all its multiplicities continues to delight me. My neighbors are so diverse that it truly is a place of no majorities. My life, as you might expect is so thoroughly entwined in the native cultures I live in, that there is a true blending and it would be hard to separate one cultural experience from another, as we adopt bits and pieces from each other and construct a new paradigm that is “New Mexican” in nature.

The need for immigration reform is apparent to all yet the manner of that reform divides white American into deep chasmic chaos. For growling in the depths of the American scene is a harshness and anger that recurs as the continuing call, by a small segment, for the draconian answer to it all being deportation.

While most everyone but the hateful few, know this is both immoral and impractical, it doesn’t stop the arguments. And it doesn’t stop the hurt that is inflicted both upon the undocumented worker him/herself, but also those of us who know them intimately and feel their pain.

It HURTS to hear this sort of talk.

These people first of all, possessed this land long before we did. We here in New Mexico, as well as parts of Texas and Arizona and California, were once Mexico’s lands, and were peopled by them and other natives in the region. That changed when Anglos discovered value in these lands (New Mexico was something of an exception. The land is not so valuable, and so it developed with less of the usual American swagger and power. Today we are a constitutionally bilingual state, and we guard our cultural richness carefully.)

Beyond that historical fact, we must turn to the horrific record of American involvement in South America per se. We have continuously through multiple administrations supported vicious dictatorships who willingly allowed American business interests to rape the country financially (as long as they shared in the stealing) while their populations suffered in poverty. (Thus the rise of Liberation theology to offset the Church’s real past assistance to the dictators in maintaining order.)

So in some real ways the situations in many Latin countries today is one created by Americans, who now it seems are upset that these populations often flee their native lands in search of some hope of a future for their families. They cross the border because we in part are responsible for the fact that their native countries are a wasteland of poverty and crime.

Look, people from South America are no different from you. If they come here destitute, unskilled, and with nowhere to turn, it is no fault of their own. If they send their children across hundreds of miles of lands to reach America, they do it because it is far safer for them this way than to remain in their countries. They love their kids, and want the best life possible for them. They are no different from you.

And when they come here, the vast majority find friends or relatives who have come before. They seek employment. They work hard jobs that you probably don’t want, at wages you would not tolerate.

Yet, there is an ugliness that surrounds the issue as people like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal and others demand that more severe alternatives be considered other than what most see as humane and fair–a process that will lead to citizenship for people who have lived here for decades.

And it results in awful statements by folks with little actual data suggesting that they are taking stuff that belongs to “us”. The facts are otherwise.

Much is made about the supposed “fact” that undocumented people “get government freebies”. This is not true. They don’t. They are not eligible for welfare, food stamps or Medicaid. They pay into the SS through their taxes and do not become eligible to receive any of the benefits. They do this to the tune of $100 billion in the last decade alone.

They do not take American jobs. As pointed out, most Americans won’t do the jobs they will. Any number of studies show this to be true. Ask Alabama what happened when it became illegal to hire anyone who was undocumented. Their crops rotted in the field as white workers found the work “too hard” or “boring” and walked off the job after a few hours.

Current estimates are that they pay in between 10-11 BILLION more taxes than they receive through any source. They thus add a positive to the economy that is numbered at about 10 billion annually. The is above and beyond what they send back to their home countries to help remaining relatives.

They are told to get to the “end of the line.” The “line” is now 4.4 million people long, and there is no real hope that any of them could enter legally for years. In 2013, nearly 73,000 parents were deported from their so-called anchor babies. They will not be allowed to return until their child is 21 and can petition for their return.

Worse yet, in a climate that claims that they are a strong criminal element in the country, the studies and numbers show otherwise. In the ten-year period between 96-06, statistics show that crime was lower in the states with the highest illegal immigration rates.

Those are facts.

Just for fun ask yourself this: Do you think the Canadians referred to Americans who fled to their country to avoid the draft as “illegal aliens”? The answer is no. They were referred to as “immigrants” and processed accordingly.

What must be admitted or realized is that all the scary stuff is designed to make you afraid. And fear motivates people to vote. And they want you to vote for them, not because their words are true, but simply because fear of ANYTHING works for them.

We, down here in the borderlands (yes, that’s the term we actually use), find your hysteria silly and amusing and sad and disgusting all at once.

It needs to stop. These are real people, just like you and I. And it’s time we give them the help and compassion they deserve. They pull their weight and then some. It’s time to recognize your misdirection and seek the real source of your misery–the sleight-of-hand-artists who depend on your acquiescence in their desire for power and money.

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As the “photo” above illustrates, crucial to all such undertakings–the pretence that THE DONALD does not really count. Nothing to see here folks, the great “HAIR” will soon depart. Well he was supposed to by now, but has tenaciously clung to the tattered remnants of Ronnie Reagan’s spurs, winking and nodding at the great masses of dumb-ass racist mother-fuckers who keep thanking God for blessin’ them with a giant of a candidate  in THE DONALD.

Donald need say nothing. He need only flash the pearls in a sea of Mar a Lago suntan to get the juices of the gun rack lovin’ beer guzzlers who are more familiar with a baseball cap than THE DONALD  will ever be.

The fireworks started immediately with The Trumpet: “Hey you, Randy Paul, whatcha doin’ here boy? You got 1% support, you aren’t supposed to get a stand.”

Randy, looks taken aback, and moans, “Why you pickin’ at me, squirrel head–thanks Bobby (I love the Brady Bunch) Jindal for the hair metaphor. I’m an opthamologist and I fight for your right to form boards and certify YOURSELF in My America!”

But the one to watch was Carly. She stalked THE DONALD, waiting for her moment to pounce. That was after she pinched Scotty, manager of the Koch subsidiary, also known as–Wishconsin. That’s because everybody wishes they weren’t in Wisconsin, especially Scotty. Wish on Scotty, you’re headin’ north my son, and you aint’ comin’ back.

Carly is a formidable debater. She can rush off a three-minute soliloquy without missing a beat, taking a breath, or breakin’ a sweat. She is GIFTED in that. She made Hamlet weep for shame.  What comes out of that precise tight little mouth is worthy of a cesspool, but she CAN deliver it.

Donald retreated with a “you are beautiful Carly” which was surely sufficient to insure she is eligible for a runway walk at the next Ms. World or Ms. Universe, or Ms. Multiplex, whichever comes first.

Ben shows why Ben won’t be president any time in the normal course of human evolution. What started out as a joke, has become, I am more and more convinced, empirically proven: Benjie Carson is an idiot savant. He can wield a scalpel like no other, but the dude is flatly the dumbest thing on earth on any other subject.

Richly, he leads the pack in the chutzpah finals. A man who was raised in poverty, given the advantage of every single government program then in existence that assisted his growth from cradle through college, now suggests that the US is rotten at the core because it keeps the “spigot of goodies” flowing. Only when it stops, will people have the ability to fend for themselves as nature meant, and as he was taught even though he never had to test that theory out in his own life.

Well, Benjie who owes somebody called Abe a debt of gratitude, as well as numerous of his brothers and sisters in color who bled, fought, and died for his freedom, this same BLACK MAN now urges that the solution to the “illegals” is to turn them into a permanent underclass of American workers–the slave laborer, whom we will permit to live in America and work for next to nothing in Merika, but never vote or have any of the accoutrements of civilized citizenship. They will be guest workers. ( see Qatar. UAE, Saudi Arabia if you want to see how such systems work in reality.)

I guess Benjie didn’t spend much time reading about the FUCKING HISTORY OF SLAVERY IN THIS COUNTRY. Which is probably clear from the fact that he thinks that Obamacare is akin to the same “free goodies” and is as bad as slavery itself.

Can I get an amen that this jerk is an idiot savant?

Did anyone believe CC’s dramatic “I care about the little guy” routine?

How ’bout Mikey’s attempts to be relevant?

Or Scotty’s blinking as the ideas were moving too fast for him to keep up?

Or Rubio’s ever-present hankie wiping his frightened brow?

By far some of the best stuff came from the under card, led by the perennial favorite in hilarity, Ms. Lindsey Graham. Lindsey is perhaps my favorite, because while awful shit is projectile vomited from his mouth every 3.2 seconds, Lindsey otherwise is funnier than just about anyone I know.

He dressed down boy king, Bobby Jindal, much as a parent might gaze forgivingly at their child. “Still growing, he is, but he looks to make a fine cut of a fellow by the time he has.” (said while nailing down the cowlick with spit).

Ms. Lindsey, who (squirrel) likes to talk about how dangerous everything is, did just that, (squirrel) reminding us that the Middle East is a scary place and he will keep us safe, cuz he’s been hanging with the “guys” all these years, and they assure him, that we gotta go kick butt and they’re  the ones to do it. (Squirrel). Lindsey will of course act all commander in chiefy, while he yearns to get his hands on some hot barrels of his own.

Meanwhile Theodore The Canadian Cruz raised the subject they just all loved to talk on–Iran. No more scary country exists. They are seconds away from the launch codes. They shout “death to Merika” and mean it. War!

War excites them all. We may have to folks they shudder in supposed sympathy. We won’t want to, but “fear, fear, blah blah, fear, fear, blah, fear” they go. We just may have to for our own good doncha know and the good of the world (which they will fitfully not believe for like a millennia, but someday they will thank us.)

Ahh, the smell of napalm in the morning. Brings back such memories don’t it?

And everybody, just everybody was shoutin’ their “not a politician but an outsider” bona fides. Nobody is a Washington “insider”. No, Captain Marvel, otherwise known as JEB! or Jebbie, is gonna be THE DISRUPTOR”. I mean, that sent a shiver down even my spine.

There were moments of anticipated high drama which fizzled: Donald is cornered on his alleged claim that autism and vaccines might be related. Of course the medical community will tell you that there is no such relationship. Trump is on to  the gotcha moment brewing, and slyly mis-directs: “I wasn’t talkin’ about the vaccines themselves but the AMOUNT. I believe the doses are too high. They should be spread out over more years.”

Ben is given his chance to eviscerate THE DONALD with some real and actual medical knowledge and . . . .he agrees, that the dosages may be too high. To make it worse, Randy chimes in that he agrees. Trump walks away unscathed, and grinning.

They tried to gang up on him, they tried to ignore him. They tried to make his petty disagreements with Carly self-centered as puff boy, Chrissie said, “this ain’t about you and your jobs, it’s out THEIR jobs”, pointing to the well-dressed audience. It probably wasn’t about theirs either but it was a cute aside.

My predictions: Oh they are no better than the next gals.

I see Walker departing soon. He did little to help himself and he needed to take off his clothes and wiggle his wiener in order to get attention. He was too shy apparently.

Huck and Randy are dead in the water but will probably hang for a while. Same for most of the rest. As long as the last dollar is left to be spent, they will drag their wrinkled asses around the country talking to anyone who will listen. I mean, their spouses aren’t gonna listen to that shit any more, somebody’s gotta be found who will.

Oh there is so much more to come. But this was a great one, much better than the Foxy beginning.

Weirdest thing that happened: Hugh Hewitt, pummelled by THE DONALD for an earlier interview, completely caved in and admitted on air in public, that he didn’t pronounce the Arab words correctly, which was why Donald failed to know the difference between Kurds and Quds. Hewitt even admitted that Trump was the “best interview” ever.

So the 4th estate sinks to unimaginably new levels of useless propaganda mongering.

And the beat goes on.

So yesterday is a strange day for me. I admit to a morbid? fascination with the day in some respects. The National Broadcasting Company always plays the tape of the Today Show. I still listen with awe at the confusion and tentative explanations offered as the events unfolded. Katie Couric puzzled questions are reassuring still.

One does what one does on such a day. Mostly one remembers how quickly fourteen years has gone by. Then we focus on where we were, what we were doing, as the tragedy focused on planes down, buildings down, people reacting.

Some suggested that they get angry all over again. At Muslims presumably. I’m sure most don’t discriminate much as to “which” Muslims. Fox has used the day as a means of scaring the shit out of people once again, comparing our impending Iran deal with some sort of shameful response to the horror of 9/11.

I get angry. But not at Muslims.

I get angry because all of this crap was so entirely foreseeable to anyone who bothered to pay attention. See the neo-Cons didn’t see it coming because they live in a bubbly world where Merika is God’s favorite child and they are the elders appointed by themselves to guard this teenager against the vicissitudes of a global body politic.

In the mind of a neo-Con on September 11 at 7:30 a.m. EST, nobody would have the guts, nerve, or death wish to attack America in it’s heart. Striking both it’s financial and military might at the same time. Actually the presumed third target was Congress, which would have made it a perfect trifecta of middle fingers.

But neo-Cons don’t live in the real world. To listen to Dick “the Dick” Cheney today is to know that. He still has no clue. Among the myriad of peoples across the globe who have reason to thrill to the chant of “death to America”, the Saudi’s and a few others were not the least bit cowed by Merika’s might.

Oddly, I’ve been reading an older book these last couple of weeks. It’s by my political mentor of sorts, Noam Chomsky. In  Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Chomsky sets out in detail some of the major assaults Merika has lodged against other parts of the world in the quest for market domination and political control.

It ain’t pretty as they say.

We have consistently, around the globe, supported repressive regimes, demagogues, fascists, and in some cases, plain old everyday psychopaths who promised and did deliver markets to the American economic machine, and the promise of military bases to house the swelling military complex. We have supported them in opposition to the people and democratic yearnings.

