HGF

Them that's got shall get, them that's not got lose.

That's what it's about in this country. Race and money.

If you're rich and white you're almost assured at getting your way. If you're poor and brown black yellow etc, not so much.

Arizona lost it's current bid to demonstrate how racist white people in this country actually are yesterday, at least for now.The battle will rage on, and on, and on, until the Supreme Court hears the case, And we all know that's where this is headed.

The comment boards are filled with frenzied white people posting their righteous positions. I particularly like the one from Texas that says people are routinely checked for their papers at border checkpoints, missing the point of this discussion altogether.(which Texas usually does)

But my favorite not only demonstrates the racism of the writer but drives home yet again my point about the pitiful education system in this country.

Let me bang that drum for just a minute with a fascinating quote:

"They are bleeding us dry and the President’ is letting them get away with it, with a lazy faire immigration policy of do nothing."


And with a lazy faire policy of "I've gotta go to work." we'll leave it at that for today.

And so it goes:

oh the dilemma!!!

This is not a dilemma I care to have.  It's not one about work or jobs or careers or any of that stuff I hvae no notion how to navigate. It's about Love

L'Amour, L'Amour.  Toujour L'Amour.

The ex is falling back in love.  If he ever was out of love.

I don't find this objectionable. He's a good guy.  He has ideas that are sometimes out there and though I have control issues of my own (who doesn't) I still find that we're a good match in a lot of ways.

I also find it comforting.

My concerns are many.  Not the least of which is what happens when I finally get ready to get the hell out of here and maybe he's not ready or willing to go.  I don't really want to hurt his feelings by saying "Seeya."  And that's what would happen if I got a job and had to go.

There are practical and material concerns as well, but that would be a bridge we could cross when the time came.  

I also question the wisdom of anyone who wold live in the same house as me of their own volition.  I am not easy to get along with. And in my own space I'm a bit of a bulldog.

It's also easy for me to isolate myself from people even if they're in the same building, cause I'm so well practiced at it, and that would have to be guarded against.

But It's nice to know someone still wants me, and that despite my numerous faults someone would consider letting me be part of thier life.

Somebody fetch me a bromide...and put some gin in it!

And so it goes:

it could be worse?!?!?!

Well, yeah I could have some untreatable disease too.  Thanks Mr. President!

He's missed the mark again.

The smart thing to say would have been.  "Ok,here's the deal.  We're not gettin' this shit done.  And we need more of a majority to do it.

"We need you to get out and vote and show support for the Democrats agenda so we can continue to accomplish the things we set out to do.  Change is possible but it takes all of us, not just a little more than half of us."

Is he saying that?
Nah.

He's telling us we could have it worse than we do, and if we see the GOP return to power this fall we will have it worse.  Well, THAT'S not very motivating. 

Still trying to find a job.  And right now I've set my sights on one that I'm really well qualified for.  All I have to do is sell the hiring mgr on it, and then ace the interview.  Simple right?

It's in the southwest and it's incredibly well suited to me talents and experience, and I fear I'll go unnoticed.  But I'm applying anyway.

Hope springs eternal.

yesterday on the way to the grocery, a job I come to abhor more as time progresses.  I suddenly had a deep and unsettling sense of foreboding.

Something is wrong somewhere.  I thought I'd hear about it already but i haven't.  But something has happened or is about to happen to someone close to me, or possibly me,  can't tell from this feeling but it's not good whatever it is.
I hate when this happens.

And so it goes:

Good vs Evil

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. -Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.


Can evil influence one's life in a negative way and actually act to oppress a person?

First, I don't believe that evil exists, well, unless one is talking about George Bush.  THAT'S evil.

God, the Devil, they're inventions.

They were invented by "religious" people in an effort to control the congregation.  What else would they be for?  The good vs. evil discussion has been raging forever, and with God and the devil they have a face.

God is this big bearded white guy in the sky looking benevolently down at us all, and the (red)Devil is among us, (indicating what?  That we're inherently evil?...Nice.) and causing all kinds of havoc which mitigates our responsibility in modern parlance, and yet makes us more responsible for fighting against the evil he would have us do.  Catholics have neatly, as is their way, invented this little ceremony in which a baby, can be cleansed of their original sin.  I mean have you looked at a baby?  Ever really looked at one?

How could anyone see evil in that?

Seriously, who in their right mind would  subscribe to such claptrap?

The main selling point of religion is not to celebrate life, it is to tell us how bad we are, and that we need them to help us not only mourn our existence, but to work our asses off at not being the inherently evil sons of bitches we were born to be. Because we were BORN THAT WAY!!!!!

So we get to waste our lives attempting to be something we're not.  We get to tell ourselves that we're not good, but we can be if we try hard enough.  As if we don't have enough bullshit raining down on our heads to begin with. And if that doesn't work we always have the devil to lay the responsibility on.

It wasn't others, it wasn't the people who treated me as though I had the pox my whole childhood. It was the devil.  Easy way out that.

The "religious" knew what they were doing when they invented God and the Devil.  Most people are sheep looking for someone to follow and in the absence of leadership that will show us our value and give us reason to celebrate our existence we'll follow some naysayer off a cliff.

We're taught from an early age to think that if we just weren't gay (not a choice) or didn't have sexual desires for others (human nature) or had skin that wasn't yellow or brown or black (I'm still mystified at Black Mormons) we could be better people, and so we mourn.

We mourn our existence, and we mourn our place in the world, and we regret that we weren't born heterosexual and chaste, and/or white, and we try to change into THAT. And by that I mean whatever THAT we think is best at the moment. 

Why?

