Author: Tom Fitzpatrick

Life

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The good friends of Clarence Thomas paid for 38 of his vacations. Of course, these gifts in no way influence Thomas when he makes any decision that might affect his good friends. I mean it could be true. On the other hand, it could be false. Thomas is asking us to take his word on it.

Somehow I am unconvinced. I need a little more here. If it were 1 or 2 trips, I would be more willing to see his point. But 38 is an awful lot of good friends and free vacations. It looks fishy and that becomes the problem. So now, because Justice Thomas was oblivious to what this looked like, some Democrats rightfully are demanding an investigation.

You might be saying that shouldn’t friends be able to give lavish gifts to other friends? No. Absolutely not. Businesses today are constantly reminding their employees about ethical perceptions. The best way to avoid getting in trouble is to refuse any high price gifts from customers. This way the company and the employee stay out of trouble. The very trouble that Thomas finds himself.

This is a standard business behavior and is well known in both business and government. I am surprised that Thomas isn’t aware of it. If nothing else happens from this tawdry investigation, the Supreme Court’s HR department needs to give Thomas a quick refresher on the perception of ethical behavior. It sounds like he may have missed his training.

More importantly, his good friends seem to have a lot of extra cash laying around and that cash is up to no good. Particularly when I am fairly certain Justice Thomas can readily pay for his own damn vacations. When rich people have so much discretionary income that they can bribe Supreme Court judges with vacations, they simply have too much money. It’s not doing anyone any good any more. Better it went to taxes.

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A Florida school district is finding Shakespeare a little too racy so instead of reading the whole play of Romeo and Juliet they are reading sections of Romeo and Juliet. Don’t get me wrong if I was the average high schooler I would love reading only the selected bits of Shakespeare because he was a real pain in the ass to read.

On the other hand, it is about the stupidest things I have ever heard. It is a play about young heterosexual children in a passionate romance. It sounds like something that a average teenager might be thinking about. This is why, of course, Romeo and Juliet is one of the most commonly taught Shakespeare plays in high schools. So, of course, educators in Ron DeSantis’ Florida are cutting out the interesting bits so the youth of Florida are saved from becoming aware of teenage sex. I think we all know they are already aware and that they are spending a good amount of time talking about it.

Then there is assumption that teenagers are brainless twits and will be enticed into a passionate romance that ends in suicide. It could happen but I think the chances are pretty remote, so remote as to be unworthy of giving it a second thought. I remember in my school most of the kids felt Romeo and Juliet were pretty crazy and probably needed some good adult advice (so take that Nurse). It was certainly my big takeaway and I was 17. Kids are generally pretty rational. The runaways and the rebels get all the attention but most kids are smart enough to stay in school and with their parents. Even poor Romeo and Juliet bought into middle class mores because they got married before they had sex. So, what exactly is the point?

Protecting youth from reading Shakespeare? Is there any evidence to support this? I would like to see it. This isn’t about protecting children. It is about controlling what they read. Every time I hear a conservative who wants to protect children from certain books, I think of gun laws and their renewed interest in child labor and find it incredibly difficult to believe them.

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Two extremely flawed candidates are about to be renominated by their perspective parties. Neither candidate has the potential for a landslide election win which is what the country needs after almost 20 years of 50/50. Trump, for too many reasons to enumerate, is a candidate who inspires either hatred or unquestioning fealty. He has attacked anyone who even remotely questions what he says, even his fellow Republicans. For the time being, they are stuck with Trump as long as the party faithful are committed to him.

Since there is no way in Hell that I am going to vote for Donald Trump that leaves me with the other guy — Joe Biden. I voted for Joe Biden and will vote for him again. But, lets put it this way, if he asked me to go into battle I would certainly get a second opinion. I don’t think he is doing a bad job either or is a PR disaster. He is OK. Given that he is 80 years old and getting older, I don’t think there is much of a chance that he will change. He will remain OK.

Sorry but this is about as much excitement that I can muster for the man.

Biden is old as is, for that matter, Trump. He isn’t a doddering old man that the Republicans make him out to be, but, on the other hand, he is far from the energetic leader the country and the Democrats need. He is not nearly as corrupt as Trump but there is a whiff of it around him.

Speaking as a Democrat, I would prefer a different candidate. A lot of my fellow Democrats, however, think that Biden is are best chance to retain the presidency. Given that the outcome of Biden loss is a Trump presidency, I understand their concern.

Yet, if all we got is Biden, then we are in big trouble any way. Think about that, there are Democrat governors, senators and representatives and the best of these people is Joe Biden. What a depressing future. I would rather not throw in the towel now on somebody new taking on the role. I would rather take a chance on somebody new in hopes of changing the dynamics of the election.