We watched as native populations were in some cases descimated, and in others simply exploited so that American interests could gain wealth along with the thieving “leaders” of each country. The poor remained poor, often got poorer, and the US puppets lived lives of privilege.

We can discuss any part of Latin and South America and find the deadly results, whether it be Guatamala, Nicaragua, Columbia or El Salvador. We can easily move to Kosovo and of course Iran. We could go on forever probably.

There is no wonder why so many across the world hate us. I should say, hates our government. Most know the difference. Is it any wonder that radical extremists found purchase in such fertile soil?

You say you are mostly unaware of all this? Yes, I assume you are. Because guess what?

This shit isn’t being offered to you on the nightly news each evening. No. The powers that be have too much control for that.

The average American has almost no idea how hideously evil our behavior around the world has been.

And that rises to the point of criminality at this point.

We live in a bubble in the US. Most of us were born here, raised here, built our lives here. We raise kids, pets, and ourselves. We travel, we work hard, we love entertainment. We give lip-service to God when called upon to do so, and wave our flags at appropriate “national” holidays.

And we don’t know how vile our leaders have been and continue to be. We don’t know of the awful but simple truth that when polled, the REST OF THE WORLD VOTES THE US AS THE BIGGEST PURVEYOR OF TERRORISM ON THE PLANET.

And it’s all because we live in the bubble of American greatness, that REQUIRES we believe all the rest of the world should bow to us as superior to them, and as their parent. If you don’t believe me, sift through state department and military archives and see the references to other peoples in other places as “children” and “those who have no experience with freedom” and must be “led” and “controlled” lest they botch it all up.

Guess what? This pisses the hell out of those people.

And we are not aware because we are too busy discussing the relative merits of the latest addition to the hotdog offerings at the local supermarket. Is Nathan’s better tan Koegels?

We are unaware, and we explain that we can’t be held responsible. For after all, we are busy forging lives, raising families and preparing for retirement. We are BUSY, and being Americans that’s all the excuse we need.

Except 9/11 happened, and other shit happens around the world as bad. And we caused it. And we can pretend it’s not our fault because we weren’t aware, but failure to act when one should is as awful a crime as acting when one shouldn’t.

I hear it from all those prissy and oh-so-nice folks we all know. You know the ones I mean. The ones who are always the first to volunteer, never speak unkindly of anyone, always have something baked for a friend in need. You know, the nice folks.

Most of you are that. And all the nice folks say, “It’s not polite to discuss politics or religion in polite company.” What the hell does that mean? Do you walk in and ask, is this polite company? What horse manure.

Here’s a little message.

You don’t get a democracy because a handful of folks who do happen to care sets it up for you and it just goes merrily along it’s way. We have ample evidence that economic systems don’t run well unregulated and left to the damning greed of the corporate warlords.

Democracy is messy and it’s hard work.

It demands and requires the attention of the better share of the population affected or it will deteriorate into what we have today: an oligarchy of corporate 1%’ers who operate only from greed and are more than willing to see the “work force” of America reduced to little more than slave labor.

Think America sort sucks now? Well?

Look around. Get off your rear end and read and study and learn what the fuck is going on in the world. THIS IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AS A CITIZEN. You don’t have the luxury of suggesting that that sort of thing bores you, or is too hard to figure out. Nuts.

While you’re explaining why you can’t be bothered, others are organizing to take away even more from you until you are nothing more than a propaganda receptor for those who are controlling your every act.

So don’t tell me, you don’t “discuss politics or religion”. You damn well better because only the power of the numbers will turn this ship of state back on course. And it’s YOUR responsibility as much as any others.

Just stop telling me you aren’t paying any attention because you are bored, irritated, at a loss for time, or any of a hundred other excuses. Because I’m gonna tell you that you are not pulling your weight. And I’m gonna suggest that if you don’t want to be part of the solution, well keep your damn mouth shut, and don’t vote.

At least leave the governance to us if you can’t be bothered. They say opinions are like ass holes, everyone has one. Well, yes, I suppose. But are you ready to be told that your opinion is that of an asshole?

NO?

Oh, well then learn something of what you attempt to speak then. And LEARN, for heaven’s sake, WHAT THE HELL YOUR GOVERNMENT HAS DONE, AND IS DOING.

And then fight for democracy.

This blog sometimes participates in SoCS.

But two of ’em were at it this week alone, tellin’ me that their ignorant ideas were worthy of dissemination in the court of public opinion. One told me Bernie was a dirty dog but Hillary was an angel. I explained that he was delusional and then unfriended him. Another did the usual crap about how America went to hell the minute we prevented the “lamb” (Jesus) from accompanying our lil one’s to school each day.

Worse yet, said Texan (too many of the damnably stupid are from Texas you know), announced that she saw no “issue” in her post and said she intended to continue to support the Rebel flag and her “spiritual Baptist” beliefs. She begged me to unfriend her, being apparently unable to negotiate that difficult terrain without assistance from someone with an IQ at least 20 points higher than her own.

I obliged. I gathered from the supportive friends and family who were “with her” that such folks still in search of real intelligence,  hang together, uplifting their common stupid to new levels of extreme height.

But that’s not what I’m talking about today. No, today I speak to a similar kind of stupid, but different as well. For there is a stupid that is fairly stupid, but knows they are talking stupid too. I mean, they know they are LYING, for it is impossible to be this stupid. You get my drift?

You may have heard about the lady clerk in Kentucky who refuses to issue any marriage licenses, forcing the entire county to live in premarital sin, because God informs her that gays are not marriage material. To each other that is.

Now I find this argument compelling in no way whatsoever. It utterly fails to meet any known test of “religious freedom” ever conceived, except in the mind of a Frankenstein oriented Christianist. It doesn’t even pass the smell test.

We start off in the state of Kentucky which is no state at all to be in. Pretty, I’ll give it that, given my cursory look at it from the cabin of a 74. It’s pretty “enough” as Barack might say. Beyond that? Oh, well, it is on the list of secondary refugee camps for the stupid. See, Texas can’t figure out what border to sit on, the one with Mexico or the ones with various US states, all seeking to rid themselves of the stupid. Such folks are placed on Greyhounds and bussed south to Texas. When Texas becomes overwhelmed, they send the extras to places where stupid people are uncommonly comfortable–i.e., Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and of course Kentucky. Whew, well now you know.

It strikes one as likely that the stupid people of Kentucky actually think that it is safe to equate the handling of paper work for gay couples seeking marital union, a complicity of sorts. After all, I’m being asked to do something in my job that I find icky, thus Jesus must find it that way too, and He certainly wouldn’t be turning any water into wine for them, so, I should refuse to be a part of it as a “good Christian”.

I mean it probably seems that way to Kim, being that she’s so new to all this God stuff in the first place. Or second or third, or gracious goodness, four times. Yes, Oh you were unaware? Ms. Kim, the clerk has been MARRIED FOUR TIMES IN HER QUEST TO LIVE A GODLY LIFE. And the set of twins she conceived in her second marriage were actually with the guy who became the subject of her “until death do us part or you piss me off” on the fourth occasion.

Kim’s a bit confused and new at all this Christian stuff. You gotta cut her some slack and excuse that she just might be simply stupid and not duplicitously so.

So Kim follows “God’s law” which she couldn’t identify as being from where should you demand to know. She doesn’t, but the little preacher guy who baptised her in the blood of Jesus “sometime after her fourth and she swears final marriage,  and  after washin’ in the baptismal fount of forgiveness, told her it’s so. God don’t like Him no homosexuals, and no don’t ask Him why he created them thus in the first place.

So let’s leave Kimmy out of the equation, because she’s sorta not sure what is goin’ on anyway.

The people from Liberty Counsel are quite another thing. Schooled in the colosseum of colossal stupid, students who graduate from this den of dumb are admitted to the bar for reasons that defy logic and Thomas Jefferson. But they gotta know better.

Surely, they know that Kimmy’s lament doesn’t rise to the level of an actual defense of anything. Well, perhaps we wouldn’t vote to put her down since she’s too stupid to know better. But surely they know this.

Religious freedom is the freedom to believe what you want and to worship at a place that agrees with you,if one can be found. You can talk about what you believe, and you can try to get others to agree with you. That is religious freedom.

This is not about religious freedom.

Every job, federal, state, local, public or private, profit or nonprofit, has a thing called “job requirements.” They are the “things” an employed person does while at work. They can change over time. They can increase in number and type and they can shrink.

Ms. Davis has a job that now includes issuing marriage licenses to a larger group of people than a few months ago. She claims to do this would impinge upon her religious beliefs. It probably does.

However, the answer is not to deny the public the service their taxes pay for. The answer is for Ms. Davis to resign her post, given that she is now unable to do her job as required.

She cannot impose her self-determined opinion on what God might want to her job and claim that she can’t be forced to do it.

First and foremost her opinion is wrong, quite plainly. Any number (in fact the majority) of theologians and biblical experts would inform Ms. Davis that her personal conclusions about what God wants are not reflected by an accurate reading of anything in the bible. Therefore there are actually NO religious laws being broken by her new job requirements, only one that she creates herself.

Think about that.

Let’s ask 319 million people to all do or not do parts of their jobs based upon their religious interpretation of the relevant spiritual text of their faith. Can you see that this might be a tad unwieldy?

This is not remotely what the Founders had in mind.

Your religious freedom stops where mine starts.

Ms. Davis may be a perfect fraud. She may be nothing more than a willing dupe to a group of religious fanatics who are still trying to set up a modern-day theocracy in the US. Or she may be a true believer of the fundamentalist variety, where all personal bigotry usually finds a home somewhere in the bible as justification.

But it is not religious freedom, and Liberty probably knows that. It has its own agenda. See above.

I sit and watch as various GOP contenders for the rabbit’s foot award all weigh in. Jindal, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Huckabee all jump on the “religious persecution” bandwagon and utter inanities that make one blanch. The rest hem and haw and go for a version of blah blah blah that hopefully will trigger no response.

Surely they aren’t this stupid.

But maybe they are.

It’s why livin’ in Merika is hard.

Hey, next time we create a new country, let’s set an IQ minimum okay?

This agin’ shit is pretty much play it by ear ya know. I ain’t never been here before. So if I don’t always get it right, hey, I’m a work in progress.

See I take no responsibility for all this. The world I mean. It purely sucks if you look at it all, into every nook and cranny as they say. It purely sucks.

We don’t learn from our mistakes, we don’t see the trends from multiple strands of social interaction across the globe. We mostly are oblivious. We use trite phrases to avoid thinking.

We say stupid things like, “everybody is entitled to their opinion.” What the hell does that mean? Does it literally mean that one of the hallmarks of humanity is the right to spew any sort of fermenting slop as one’s “opinion” thereby classifying it along such noted remarks as “I came, I saw, I conquered”, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” and “Mikey likes it.”

I’m supposed to accept that your “opinion” about Donald Trump being a breath of fresh air is equal to my assessment of the probability that the dark matter in the universe is sufficient to close the universe from permanent expansion? I don’t think so.

See, we have got this notion that everybody is entitled to an opinion. They are not. This is not a handout in which every newborn is checked at the door. “Yep, little Ralph has his “opinion rights” right here in his diaper. Let him go forth unto humanity to spake his piece.”

Spake his piece?

Okay, let’s get this straight.

You are entitled to inclusion in the human race on very limited standards. Basically you must have the general physical equipment of legs and arms and knees. Mostly, but hey if you are missing one or two, not a problem. If you resemble being human more than say being a salamander, you fit the bill.

This does not entitle you, however, to a soapbox and a microphone. Nor does it entitle you to open your yap whenever you wish to spout some personal preference for anything if it is swimming in a sea of “just my opinion”. Your opinion is worthless flotsam unless it is tied to this thing we call FACT.

Facebook is a collector of such human dramas masquerading as intelligent people. Don’t get me wrong, there are tons of really smart folks on Facebook, millions of them in fact. It’s just that they are jumbled up with all sorts of misbegotten refuse who have the appellation of “human” while having little in the way of grey matter.  And the latter sort continue to intervene in adult conversations with their “opinions” which contain nothing but the machinations of their six brain cells operating at half power for thirty seconds.

And of course, the rest of us who are not tied to personal preferences and the desire to hang on to every penny we’ve managed to accumulate at the expense of the continuing efficacy of the planet if that’s what it takes, have to “address” these cockamamie “theories” as if they actually made sense.

So here’s the low down bottom guppies. If you are a marginal human being, meaning that you shouted “whew” at the end of twelve long years of recesses, punctuated by football floats and sneakin’ a peek at Ms. Andrews boobs when she bent over to help you with long division, and called that “being educated” then, here’s what you must do.

Shut the FUCK up. Unless it has to do with what brand of weed killer works best on fescue, shut the FUCK up. You don’t contribute to the conversation, you embarrass it. You can’t put two coherent thoughts together. Hell, you don’t HAVE two coherent thoughts.

Stick to birthin’ babies, greasin’ axles, and giving McDonald’s a reason to exist. They created bowling alleys for you. They created comic books for you. They created Disneyland for you. MOMA? Don’t trouble your often pretty head about that. Keynesian economics versus Hayekian? Stick to those abs.