Why can we not celebrate the difference?  Why can we not see that, yes, it does indeed take all kinds to make this world, and why must we have this incessant duel between rational thought and zealots who believe that that big guy with the beard in the sky sat around for few days and made everything we see, and negate the work of people who look at frogs and tadpoles and say..."hey, wait a minute..." 

I went through the phase of thinking I could be straight in my youth.  I went so far as to have a girlfriend and to get my dumb ass engaged.

I was lucky.  Something happened.  I honestly can't remember what this far down the road, but I had an epiphany.  I suddenly realized that my "beloved" wanted to get married.  It just didn't have a thing to do with me.

A week after I broke it off, she was engaged to someone else and 60 days later they married.  I dodged a bullet there.


But my family would have been thrilled for a while.  Until they came to the realization that I was apparently unable to control my desire for evil and chose to go back to being a degenerate 'mo.

See, control.

That's what it's all about.

So we'll continue this march off the cliff, lemmings that we are,  and this civilization too will end, as must all things.  But the real question is; Will we be remembered as a people who tried to make a difference, who tried our best to see that all people regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, political preference, ability to understand simple instructions, or country of origin have worth and value?  That they, no matter what they think or do or feel had intrinsic value that we embraced them and took them to our bosom as one of us?

And so it goes:

Daniel Schorr

Daniel Schorr, a longtime senior news analyst for NPR and a veteran Washington journalist who broke major stories at home and abroad during the Cold War and Watergate, has died. He was 93.
Schorr, who once described himself as a "living history book," passed away Friday morning at a Washington hospital. He was able to bring to contemporary news commentary a deep sense of how governmental institutions and players operate, as well as the perspective gained from decades of watching history upfront.
"He could compare presidents from Eisenhower on through, and that gave him historical context for things," said Donald A. Ritchie, Senate historian and author of a book about the Washington press corps. "He had lived it, he had worked it and he had absorbed it. That added a layer to his broadcasting that was hard for somebody his junior to match."
Schorr's 20-year career as a foreign correspondent began in 1946. After serving in U.S. Army intelligence during World War II, he began writing from Western Europe for the Christian Science Monitor and later The New York Times, witnessing postwar reconstruction, the Marshall Plan and the creation of the NATO alliance.
Schorr joined CBS News in 1953 as one of "Murrow's boys," the celebrated news team put together by Edward R. Murrow. He reopened the network's Moscow bureau, which had been shuttered by Joseph Stalin in 1947. Ten years later, Schorr scored an exclusive broadcast interview with Nikita Khrushchev, the U.S.S.R. Communist Party chief — the first-ever with a Soviet leader. Schorr was barred from the U.S.S.R. later that year after repeatedly defying Soviet censors.
He covered the building of the Berlin Wall as CBS bureau chief for Germany and Western Europe. In 1962, he aired a celebrated portrait of citizens living under Communist rule in East Germany.

He was reassigned to Washington in 1966. Other reporters in the bureau were already covering major institutions such as Congress or the State Department, so Schorr assigned himself to cover the implementation of President Johnson's Great Society programs.
"No one had such a beat," recalled his bureau colleague Roger Mudd. "He was everywhere. He had almost carte blanche to cover Washington."
David Broder, a longtime political reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, added: "I think he's unique in the sense that he's been at the center of so many different stories, both here in Washington and overseas, for so long. He kept his perspective so well and does not ever exaggerate what's taking place, but really let you know why it's important."
Becoming Part Of The Story
Schorr was surprised to find himself on the so-called Enemies List that had been drawn up by Richard Nixon's White House when he read it on the air. The list — naming hundreds of political opponents, entertainers and publications considered hostile to the administration — became the basis for one of the charges of impeachment against Nixon.
Schorr, along with some other members of the list, counted his inclusion on it as his greatest achievement.
Schorr won Emmys in each of the Watergate years of 1972, 1973 and 1974. Over the course of his long career, he was honored with numerous other decorations and awards, including a Peabody for "a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity." Schorr was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Society of Professional Journalists.
"He was sophisticated about the government and how it works," Mudd said. "He was a damned vacuum cleaner, is what he was."
'Killer Schorr'
In 1975, Schorr reported on assassinations that had been carried out by the CIA. "The anger of the administration can be gauged from Richard Helms' denunciation of Schorr," historian Garry Wills recounts in his 2010 book, Bomb Power.
Helms, then the CIA director, confronted Schorr in the presence of other reporters at the White House, calling him names such as "son of a bitch" and "killer."
"Killer Schorr: That's what they ought to call you," Helms said.

Schorr At NPR

In 1976, Schorr reported on the findings of the Pike Committee, which had investigated illegal CIA and FBI activities. The committee had voted to keep its final report secret, but Schorr leaked a copy to the Village Voice, which published it.
Schorr was threatened with a $100,000 fine and jail time for contempt of Congress. But during congressional testimony, Schorr refused to identify his source, citing First Amendment protections. The House ethics committee voted 6 to 5 against a contempt citation.
But CBS had already taken Schorr off the air. He ultimately resigned from the network that year.
"CBS found that, like other big corporations, it did not like to offend the Congress," Mudd said. "He broke his ties to CBS and before they could fire him, he resigned."
An Enduring Career
In 1979, Schorr was hired to provide commentary for the fledgling CNN. The network inaugurated its programming the following year with his interview with President Jimmy Carter. But in 1985, his contract was not renewed, which Schorr counted as his second "firing."
"Schorr was always a person to challenge what the government was saying and being skeptical and contrary," said Ritchie, the Senate historian.
"It really is true that I would sometimes stand up for principle at the risk of my job," he told his son Jonathan for an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition last year. "It is also true that when I lose my job I get terribly nervous."
Upon leaving CNN, Schorr joined NPR, where he had been doing occasional commentaries for several years. He had been a senior news analyst for NPR ever since. He also wrote a column for the Christian Science Monitor for decades.
"What passes for commentary today is almost all opinion," Ritchie said, "but Schorr was part of that breed of commentators who dug up information before they pontificated about it."
Schorr was born in the Bronx in 1916, the son of Belorussian immigrants. He got his first scoop at age 12, when he saw the body of a woman who had jumped or fallen from the roof of his apartment building. He called the police — and the Bronx Home News, which paid him $5 for the information.
"It was the first time I'd ever seen a dead person in my life," he told NPR's Robert Siegel in a 2006 interview on All Things Considered marking Schorr's 90th birthday.
"Why didn't I react more emotionally to that? It was the essential journalist who manages to absent himself from the situation and simply report it without feeling it," Schorr said.