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Until recently, I prided myself on being able to spell the most difficult word and if I couldn’t spell it, I could generally spot my error pretty quickly when I edited. As I age, though, I find that this super power is declining. Maybe aging isn’t to blame but I have only noticed the problem since I slipped over the 65 years marker. Whatever the reason, I have noticed my spelling has gone to Hell in a hand basket.

Here are two recent and, once you see them, embarrassing, mistakes. I tried to spell technically as tycnically. I was convinced that the tycn was correct and ically was wrong after I began to edit. I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to change the ically before realizing that perhaps the tycn was wrong. I still think that tycnically is a valid alternative.

Then there was exspell instead of expel. This misspelling I blame on my sounding it out. I say ex spell when it should be Ex pel.

I am not so worried about the actual misspelling because I think that when you are writing and you need to get the word on the page, putting down a close approximation of the word is enough until you go back and edit. But now I can’t see the problem where it once, on review, was easy for me to spot. I now make countless attempts to correct the wrong syllable.

Which means I am down to one super power – parallel parking.

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A Catholic School in Kansas expelled a student because the kid’s mother objected to the banning of gay books in the school. The Catholic Church thinks it can still boss people around and people will obey. That they don’t have the good sense to handle a dispute like this better is disappointing. They simply no longer have the same power to intimidate critics.

The Church, however, will still try. The Spanish Inquisition is in the Catholic Church’s DNA so when the opportunity to actually punish someone presented itself it was impossible to pass it up. The Church should have thrown the issue back to the mother. They could have said here is our teaching on homosexuality. If you feel strongly about it, you are free to take your spiritual business elsewhere. It would have put the decision back where it needed to be with the woman who disagreed with the church. Let her decide how much she can take.

Unfortunately leaders in the Gay Community might feel the need to react to the Church. The best thing they can do is a mild reprimand saying that the Catholic Church shouldn’t act that way and forget it. Because the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality never changes, it is well known. So when the school banned Gay literature from the library, it shouldn’t have been that surprising to the mother. I am more surprised that the library already had these pro-Gay books in them in the first place. Once the Church banned the books, the mother was at choice. Sucking it up so her child could stay in a Catholic school or making an issue of it. She choose correctly but, in doing so, she now has to face the consequences. The Catholic Church has the every right to say the Church isn’t changing their teachings and we need to part ways.

The Gay Community should focus their efforts on protecting the rights we presently have won in civil life and not get sidetracked by an internal church dispute. If Gay Catholics and their supporters want to continue the good fight, by all means, let them. But given that the Church has dug in their heels over birth control and abortion, I doubt very much that things will change. I am having a difficult time getting upset about this. As far as I am concerned and as long as they aren’t calling for my execution or incarceration, it is none of my business.

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Moms for Liberty, a right wing group, recently quoted Hitler. It created a great deal of commotion. So much so that Lt. Gov. Robinson came to their defense. His awkward finesse was basically that just because Hitler and Mao were wrong about a lot of things doesn’t mean that they weren’t right about some things. As the old saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day. This doesn’t mean you should rely on that clock in any way.

As a rule of thumb, I think if you have a quote from a serial killing authoritarian and you want to use that quote as support for a position you are espousing, take a deep breath and, after regaining your senses, find another quote from someone less controversial, and when you are considering Mao and Hitler, this would be almost anybody, and use that instead. But never use the quote from the dictator. NEVER. It will only bring you heart ache.

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The discussion regarding the skills some enslaved people received is raging due to a Florida text book singing the praises of plantations at trade schools. I put my two cents in here.

What is interesting is that the a lot of conservative feedback is focusing on the truth of what is in the text book and not the relevance. The line causing the controversy is about the skills that a slave might acquire while working on a plantation which is really a weak way of trying to find something good about having been a slave.

I will let the historians debate the veracity of the statement because I think there is a bigger problem than the truth here. Who cares if it is true? How relevant is it to understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction. The vast majority of the slaves didn’t receive that training so when the Civil War ended the only skill they had was field work. That a few lucky individuals were blacksmiths while slaves and were able to take that skill and make a good life for themselves is a great story but not particularly illuminating on what happened to the millions who did not.

It is a trick. It allows Governor DeSantis to soften the horrible image that white children might conjure when they learn about their slave-holding ancestors. Because White children, for some reason, shouldn’t have to learn about how wretched the slaves were actually treated. Why they may begin to hate their ancestors? And I say good. It is about time.

