Sometimes, after a day of stocking up on provisions at Costco, I think if the Zombie Apocalypse has to happen this is the best day for me. I should be able to ride out a week or so locked down in my apartment and keep my fingers crossed that someone in charge will figure out how to stop them from attacking.
On the other hand, on the day before shopping at Costco, I dread thinking about having to dodge zombies while knocking on my neighbors door for a roll of toilet paper.
Bob and I have two cats and I sometimes feel like all I do is tell them no. Cisco wants out doors. No. Chloe wants to scratch the furniture. No. Cisco wants to eat the food off of my plate. No. Chloe wants to scavenge the kitchen counter for leftover. All they hear from me is no.
What worries me is that it makes absolutely no sense to them. For example, why can’t Cisco drag the chicken bones across the kitchen counter and then drop it on the floor so he can eat it. I was obviously done with the bones, why can’t he just pick the bones for whatever he can find. Why is he getting all hysterical about it?
Or why is it all right for Chloe to scratch the cat scratchers that Bob has so artfully arrayed around the house but not the couch and the chairs that are just a juicy targets. Why is one scratchable and the other not? And how, a poor cat, supposed to the difference.
They just run and hide when we raise our voices but I am sure they are thinking WTF. This is what animals do why are these two humans such pains in the asses.
I am surprised that they are both still civil with us. But they are.
A senior moment that keeps recurring in my life is misplacing things. I lose my glasses the most. My eye sight is actually pretty good which enables me to ramble around the house without them. So, unless I have a pressing need for them, like watching television, I go without them.
I try to put them in the same place every night before I go to bed. The problem comes when I take them off earlier in the day for some seemingly benign act like rubbing my itchy eyes and forgetting to put them back on. At this point, they are lost. I go looking for them but without my glasses. This sometimes proves an impediment to finding them because instead of seeing the room clearly, there is a bit of blur obscuring everything.
In the past, I would just get my spare pair of glasses and wear them until I found them.
This worked pretty well until recently. I bought a new pair of glasses. The day I bought my glasses I was overwhelmed with the number of choices I had — there were hundreds of potential frames. This paralyses me. The more choices I have, the more difficult it is for me to come to a decision. So, I thought, well Tom you liked your present frames, just get a pair of frames that looks like the old ones you have. Genius, right? I got the exact same frame.
As we all know, the road to Hell is paid with good intentions, it has actually made it worse for my search for glasses.
Since I misplace my glasses on almost a daily basis, I constantly am putting on my spare pair. When the old pair and the new pair looked different, I could easily determine which pair of glasses I should be wearing when I stumbled across them. I would put on the new pair and return the old pair to my cram packed junk drawer until I need them again.
Now, so I just put on my old glasses which work until I stumble across my new ones. This would work if I also kept better track of my old glasses but I don’t. So, much to my chagrin, I will misplace my glasses and when I go to the junk drawer, the spare pare is missing. Which means instead of wearing my new pair, I was already wearing my spare pair and now, instead of looking for one pair of glasses, I am looking for two pairs of glasses.
Worse still, I don’t know which is my old pair and my new pair when I do find a pair of glasses because I didn’t think to check if there was anything that would differentiate the two pairs, I don’t know which pair I am holding — the old pair or the new pair.
As I am reading this back, I am thinking why am I writing about such a trivial matter. Then I think, wait a minute, this is important. As a Senior Citizen, this is how I spend a large portion of my day — looking for shit I can’t find.
You don’t press unpopular issues if there is little chance of winning. For example, Barack Obama did not support gay marriage when he first ran for president. Now, in my mind, a gay man, I realized that Obama could give a rats’ ass about gay marriage and was opposing it in order to win an election where a significant portion of the American public opposed gay marriage. It doesn’t make sense to lose an election for an issue, gay marriage, that would surely go down to defeat in most state legislatures. Gay marriage had to wait for another time because Obama could do other things that help me and, more importantly, every other non-gay citizen who, by the way, make up 90 percent of the population.
One of the great lessons of age is you realize that you don’t get everything you want. It is better to get some of what you want than to get nothing. You have to win elections in order to govern, this means compromise. This is how democracies work. Some changes have to wait. You have to deal with the reality you are in.
Which brings me to the New York legislature’s recent passage of a law that replaces mother and father with gestating parent and non-gestating parent in the law books. This change was necessary to make sure that the very few women who are transitioning into men (and vice versa) know that New York law is aware of their non-binary status and included in New York law.
I have numerous problems with this fishing expedition in an empty lake.
I don’t want to lose this election but if it were to happen, I want the defeat to be about something big — something like Medical Care or the War in Iran and not whether to rename Mother’s Day to Gestating Parent’s Day.