See how easy this is? You return to the stuff you do best and leave us along to puzzle out the state of the world and the solutions to all those problems you haven’t really got time to think about anyway, since you really have to decide–should Hulk be the VP nominee or Sarah for the Trump machine?

See, we want you to think about that, cuz it doesn’t matter what your answer is. It has as much chance of happening as hell oozing into your toilet and nippin’ your nuts while you count backwards from a hundred and count ammo.

I’m pretty sure that your “average Joe” is pretty content to ignore politics and religion as being boring if they really thought about it. The average Joe is pretty happy with being average. He averages through life. He works, he retires, he fishes. His wife raises kids, retires (though few recognize the difference) and knits. Their parents did the same, and probably their grandparents. They think this is swell.

The rest of us, we are never satisfied. We are terrified of getting “set in our ways”, and doing the dreary ordinary things of each age category. We yearn to know everything, the faster the better. Our routines are only set in order to get as much done each day before we tear it all apart and set up new ones so we don’t get “set in our ways.” We flit from one thing to another, gleaning a bit of knowledge each time so that as we age, we do in fact become “wise” and able to discourse on hundreds of topics with some basic understanding.

I figure it is the “rest of us” since I never have believed for one second that I was very unique. Oh unique in the obvious sense, so we all are, but unique beyond the obvious? Naw, I doubt it very much. The Internets are good for that sort of thing–lettin’ you know you are not so unique as you think.

The Internet humbles the savage beast, or takes down the arrogant a peg or two at least. And sadly it has the worst possible effect on the stupid. A computer is so simplistic in its operation that it allows the most lacking in brains to get on it and find to their amazement, that their dumb notions are shared by a segment of humanity. And that makes them feel, what they are not–SMART.

And that gums up the entire works.

Was a time when stupid people knew they were stupid.

I’m guessin’ about that, but I know one thing, nobody thinks that today.

Hell, seventeen of them are running for President.

Well, hey there! Belly up to the double-wide, find somethin’ to plant your keister on, and I’ll hit the cooler and bring ya back a cold one. As soon as everyone gets here, we’ll commence to havin’ our monthly meetin’ of the Daisy Trailer Court All Tea Party Believers Group. Hey pass those pork rinds will ya? Clara ate the last bear claw this mornin’ and I am sure I can’t wait fer lunch.

It’s been a busy week doncha think?

That darned Trump is sure messin’ up some feathers ain’t he? Man has the gumption to tell it don’t he? He’s makin’ all those others look like the Cuckservatives they really are, cuckholded and Rino at the same time. Oh boy, don’t get me started.

Now, I was at the city pool the other day. I know, I know what you are gonna say. What’s a fellow doin’ at a pool? I mean a good creek or pond is what ya swim in, not some indoor cement thing. Remember ole Jeb and his “cement pond”? Haha, we got a different Jeb now don’t we. Our Jeb could make ya wish for the opportunity to watch paint dry couldn’t he? Boringest man I’ve ever heard. But them Bushes are all strange aren’t they? Daddy and his jumpin’ outta planes and Dubya, well, he avoided planes as far as I heard when he was in the Reserves.

Reserves, Preservers, seems that “branch” of the service is only for rich kids who need to look the part without being a real soldier. But that’s another whole thing ain’t it?

So, anyway, I was at the pool cuz my doc sent me on account of this torn muscle thing. Thinks I can heal faster if I walk in water. Well, I’m hear to tell ya, I learnt something a bit different there.

See, I was watchin’ as people walked into the pool water. Now given all the waters I’ve tucked my toe into, I’d say this looked mighty clean and well purdy warm too. But you’d not a known that ‘iff’n you had watched.

These folks would stick a toe in and screw up their faces so bad you’d a thought they was shocked that water was wet. It was a sight to see. One after another, all lookin’ so surprised when they stepped in. Either that, or they was shocked that they weren’t walkin’ on it. I’m not sure which.

Oh, looks like everybody is here. Let’s call this meetin’ to order. Donnie, lead the pledge and then Cindy Lou will lead the prayer.

Okay, let’s look at the news:

First of all, women are now in the Rangers. What ya all think of that one?

SFODx33 offered this: “I’m calling it right now. First female in combat that has an ingrown toe nail will receive the Medal of Honor. Some folks are way too eager to ram this through and force women to the front line. There is NO DOUBT, standard will be decreased to accommodate the next “GI Jane”. I can already see the discrimination claims against CO’s and senior NCO’s for expecting the chics to pull their weight.” And the only thing you ever served on was as float captain for your freshman highschool class. Are you just complaining because nobody cares about your ingrown toe nail? Suck it up dude, or this chic (sp) will force more prune juice down your gullet to move that shit along.

Andy M chimed in: “If you haven’t been paying attention over the last 20 years, equal opportunity and affirmative action are doing more harm than good these days.” I’m guessin’ it has more to do with you losin’ your job at McDonald’s because you couldn’t flip a burger and keep it on the grill, than it has to do with affirmative action and equal opportunity. I’m guessin’ you’re a “discriminated-against white dude?” 

So how you guys think of that “black lives matter” thing? Don’t ALL lives matter?

Demonrat Plantation utters with a smile: I prefer #black LIES matter as it is more truthful regarding their methods.” And I thought that Confederate flag in your front yard was only a joke. 

R Hugh Sirius blubbered: “Enduring the Black Lives Movement: When it’s brown, flush it down. When it’s black, send it back…” Now aren’t you clever. Oh you forgot one. “When it’s an ignorant white dude, just bury it.” 

Well Trump has talked about eliminating “birthright citizenship”. How’s that sittin’ with ya? Scotty Walker says he won’t take any position on it. You agree with that?

Anabasis sighed: “American workers should not be compelled by their government to pay for Mexicans to sit around and breed.” Ana do you have any basis for that? No? I thought not. Go back to your donuts. 

Chootum moans: “Well another bites the dust. I want to know why we can’t close the boarders, find all the criminal illegals , build a fence and change our laws on citizenship to protect our citizens ALL at the same time ? I guess our candidates can’t multi-task” I often wonder why I can’t have chocolate sprinkles on my popcorn when I ride my unicorn, but unicorns don’t multi-task well. Why don’t you practice guard duty in your backyard for a while, and we’ll see how that goes.

And then there’s that Iran deal. How do you all feel about that one?

Latern59 mutters: “Under the table deals, secret deals, this whole thing stinks to high heaven. Obama Kerry should be in prison for making deals with a terrorist nation. If the average citizen knows this is wrong, why are our, so-called, leaders violating their own rules and laws?” Ever hear of a guy named Ronnie Reagan? He can tell you a thing or two about makin’ deals with terrorists. Oh history is not your strong suit?Well, you could have fooled NO ONE.

CharleyM1 pouted: Why do any Republicans favor the deal? Democrats I get. They vote blindly on party lines all the time. Why any Republicans? Yes, you sure got that right. Fifty votes to kill the ACA in the House proves that Democrats will all stick together. Not like those silly GOP’ers who are always all over the map when the votes are taken. 

erv999 jumps up and down: Here is some interesting trivia for you. Do you know what Obama means in Persian? It means “he is with us”. Want more? The meaning of Obama in the Kenyan Luo language is “crooked or distorted”. In retrospect, the name was prophetic……Are you trying for extra credit or something? 

Our guy Troy will be loadin’ up his truck and I think Tommie too, to take ya all down to the mass protest of them baby killin’ Planned Parenthooder’s. How many are goin’ down for that?

Reason_Over_Ideology wondered: “Why protest when you could just pray?” I do know what ya mean. I mean while prayin’ you can easily drink a can of beer and eat lunch. Also it’s probably dangerous to get too close to such a place. Satan lurks ya know.

Virginiagentleman had this to add: “Don’t hold your breath waiting for the mainline Protestant denominations to side with these protests against PP’s ghoulish conduct. Somehow their willingness to speak for the “oppressed victims” of the world doesn’t include the unborn children who are slaughtered for their organs and other body parts.”Nope, everybody knows that those sorts of Christians aren’t the REAL kind. And once we get control of the government we are gonna make sure those sorts lose their tax exemptions since they don’t deserve them. Long live the Constitution!

When you add in that the House Rep from Alaska, Don Young, said that government handouts had more to do with Alaska’s high suicide rate than anything else,

Or that in Missouri, the state legislature (GOP controlled) having been plagued by a number of their members being forced to resign because they were sexually harassing interns, figured the solution to that was to demand that interns dress more conservatively,

Or that the Duggars are requesting a new show where they counsel sexual abuse victims (presumably not Josh’s),

Or that Donald Trump is still the outstanding front-runner,

and you have PROOF POSITIVE THIS IS NOT THE EARTH YOU WENT TO SLEEP ON.

YOU MY FRIEND HAVE BEEN TRANSPORTED TO ANOTHER PLANET, ANOTHER GALAXY, AND PERHAPS EVEN ANOTHER UNIVERSE (IF ONE BELIEVES IN THE MULTIVERSE CONCEPT).

Control of your computer is now returned to you.

All above remarks were made by real people in response to stories in The Daily Caller, The Blaze, and Breitbart News. I swear it.

What is this phenom called “The Donald”? What does he want, need, or reflect? What is this barely one-third filled auditorium of robotic clappers who cheer when candidates say, “no abortion, not even to save the life of the mother,”? A very smart right-wing excuse for a human, points out that, hey if the woman is saved but not the baby, she’s no mother anyway. Burn the bitch at the stake!

Watching over the past weeks at the land laid bare by one Donald J. Trump, put-er of names upon objects, flashy promoter of silly “reality” shows, ex-promoter of barbie dolls in swimsuit and gown barely able to string one sentence together with proper grammar. All around douche.

It is impossible for a person of normal sensibilities to look at this trainwreck of a human being and do anything but shake your head in. . .in what? Sympathy? Understanding? What exactly do you feel when you look at such a creature of an evolutionary roll of the dice?

A surprising number of folks, some clearly knuckle-draggers, but quite a few seemingly normal, will respond to the question, what do you think of the Donald, with “well at least he tells it as it is” or “he says what he thinks regardless of whether it’s popular”. With similar phrases a man who has managed in his lifetime to accomplish nothing that anyone would admire much at all, has been catapulted to the top of the leadership board in the GOP clown car race to lose the presidency once again.

Yes, The Donald may “tell it like it is” or more pertinently, tell it like we’d like to if we had the chance” but what does  that mean? Surely we don’t (most of us at least) agree with much of anything that falls out of his prissy lips. So is it just the choice to throw caution to the wind and speak one’s own sense of truth no matter what that counts?

I doubt it. We can know this because while not apologizing for any of the shocking things he says out loud, he does go to some lengths to “explain” so that he won’t be judged so harshly by his base.

His base?

It seems the right winger tea-sippin’ loons are fairly fungible. They slither under the rock supports for such buffoons as Trump, but also the Jindal/Cruz/Santorum/Carson et. al. as well, and they will abandon any of ’em should they stray from the deep and bitter hatred speeches that this group demands.

Of course conspiracy theories abound as well. Which is nice, since the Trumpster has been author of a few himself. Note how the “proof” he had that President Obama was not a real citizen, has evaporated into interstellar space long ago. Along with the ever anonymous “border agents” trotted out by everyone to prove that one cannot cross the border these days for the heaps of bodies and crime victims littering the Chihuahuan Desert, along the red line that separates Merika and my little slice of heaven from Mexico which stands for all of the rest of the world. To the loons, all brown people are Mexican regardless of whether they hail from Ecuador or Peru. And let’s not forget all the Arab terrorists that have been living there just waiting to sneak across and blow up Deming and Ruidoso.

We are glad you informed us all down here of the danger we are in.

Yes, the Trump man likes his conspiracies. One aimed at him, is that he is nothing but a wolf in sheep’s clothing, entering the private hell, aka GOP, as a means to destroy it from within, no doubt at the behest and for a good hand/blow job by the ever versatile Hillary.

Now, while it is an appealing thought, I really don’t think that normal people like Hillary could have concluded that even The Donald could out-crazy a Ted  (machine-gun bacon) Cruz for instance. Who can outdo a Mikey Huckabee and his “Obama is leading the Jews to the doors of the ovens”? Who can outdo Bennie the scalpel Carson’s, “Obamacare is worse than slavery”? I mean can not crazy probe into crazy deep enough to out GOP the GOP? Does one risk losing one’s senses to even try?

Look, Donald is one very mean son-of-a-bitch, and we all know that. He unrelenting attacks against Rosie O’Donnell are proof positive that he is neither a gentleman nor a man in firm grasp of his own self-esteem. He cannot stand being criticized no matter how minor the issue, and he does what people of low self-esteem always do–they hit back hard and vicious, attacking people on peripheral matters that are suggestive of grammar school playgrounds.

He pretends to live in some world where he is the most attractive, smart, rich person and is admired by all. I doubt even he believes it, but he is driven by some absurd need to succeed, and his measure of success is, believe me, no standard you or I will ever know. I suspect it’s all tied up with daddy issues and probably a mommy one or two to boot.

If you read the right wing bullshit creator (otherwise known as Fox but also Breitbart, WND, Red State, Town Hall, and the Blaze), you realize that Donald has done nothing more than tap into the drooling stupidity of the far right that knows almost nothing, is educated about almost nothing, but can still identify a white stranger (friend) at sixty paces, and finger the safety on their semi-automatic while they purchase diapers at Walmarts.