We're outnumbered Boss!

And we are.  Those of us who believe that when Ronald Reagan changed the direction of the country that he changed it for the worse are fewer than common sense would imagine. 

Two of my "nephews" hold Ronald Reagan as an idol, one named his son Reagan.  (disclaimer-they're not actually my ehews, one is the son of a stepsister and the other is a nephew by right of my own adoption, so I can disavow any biological claim they might make-phew!)
 I admit that when Ronald Reagan busted PATCO he did so with a righteous indignation he usually reserved for communism, but they all but begged him to do it.

For any union a strike is a gamble.  They're taking the very calculated risk that if they prevent a company from producing it's goods, services whatev, they're using what little leverage they have to force advantageous changes to their employment situation, therefore, improving quality of life for their members.

This is not what always happens, and certainly not with PATCO. They went on strike and crippled the nations ability to fly.  This understandably got the attention of the President of the United states, who being not only a conservative, but also a devotee of the notion that labor and everything else should be deregulated, Ronald Reagan went about doing just that.  He fired thousands of them and threw more than a few in the pokey to boot.  

It was 15 years before the union even tried to recover.  And still it's membership, though growing, isn't national yet. 

Unions, it seems to me suffer the same pitfalls that overcame my job and the jobs of several others at the library.  No foundation was laid to ensure the continued existence of these jobs.  I'm not privy to the machinations of these positions and therefore not able to provide any intelligent discourse on how or why this wasn't done.

But!  The fact remains that the Director and Assistant director of the library that I worked for set out on a long range plan to expand the library system I worked for and yet they laid no foundation. They acquired a building, remodeled it, ran fiberoptic cable to provide the entire system better and faster and more readily expandable internet access.  They bought new furniture, they created new positions, they  hired movers to take us all across the street and install us in our new offices.  I, in fact was the first person to occupy a new office. 

That was in 2006.  in December of this year it will all be dismantled.  The Library administration will return across the street to it's original location.  The fiberoptic cable will have to be re -routed, jobs have been lost, the building will be abandoned, and a new yes-woman has been installed in the position of Director. 

See, no foundation. 

Now, this was not a union position by any means, but the principle is the same.  The people involved in the creation of this little legacy were smartly and rightfully attempting, during a time of what we thought was prosperity, which turned out to be smoke and mirrors, to create something that would not only last after they had gone, but something that would enhance the lives of the citizens of their particular little province.

That's where they, PATCO, and the liberals went wrong.  They jumped in to make changes and made no foundation.

Therefore, in November  when the conservatives take back the congress, since mid-term elections rarely support the party in power, we'll see a return to voodoo economics. I promise.

See the idea goes like this. 

"Let's  create a crisis.  Say by not only extending tax cuts for the rich, but making them permanent. Then we don't have enough money to run this government and we can say 'hey, you got to cut back like we told you all along!'  And then we can get rid of things like Health Care, and extended unemployment, which is only welfare with a different name, and maybe even get rid of Social Security.  We'll be heroes to the people who benefit from our machinations."

Of course, real people will starve, and lose their homes and   never be able to have credit again, never be able to attend college, etc.  But who cares about all that?

Bill Clinton got a blow job from a woman who wasn't his wife in the White House!  And though there are those who STILL aren't over it yet, it's not the real problem.  Alan Greenspan, devotee of the ideas of Ayn Rand, of all people, Chair of the Fed for 18 years and six Presidents was in charge of the money. 

Oddly Greenspan thinks Clinton was the best money manager of all the Presidents he served.  But Clinton taxed the rich.  The Conservative factions howled, predicted doom.  And we wound up with a surplus. 

Which George Bush spent...and then some.

Laying a foundation that the future can rest on should be considered the responsibility of any administration no matter the present concerns.  "What's best for future generations?", should be the question always. "What can I do that will not only help right now, but benefit those to come and hopefully guarantee the continued existence of this Republic I serve?"

How many recent Presidents, I wonder, consider that...at all.

And so it goes:

Witch hunts must be fun

I assume that's why people so readily and without any question join in Witch hunts, because they not only sound like a good idea, but they sound like fun.

I've seen too many witch hunts in action.  The mob mentality that pervades the almost always bizarre and unfounded actions of those who blindly jump on the hate bandwagon is usually hysteria. Later, after they've done something irreparable and just plain wrong they're contrite and then they begin to think and maybe discover some of the facts they've not bothered to learn before running right out to be a dick.

And here we have Shirley Sherrod.

A woman who has apparently dedicated her entire working life to helping farmers and learned from her experiences that people really are just people no matter their color, no matter their profession, no matter their intelligence, no matter who they love (hopefully.)