The continuing debate regarding slavery and the Civil war is baffling to me. There is this faux confusion about why slavery is such a big deal. A good example of this odious opinion can be found in Jason L. Riley’s post in the City Journal. He makes two contentions regarding slavery in USA.
The first is that slavery was pervasive all over the world so why should the American version be seen as evil while every other country gets off the hook. Riley ignores the racist defense of slavery which justified the enslavement of Blacks but also persisted long after the Civil War ended. There was big difference between Roman slavery and American slavery. For most other countries who engaged in slavery, the slaves came from the defeated population after the end of wars. It was just bad luck that the losing side became slaves to the winning side.
Americans, on the other hand, and probably because it was a glaring contradiction with American values, justified slavery with the pernicious view that Blacks were racially inferior to Whites and thus their subordination was justified. It is the only way someone can understand why the subordination of Black people continued after the Civil War. White Discrimination, then, limited Black progress for, at least, 100 years following the Civil War and, sadly, even today, some Whites cling to this racist ideology.
Furthermore, particularly for conservatives who liked to sing the praises of American Exceptionalism, saying that everyone is doing it has all the moral weight of a teenager caught with a can of beer. So what if everyone was doing it? The question pertinent to American History is why did some of our forefathers have slaves. It doesn’t really matter that some African Blacks sold other African Blacks into slavery. Yes, it was wrong of them but their history isn’t what we are looking at. We are looking at American History. It was Americans who thought that these African Blacks were the equivalent of cattle and hogs and so there was nothing wrong with making them slaves.
Then there is Riley’s contention that slavery did very little to the advancement of American Capitalism which, OK, maybe but it hardly matters when Southerners, both slave owner and non-slave owner, believed that the continuation of slavery was vital to the economy of the South. They believed it so strongly that they were willing to defend slavery with their lives. They were willing to break the country in two to defend it. They thought their way of life was under attack. The percentage of GNP that slavery brought to pre-Civil War America seems a irrelevant to understanding the actual conflict.
The reason that Riley is confused about American Slavery being such a big deal is that he overlooks racism. The reason that Conservatives won’t look at racism is that it would involve some uncomfortable discoveries. The painful truth is that White people, either actively or passively, treated Black people badly for quite a long period in American History. It is painful to think that great Grandfather and Grandmother weren’t such good people. They had flaws. They really didn’t represent American ideals. On the other hand, it would certainly make such landmark events like the Civil War much more comprehensible to people like Riley if he introduced racism to the conversation. and, after all, isn’t understanding our history what learning is all about.
The Right Wing Echo Chamber are using the Henry Nowak murder as evidence that DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is not only bad, but it also is deadly. For those who don’t know about the Henry Nowak case here is a brief rundown of the events. Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh man living in Southhampton UK, stabbed Henry Nowak, an 18 year old university student. Digwa’s brother called police and told them that Nowak had attacked his brother for racially motivated reasons. When police arrived they handcuffed Nowak who repeatedly told them he was wounded. An ambulance was called but unfortunately to late to save Nowak.
The key discussion going on is that the police were so infected by DEI training that they allowed a White man to die because they believed the Sikh man over the White man thus causing the police to mistreat Nowak and, for this, DEI is responsible for Nowak’s death.
It is depressing that rabble rousers are using this unfortunate incident as a call to action. The facts don’t support their contention.
Digwa’s family made the first contact with the police. They claimed that Nowak had made racists comments before attacking Digwa. The police were looking for a violent man. When the Police arrived, Digwa and his family was able to tell their story first. Thinking they had a potentially violent person, they handcuffed Nowak. This is a common police practice. Police handcuff dead people, particularly if the person is suspected of a violent crime. This is for the protection of the police. A wounded person can still be violent.
Once the police learned more about Nowak’s wounds, his handcuffs were removed and his wounds attended to. Unfortunately, all this came to late for Nowak who died at the scene. The media accounts make this time lapse seem like a long time. It wasn’t. From the police handcuffing Nowak to the police administering first aid, took somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 minutes.
How DEI killed Nowak though somehow eludes me. The cops weren’t saying we have to believe the Digwa’s because they are Sikhs and ignore the wounded screams of Nowak because he was White. The police were acting on the information that the Digwa’s first provided and when they saw Nowak’s condition, they changed their tack.
It it makes no sense, as Konstantin Kisin does in the above linked article, to compare it to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis. Floyd was arrested by cops who then used holds that were known to be dangerous when applied and have subsequently been banned. The cop’s actions were responsible for Floyd’s eventual death.