These people are STUPID. They don’t want to pay taxes. They want a better job (with no clue how to get one or what to do with it if they had it). They have been Foxy educated to hate all people of color not because they are of color, but  because they are criminals, job thieves, and don’t pay taxes. If your life sucks, Fox will explain who is to blame, and it ain’t you and it ain’t them. Funny how all them just happen to be not white.

This is where Trump is stuck. He can claim that he doesn’t filter but says what he means, but really? Apparently  he has suggested that PPH should be funded to the parts that don’t deal with abortion. Reasonable? Some would say so. But the far right whack jobs are already threatening him with the appellation RINO as a result. He can drift almost not at all from the stringent rules of the road established by the gun rack lobby.

These folks are willing, for the right candidate, to burn the house down to make their point. Trump dare not come off rational in any respect or they will abandon him like two day old raw chicken left on the counter.

Trump has no hope of winning over the middle, for even the “I don’t vote for a party but for the candidate” folks won’t go that far. The independent voter (which is nothing more than those who don’t listen to any of the shit until a week before an election) is not his to win. They may be uninterested, but they are not fall-down drunk stupid.

It seems to me that Trump probably never does better than about 25 per cent. That means he wins nothing either as a GOP candidate or as an independent hair express man.

So what is his point?

Hell if I know.

As a comedian suggested on Larry Wilmore the other night, “if it appears I’m trying to get into Trump’s head, just kill me. I don’t want to ever go there.”

We figured the GOP for a good circus act this time around. But this? Oh we never expected this. This is too sweet. It’s like SNL playing new stuff ever minute of the day. Trump delivers the bull and the media cackles and tries to make sense of the crazy. Worse, they start predicting.

It’s going to be a long season. If the best is yet to come, lordy are we in for a bumpy ride.

You see, I’m pretty much in the “live and let live” category, but the good folks who profess to believe in their decades old-idea that the bible should be selectively read quite literally, have a pesky habit of carrying their self-serving interpretation to the ballot box with them. This is where we part company, and I get out my pitch fork to do battle.

I personally don’t give the good side of a rat’s butt what you think about nearly anything actually. You may (and must if you are a true fundie) believe in a flat earth and I don’t care. Just don’t presume to make public policy decisions based upon your warped thinking and we’ll be fine.

But of course, you do, so we’re not, and it all gets ugly.

Most people agree with me.

You persist.

Why?

Because you claim that we will be lost if Christian morals aren’t a part of the mix in determining our national public policies. In that, as in most other things, you are wrong.

We don’t derive our moral positions only from some religion. That is a fallacy. Moral rectitude comes from lots of sources, and experience and historical recall are two great beginnings to a moral code independent of deity. It is convenient to deny this, but hardly honest.

Let me give an example.

Look at the Hebrew testament. What sticks out?

God, as portrayed seems a might vengeful  deity doesn’t he?

This God is upheld by the religious right evangelicals. God is vengeful right? After all, at the very start of the commandments, God appears to make it quite clear:

There shall be no other gods before me. 

Much of the “history” of Israel constitutes the wars and invasions necessary to make this clear. Israel claims the land of those who worship other gods. Israel ends this by sometimes destroying all the people associated with the cult of “other” gods.

The rightie-tighties view all this quite literally. God punishes and favors those who fight other gods and who cleave to Him alone. God is warrior. God is vengeance.

We understand this sort of god quite well don’t we? We are a warrior people, and a fair reading of human history suggests we have been warring almost from the start. We are like God.

It’s almost as if we forgot what came next in those commandments:

You shall not make a likeness or image of any sort to represent God. 

Does that possibly suggest to you that our human traits don’t really apply to God?

Where does that leave us?

With a better interpretation than a literal one.

Experts might suggest to you that the anonymous men and women (?) who wrote various pieces of the Hebrew testament might have something quite different in mind when they wrote than pure naked truth.

In fact, these may well have been teaching documents when “written”, designed for various purposes other than to provide a “manual written at God’s guidance” about what Christians must do. They may well have been nothing more than tools of persuasion for a “country” in formulation.

How best to justify our rather violent takeover of a region long inhabited by others? Blame it on the God you follow whom you would argue has proven himself more powerful than any other. Forget that your writing set out to deliberately establish that, using the jealous god theme as your basic defense to being called “invaders”.

Coalesce one’s followers around the theme of “being chosen” and “special” and only responding to a God who had proven to be powerful enough to destroy whole armies at will to those who were faithful.

Tell a common story to a people straggling along the roads and byways of roads that led from Babylon, the place of exile, to the “homeland” never seen for generations. This is how you build a “people” from refuges who have for generation lived with other gods and other cultural rights and wrongs.

A vengeful God becomes the one to point to. We didn’t kill all your village elders, God did. You see how easy that works?

You see how much sense it makes?

The bible becomes the reflection of how a society came to be, the methods used to coalesce its numbers and the code of conduct determined to work best in order to keep that common cause always foremost. It blames the nasty behaviors on God, and allows the rank and file peasant to “get along” with the indigenous population. This vengeful God thing becomes the perfect cover for violent overreach.

Those of us who see that, see everything else quite differently as a result. If we feel squeemish initially at other people’s choices in spouse we don’t look to give sanctuary to our lack of compassion in a few remarks made by a writer who had a far different agenda and describes practices unknown in our modern world. We deal with our own failings that lead to this feeling and correct it.

The truth is, we on the left side of religion understand one thing as paramount. God to us is love, and if love is served, nothing else much matters. If the relationships humans define as sacred to them are based on loving feelings, it is sanctioned by the God we believe in. All decisions, feelings, notions, actions, contemplations, are judged simply by this: does it favor love or cut against it?

This is a morality that while based on belief, serves as well without the god attached. It cuts in both directions. We can take as given that cross-culturally, all humans arrive at much the same place albeit through a myriad of paths. We all fairly collectively agree that ending a human life deliberately is not acceptable except in specific instances usually well-defined. Cultures world-wide develop some concept of the “golden rule”. A moral code which in general is much the same comes to be, over time, everywhere.

What does this mean?

To the atheist it means that we are evolutionarily programmed to arrive at a code of conduct independent of any god because it is evolutionarily useful in maintaining the species. Admonitions against killing make sense because they provide for the continuation of the species. It has zero to do with any god.

Believers of course see the whole thing differently. To the degree that all religions share major tenets of good behavior suggests that God places in each of us some germ that leads us to a moral code that is responsive to God’s offer of unconditional love.

One sees our shared ethics as proving there is no god and the other comes to the exact opposite conclusion.

Fundamentalists fall out of the mainstream for they don’t share either opinion. For them Christianity serves as a tool in their arsenal of self-esteem. God chose them. God sets out a strict list of rules to be followed to remain one of us, thus not them.  We are saved, they are not. There is always a scapegoat in the bible; someone to blame. I am always to proclaim my unworthiness, but no matter what I do in actuality, I am saved, and that’s all that matters. My bad acts are forgiven. They are still to blame.

It is not enough for a fundamentalist to live his or her life according to their interpretation. They insist that I must as well. But since I know them to be utterly wrong in their simple and self-serving interpretation, I can’t be happy about that. They don’t want to live peacefully, they want to force everyone to live as they dictate. And that we cannot allow.

That I will not allow. I will fight to the last to deny you that.

And somehow, I gotta believe, and I really do, that love is a much stronger emotion than hate. It will win simply because in the end it makes the most sense. And hate-based judgments will wither and die.

But this is not about writing, for as I just admitted, I can no more set out the requirements of good writing than I can turn a cartwheel these days, but I do know something about writers. Being one, I can relate.

But what a ragged bunch we are. Actually writers make me laugh sometimes. After all, to declare one to be something which is not measured by a weekly salary or a list of duties associated with one’s daily grind, makes it hard indeed to stand with head held high. Starving artist comes to mind. Are you indeed an artist if nobody buys your work?

Well, so say some.

Dorothy Parker famously queried whether one can be a writer and have no book? In her time, there was no such thing as “self-publishing”. So she opined that unless one had taken to the lonely task of writing a book (fictional presumably), one was not fairly a writer. Those who wrote short pieces for magazines did not qualify.

There are other similar questions by some, mostly I’d suggest, from people with an axe to grind.

I mean self-publishing is now easy and fairly cheap. Anyone can publish their writing and disseminate it in book form. One can, as some do, buy up large quantities of one’s own work and count it as “copies sold” to impress others.

But for some (usually those who have been published), the appellation writer only applies to one who has been properly published by an established publishing company. But there are publishers and then there are publishers. These types however don’t tend to worry overmuch about that. Any publisher will do, but published one must be.

Others might draw the line at “been paid for”. If Boy’s Life paid you $25 for your little ditty about handkerchief folding, well baby, you been published and paid! Welcome to the ranks of Faulkner and Balzac.

Once upon a time, I was a lawyer. I’ve also been a student, and even a waitress for a couple of months (oh I was awful at that I gotta say!). When I started blogging a number of years ago, well, I eventually got the idea that I too was a writer, and I began to learn of the various definitions of what constitutes a person whose “job” it is to writ large.

Of course such writing doesn’t differentiate between fictional and other forms of writing. Technical writers are writers too even if their offerings are much less glamorous than the work of a Mitchener or Cervantes. But if publication is the standard, then all writers who get published by a publishing company can claim the banner.

I don’t know if any of this is unusual in other professions. I mean most of them require the same basic standardized list of accomplishments in order to matriculate through its school and to the degree. But heck, who knows, among physicists, there may be many factors that separate the fish from the chum.

I find it all amusing.

I really do.

For I define writer in a rather different way.

Perhaps it is all self-serving since I admit willingly that I’ve not been paid for writing, other than as a lawyer and no one can separate the brief writing from the argument. I’ve been published in school newspapers and here certainly. A few entries in the Courts of Appeal with excerpted arguments.  I have no other bona fides to claim than that.

Yet, still, I am a writer.

Because writing isn’t about any of the stuff others claim for it.

It is singular and something that only the person can claim for themselves or not.

It is not about publishing or being paid.

Writing is a form of communication, so first and foremost is one person placing into written form thoughts that they wish to convey to some “other”. And most important, do they care about how that thought is conveyed?

What I suggest is that writers love words, and love them to death, agonizing over the placement, the right word, the perfect modifier. Writing is not casual, but sweat and yes even tears on occasion.

However one engages in the craft, it becomes the thing itself, not the means to some other end. When it stands or falls on its own as readable, nay enjoyable, success has been achieved. We struggle with each word, each paragraph, and the order of the thing so that it “flows” and brings smiles of recognition and delight.

It is poetry but not. It is some in-between thing. Not an instruction manual and not Shakespeare, but something of its own. As you read, you marvel. What a wonderful turn of a phrase, how beautifully captured, how eloquent.

Each page is turned with fresh anticipation. One fingers the remaining pages with a certain despair and melancholy. Too soon it will be over.

Such writers, whether their offerings are fiction or not, cause people to search out everything they have ever written. We are insatiable in our desire to read more of this wonderful stuff.

If you don’t aim for this as a writer, I don’t think much of your efforts. If you are not continually searching for your own style, your own “voice,” your own distinct way of delivering your message, you are not a writer. You are at best nothing but a competent communicator. No artistry can be found.

Only the writer can honestly assess these things and declare themselves as wanting or as having passed the test. Of course this is entirely self-serving by definition. I control who  am.  But truly to be dishonest with oneself on this issue is to serve no purpose. One can claim the title but if one cannot produce the magic, well, everybody KNOWS you are only a sham.

Lover of words, extraordinary words, ordinary words catapulted to new realms of usefulness. Cantilevered into phrases, exploding into instantaneous meaning by new association, this is writing. This is art. This is sublime.

This is what I strive for. This is what I attain in singular moments of wordy ecstasy. And then it falls apart and I am left with the refuse of words not used, old favorites, and ones I fully wish to use but struggle with finding a context when they will sing their crystal clear illustration of some obscure thought.

Writers of my ilk love some words to death, hate others, are frightened of the implications of others, and judiciously dole out a few that are so powerful they risk being old hat if used often. Dusted off and polished, old thines and betwixts, hasts and methinks yearn for inclusion in a modern world. Find us a place, tuck us into that sentence, there, with an exclamation point!

Such makes us giddy with excitement. Palpable, throbbing, sexual energy.

I say too much?

I am ready, ready, ready, ready, to write.

Are you ready?

Participating from time to time and loosely with SoCS.

And then there was hair loss later in life, and well, I don’t pretend to know whether men obsess over chest hair or not, but it just seemed that their burdens were not worth the exchange.

I suppose it all goes back to caves, or whatever suitable accommodations were “home” to our ancestors on the plains of Africa. Men are for the most part stronger which makes them quite useful for things that require brute strength. Ironically men who work with their hands and use their bodies as their machines are fairly looked down upon by their Madison Avenue brothers as having not “made it” in the wicked world of power and wealth today. But it was the originator most likely of men’s superior classification.

In an event, men ruled, and that is pretty much everywhere you look across the blue marble we call home. In the only parts that counted (by those same men), white men ruled all others, including men of color. And it was all seen as good and well, as evidenced even by major religious scriptures, who took it for granted that men pretty much ruled naturally and with God’s imprimatur.

Somehow, even allegedly smart white men failed to see that Jesus rather turned that cart upside down when he suggested that women were, *gasp* capable of preaching the “good news” of the coming Kingdom.