And what did she get for all her learnin' and trying to help?

She got her ass fired that's what she got?

Now, I do not know Shirley and I'm certain it's possible that she has personal  views I might abhor.  But here's a woman who has worked for the U.S. government helping farmers for over 20 years, she must be somewhat capable at her job. And when someone else attempts to use her as a scapegoat and misrepresents who she is and what she's done and most importantly what she's saying, she got shown the door.

I understand that we're all dispensable and that there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there willing and able to take our jobs at any given moment and I realize that the "I'm lucky to have a job" mindset is pervasive at this time, but what does this incident say about the face of modern America?

We're still living the effects of a Presidency that taught an entire generation to live in fear, that being fearful is tantamount to vigilance.  That makes us easy to manipulate.  It makes us easy targets for the next scare. It makes us ever vigilant for the threat that  is our neighbor.

Were we ever NOT the characters in "The Monsters are due on Maple Street?"

We have to stop looking for he enemy!  To begin to attempt to understand that we can care for each other and still make this country great again.  That fear and hatred are always at hand yet they're not building blocks on which to reconstruct a nation. And that the monsters are not without but within and often of our own creation.

If there was a simpler time I don't remember it. There's always some strife, some conflict, some threat to our freedom and our liberty.  But I remember that defiance was the key in olden days.  Walk with your head held high because you know you did the right thing and you know that you have the right to exist, and that you know your leaders are moral and thoughtful in their actions, not CEO's who need to show a profit to the shareholders. 

We make the Tea Parties, and the KKK's and the NAACP's and the HRC's and all the other organizations that supposedly represent us as individuals yet manage somehow to keep us all apart and isolated. To keep things as they are we have to be kept separate.  What if we compared notes?  What if we learned that what we were being told by our very own special interest group was in direct conflict to the reality of a given situation?  What if, Gods forbid, we were being manipulated by those who had a direct interest in keeping us on the path that benefited them most?

A brief return to yesterdays conspiracy theory post.   The above is not to say that there is some organized plan by these organizations to propagandize our minds and keep us afraid so they can accomplish some specific goal.  It's the job we tell them we want them to do! They're not in league with another organization!  They're running the organizations we create with the funds that we give them in the manner in which we instruct! We want to be ignorant!  We want to not be bothered by the messiness that is United States citizenship!  We want to eat our egg white omelette's with our Starbucks and drive our crossovers to our meaningless little jobs from which we get no satisfaction while we talk to ourselves in our bluetooth-ed cars and delude ourselves into thinking that a pound of salad covered in hard boiled eggs and four ladles of ranch dressing is healthy for us and then racing home to drink beer and watch the 623 inch flat screen so we can get up tomorrow and do it all over again.

The eggs are likely from a "farm" that keeps chickens in a nest who never move and never go outside and never exercise and are fed all kinds of antibiotics which we then consume, and the coffee is imported from a foreign country where the workers make .25 a day, and all that money we spend on a cup of coffee is absorbed by the middle men. The salad fiasco speaks for itself except that we're supporting the illegal workers we so rail against when we buy all that hand-harvested produce grown in America, and that 623 inch flat screen was made in China by people who get paid .25 a day.

I wish I could remember the film that I'm about to paraphrase from, but a government official is talking to someone who is telling them how bad they are and how wrong the things they're doing are and he says something to the effect of , "And what about when the food runs out?  And when you need oil?  You're gonna just want us to get it for you, and you're not gonna care how we do it."

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children and the children yet unborn."- Rod Serling
Were the monsters on Main Street actually to be revealed we'd be shocked, because well...it is us.

And so it goes:

"I dream things that never were and say, why not?"

a slapdash half assed hot mess

Sometimes I think  I sound like a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I wish I were.  Then there would be an actual them.

Unfortunately I don't really think it's that organized. I think the education system sucks because we WEREN'T paying attention to it's development.  I think the economy is in such a mess because we just thought "they'd take care of that"  

I also think our lives are changing because we didn't lay the groundwork for our last life, i.e. there were no jobs created for any of the master's of PhD candidates so we wind up selling stuff at a counter, and since there wasn't any real application for all our education we simply became a lot of people with a lot of specialized knowledge in our heads that's not very useful.

Is anyone else looking for a job?

I mean it's not a very rewarding activity, it's pretty much a waste of time and it seldom results in an interview.  Jobs either require you be one of two things, an idiot without any education or experience, for all of which I am ridiculously over-qualified,or, that you be an expert in the field with 5-500 years of experience and 23 specialized degrees and 15 certificates.

The companies that are telling us they want to hire really don't, and it's not that hard to figure that out.

"Just make the jobs only available to two or three people in the whole city and it looks like we're hiring but we're really not.  Then we can complain that we can't find skilled workers." 

Here's a job I found in a relatively simple field, Customer Service.  It doesn't require a lot except the ability to use what tools you are given to solve problems and the ability and willingness to tell a customer you're not going to be able to help them...without getting in trouble in the process.

QUALIFICATIONS Six months to one year Customer Service experience

Bilingual (Spanish/English) preferred

Call center and wireless experience a plus

Customer Service Skills

High School Diploma or GED

Basic PC Skills, able to navigate through Windows based programs

Stellar verbal and written communication skills

Strong problem solving skills Ability to thrive in a lively working environment and multi-task Flexibility and Winning Attitude a Plus

Now, here's a job that a lot of people could do, provided they could afford to work for $10 an hour.  But the bilingual requirement...exempts 50% of the applicants immediately.

Next up is a job that was advertised through my faculty email:

Here's an excerpt-

This program is designed for individuals interested in starting their own business.