Lets be clear — the police were in no way involved in the murder of Nowak. Digwa stabbed Nowak. Digwa then lied to the police about Nowak’s and failed to inform the cops he had stabbed Nowak. As the police learned more, they released Nowak and worked to save his life. Digwa lies are the problem here and not DEI. The police had to traverse this chaotic situation and the Digwa family’s misinformation and rather quickly came to the right conclusion.
We live with imperfect systems. They will always be imperfect. Every time terrible things like this happen, they should be investigated and any information that can improve police procedures should be made. These are reasonable actions in the face of this or any tragedy. On the other hand, Farage is taking advantage of this tragedy to make dubious claims about the mistreatment of the Whites which is both dangerous and unwise. Sowing discord is apt to create even more discord and division which, I am afraid, is the actual reason Farage has latched onto this particular case.
I am a party man when voting. If a Republican and a Democrat are running against each other, I will vote for the Democrat. Always. Not because I like the particular Democrat. This, unfortunately, doesn’t always happens. I do so because this gives the Democrats a chance at governing and this is more important to me than having a perfect candidate for every office.
This said, I found River Page’s defense, in the Free Press, of Graham Platner a little depressing. Platner’s skeletons keep slipping out of the closet and at a prodigious rate at that. It makes me think he might be a weak candidate. This is concerning because the seat he is running for is a very winnable Senate seat. His opponent, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, appears to be behind in the polls although this has been the case in all of her races — she runs behind or very close and then manages to handily win her elections. She is a tough candidate to beat.
Platner, her apparent opponent, is having a bad week or two. Page describes the problem. He has no filter which means he bluntly speaks his mind and that occasionally causes his foot to fall firmly into his mouth. When he was young, he got drunk and wound up with a Nazi tattoo. Years later, he got drunk and danced shirtless at a friend’s wedding thus displaying the Nazi tattoo in it’s full glory. He has made derogatory comments about Blacks, Jews, Gays and Women — all, by the way, the most dependable Democratic voters for the past 50 years.
Page, however, thinks all this worry is for nothing because Platner has working class appeal. He lived among them, even if only temporarily, speaks their language and they like his blunt talk. He is just the right kind of candidate to counter Donald Trump.
Because Page thinks Platner is such a great candidate he tries to address the concerns about his unfiltered tongue. Page writes about Platner’s use of the gay and fag, “he (Platner) also used the terms gay and fag as general insults. Similarly to the r-word, the consensus among the working- and lower-middle-class people I’ve spent most of my life around is that calling someone a fag may be mean, but it isn’t bigoted unless they are actually gay.” What? Calling someone gay isn’t an insult unless they are actually gay. Well, this certainly news to me. What kind of bull shit is Page, a gay man as a matter of fact, trying to spread?
When a straight guy calls another straight guy gay, he is just being mean but not homophobic. I fail to see the distinction. Why would a straight man calling another straight man gay be an insult if there weren’t negative connotations to those terms for a straight man. If you are trying to be mean to someone, you use terms that will insult the man. He used those terms to get a rise out of his male friends. Now it might be only friendly banter between the guys but telling me this isn’t also homophobic is unbelievable. These men think there is something seriously wrong with being called gay which pretty much defines homophobic. It, then, does mean something after all and it isn’t as innocent as Page makes out.
It is also insulting to Working Class people. Indeed Page’s whole working class appeal is a slam against working class people. That is just the way they talk. They love hard drinking, free-talking tough guys who don’t filter their words. It is part of their appeal. So what if a few of them use the N word or anti-Semetic terms or fag, these are real people in the real world. Grow up.
It doesn’t help Plant’s case when he makes a disturbing comparison with Trump, “A decade of Trump should have taught the political and media establishment that voters, especially those in the working class, couldn’t care less about personal scandal so long as their genuine-seeming proposal for real political change is on the table.” So what the Democrats need is a foul mouth bigoted egotistical lout who makes rash decisions (lets not forget the Nazi tattoo) and is offensive on so many levels but, at least, he wants Universal Healthcare and he has just the type of muscle to make it happen.
What worries me is that it is only June and the Republicans have yet to dig for all the dirt on Platner. Given Platner’s character, I fear there are more juicy stories to come. If this is where Platner is starting, what fresh shit will be thrown at him in October.
Plant will say that the working class don’t care about that. Maybe. But then other parts of the Democratic coalition might – say like Women, Blacks, Jews and Gays. Platner is still at the starting blocks and the race has a long way to go, many other politicians who aren’t named Trump were done in by lesser hurdles. The question I have is why would we want to start with such a damaged candidate, when we could choose otherwise?
Not key Democratic demographics.
Mind Stewing, Fingers Typing 