Things have gone on in that vein for some time. Well, to be honest, it has gone on through most of recorded time. I’d hazard a guess that even where women ruled it had more to do with “blood lines” than competence, and many sturdy men were gathered around such a lady to “guide” her to correct decisions.

It continues today, but the battle is now fully engaged, and white men are getting a bit nervous.

Women have always been angry, but anger needs direction and some sort of power base to be effective. Only in the 20th century do we begin to see real movement to question the paternalism that has been the history of women’s life in America and the world.

Another aspect is now apparent as well. While white men were busy running the world and making obscene amounts of money to feel “successful”, the rest of the planet was busy reproducing like rabbits. Left with so much extra time on their hands, they played in the garden of rare delights also known as ladies private parts. And the birth rate has skyrocketed and well, do the math.

Ms. Lindsey is correct. If you look around white dude, well, I can understand why you are shakin’ in your boots and clingin’ to your guns. Your days are numbered and no amount of prancing around neighborhoods with your semi-automatic penises strapped across your chest is gonna make any difference to that.

You are a not dying, but certainly about to become wheelchair ridden, mere shadows of yourselves.

Now, I don’t say this with glee necessarily. After all, I’m married to one of y’all.  I rather like him too, so I have no ill-will in general to white men, just everything mostly that they stand for.

We can all pretty much agree that you have done a lousy job of runnin’ things. I mean yeah, you build a lot of stuff, but it seems for the only purpose of blowin’ it all up eventually. You guys can’t stop arguing about whose penis is bigger and if you ever bothered to ask us, you’d know that has nothin’ much to do with it.

Yet you persist.

And our sons and daughters and well, all of us suffer for your insatiable desire for bloodshed. There just ain’t enough hills for all of ya to be kings on.

So I can get why you are so angry. And like petulant children who can’t have ice cream for breakfast, you take it out on everyone you come across.

What you all are in need of is some basic psychoanalysis. I mean your ability to blame it on anybody but yourselves is shocking. It’s the black, brown, female, immigrant, wrong religion, youth, liberal, educated, government, et ceteras into oblivion’s fault for your troubles. A white man never looks in the mirror and sees the cause of his own disaster.

Anyway, you get all out there in your twisted but fact-less minds, and become conspiracists of one sort or another. We’ve visited the FEMA camps, and gun confiscations, the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration to death. We’ve been birthered to death and delved into the drug-induced supposed gayness of the black guy in the WHITE house.

We have tried to talk sense to your sense of impending loss, we really have, but past a certain point, crazy is too crazy to hear let alone understand. You are like the child who attempts to solve his unhappiness by making public scenes of displeasure at the world.

Unfortunately, you’re methodology includes the killin’ of plenty of innocents as you strike out in anger and frustration that you can’t always be first in line and get the best cupcake.

It’s over dude.

Do the math.

You are like the king who rules over a kingdom of “others”. Once his army became “others” too, it was only a matter of time, until they learned to count. Suddenly it was lookin’ a bit grim for the king.

Some of you have taken to claiming that you are the one’s being victimized now. Oh, if only that were true. We’d surely come to your aid if it were true. But it’s not.

Nothing is more pathetic than hearing a white dude proclaim that he is being discriminated against. Dude you were born with a white penis, what more could a person want? With it came all the entitlements and assumptions that have always attached to a new born white male. There is no “stretch” to thinking of you in a new more powerful way. It’s business as usual for you.

You can’t fathom how that is not what it is for the rest of us. We have to first convince somebody(s), that we can do the job, that we are smart enough, strong enough, carry the right emotional schema, are not unsuitably encumbered by family and obligation, and a host of other things. Women must explain that their menses won’t cause them to divulge the nuclear codes nor will “pillow talk”. Black and browns must assure that they have enough of the “cultural”requirements to govern. Remember, they weren’t “raised” the same as white dudes, which has become by their decree the cultural norm.

And since the numbers, (damn them) simple are what they are, white dudes are gonna lose no matter what. You can’t shoot it, marry it, enslave it, or stick it in a company town. It’s just gonna swallow you up.

So you lash out.

Do you realize that almost all crimes of mass murder are committed by white men? Dude, this endears you to no one. Let us know that your brains are falling out because you can’t be king any more, and we will help. If you don’t, well, the end is your demise one way or the other.

But please, stop trying to take us with you.

My husband is a Vietnam Vet. He came away from that war with PTSD. He was probably on the cusp of when the military was starting to take “shell shock” or “battle fatigue”  and other various appellations for PTSD seriously. He attended the PTSD clinic in Kansas City back in the seventies for some weeks.

In addition, he suffers from COPD, and a very strange and intermittent lack of balance which makes mobility difficult for him sometimes. The latter is usually attributed to several concussions suffered in youth and in a helicopter crash in Vietnam.

We live in New Mexico, a state that has a “medical marijuana” law. My husband is candidly, no stranger to pot. After all, we are from the 60’s generation and it would be expected that we had dabbled with cannabis and perhaps more over the decades.

In any event, my husband decided to pursue the issue in New Mexico. The process was easy for him. A quick trip to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, and the securing of his rather large PTSD file at the VA was essentially all that was required. My spouse was lucky in that a few years ago, the VA re-evaluated his PTSD pursuant to a renewed request for VA disability status.

His PTSD was diagnosed as active and ongoing, which, as I said, made the process with New Mexico fairly much a no-brainer.

Within a few weeks of his evaluation and submission of application, he received his card. We live in Las Cruces, which has several “drugstores” that cater exclusively to medical marijuana users, so my husband soon was purchasing weed legally for the first time in his life.

We were concerned that whatever relief he might garner from the marijuana vis-a-vis his PTSD might be overwhelmed by a turn for the worse in his COPD status. We expected that he might have to use it in the form of food or as a vape. But he started out in the traditional way: the joint.

After a week, an amazing thing happened. His breathing improved dramatically. Not just dramatically as far as he was concerned, but it was astoundingly obvious to me. I had long grown used to the fact that even walking from the car to the house left his breathing hard. The focus of walking straight seemed to add to his burdened lungs even more difficulty.

Yet, here he was almost NEVER breathing hard no matter what he was doing. Surely he was still taking his inhalers as required, but he was no longer waiting for his next dosage–he often forgot.

So much better did he feel in fact that he has started to ride the recumbent bicycle each morning, taking Diego for a good ride through the neighborhood. He returns in fine fetter and for a while at least, even his mobility improves.

I’ve done some cursory research. What I have learned is that a couple of very long term studies seem to have put to bed the argument that marijuana is even worse than cigarettes for the lungs. In fact, for “light users” there seemed no long term damage to the lungs at all. Even with heavy usage (daily) there seemed to be little change.

Beyond that, there seems to be an increasingly large anecdotal collection of data that suggests that contrary to expectations, use of marijuana seems to help COPD patients. A number of theories are advanced: the normal coughing that might bring up more phlegm and thus open the lungs, the deeper inhaling customary to pot smokers, or just the general relaxation of the body’s systems which allow for greater oxygen intake.

For whatever reason, some COPD patients have reported that they are doing much much better using marijuana. One person has gotten off inhalers completely.

While my husband has not experienced quite that dramatic an improvement, it has been significant. He has been much more active, which explains the bike riding. He sleeps very much better, the best in years. His balance issues come and go, but he feels that that is a worthwhile tradeoff for breathing so much easier.

I wondered whether I should talk about this, but it seems to me that the tide has turned on the issue of marijuana in this country. Colorado and Washington State have led the way, as well as a number of states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes. People on Facebook, for instance, now talk openly, supporting further legalization.

I thought therefore that I had some obligation to speak out as well. If you have a medical condition and live in a state that allows medical marijuana, you might be surprised at the range of diseases or conditions that can be improved. Who would have thought that smoking a joint would help COPD?

As I said, I’m no doctor. I’m sure a boatload of them will still say it’s a bad idea. A boatload of marijuana supports will say otherwise. As far as I can find, most of the supposed dangers of marijuana are way overblown, and it seems certainly to be less of a health risk than alcohol.

I have no interest in talking you into anything. I just offer one story, one anecdote among others that suggest that some really good stuff can come from pot. I can’t speak to what that might mean five years down the road or twenty. It’s just more information for you to use as YOU see fit in determining your own care.

It’s no secret that American youth are fairly poorly educated in this country. While there are plenty of reasons and excuses for this, top of the heap is probably because they are taught lies. 

Such is underway in Texas anyway, where new textbooks will play down slavery as a cause of the Civil War, and emphasis a lie–states rights–as being its motivation. Now states rights had something to do with the Civil War, but not in protecting states rights–in actuality it was  the states rights of northern realms that they despised and set out to separate themselves from. In fact, up until the 60’s there were specific “southern” textbooks on these issues, not used in the rest of the land. We are returning to that era, when again, Southern kids will be taught a different “history” than the rest of the country.

A demagogue is one who through resort to fear and prejudice, appeals to the common people, in an attempt to manipulate their approval to gain personal power and influence. Lies are a common vehicle used to gain the support of lower socioeconomic classes which is then used to gain the ends (usually hidden) of the demagogue.

Americans think they are smarter than the average demagogue, and always have. We look at people such as Hitler, Stalin, and others of that ilk with a certain disdain, sure in our adolescent minds, if not our later adult ones, that such a thing could not happen in the good old USA, because we are “on to them” sorts. And the slightly smarter among the great unwashed will use Joe McCarthy as an example. Sure we toyed with demagoguery for a bit, but in the end we censured Joe and sent him packing, destined to go down in history as a rather sinister chap who in the end was admonished, “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

So, we sit in smug superiority.

We of course were and are wrong. We are no better at ferreting out demagoguery than your average Athenian was when Cleon was stirring the people to behaviors we normally don’t associate with Athens in the classical period.

We live in a soup of demagoguery with any number of suitable candidates lined up to become the populist hero of the day. Fox Noise serves as the propaganda disseminator with plenty of minions named Rush and Ann and Rich and Sean ready and willing to spout the memorized script of why “they” are destroying America, and “we” must get out our guns and show them we will not tolerate their warped secular world.

We finally, at long last, sat down and watched Game Change the other night.  Sure, it was filled with lots of giggles and nodding, as we saw our Sarah entering the national stage. We saw the almost comical cluelessness on anything beyond the demagogue’s rhetoric. We watched as she puzzled over basic European history, attempting to take notes (on paper in the beginning, precursor to the famous hand writing), and figure out who was who, and what was what.

And we saw the debacle of interviews that broke open the wisdom of hirin’ Sarah wide open finally, and exposed what McCain referred to as the “dark side” of Populism–the degree to which it is based not on facts and well-thought out logic, but rather instilling and promoting fear and anxiety regarding “others”.

Sarah is pictured as sitting mesmerized listening almost spellbound to the criticism of her. Yet, either through brilliant acting, or truth, one sees a startling revelation. Sarah is not studying her detractors to learn what she is doing wrong, so much as she is carefully examining her detractors for weakness, and how she might better exploit it.

She studies, not foreign policy position papers, but what makes people smile or frown, what makes them cheer, what makes them nod in approval. She is all about one thing–how best to sell Sarah, and reap of course the benefits–fame, and more importantly fortune.

Sarah, as we have come to know, is really only about becoming wealthy. She forcefully and loudly proclaims that “they are boxing her in”, preventing her from doing what she does best–talk to the common folks. She ends up in a long and exhausting war with her handlers over who will control the agenda.

And of course, we have seen the fine results. After the election, Sarah made all her own decisions and she’s managed in six years, to not be the “new young leader of the GOP” that McCain predicted, but rather she has become a cipher in the conservative movement. A few thousands still shout her name, but largely the great uber right wing has moved on.

But the not surprising popularity of Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Scott Walker remind us all too well, that there are more than one ready to take over the mantle from Ms. Palin.

Cruz, following the SCOTUS decision regarding marriage equality enters the arena with the lie: a few people who were never elected by us have dictated to the rest of us how we must live. Now of course, Cruz leaves out that this is exactly how our constitution intended.  It is what was established in Marbury v. Madison.  Trump contends that Mexico is sending us criminals, and then sets out to find an example to make his case.

Walker advises he will do to the Middle East problems exactly what he did with unions in Wisconsin–destroy them. Santorum suggests that the rights of every real Christian are at risk if gays marry. Jeb, not quite as capable as demagogues go, wrings his hands and mutters the code words, but doesn’t exactly know how to utter them convincingly.

We need not fear that demagogues will become extinct. We must fear that we are perhaps more susceptible to them than we thought.

Look, we live in a busy world. As has always been the case, the vast majority ignore politics and worry about paying the electric bill and getting packed for that fishing trip to the lake. But while you sublimely watch fireflies at water’s edge, back in the recesses of taverns and game rooms in fancy townhouses and estates, grifters like Sarah are busy trying to figure out what will scare you into voting for them.

I’m not expecting you to spend two hours a day reading what’s going on in the world. It would be nice if you took that interest in the now and future, well mindful of the past, but that’s asking too much. Half  aren’t mentally up to the task, and half of the rest are just too bored by anything that doesn’t speak to the World Federation of Wrestling.

But I ask you to remember one thing. The better it sounds the more likely it is to be not true. 

You do not need guns to prevent the government from overreach. If the government wants to stop you from mouthing off, it will kill you, and no weapon you have will make a difference.