We are looking for individuals that are certified as an instructor/coach for the Kauffman First Step Fund or Kauffman FastTrac.

If you are certified and would like to serve as a Business Coach for this First Step FastTrac session, please let me know ASA, and no later than Friday, July 23^rd.  

I don't have the qualifications but I did the math anyway.  The job pays $100 a week.  And it's temporary!

Here's a doozy!

· Top-notch customer service;
· Multi-unit management experience(at least 10 stores) – A MUST;
· At least three years high-level supervisory, management, sales experience;
· Collections experience is a plus;
· High school diploma or GED;
· Associates/Bachelors degree or related work experience;
· Experience using Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook;
· Ability to travel (with personal, reliable transportation) within district.

Guess what you'd be doing?

Managing check cashing stores!  Now that's what I went to grad school for...to cash bad checks for people who can't afford to pay their bills cause they don't make enough money.  How gratifying is that?   

So it's easy to see how the mindset works.  Just make the job impossible to obtain and the untrained  worker is to blame.  Then we don't fix the education system, nor make it available and we create this underclass who has to live in trailer parks and drive 25 year old cars if they're lucky and we keep them stupid, unhealthy and easy to push around.  

And I hardly needed my PhD to figure that out. 

I've been reading Tom Franks book "What's the matter with Kansas" this week, and it's really got me going. 

It's funny I never  met him. We seem not to be that far apart in age, we grew up in neighboring areas, traveled in the same circles, yet I never heard of him until now.  Thank Gods I did.  He's so right on the money about this place.

Looking for a way out.  I'm not delusional...well I'm delusional, but...well if you read regularly you know what I mean.  

I don't think it'll be significantly different anywhere else, in another state of likely another country, but I want a different place.  different people different experiences, just different. 

I think what we've done here in America is create the world the corporations really want.  They want us all to be free-lancers, who pay our own insurance, taxes, health care, vacation and sick time, and generally be completely expendable if we cause any trouble at all.  

We get the benefit of doing what we prefer, but without any security.  We won't have company towns, we'll have tenements where those of is lucky enough to get contracts are able (barely) to afford to get by.  

The days of 3500 sq ft houses are done for most of us, IF we ever wanted that.  2000 sq ft will be HUGE to most of us within the decade.  

My first neighborhood out of my parents house was in an area in which most of the houses had been divided into apartments.  We all lived like students, which we were, and parked on the street and had little rabbit warrens in which we lived.  

As adults we're headed right back to it.  These huge homes will get subdivided into apartments so they can be sold, rented, sub-letted, etc, and we'll all be parking on the street again scraping our windows in February cause there aren't any garages that haven't been converted into apartments for the new lower class of worker.  

Thankfully I prefer living in a small space, that way I'm not only more organized, but more mobile as well.  

Hmmm, mobility..a theme I keep coming back to today.

And so it goes:

Rare Sunday Post

Feeling reflective this morning.  I had thought all my current concerns were material.  Underemployed, unable to pay all the bills, perhaps losing the car, (which will ultimately entail bankruptcy if it comes to pass) fun stuff like that. 

But last night the ex calls at 10:30.  When the phone rings at that hour I know something's up. No one would call that late unless either something was wrong or they knew they were one of the few that could. 

He was a little, well...shall we say in his cups. Which concerns me that he thought he had to get inebriated before he could approach me about the subject at hand.

Apparently best friend, who injured himself a few weeks ago, is feeling seriously neglected and I didn't know it. Ex spent most of the weekend with him and discovered that what he really wanted wasn't his presence, but mine.

So I got THE CALL.

I suppose the question for today is what the fuck does the universe want that it won't leave me alone right now?  I played by the rules as I know them!  I got my little piece of paper they told me I had to have, in fact several of them, and I got me a good job, and I paid my bills, and I took care of those I needed to, and I took care of  me, and I tried to give back, and still I get kicked in the shins for my trouble.  Best friend has a support system, he has husband and he has family and he still has his income, and yet what he wants is my presence.  So he'll get it. 

It gives one pause to think that doing all that wasn't what one was supposed to be doing and that  not doing what the universe has in mind for you will get you booted out of your safety net and into the street if necessary.

So in a few minutes I'll get up and get ready for the day and  go buy some krispy kremes and coffee I can't afford and go spend several hours with best friend.  Then it's off to another joyful day at work during which I apparently get to keep my mouth shut so I can chew all this crow. 

Somedays...

And so it goes:

 

HGF

Einstein

We've been so crazy about the theory of relativity developed by a guy whose first job out of college was in a patent office, and our education system sucks so much ass that it's not likely that anyone familiar with Einstein famous theory knows anything about any of his other work.  (btw his work didn't materialize out of any great epiphany, the only job he could find out of college was at the patent office.  He got passed over for promotion twice before he left.)

In 1949 he wrote, yet again on his feelings regarding capitalism.  He had some good ideas, unfortunately no one listens to this kind of talk here in America. 

"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate (the) grave evils (of capitalism), namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."

Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?, 1949 ^[13]

That last sentence almost makes me want to cry.  

That we need to make substantive changes to our economic system is clear.  However, here we are watching the state of Missouri debating, not when, or even if, but how much of our tax dollars they should give away to Ford Motor Company so they don't pull out of the Claycomo plant near Kansas City.

Yes, they'd take 3700 jobs with them not to mention the peripheral jobs that would dry up if they left, but seriously, we're paying some undereducated lug 70k to put windshield wipers on an SUV, which no one even buys anymore.  Why don't we pay 70k to the guy who teaches our children?  We've got it all backwards and the system can't sustain itself. 