This also exposes a much bigger problem with American History. There is a tendency to highlight the successes of a few individuals and say this is what is possible. This is actually what could happen to you. The other side of the story is downplayed. The millions of people who don’t make it out of poverty or don’t make a million dollars. Stories just as true as the success stories but, for some reason, we don’t want to tell. Numbers and statistics aren’t personal stories of success. They are abstract so the child can’t see themselves in this personal story even though it is every bit as likely, if not more likely, as making a million dollars.

All these complaints from employers who have to deal with young people with high expectations of their employment might be better addressed if we gave children a more realistic history of what might happen to them. They might understand that world a bit better and not be so disappointed when it doesn’t happen to them. Maybe we should teach them that hard work is often unrewarded. And talented people sometime go unrecognized. The good guys don’t always win. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes people, even leaders of our country, do horrible things. We want kids to have this glorified image of what America is when it is a lot more complicated than that.

There is this fear if children learn the truth that they will just give up on their country. The thing is they do eventually learn the truth but in the process they will also learn that people they trusted, the teachers and the parents played fast and loose with the truth. How is that better?

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Three 16 year old boys died in the past 5 weeks while working with big machinery.

One company explained that “the child ‘should not have been hired’ and that his age and identity were misrepresented on his hiring paperwork with an outside staffing company.” You don’t say. How innocent the company is acting? We were lied to and this poor unfortunate 16 year shouldn’t have been hired, we wouldn’t have hired him if only we had known his correct age.

For some reason I don’t believe it. Every employee has to provide proper documentation in order to work. The company has a responsibility to examine this documentation for validity. This is standard practice in place for some years. I used to do it in the 1980’s. HR departments should have this down. But OK, mistakes happen, perhaps a 16 year old was able to get a hold of a convincing fake document but a quick glance at the prospective employee might have set off some alarms. Somehow these boys with peach fuzz as beards were able to pass themselves off as older. Even if you accept that they are telling the truth, there is a frightening level of incompetence within the management of the company.

But I think this more than just an accident. One of the more illuminating giveaways that this is something more nefarious, is that it happened 3 teenagers at different companies and in different parts of the company met the same fate. This also might explain why Republican governors and legislatures, those champions of the working class, are loosening child labor laws. Companies are complaining that they are having trouble filling their open positions. Something must be done, so teenage labor is the solution to their problem.

Unfortunately, teenagers are banned from hazardous labor. No problem. These companies did a risk assessment about hiring underage employees. They figured out how much potential fines would be and then compared this to the price of raising wages and decided that paying the fines was the better deal. Higher wages are a sure thing while fines need only be paid if they get caught. Now that is a risk worth taking. They would probably have gotten away with it if nothing had gone wrong. This suggests that fines are too low. Fines should discourage companies from breaking the law, not be a factor in whether they are going to break the law or not.

But, saying that they can’t attract workers is misleading. These companies are having problems filling positions at the wage they want to pay. The wage isn’t enough to attract adults to perform an obviously hazardous job. When labor is scarce and the job is hazardous, the company needs to pay wages that attract the best workers. It is basic capitalism. They can’t just expect workers to risk life and limb for nothing. But, of course, these companies do.

What I find particularly irksome here is that these so called Capitalists only like Capitalism when it is to their advantage. When it isn’t, they moan to government for help — make the laws easier so we can hire people who will take the jobs at the rate we want to pay. Let in qualified immigrants who will take the lower wage. Hire teenagers who will take the lower wage. Boo hoo. Whatever they are, they aren’t good Capitalists.

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Governor Santis is having some effect in his effort to rid history text books of anything that might upset a student. A new Florida textbook now includes a statement that some slaves learned marketable skills from their time on the plantation. Really. You don’t say. That is the first time I’ve ever known that plantation doubled as trade schools. But interesting nonetheless.

So what it sounds like to me that there was some kind of trade off occurred here. The slaves worked the plantation while learning marketable skills that would help them in the future. Is this giving any 21st child any idea of what happened on a plantation? It is a completely meaningless statement without context of the time, the skills they are talking about, and whether they were relevant to the individual’s future.

History books have to cover hundreds of years and numerous topics. The history taught in the grade schools are broad brushstrokes focusing on the most important information. The things you would want children to remember. I challenge Governor DeSantis to show any Civil War historian who would prioritize the job training at plantation trade schools.

I am sure the publisher told some poor text book authors to make slavery sound a little less horrible and, after several stiff drinks, and failing to come up with anything, decided this little ditty would work. It’s incredibly weak and patently dishonest. There is some outrage about this now, so maybe something will happen. I’m not very confident though, unfortunately, there are so many things to be outraged about and so little time to focus on all of them.