You’re way of life will not end because gay people can marry each other. I’m quite sure almost none of them will want to marry you and with good reason.

ISIS is not plotting to blow up your neighborhood. It is quite more likely that you will die from a bee sting or be blown up by your neighbor’s arsenal when it goes off in a house fire.

You are not being attacked as a Christian. Nobody has ever stopped you from reading the bible you want, interpreting it the way you want, and going to the church you want. There is no war on Christianity, and as much as you want to think of yourself as a martyr, you aren’t. You would piss your panties should the feds show up and demand you become a Sikh or Buddhist, and all to many of you would bow and ask for the rules of proper worship.

If it sounds good, and makes you feel vaguely selfish–it’s a lie and you are being selfish. Don’t fall for it, even though it would mean a cut in your taxes and some sort of wispy comfort that your way of life is being protected. It isn’t and won’t be. We are becoming both NON-white and NON-Christian. It’s a fact. Learn the word ameliorate and learn it well.

If in doubt, don’t vote. A stupid vote is worse than no vote at all. Remember the demagogue is not looking for a smart vote, but a stupid one. Don’t take the bait. There is really nothing in it for you. EVER.

But keep an eye out for Sarah. She’ll be opening a supermarket near you.

Trust me, letting them think they have me at their mercy is just my way of inviting them into my lab-bore-a-tory said the spider to the fly.

Is I?

As a child, I laid upon my bed and wondered was anyone in the world like me? I feared not, and in the era of peer-pressured sameness that we all strove to reach, I quivered. Was I normal?

Now, at the threshold of agedness ( I shall never be a “senior” or and old person I swear), I lay upon my bed and wonder if there is anyone in the world like me. I fear so, and in an era of eccentricism, I quiver. I don’t wanna be normal.

I think my prayers are answered. Were answered, or were ignored but I was just lucky that my prayers were actually the way things are? One of the above.

I’m a nut. I believe in all sorts of things that you no doubt think foolish.

For instance.

I wrote about this before so bear with me. In college I took a logic course and was asked to write a response to this statement: Would you be willing to pay for the support of an individual whose only requirement was to read? In other words can I fathom a world in which not everyone must work for a living?

Buckminster Fuller suggested an answer:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

See,  I went to college. But not to think. I went to earn a living. And I did very well, thank you very much. I set myself up for a gentle life, not working too hard, in a reasonably decent setting. I had tons of friends and colleagues. I made good money and enjoyed the perks of professional work. I needed to make a living and by all standards, I succeeded rather well.

But that’s not what should be or could be. Too many good minds are wasted in menial work of all sorts, professional and otherwise. These minds might be better used if we just let them think.

I think it would all sort itself out over time. I mean if you aren’t a good thinker, then thinking would become both boring and well, mindless at some point. One would ache to get one’s hand on a piece of wood or a pie crust. And one would move to that. We would do what pleases us and revs up our juices. It would be sane.

Trouble is, most of us aren’t willing to pay for others to do what seems pointless to many. But thinkers think about things and thinking about things leads to ideas and ideas lead to schematics and drawings and experiments and prototypes, and, well you see where this goes.

New stuff is discovered and people who work with their hands for pleasure make this new stuff. And thinkers and paper pushers and bus drivers enjoy this new thing, which makes their lives a wisp easier or more pleasant. What’s not to like here?

Still, tight asses will complain. They will suspiciously stare at the thinker and want proof that their money is being well spent. No lobster sir, be satisfied with bean soup you grifter! Yes, they will not trust the process, because they are all about making sure they ain’t bein’ ripped off.

Hey nothing is perfect. Somebody is always scammin’ the system. Hell people go to great lengths to set themselves up as pillars of the community when they are stealin’ ya blind. Humans are very human no matter the system.

But if you are of the mind that humans are in a process of evolving, then shouldn’t we pursue avenues that point to evolution in our THINKING as well as in our technology? Shouldn’t we be nobler and kinder in our systems of governing, pushing us mere mortals to be better than we think we can be?

Didn’t Jefferson and Adams and Madison and all the rest focus on the horizon and see a future better than any before them? Didn’t they offer us the messiness of democracy because we would screw it up surely as humans, but we would have something worth struggling for rather than languishing in the monarch-subject model?

Why do we keep beating up on the defenseless? Look, a cursory examination of physical types of human being proves rather clearly that genetics is a tricky and sometimes comical thing. I’ve seen people put together in what looked to be no more than random cutting and pasting of various limbs. Head too small, body growing outward as one descended, legs like stumps without the merest reference to ankles?

If some physical jokes pass as the range of genetic drift allowed within the species,why is it so hard to realize that not everyone has inside their cranium the makings of even a good basic biologist? Some people are dumb. Some are thoughtless. Some are unable to walk and chew gum, or see beyond their own nose.  Why must they be conformed to some job to which they are ill-suited in almost all respects?

Let them find their way, and then make up the slack. Don’t they have enough to contend with? What must it be like to realize that one got shortchanged in the brain functioning department? To think but not to reason well? Ah, that’s the rub.

Out of common decency let these people be! A decent home, nutritious food, medical care, education based on interests. Do this to our less fortunate and embrace them as providing a meaningful richness to the fabric of humanity and move on.

Stop the whine. Yes, uber conservative with your compartmentalized brain and your rigid sense of right and wrong, I’m talking to you. You have worked all your life. Nobody gave you a thing (I know you believe this although it’s far from true). You can’t retire because you don’t have enough of whatever it is you think essential.

But that is not the only model of living available. There is nothing to be ashamed of if for any reason you can’t hoe the row established by the not so bright but physically strong average human. There is a place for us all, and if we do it right, we will be doubly enriched by the offerings of all these oddball humans who contribute to the human family diversity.

Sometimes people just make damn bad decisions. Should they pay forever? Or can you cut them some slack and help them exist in what’s left of their lives? Can ya?

That damn Protestant work ethic and those bootstraps will be small comfort in the grave. It did not serve you especially well quite honestly. There are other ways.

It’s a little bit socialistic I guess. And a bit psychosis.

That is. . . .

We participate in SoCS.

I arrived home yesterday to find my Better Half (aka the Contrarian) all dressed up and meeting me at the door. After the usual, “how was the pool?” dialogue, I was unable to contain my query any longer. “Why are you all dressed up in your big-boy clothes at 9:30 in the morning?” i asked.

“Guess you didn’t hear the news,” he grinned. “Gay marriage is now the law of the land, and according to WorldnetDaily, the next step is mandatory marriage. I don’t even have a boyfriend yet, but I’m ready if anyone shows up at the door as my designated gay-marriage mate.”

“I won’t make the cake you know,” I reminded him, “since it’s  my constitutional right based on religious freedom not to be forced to sanction your unholy alliance. Besides, since I’m gonna wear white, I don’t wanna take a chance on getting ganache all over me.”

I have no doubt that similar scenarios were played out all over America.

It’s now a day later, and well, we are being patient. I do hope the Committee to Assign picks a suitable dude for my dude. We are still negotiating whether I’ll get my own room or just get a King-size bed.

Oh, in case you have any “in” with that committee, we just want to say, we are open to most anything but we both dislike back hair if you don’t mind not sending that type. Otherwise we’re pretty open-minded.

On the other side of the ducat you will find your pass to health care still intact. Much as the uber right was praying to see millions of weeping ex-insurance holders collapsing in cancerous piles, all to the tune from The Life of Brian–bring out your dead!

Justice Roberts is being hung in effigy throughout the south and other hidey-hole enclaves throughout the lower forty-eight. “Traitor” is being bandied about and serious inquiry is afoot to determine whether the Chief has middle initials of B.A. and no I ain’t talkin’ about Bachelor of Arts.

It’s been a thoroughly bad week for the side that hides its hatred and bigotry behind phrases like “religious freedom” and “work ethic”. As usual they betray themselves in ‘splainin’ that all they want to do is punish the sin and give charity as they see fit without being taxed. Cuz we are so wilfully caring of our fellow-man and woman ya know.

Meanwhile, another  very right-wing piece of refuse, killed a bunch of surely very nice folks at a Black church in Charleston S.C. The Foxy Fools immediately decried this “attack on Christianity” furiously trying to pretend it had nothing to do with race hatred, since we live in a post-racial loving America.

Inevitably, somebody mentioned that once again, mass murder by guns in the hands of a loon. And just as surely,  the Foxy Fools  recalling their Murdock learnin’ responded, “the libs are trying to politicize this tragedy once again! Shame on them!” This while, Wayne La PeePee, stuttered in a whisper, “tell ’em to buy all the guns they can, cuz that Nazi-Arab-lovin’ usurper in the GOD-DAMN IT, CAN’T YOU SEE IT’S A WHITE HOUSE, is surely gonna take them away from you, declare martial law and declare himself Emperor for life.” Wayne’s phone went off, to the tune of cha-ching.

Meanwhile, I engage in yet another fruitless discussion with idiots. “If the crime rate has gone down in the last 25 years, as you say, well it must be because our gun laws are perfectly strict now,” said the lady who is too lazy to even determine whether crime is down as “I say”, let alone offer a rational explanation. Actually, the drop in crime is so significant that it has spawned several major studies done by illustrious public institutions like the U of Chicago, and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Guess what? It has to do with abortion (meaning unwanted children are not raised in poverty and do not fall victim to crime as a means to get out), and the passing of clean air/water act which cleaned up the lead in our old housing units and the neurological damage is does. Or better policing. Open carry and conceal carry? Zero impact on falling crime rates. Strict gun laws? Huh?

Now that’s gotta twist some knickers don’t it? Things the GOP and the so-conservative-it-hurts group have opposed. Abortion and regulation are ugly words to a Rightie.

So how about that Confederate flag thing? Yep, as soon as the GOP gave up any hope that the Foxy Fools could work their magic and turn the issue of a mass shooting to serve their own purpose, well the GOP turned on a dime and became “outraged” and all agreed that Nickki Haley was “courageous” in doing the “right thing”. Course the Nickster saw the flag as no problem just a few months earlier when running for her re-election.

“Why the CEO’s I’ve talked to haven’t ever mentioned that Confederate flag,” she assured us, so what’s the problem? Black folk, you see, did not figure into her determination. Why should they care?

Meanwhile, Governor Abbott in Texas proves what was deemed unbelievable only a few months ago. Somebody can do a worse job than Rickie “glasses” Perry. Abbott, appointed some woman to head up the state’s Board of Education. Which is of course not remarkable, except the woman appointed home schools her kids.

Did you read that? She home schools her kids because she doesn’t believe in the public school system. How rich is that? Seriously?

I’m keeping a close tab on all points of egress from the US. There are scores of drooling half-wits who claim that if either Obamacare or gay marriage came to fruition they would be movin’ elsewhere. I want to be sure to be there to wave them goodbye. And then burn the damn ramp to the boat once they are aboard. Good riddance!

Oh and California is facing a water shortage. Actually they are facing NO FUCKING WATER. This lead one lady to blame it on gays. God surely hates the wrong people screwing each other she bellowed and will punish US. And the rest of the thirsty bunch is suing to make sure they get their fair share of dry sand.

I gotta say, it’s been a good week for sanity. If you sort out the bullshit.

Substitute, writing for Catholic, and you have my last few weeks in a nutshell.

Confused?

Welcome to my world.

So am I.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had returned to the Church once again, seeking. . .something? Hell if I know what.

I didn’t find it. Nothing bad happened. The priest was okay as priests go. I don’t expect much.

If you don’t know what you are seeking, it’s pretty likely you won’t find it. How would you know?

Writing is just about as confusing. I’ve written a lot over the years. All sorts of writing. Big bold essays of a hundred pages, footnoted to Hades and back. Short, “reflections”. Legal arguments chock full of citation to other learned writings. Notes of books I’ve read. And then all this blogging. Years of it. thousands of posts, millions of words, ideas formed, bent, twisted, reconfigured, spit out. Arrogance, pomposity, mendacity, with a rare humble crumb offered here and about. My guts displayed for any who bothered to note it.

Do I have nothing left to say?

Perish that thought. I’d shrivel up and croke. My enemies (having enemies is a true joy if you think about it seriously) wish I would just “shut the fuck up”. That alone should spur me forward.

I start, I stop, I flounder. As good as I came, I saw, I conquered (veni, vidi, vici) doncha think?

Why are we so three oriented? Tragedies come in three, examples are most often offered in threes. Trinity? Trifecta? Triple creme? Triple crown. Banana split which has little to do with the split banana and everything to do with three scoops.

I’m reading a very intriguing book. What is God? Not Who, but What. It all stems from that flip. Turn a globe upside down and leave it like that. It will make you rethink a few things.

I’m processing faith versus religion. I’m pretty down on religion right now. Composed of fallible humans what would you expect? Is it necessary? Church votes yes. I’m pretty much votin’ no at this point.

I choose to express my faith through some rituals of this faith system. I call it Catholicism. You can call it the Whore of Babylon if you are not well educated. I don’t care. There is too much wrong to defend it. There is more right than I often admit.

I’m pretty sure that God is not what we think. But I am not at all sure. I don’t think I’m supposed to be sure. Augustine said we can only say what God isn’t. That is hardly a recipe for success.