Until and unless we start figuring out that voting against our own interests is not the way to go we're doomed.  Look at the Midwest.  The small towns are drying up.  They're dying slow protracted deaths, and no one can seem to stop it.  Yet the people who live there keep voting Republican.  All they have to do is look around, it doesn't take a genius to see that the very people they keep in office are the ones helping to destroy their economy.  Why do they do so?  Religion.


Religion is killing our country like it has so many before it.

Recently the Kansas City Star ran an article extolling the virtues of immigration to western Kansas.  They told of economic development in Garden City, and how the schools were overcrowded because so many families are moving there from Mexico just to work at the meat packing plants.

What they conveniently neglected to mention is that those self-same meat packing plants run the whole she-bang.  If they don't get the tax breaks they want they pack up and move to the next town where they will get them.  They insist that they don't have a tax burden so the poor workers are saddled with the burden of creating roads, which don't exist, schools, which are overcrowded, health care, which the companies don't provide, and it keeps the towns and the citizenry poor and stupid just the way the company wants them.    

And all the while the rich get richer. 

The system is going to implode. We've seen this kind of rot in cultures in the past, yet we deny it exists in our own.

Take me for example, I hold an associates degree in ceramics, a Bachelors degree in Liberal Arts, a Master's degree in Theatre, and a PhD in comparative religion, and I work in a grocery store, for about a third of what I made two years ago when George Bush invited his friends over to sack the treasury.

Imagine trying to maintain your standard of living on 1/3 of your income.  Let's be clear here, I live in a 650 sq ft apartment, I drive a 3 y/o car with 70k on the odometer, and I have so little retirement savings that it's laughable. Credit card debt I no longer concern myself with because I'll likely have to file bankruptcy within the calendar year.  The days of travel, of housekeepers, of , hell of HBO and Showtime are long over, yet I keep on keepin' on, what choice do I have?

Am I bitter?  Fuck yes I'm bitter!  But I'm not alone, that's my only solace. There are millions of me.


Shortly before the 2008 elections I heard a report on doom and gloom radio (read NPR) and this guy who at the time was with some government agency said that he often emerged from meetings on Wall Street and looked around and thought to himself, "If the people knew what was going on there'd be a revolution."

Well, they know now...

And so it goes:

Be careful what you wish for

Just when one thinks the Gods have forsaken them and all hope is lost, along comes the very thing one wished for, and it's a demanding bitch.

A few weeks ago I mentioned having sent off a writing sample to a website in application to be a reviewer for them.  Then I realized I'd sent off an article that I'd edited poorly and they asked for another.  I wasted a week on revisions of an article I'd dashed off in a few minutes and finally sent it yesterday.

They hired me.

They also sent me a list of things they expect within the week. 

Someone remind me to be grateful.-


My poor brother is the only one left who will deal with that S.O.B. my adoptive father.  Last night he was called to come and help the old man who was complaining of shortness of breath. When he got there the old man thoughtlessly insulted my brother's wife.  Needless to say all hell broke loose. Many things got said.  My brother quotes himself as saying something to the effect of: "You ran S*** off, you ran C***** off, you ran my son off and my wife and now you're trying to run me off. Who the hell are you going to have left when you're done with all of us?"

Personally I couldn't care less, that old bastard should rot, but I find his patterns of abuse interesting.  Someone must always be to blame.  And when it's discovered that he's the culprit there's never an apology forthcoming.  He also asked my brother not to tell anyone of the argument.  This is an old pattern because he knows he'll come off looking bad and he wants to control the situation.  Dick.

I also contend he couldn't have felt that bad he had the energy to have a fight with my brother.

It's my firm belief that he's still here at 87 because he refuses to learn the lessons the Gods put him here to learn.  The day will come and I wouldn't want to be him when it does.

And so it goes:

Everybody's got an opinion

Yes, everyone has an opinion and they're free to express it, particularly here in America where we're free to be the world's moralists and tell them exactly what they should think and do.

I read this morning that Roman Polanski won't be extradited to the U.S. for the crime he's accused of, and true to form a lot of the comments from Americans were charged with self-righteousness. 

I made the mistake of voicing my opinion and was roundly trashed by the commenters who need their meds adjusted.

But we are!  We think we're right because we're Americans, and we NEVER think of the opinions nor the needs, nor the concerns of others.  It's US, that's all that matters.  I did notice that those who trashed me were the self-same commenters who checked the option NOT to be replied to.  hehe.

Here in the world George Bush left us, one in which we're told to be stupid and fearful, which Americans were happy to do, we stomp around the world and regulate commerce, military conflicts, religious conflicts, and any other disagreement it's to our advantage to get in  the middle of.

I'm waiting for the day America gets her comeuppance.  I fear it'll be a biggen. Which is one of the big reasons I don't want to be here. 

Truthfully if I could find a country that would take me, in which I wouldn't likely be stoned to death just for being an American, I'd go tomorrow.  Alas, no one will have me.  I'm an American so I'm poor and they don't want me taking up space on their employment status.  I'm an American, so though I'm over educated I have no real idea how the rest of the world thinks, which makes me nothing more than a liability that has to be re-educated, and at my age they hardly want to make the investment.  I'm an American, so I'm going to think I'm entitled to EVERYTHING!  Which is a well-founded fear, so there's that. I'm an American so I'm infused with all that Christian bible-thumping crap(they assume) which they'll be not only mesmerized by but also which they'll abhor. AND I'm an American.  And if they're not a third world country they really don't have any interest in giving me one of the jobs we exported to them in the last decade.  