Church is like stopping off at a rest stop. It is good to get out and stretch your legs, relieve your bladder, and munch a snack. But it’s not home. You got to get back at the grueling drive that never ends. Thinking, watching, staying awake. Driving requires concentration  if you plan to do it successfully over time. So is God-seeking.

One premise is that there is always something not quite real about reality. We sense there is more, but we can’t see it. We recognize the unreality. We have become desensitized to unreality. It passes by us with nary a nod.

A man says, “I am going to kill you because you are raping our women and taking over our country.” Another man says, “that’s hate against Christians,” (since the dead are Christians). Whose reality are we talking about?

I don’t reject the Catholic Church because of its theology. There is a Catholic Church here that is “not aligned with Rome”. They love my politics. But I don’t go and sit in the pews there. There is one of those Universalist Unitarians, or something here. There is Bahai here. I am not interested.

I plant my butt in a pew and I sit, and I wonder why I’m there. I count off the various “parts” until we get to communion and then the closing prayer, and then the closing hymn and then. I’m free again.

Why do I go?

I stopped going.

I feel something missing. Vicious and jealous mistress you faith!

Faith and religion. Two separate but unequal things. Faith matters, religion is some bonus at least once upon a time. Ever? Never? I did good once. It does good sometimes, somewhere.

The problem as always is the people. Fallible humans muck up the mud. Turn it ugly and personally motivated.  I hate welfare not because I don’t want to help the poor but because I want to decide who to give my charity to. So they say. What they mean is I can then avoid giving welfare to lazy queens and princes who lay in bed half the day before they saunter down to the welfare store and pick up their checks. As I JUDGE them anyway.

I don’t want the government to tell me how much to give. I bet ya a million bucks you couldn’t come begin to tell me how much the “government is taking out of you in taxes” to support medicaid, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and so forth. You couldn’t even give me a ball park figure of what they take. But somehow, you assure me, you would give more if it were voluntary. Yeah, sure ya would.

Religion starts off with laudable goals. Seek God. Take care of God’s people. But your old fallibility rose like the skunky smell it is, and you changed that to “God’s chosen people” however YOU JUDGMENTALLY DECIDED THAT.

I’m for Israel because they are God’s chosen, you utter with perfect surety. Bullshit.

If you believe God has favorites then you believe in an awfully wicked and strange being. One who creates so poorly that He finds one poor slob called Abram and tells him, he will “create a nation” of him. Hope he does it better than the first couple of times. Dont’ forget the whole fiasco of Noah and that damned ark that couldn’t be built large enough to begin to house “all God’s creation”.

Yet you got a passel of morons whose brains are so gucky with sludge that they gotta cling to that stuff as literal and then make it their life’s work to make you take it literally too.

And God is not in that damned Book you fool. PEOPLE wrote the book. They wrote it about the God they were seeking. Since you can’t tell me much about God on your own, why do you think they were any better at it? They’re just trying, same as you and me. Yet you kneel before the freakin’ book.

So here I sit. I read that the Pope has offered up an encyclical on the environment. As sure as it’s June and it’s hot, right wing Catholics are finally letting out what they really think. They really really don’t like this pope at all. Unlike their precious JPII and Benedict however, Francis doesn’t inherit the “God’s chosen” appellation. We don’t have to pay attention to Francis when we don’t like what he says.

“He’s not a scientist. He’s just giving his opinion on a subject that he has no expertise in.” So the upshot is to ignore what he says. He’s a dupe of some libtards in the Vatican who haven’t explained to this poor illiterate fool that words matter. “He’s a marxist, anyway.”  If you tried to continue the conversation say about women priests, they would tell you. “Pope John Paul has spoken on that issue and we will not allow further conversation because he says it is a closed issue.” Some personal opinions count. Oh yeah, the one’s you agree with.

Whose reality are we talking about?

Everywhere I go, I see the same thing. Distinctly different takes on reality. Both can’t be right. Or perhaps they can.

God is in the mysteries of life.

Oh, seeking Him there is not as easy as sittin’ in the pew. Reading and thinking and meditating, and working out the details. Only to realize that each and every insight provides fresh mystery, new questions, and potential conflicting yearnings.

Open your eyes, and your ears. But mostly open your heart. Take little if anything for granted. Seek serendipity, and sweet harmony. Enjoy the sugary taste until the bitterness creeps in. Seek further, and never stop. Ever.

That is human becoming.

What day?

Oh, the day I realized that I had the answer to most everything. When I got it all figured out, and knew that the remaining puzzle pieces were all gonna fit. In my picture of the world.

It should be a national holiday, shouldn’t it? And I know, now you are grabbing a blanket, some snacks and sitting down to listen carefully as I explain the answers  to all your hearts questions.

Sarah Palin continues to bring down the IQ level of the planet simply by breathing. She interjected herself and her simpleton daughter into the Duggar fray. She uses big words of which she knows not. Pedophilia comes to mind. Sarah, coming to a supermarket opening near you.

I ponder how profoundly the world changes. I mean, one doesn’t have to be a genius when it comes to history to understand that Jews and Arabs were natural allies for a good many HUNDREDS of years before they weren’t. Jews found some safety in Arab controlled lands at least when it came to the Christians who often slaughtered entire towns of them during the Crusading years. Muslims allowed them safe haven and allowed them to practice their faith largely unhampered.

And let us not forget that Jews fled places like Spain, often ending in Muslim held lands, to avoid  Torquemada and his forced “conversions” of Jews to Christianity. Muslims fared no better.

Yet today, we have a Middle East Muslim population determined (rationally or otherwise) to eradicate “Israel from the map”. Actually I think that refers more to the physicality of the state rather than all people Jewish, but still, a hell of a turn of events wouldn’t you say?

Is it in the water? No. It is the result of trying to pretend you’re holier than thou, when you are not. That’s why the GOP continues to find itself mired in the cesspool of sexuality wrongdoing virtually ALL the time. Hastert and the Duggars are simply the latest examples. We ain’t talkin’ your garden variety adultery ya know.

Like wrap your brain around the fact, that while wringing his holy hands in shock and dismay at Clinton’s adultery with Monica, the Speaker (Newty) was busy on his third serial adultery himself (and treating his ex in the despicable manner only a man who thinks of women as disposable arm candy can).

Newt stepped down in favor of Bob Livingston, who stepped down even before he formally took the gavel, having played around with as many as four women not his wives.

And then they settled on Dennis Hastert.

Well you know how that turned out. And then there was that guy who was pantin’ after pages. And the prostitutes, and the gay liaisons. And plenty of regular old adultery. It’s not that the Dems don’t engage in bad behavior, but it seldom flies in the face of their public hypocritical stances on gay rights, and the sanctity of marriage and all that other rot.

This sign should have been posted back in the fifties and sixties to most of the mothers giving birth to people like Santorum, Carson, Trump, Cruz, Walker, and so forth and so on and so on.

If I hear one more Republican strategist talk about the “wonderful field of candidates” we have this season, I’m gonna vomit.

Seriously do you paint crazy glue on your face so as to not crack up when saying that shit?

I read this and it seems accurate. The song says, “only the good die young.” That might well be true. I’m living proof. I ain’t good by design that’s for sure. My heart leads me to places that seem to rail at inequality, injustice, and all manner of dickish wrongitude, but it’s from no desire to be good. Just how it turned out. Education is a powerful teacher.

Speaking of which, living well is the best revenge I’m quite sure. And once I learned that, I spent my time trying to live well, which made living well much easier I gotta say. And knowin’ that the people who dislike me the most live these narrow mean little lives, well that’s my frosting.

My husband and I chatted the other night about how in our darker days (before we met or otherwise) when one sits and daydreams about the “perfect life”, well, reality caught up with us both. We are living it now. Both of us, rather blissful, sober in our assessment, very very aware of how lucky and blessed we are.

We love where we live (it ain’t called land of Enchantment for nothin” folks). We love our home and fitting it to our needs and desires as perfectly as possible. We love our companion pets whom we are privileged to care for. Most of all we love each other. After nearly sixteen years we still are never bored, and seldom disappointed. We laugh, and almost cry occasionally at how lucky we are.

I recall my father saying very sarcastically as he sat in his chair, his life fading away before his eyes, “And they call these my golden years.”

Well, they are truly golden for me, and I wake with such anticipation and such eagerness each day, fulfilling all my dreams and hopes for how I would live and do in these years after the working was finished.

But I’d still like a spare million should you have it. I can do more.

I know a lot of nice people. Past and present. They are always smiling. It’s part of the persona. At least while in public.

It’s always saying the right thing, and worse yet, it’s actually believing it. It’s liking to be liked, and being liked by so many people that when you die, well, there really won’t be a dry eye in the house. Your funeral will be well attended.

Why is it so sad when a funeral is not well attended? It shouldn’t be. I figure it’s as good of evidence as one gets that one has lived a life of profligate self-interest. I figure Donald Trump’s funeral will be well-attended. But it’s not because he ain’t all about self-interest. It will be because people want to be seen there, nothing else. There won’t be many wet eyes at that one.

Nice means submerging one’s true feelings because it’s not polite to be cruel or dismissive of the normal but boring detris of other people’s lives. First on the scene with a box of cookies. First to offer babysitting services. First to offer to plan a wedding shower. Yech, I gots way better stuff to do than that.

But it’s not all disrespect and narcissism. I mean being un-nice is not being deliberately mean or something. It has nothing to do with being good or bad. You can be good and un-nice. Or you can be good in spite of being un-nice.

Good is striving at all times (well most of the time maybe) to do the right thing, insofar as it leads to correct factual determinations and ultimately the use of such criterion in making decisions that matter. Or something like that.

It means caring about shit deeply. And it means speaking truth to anyone who will listen and shouting at those that won’t because you are damned sure that you probably know more than most about whatever you choose to pontificate upon.

It’s self-centered but benign. Or maybe not so benign, but that’s a word that doesn’t get used nearly often enough. I try to encourage the use of more words.

Being nice requires a lot of time. And to a lazy person, that means it starts with so many negatives that it surely can’t be resurrected except for the most important of situations.  It requires a whole lot of time and effort. Too much.

You know the nice people. They are uniformly nice. And secretly you admire them sorta, but not really because you figure they are more patsy than role model. They are sorta soft people, who settled on the safe “being nice” as their claim on the universe.

Wasn’t she just nice? The nicest person I ever knew. She was so nice. Everyone liked her.

Now that is the kiss of death ain’t it? What wants to be liked by everybody? What sort of bland is required to reach that pinnacle of mediocrity?

Seriously, nice is the easy way out in life. It’s bending to everyone’s whim because it’s far easier than sorting through all the demons that whisper in the background for you to come out and have some real fun.

Being the teacher I shall always remember as my favorite is not a claim to fame. Better to make someone sit up in shocked attention, and make it their life long goal to prove you wrong. That’s an impact. That’s worthy for the reference books, or at least an entry in Bartlett’s.

I don’t mean to make light. But I do.

For I am defending me.

Because, not being nice, no one else will.

Well, maybe not nobody. But not a lot of some bodies.

Few.

One other.

I’m a good person. I don’t pull the wings off flies. I don’t taunt little children, not pinch dogs to make them squeal. I think of global things that matter to lives in deep corners of the world and I tell people to think about them too.

I don’t steal or lie or commit adultery. I don’t commit treason, nor do I harbor hateful beliefs about fellow humans without strong evidence. If I do have the evidence, I’m surely not too polite to tell you. I figure you should know. It’s important to know who’s who.

Good is different from nice. Way different. And if you don’t know the difference, well, I ain’t got the time to explain it. And you might just be too stupid to get it anyhow. I have few illusions.

Illusions?

Figments of facts, floating by. Snatch one or two and make a statement. Let them all float by and you are living in suburbia serving the Merikan dream and largely brain-dead.

Who speaks of all this stuff?

It’s so much easier to play in your own puddle  but so much more fun to comment on the dirty water in your neighbor’s.

I don’t smile at clerks in stores all the time. Nice people do that. How can nice people be defined properly if I don’t help to anchor the alternative? So I don’t smile. And if they say one of those stupid things, like “did you find everything?” I’m likely to respond with a “now that is some sort of stupid question isn’t it? Either I gave up looking for “everything” or I did find everything, or I’m too lazy to care.

I point out stupid well. It’s a gift.

It’s lonely here in the gut section of humanity. Being the speaker of the obvious truth rather than pointing out how lovely your crappy dress looks with those shoes when they look hideous. Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not nice enough to not bother telling you that that crappy dress looks hideous with those shoes, because  why is it my job to care how you look? I enjoy a joke too ya know.

Mostly not being nice allows me to enjoy all the stuff I want to, without bothering to note the inconsistency in my commonly held positions on just about anything. Oh I bother now and then, and strike the old cognitive dissonance bell a time or two. But being good means never having to say you’re sorry. (Surely I did not lift that from Love Story?)

I’m almost sure I said everything. It’s hard to know, when you’re fighting writer’s block and feeling all Hemingwayish. No I did not mean that I’m fondling a shotgun or anything. Death wishes bore the shit out of me, and I find such people tedious.

I’m almost through grieving for Robin Williams. Almost.

Can you almost hear the sarcasm?

Can you almost wish this were over? No, my ego says no.

Almost.

We participate, (with a certain shamefacedness) in SoCS.

Who does she think she is?

I said it before. Like her, or not, there are few other alternatives. She ain’t tepid oolong or Earl Grey.

She is me, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that you probably got that.

I’m like a cat on a hot tin roof.

Or not. Mostly not.

If I were an animal which one would I be?

Polar bear mama?

Ponder that with your swayt tea. Yeah, we get that down here in New Mexico. I frankly hate that stuff. Sugar in tea? Are you mad?

People make me wonder. I mean take Bobby Jiggles Jindal. That man has no more chance of winning the GOP nomination than I do of winning a best in show at Madison Square Garden. Yet he twattles on.

Twattle, is a word conceived in sexual confusion. A cross between cunt and flapping lips of the face. See? Now you get it.

It’s a hell of a thing when your spiritual guru is a gang banger.

Well, not really, but sorta.

Yesterday I was a sittin’ in the pew when I noticed a young man with the usual accoutrements of style. . .ear-ring, sleeves cut out of the t-shirt. jeans, sneakers. He was sittin’ a few pews to the front of me.

Which made it convenient to watch.

So instead of concentrating on my own sinful self, I was bemused by this young man’s spiritual methodology. A very long time on the kneeler. No singing of entrance hymns. No murmuring of the “profession of faith” which is such a convoluted rattling of various Council pronunciations as to be indecipherable to all but the most religiously stringent of the faithful.

When that Gloria came along, oh good grief. It’s so badly written as to leave a normal believer astounded that given the whole of the Roman Catholic Church, no better rendition can be rendered but this? A squawky, akin to the Star Spangled Banner inability to keep the tune, sort of music that is painful to the ears and the senses.

My gangbanger, stands stoicly.

Mostly he sits with his head down, as if he’s there to beg atonement for a laundry list of crimes too numerous to mention. “Sorry God, but I shot somebody in a drive-by, and then celebrated with some blow, while threatening the mama of my baby for not having my dinner ready.” In the next breath, more sinful conduct is extruded.

Is any of this real? Oh probably not at all. The dude is probably a pediatrician, just out in his hoodie regalia which helps him calm down from the high intensity life of savior of children.

I jest?

Mostly.

It provided a handy excuse for not paying attention as Father explained all about the Holy Spirit and how we neglect it in our prayers.

Is that true for you too?

Do you pray to Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit? All the same yet different as they say.

Is it reasonable that Christian theology must be so convoluted? I suspect it works for theologians who like to think of themselves as pretty smart folks. And they are for the most part. Least they sound that way.

So, I’m sittin’ in the pew, figurin’ this guy is really doin’ it right. Most people don’t if you noticed. They are rushin’ around front to back, always with the obligatory bow to acknowledge that Jesus is layin’ on the altar, while we are talkin’ to our neighbor in the pew about a meat sale at the Carniceria.

So, I’m not talkin’, just praying me some Rosary until the bells ring and they remind everyone to shut the phones off. And I’m watching my mentor. I watch him with his own style of reverence, again on that kneeler when most everybody else is standing, because  the whole consecration thing is something to be knelt about.

And I wonder what the hell am I doing here?

Trying to recapture what once I had, yet which has so thoroughly departed. The devotion, the intensity, the It fuckin’ matters syndrome, it seems ephemeral after all this. Yet, I turn attention back. Jesus, I am not worthy to have you “under my roof” which is another of those John Paul/Benedict changes that is just change for change’s sake.

And he goes up for communion, but he is ahead of me, and I don’t realize until I get back to my seat, conveniently marked by my purse (what do men do to find their seat again?), that he has gone.

Guru man, you are of that ilk, (which I have never been) of those who in the confusion of people traipsing from pew to communion and back again, against the backdrop of a couple of hundred faces, working out their salvation with a wafer and sip, chooses to keep walking to the back and out the doors. Done! Got what I came for. Jesus is digesting in my belly and I’m roaring off in my Mazda to new Saturday night adventures.

I’m a bit chagrined by this turn of events. I wanted him to remain pious to the last second. Maybe be one of those stalwart types who continues laboriously to sing the closing hymn while people jostle  to get by and into the aisle, seeking the fastest route of escape past the priest who is taking a stand outside hoping to catch every last hand as it passes.

Alas, he has escaped and I’m chagrined, yet I’ve spent exactly three minutes of the sixty actually contemplating my own salvation. I don’t account all that bunk for much actually. I am, as they say, more of a Matthew 25 person. Get on with feeding the hungry and tending to the sick.

My spiritual guru seems made of common clay after all.

I sigh.

Whatever I’m here for, I seem to find. Not sure what exactly that is. But I feel better about everything somehow.

I don’t find it makes me kinder to stupid drivers though. I still yell at them from the safety of my car seat, taking satisfaction in the fact that I’m not stellar driver, but I am damn well better than that!

And I put it all aside, as I do every Saturday evening. Done! Mass obligation met. No need to think about that until next Saturday.

Which reminds me of the old guy at the pool, who apologized so deeply and long for not being able to sign my petition to open the pool at 8 because as he said, he could never come early, since he’s at Mass every morning. Alex, who recites the Rosary while he walks the water channel, did sign. No morning mass for him.

Too much piety for me. Except when I was in formation to be a nun.

Oh that’s news to you?

Fancy that. I prolly should yak about that sometime.

But not today. I don’t like to brag, unless I have a captive audience. God I know, I’m such a bitch. Which makes you even madder doesn’t it?

Remember this: happiness is the best revenge.

We participate occasionally and poorly in SoCS.

I’m not one of those persons who people are casual about. You either like me or you hate me, seldom anything down the middle.

So I don’t give a rip’s roaring ass which one you adhere to frankly. I can come down on that both sides of that issue too, depending, so welcome if you are reading, screw you in absentia if you aren’t.

I don’t figure myself to be that much different than the rest of ya, a bit smarter than the average, a tad wiser given my age than a thirty-year-old. I know myself better than most people  bother to inspect their innards, and I’m comfortable with what I find. Not always happy with it, mind you, but comfortable.

I grew up privileged. Not in super rich mind you, but privileged nonetheless. Most average kids from working class families don’t believe that, but it’s true. It was a hell of a lot easier than growing up African-American or Hispanic. It would have been better to be male given the times. But I never went to bed hungry or didn’t have a pair of shoes. I had the opportunity of a pretty decent education back when it was still affordable for the working class kid.

It’s a small but constant wonder to me that I ended up being a bleeding-heart liberal. I shouldn’t have, at least as I measure it from examining the lives of those I went to high school with. Some of them are loons. Some of them are just immersed in their own lives of grandkids and whatever one is interested in if it ain’t the state of the world and all who inhabit it. A few are liberal, a few pointedly conservative, but I repeat myself–the loons.

But I pride myself most about being a rational thinking individual who manages to blend a sophisticated metaphysical belief system along with a logic based political view of the world at the same time. They conflict, my angelic side and my devil as you would expect, and when the conflict comes, I wrestle with it, I seek to escape from it, but I rarely can ignore it.

Back in 2008, I supported Hillary Clinton, until it was obvious she was losing to Obama. Then I switched allegiance, since John McCain and his Alaskan albatross proved  to be unacceptable as leaders of the free world.

So we are now 2015, and Hillary is running again. And I am supporting her again. And. . . .

I’m conflicted.

Bernie Sanders and I disagree on very little. I was frankly surprised that he gathered so much money so quickly.

I am sensitive to the notion that if all of us smart people read the tea leaves accurately and accord him no real chance, we in fact insure he will have no real chance. Yet Hillary is more than competent and it’s so time for a woman to take the leadership.

Yet Hillary and I don’t agree on a number of things, and I am more than aware that she is more conservative (by nature) and certainly by design than I am. She is more comfortable with Wall Street than I would prefer. She is more hawkish that I would prefer.

In some ways Bernie has made this easier. At least his has the good sense to run under the Democratic banner, which means he is no threat to siphon off votes in the election as a third party candidate.

So I’ve been quiet about Hillary for the most part, hoping to let Bernie’s run peter out as it is expected to, and let the conflict within my head die a quiet death. And yet, I’m mindful that if he has no chance, it can surely be in part because people like me, his natural allies, won’t switch.

I am more than aware of my conflict of interests, which devolve down to a moral choice or a loyalty choice. Both are important I suppose, but one is compelling.

I am, as I say, pretty much clear on what motivates me.

An example.

The other evening, my husband admitted, “I have no opinion on the President’s trade agreement. I simply haven’t read hardly anything about it, so I don’t know who has the better argument.”

“Same here,” I replied, “but my reasons are quite different. I have deliberately avoided reading about it. I know at the end, I’ll either have to diss Elizabeth Warren or the President, and he needs all the support he can get against the crazies, so I’ve avoided the cognitive dissonance becoming informed would cause.”

See? I can and do act to avoid issues I don’t want to deal with.

And as I scrolled through my Facebook feed, I basically stayed fairly quiet when the discussions turned to Hillary or Bernie.

Yet the nagging continued.

This is not a time to merely support the candidate who can win. At least not until we get to the crossroads. Until the primaries are completed and one has withdrawn, I figure I am required by my moral compass at least to support the candidate whose dedicated to doing the most for the average person.

So I find myself feeling all sorts of traitor in leaving Hillary’s side and offering my small donation to Bernie. I still figure he doesn’t have a chance, but if that happens, at least I can sleep well knowing I did the right thing. I followed my conscious and not my cynical political savvy self.

Nothing will change in this country before it is too late to matter unless we as citizens, victims of the government machine, stand up and stop this madness. I’ve truly had enough of those who promise a better future while continuing to “play the game”.  The game at this point is simply rigged, and so clogged with illegality and personal greed as to make even Satan blanche at the sheer chutzpah.

Perhaps it’s always been this way, with a small but vocal group warning of “the end” but with climate change and income inequality, I don’t see planet earth surviving much longer with humanoids being at the top of the ladder. Unless that is, we make drastic changes.

They say that the uber wealthy in the world now routinely have bunkers build beneath their luxury homes, guarding against what they know must surely come, the uprising of people who have nothing left to lose.

I fully expect Hillary Clinton will be the next president. I hope however that she is not. Not because she wouldn’t be okay as president’s go. But because following Bernie, would be a fine time for Elizabeth Warren. And at least with Bernie, we have an honest chance to turn the page to a new way of doing democracy.

But enough of fantasy politics.

Back to reality.

Where’s my checkbook?

When blogging came along, I gotta say, it was a perfect storm.

My favorite writing is just off the cuff sorta rambling and blogging seemed to meet that style and give it a big old kiss of acceptance. No longer editing but gettin’ on with it.

I’ve been through a lot of transitions and polishing since the beginning back in whatever it was, 2006 or something. I changed the name a few times, changed the pretty covering it comes it, changed the focus, changed the writing. Guess it changed me too. Made me a bit more fearless, a bit more in your face, a bit more eccentric too no doubt.

Yeah, you know what’s comin’.

I’m taking a break. Maybe a break forever, maybe for a while. Maybe I’m moving to different pastures or just being bored. Some combination is about.

This, (these) blogs have never been what I envisioned. I envisioned a wildly controversial give and take with a bunch of people arguing over points and theories. That never happened. I got plenty of feedback, but it never developed into the conversation I had expected. The numbers went up and they plateaued and they rose, and they fell, but the comments never took over.

I always sought to be the spark that ignited the chat. Instead I remained the focal point.

I’ve had amazingly faithful readers, some for years.

My haters are numerous but cowardly for the most part. They tend to “cut me” in some juvenile high schoolish drama instead of having the courage to actually try to drum up a defense to their silly notions. So my response has been to poke at them incessantly as one does a bear in a cage, provoking its rage. That doesn’t speak so well of me, but I never tried to claim I was a good person after all.

So ceasing my efforts comes with some regret that I can’t dangle the truth before them daily, though lord knows they surely don’t read it anyway.

This does not mean I’m going off to some mountain to meditate.

I just seem to have an increasingly busy life right now, and I’m enjoying it too much to worry about getting out a daily missal of angst written in my indomitable snarky style. Worse, I find myself repeating myself, too many times.

Since much of my activity is on Facebook, I’ll still be making my points, and offering up good reading material when I find it. Just not formalizing it with an essay.

Perhaps the time of the blog has past. They say it has. Who am I to disagree? All I know is that I made no “smashing success” and never became the “talk of the town”, though I’m not sure I wanted that. Undoubtedly I wanted the praise, but not the responsibility that comes with it.

Perhaps the ensuing presidential campaign will ignite me again, but I fear that I will repeat again and again the same arguments, pointing out the same stupidities. I’m boring myself at this point.

Anyway, I’ll be around to those of you who are Facebookers. I may start a page there just to focus the political and stupid off my wall and into it’s nice little cubby hole. Who knows. I don’t.

All I know is that I have a lot of living type things to do, and I want to do them more than I want to repeat myself daily. Frankly I’m tired of writing something I think is juicy and certain to piss off a few, and having it land like a dud. Read by many, commented upon by nobody. The echo hurts my ears.

Perhaps I don’t write at all well after all.

Perhaps I do.

Perhaps, and perhaps.

I’ll send out notices if I start a Facebook page, but a title eludes me so far. Somethin’ catchy?

Anyway, I’m copying this to the other blog too, so you all will know.

So adios for now friends, and thank you all, especially those of you who have been faithful supporters.

I’m off to shopping, and cooking, and beading and reading, and rubbing my dogs’ bellies. And scratching the old man’s libido when he smiles that smile, and my heart melts.