I'm a liability.

Of course, if Ronald Reagan, George Bush I, and Bill Clinton hadn't decimated the labor market in the U.S. and eliminated the middle class many of these problems wouldn't exist.  Alas, they did.

Why I aspire to the middle class I'll never know, but apparently I do.

But the catalyst for this epiphany was Roman Polanski's extradition hearing in Switzerland.  Is he guilty, well, yes and no.  First of all, what was he doing alone with a 13 y/o girl in the first pace, where was her guardian?
Second, what kind of judgment was being exercised by all the adults in this situation?  Third, wasn't this in the 70's?  There remains no understanding of that sexual mindset in this age of religious zeal and sexual phobias.  So yet again we apply our current restrictive and fear-driven mores to a person, a situation, and yes a crime that currently is really none of our business.  The woman in question wants nothing more to do with the whole mess, and Polanski is 76.

But we're the arbiters of everything moral here in America, so let's cast that first stone since we're so free of sin.

and so it goes:

ed note: It's been brought to my attention that I neglected to mention a few weeks ago that my beloved Cubbies were also in the Chicago Pride parade.  Thanks to Ernie Banks and the Cubs. 

HGF

Genius at work

I'm the New Me, and the word for today is Irony.


This genius married poorly in the 1970's and apparently is still paying the price for it.



I've always expected the police to arrive to deliver such news only I figured my "sister" would be the culprit. She's certainly crazy enough.

Then there's the Mexican drug cartel that apparently controls most of the meth traffic in the U.S. who likes to throw severed heads onto the dance floors of Mexican nightclubs.

Apparently La Familia Michoacana is a Christian fundamentalist paramilitary crime syndicate (to borrow a phrase, you can't make this shit up, I dare you to try!) that insists they only kill people who deserve it and that their members have good manners.

I will contend, until OJ, or a well-mannered member of La Familia Michoacana severs my head, that this was not the intended message of the authors of the bible. I think that perhaps a message of love and acceptance was the intent, not "Well, yeah it's ok if they deserve to die."

Alas, here in suburban America it's easy to judge.

I know a woman at work who's a single mother (28) and has been an employee at the grocery for 9 years. Trying to raise her 8 y/o daughter, and has had one bad series of things happen to her after another. Nothing catastrophic, but annoyances major enough to put her into bankruptcy and back in her mother's home.

This past month after hearing that she had enough money to buy a car and move out I happened to run cross both a car and a house that fit her needs perfectly. Today she'll drive the car I found to the house I found and sign the lease. I feel like I did something good for someone. Feels nice.

On the other hand I still have that list of people who need their heads severed, maybe I should read a few passages of the bible while contemplating.

And so it goes:

Mourn this bitches!

I'd love to sit here and pontificate about how delightful this is to hear that the Catholics have yet another thing to mourn but it's just too rich to comment on further.  

I hope you get as much enjoyment out of this item as I did. 

  from towleroad via joe my god-

CONNECTICUT: Catholic Priest Busted For Embezzling $1.3M For RENTBOYS

Father Kevin J. Gray is under arrest in Connecticut for embezzling $1.3M from his parish, money he allegedly spent on luxury vacations and lavishly appointed rentboys.

Police have arrested a well-known Roman Catholic priest in connection with the theft of $1.3 million from the Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon parish over a seven-year period. Rev. Kevin J. Gray, 64, was charged today with first-degree larceny. Police said he used church funds to pay for hotels, restaurant meals, clothing and male escorts. Gray turned himself in to authorities this morning and is scheduled to be arraigned in Waterbury Superior Court today. Gray was placed on medical leave by Hartford Archbishop Henry J. Mansell on April 15. The priest had told people in the community he was gravely ill. Gray was described as a popular priest in Waterbury, having served in the city for 26 years, first at St. Margaret's and St. Cecilia's churches before arriving at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon. "We are deeply saddened by the events which have recently had such a profound effect on Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon parish," Rev. John P. Gatzak, director of communications for the Hartford Archdiocese, said in a statement today.

In March of this year, Gray presided over 40 couples (photo below) as they renewed their opposite marriage vows in a ceremony created by the Hartford Archdiocese's anti-gay Family Life Office. In January, the Hartford Archdiocese endorsed the anti-gay Manhattan Declaration, which calls on Christians to disobey all LGBT rights laws. The Hartford Archdiocese has also denounced same-sex marriage in DC and in April they claimed that out of all child molestation cases, "less than two per cent [are committed], allegedly, by Catholic clergy," therefore the problem is "societal" and not theirs.

And so it goes:

strange behavior

Google is a strange animal.

This week I see a post on Towleroad telling us all how cool Google is that they're paying their gay employees a little more to make up for the extra taxes they have to pay for health benefits for their partners.

Then I see a post by a fellow blogger in the UK who says his fairly innocuous comments won't post.  They are as follows:

Racial background of US Presidents and Blogger

[With reference to Look Mummy, below]

Something very weird is happening at Blogger. In response to my ramblings about Pride, a kind reader left this comment:

It feels like Obama has been in office for a looong time, but there is still no way the equivalent of this could be seen in the homeland of our US "allies", who continue with the idea that there are no queers in their Goddamn man's military. It must be utterly galling for them to have to serve alongside the lezzers and woofters in the British forces.

Quite the opposite. There are many in the military who wish to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, including General Petreaus, James Jones, Colin Powell and certain members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Don't lump the mouth-breathing troglodytes with the rest of us Yanks, ok?

It frustrates me when others paint Americans as unenlightened inbred hill folk, since the rest of the world isn't so much better. We did elect an Obama, after all. When will the British elect a Prime Minister of Pakistani descent? Or the French a Senegalese President? The Dutch a Moroccan Prime Minister? The Germans a Turkish leader?

See, you got me all worked up, and not in the way I'm usually worked up when I visit your blog! Oh well, I'll scroll down and look at the pretty pictures again.

I replied, with this -- but for some reason Blogger refuses to publish this comment:

There are many in the military who wish to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, including General Petreaus, James Jones, Colin Powell and certain members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Well now I'm really confused. If all those powerful people want to end it, and if the saintly Commander-in-Chief also wants to end it, er... why hasn't it ended? Are they all just completely inept? Or is it that they don't actually care that much about this issue because, as Clinton found, queer rights don't play so well in the electoral heartlands?

Really, I'm struggling to reconcile the picture you've painted of all the views of all these lovely enlightened people with the fact that "don't ask, don't tell" is still in place.

You should in no way think this is an attempt to diminish your people and Big Up my own -- as you'll have seen on numerous occasions, I am much, much harder on British politicians than I am on any others.

But we've got to stop letting Obama off the hook just because he comes from a different racial group. That would be like letting Thatcher get away with stuff because she just happened to be a woman.

Of course these break-throughs are to be celebrated. But either these people are fit and proper to do their jobs or they are not -- and their particular circumstances should not be an excuse for mistakes or under-performance.

The whole point of Pride is to (or was to?) underline that queer rights are basic human rights. My post was a reflection of the fact that, for almost every practical purpose, we have finally managed to achieve queer equality in the UK. Other places are not so fortunate -- and we can either make excuses for that or we can keep the pressure up.

For sure, there are much worse places than the US for queer rights. But since we are supposedly the closest allies in the current insane wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and since I was commenting on the British military's always rather popular presence at Pride, it seemed a logical swerve to the US. I'm sorry you don't see it that way.

On reflection, I thought I'd not properly responded to another point, so I left a second comment -- which, for some reason, Blogger also refuses to publish. Here it is:

Oh, and I'm rather with you on the racial background of elected politicians. I'd like a world in which these things don't matter, any more than gender or sexuality or disability.

But if you want to prove the US is more enlightened because it has elected a leader from a different demographic background, most of us can play similar games: a few decades back both Britain's Head of State and Head of Government were women -- when will the US elect a woman President?

I've lost track of the number of lesbian and gay ministers that have served openly in the British Government. But I'm struggling to think of a single lesbian or gay US Secretary.

Race is one issue, and an important one (though I suspect more important in the US than in the UK, for all sorts of historical reasons). But it's not the only one.

I'm very suspicious about why these wouldn't publish. Very strange.

Incidentally, I might also have done a bit of demographic sleuthing -- don't minority ethnic groups in the US make up around 40% of the population (and heading for majority status in a few years)? In the UK the equivalent figure is about 7%, so if you want to do "what proportion of UK Prime Ministers should come from minority ethnic groups" it will be very, very much lower than the equivalent for US Presidents. Women, of course, make up a majority in both countries...

-reciprocating motion

As you can see he didn't say anything particularly inflammatory, and yet is suspicious about why these comments won't post.   Personally I just think they were too long and blogger isn't programmed to think we can formulate sentences that lengthy.

But then the other day I tried to access an email account I have and got the message that they suspended it because of "suspicious activity."

What suspicious activity?  I rarely use the account, in fact it's my secret acct for when I have to give someone an address like for a department store or other online account that I know is only intended to generate useless emails that will do nothing but clog up my personal account. So naturally I was miffed and sent Google the following message:

Stay out of my accounts, I'm doing nothing in there but contacting family and friends which is none of your business.

Today I find that I can't access the account at all.  In fact it asks for my LIBRARY CARD number to reset the password. What the fuck is that?

I sent a form to google from which I expect very little action.  But their unwillingness to actually help me with the problem speaks volumes over and above the domestic partners benefits thing.

So let's hope that someone is actually hijacking email addresses and that's what's happened to mine.   Otherwise Google is turning into something I don't want to associate with...and that would be a hassle.

Feeling like everything is up for grabs recently and that losing it all isn't really the worst thing that could happen.  It is after all just stuff.

and so it goes:

Independence?

Funny how Pride and Independence Day coincide isn't it?

I've had issues these past several years about being Proud of parades that celebrate boys in speedos and drag queens, but then my type isn't very interesting, and when the married with children crowd takes over the parade I'm not impressed by homogenization.

Then there's this:

British men and women in the military ...serving as openly gay men and women.

Where's the military in our parade?

I heard tell of some Christians in America who showed up at parades with signs of apology since they FINALLY interpreted the message of their God as being one of acceptance and love, instead of fear and hatred. 

It's about fucking time.


There's a young man whose blog I read frequently, he goes by the moniker Davey Wavey, (yes he's young) and  recently he's become quite the outspoken little activist. 

I quoted and linked to his post recently about  some Catholic propaganda he'd found while doing research. And then today I see that he's a little miffed that he can't stay in the United States and get married to his love.

Good for him.

I'm not sure going up against the IRS is a good idea, but it would certainly get attention.

So here's to awakenings.  May they be informative, motivating, and have lots of positive results.

The 5th of July it seems is a lazy day designed to provide rest and reflection for those of us lucky enough to be born in a country as simultaneously rich and poor as this.

Taking it easy and considering what we really need to be doing for each other as citizens of a great nation that would not only benefit some but enrich us all, would be a healthy and possibly informative activity today that wouldn't take a lot of energy.  Maybe we could use tomorrow's energy to put newfound ideas into action. 

And so it goes: