Posted on

The World Is Ending. Michele Bachmann Says So.

I love this quote from the Daily Kos story:

Rep. Michele Bachmann is a member of Congress. She’s one of the people currently celebrating the shutdown of the American government as being a fine thing. She is on—and I am not making this up—the House Intelligence Committee.

This is a person who gained so much respect in her home district, where people KNOW her, that she has been repeatedly elected to public office — first the Minnesota state senate, later the U.S. House of Representatives — since 2000.

Which makes her voice more resonant than the guy standing on a corner mumbling about Jesus:

Now what this says to me, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ, as I look at the End Times scripture, this says to me that the leaf is on the fig tree and we are to understand the signs of the times, which is your ministry, we are to understand where we are in God’s End Times history.

Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand. When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah.

I’m out of the loop on whatever sect this phrase comes from — Maranatha Come Lord Jesus — but isn’t that a magical-sounding thing? Makes you want to throw it into your own conversations.

I took the dog for a walk today, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, and the fall colors were wonderful.

No, I did my homework, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, but my little brother tore it up.

Maybe we could start abbreviating it and it could replace LOL as a frequent interjection in online conversations:

You were drunk as hell at the party and took off your top in front of everyone, MCLJ!

The boss bent over at the water cooler yesterday, MCLJ, and it was like looking at the Grand Canyon, only with pimples and hair.

I also love this bit from Wikipedia:

Bachmann is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, the Federal Election Commission, the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee, the Urbandale Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of alleged campaign finance violations in her 2012 campaign for President.

And I especially like this:

On May 29, 2013, Bachmann announced that she would not seek re-election to her Congressional seat in 2014.

A little more than a year before the Bachmann Crazy Show goes off the air.

Posted on

Pain As a Monument to Life

The question always comes up: What do you say to someone who’s lost a loved one to death? How do you comfort them? Maybe the only useful answer is that there is no real comfort, and that that’s a good thing.

A few days ago I found a microcassette tape of my Cowboy Dad talking to me. The tape is nothing special, it’s just him sitting there in his living room talking. Teaching me something … and that was so HIM.

I wish I had more such tapes. I wish I had video. Jeez, I want HIM back. But I know I’m not going to get that. The rotten realization hits me yet again: I’ll go the whole rest of my life without him in it.

But I’m also thinking, you know, he had his moment in the sun. And this moment, THIS one, is mine. This is the moment in the sun of all of us, all we living people. And yeah, sadness is a part of it. We’ll always have that, those of us who feel real love, and lose it.

But this brief Moment, our moment, is also the only time we get for creating joy, for living our lives as our own selves, and discovering how much we can do with that.

That’s what we’re really about, isn’t it? Not just getting through the day, not just slinking through our lives making as little fuss as possible, not just dragging ourselves from one place to another and back over and over, but creating joy. DOING something joyous and big, and sharing it.

I suppose it’s irony that each next generation most strongly feels the sadness of losing us when we have created an environment of love, of the joys of life, for them to live inside. The sadness we feel at the loss of a loved one is the monument to a life well and lovingly lived.

In my view, nothing should be allowed to diminish that sadness, that monument. Not drugs, not religion, not well-meaning fantasies about better places and rainbow bridges.

When you lose someone you love, it should damned well HURT, and keep on hurting … until you rediscover the joys of life in your own time, hear the music of life again and find your feet dancing to it.

Every generation carries within it the darkness and pain of death, and yet manages to dance in the music and the sunshine of life.

It will happen for you.

Posted on

A Young Artist’s Heartbreak

You ever have the experience of finding something in your head you didn’t know was there?

I just had one of those moments. I’m not totally surprised to find it there — it’s based on a memory, after all. But it’s a leftover from, oh, about the age of 6 or so, and at my current age of 60, it’s just curious to find it still in there somewhere.

It has to do with how I felt about Crayola crayons. And the memory bubbled up at this bit on the ColourLovers site: All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts.

You remember when you were a kid how much you loved your Crayolas? You could do anything with those great colors. I wasn’t much of an artist when it came to creating original works on blank coloring paper, but I was pretty good at picking realistic colors to fill in pictures in coloring books.

I couldn’t match Michelle, of course. Michelle was the little girl in my class – maybe in every class – who could color things perfectly. She was the Winslow Homer of coloring books, so good at coloring she wowed even adults.

I still remember the alien perfection of her coloring. She not only picked the right colors, she had this way of bearing down at the edges of each coloring block so that it gained a special brilliance. Under Michelle’s hand and eye, simple line drawings in coloring books took on a life beyond what their creators dreamed, leaping off the page at you in smooth chromatic brilliance. She even put in extras, added lines of shading or definition to give depth to the flat images of kittens and frogs and cowboys.

And whereas I, with my 6-year-old hand-eye coordination, sometimes slipped and let the waxy color wander over a line, when the Crayon was in Michelle’s hand, not an atom of color lapped over.

Worse, she wasn’t even snotty about it, so I don’t get to remember her as a nasty little brat. She was sweet, even generous, about showing others how she did what she did. (Pfft. Rotten little minx. Today she’s probably on the board of Crayola, or a member of the Presidential Commission on Coloring Books.)

Anyway, coming across that listing of all the crayon colors, I felt a moment of … hurt.

Seriously.

My family was poor. Not starving and freezing poor, but raggedy-ass hand-me-down poor. Occasionally even charity-case welfare poor. I never lacked for my own socks and shoes, but until I was 13 or so I don’t think I wore a single shirt or pair of pants that hadn’t been worn by one or both of my older brothers. My “rich” uncle once bought me a chemistry set for Christmas that cost all of $15, and I felt like I was king of the world for months after.

The relative poverty played out in other ways. Toys were all hand-me-downs, or Goodwill acquisitions, and even so, there weren’t many.

Which leads me to Crayons.

They came in different-sized boxes. Still do, in fact, but I’m relating the memories of the 6-year-old at the center of this memory.

There was the 8-crayon box, which anybody could afford. Crayola says “8 ct. Crayola Crayons are the classic kids’ art tool. They are the colors generations have grown up with — includes red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple!”

There was the 16-crayon box, which included the coveted gold, silver and copper. There was the 24-crayon box, and then 48, which moved into ethereal realm of colors called yellow-green and sky blue and flesh.

There was the 64-crayon box, which I think I saw only a handful of times in my entire life, so I can’t say what colors it contained.

And then there was a box that contained 96 crayons. Ninety six!! Tangerine! Jungle Green! Fuschia! Red Violet! Royal Purple! Pacific Blue! Sea Green, Dandelion, Sepia!

The colors were ranked in disciplined rainbow rows in the huge box, like an invading Crayola army.

This was WEALTH. Raw, in-your-face goddam opulence.

Only two kids I ever met had it. Michelle was one. (The other was a kid in the 6th grade, long after any of us really cared about such things, so he doesn’t count.)

The first time that box came to school, it nearly caused a riot. Unheeding Miss Calvert’s orders, we left our seats to crowd around and gawk. There were gasps. There were wows. Even fat old Miss Calvert waddled over to marvel.

When Michelle opened that box for the first time, a kind of glow emerged, something like really religious people might imagine emanates from holy shrines. It wasn’t just glorious, it was Glory itself. Thinking about it now, I even seem to remember a sound, the distant choral notes of a heavenly choir (although this may only be the constant tinny whine in my aged ears) that accompanied the opening of the full 96-crayon box.

A brand new box of 96 crayons, in untouched splendor. Pristine tips. Not a scratch, not a tooth mark. Perfect, unpeeled paper covers. Unbroken. And the colors! None of us dared touch them, but Miss Calvert and Michelle read off their names as the rest of us stood in stunned, slack-jawed silence. Periwinkle? Cerulean? We’d never even heard of them.

Damn.

Eventually I went back to my desk and my own coloring book. I opened the page to the horse. I opened my own box of crayons. They were new and perfect, just as unbroken and unblemished as Michelle’s. But when I looked at my color selection, there was only red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, orange and purple.

I had the 8-color box.

Sweet, wealthy Michelle might have colored her horse brick red or mahogany, desert sand or almond, but I had only brown.

The memory ends there. Surely I picked up the brown and started coloring, doing the best I could with what I had. Even at the age of 6, you know life doesn’t end just because it hurts. And there’s a hazy something in my head that suggests that later in the year, Michelle even lent out certain colors to special friends, and that once or twice I qualified to borrow her sunset orange, or silver, or even copper.

But carried unnoticed and unsuspected across half a century, there’s still a tiny little wound on the heart of that 6-year-old boy.

Being poor sucks. Certainly there are plenty of children in the world who have less, and the sensible-adult me of today well knows it.

But 50-plus years later, there’s a 6-year-old in me that still yearns, impossibly and hopelessly, after Crayola’s Big Box.

And I still have no idea what periwinkle looks like.

————————————–

[Afternote: I looked up the history of Crayola on Wikipedia, and I’ve misremembered some of this. The 96-box came along well after I was in first grade. It was the 64-box I recall.]

Posted on

Beta Culture: Bridges and War and All Things Daft

I know there are people who don’t like driving across long, high bridges. I’m one of them, I guess, but my job requires me to gird my loins and cross the huge, 3-mile-long, almost-60-year-old  Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River near New York City twice a day.

The collapse of the Interstate 5 highway bridge in Mount Vernon, Wash., on Thursday, brought that roaring to mind over the past few days.

On days when traffic is slow and you’re standing still on the Tappan Zee — like yesterday evening during rush hour, with the roadway packed with the multitude fleeing the City for the Memorial Day holiday weekend — you can feel the thing flex and rumble under you. Not a day passes that I don’t think about what it would be like to fall 150 feet into the deep river, with deadly beams collapsing all around me.

Wikipedia says the Tappan Zee “was constructed during material shortages during the Korean War and designed to last only 50 years.” The really freaky thing about the Tappan Zee is that the roadway sometimes develops holes THROUGH WHICH YOU CAN SEE THE RIVER BELOW. They even have a name for the holes: punch-throughs. Sheee-it. Maintenance and repair crews work on the thing pretty much 24/7, but the beams overhead are covered with rust.

Wikipedia again (bold emphasis mine):

In 2009, the Tappan Zee Bridge was featured on The History Channel “The Crumbling of America” showing the infrastructure crisis in the United States. Many factors contribute to the precarious infrastructure of the bridge, which has been called “one of the most decrepit and potentially dangerous bridges” in the US. Engineering assessments have determined that “everything from steel corrosion to earthquakes to maritime accidents could cause major, perhaps catastrophic, damage to the span,” prompting one of the top aides in the New York state governor’s office to refer to the Tappan Zee as the “hold-your-breath bridge.” A 2009 state report noted that the bridge was not built with a plan that was “conducive to long-term durability” and that the Tappan Zee’s engineers designed it to be “nonredundant,” meaning that one “critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports.”

You catch all that? THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS IT’S DANGEROUS.  They haven’t fixed it. Just as so many bridges and overpasses in the U.S. haven’t been fixed.

But meanwhile, the United States spent close to a trillion dollars in destroying civilization in Iraq, at the orders of that brainless, gutless little shit George W. Bush. While our own infrastructure here at home was known to be crumbling, corporations that make weapons and military goods toddled off home with enough gold to make a pharaoh look like a filthy street beggar.

War has a price. Aside from the thousands of needless deaths of American’s young men and women, there’s the actual cost of war, and it is dramatically non-trivial. Estimates of the cost of the Vietnam War range from $150 billion to $584 billion. The cost of the combined Iraq-Afghanistan wars is upwards of $1.5 trillion. (Here’s a PDF with more on the cost of wars.)

Kids, if we’re counting the things we could’ve had if we hadn’t spent the  money on recent wars, that’s a FUCK of a lot of new bridges. High-speed rail routes and trains. Schools and teachers. Libraries. Parks and playgrounds. Hell, we could have thrown in free college educations for a million young Americans. So much, much more.

The reasons for this are way-hell more complicated than anything I can winkle out, but down at the most basic level, it seems to me it’s a failing of intellect, of the understanding of facts, of the desire to know true things and live in the real world. It’s the poison cranked every day out of a vast well of fantasy, wishful thinking and studied ignorance — plus the by-no-means-minor  willingness to be commanded, even owned — bequeathed to us by our thousands of years of religion.

None of this is anything we can afford for very much longer.

Nothing will stop it except sane, conscious effort.

By, you know, SOMEONE.

 

—————————–

Posted on

Congratulations! You May Already Be A Wiener!

Powerball Jackpot Winning Ticket Purchased In Florida

Here’s the truth: One person is going to win the Powerball Lottery. The other hundred million ticket purchasers (or however many there were) have already gotten screwed.

I make no secret of the fact that I despise lotteries. For so many reasons, but this main one: Government sponsored “games of chance” engineered to sucker hapless victims out of their money? Really? Really??

The lottery is one of those things – like smoking, or beating your wife, or slavery – that seems perfectly normal until you seriously start thinking about it and discover it’s actually immensely disgusting and immoral.

Millions of us DO think it’s perfectly normal. And not only that, but good. Hey, you could WIN. Millions! (Or in this case, six-tenths of a billion dollars.)

But … look at the real picture. For all those who don’t “win,” they have really and truly gone and put money into the thing and gotten nothing back. Week after week, nothing. They literally give away their money. Day after day, week after week, THEY GIVE AWAY THEIR MONEY.

It’s “give,” not “buy,” because a lottery ticket has no value.

Yes, yes, yes, I know some people get those little “wins.” But they’re not “wins” if they’re less than you’ve spent on the game to date. They are wholly temporary lend-backs of your own money, made in the confident certainty that you’re hooked and will come back to regift it to the game in the near future.

Face it, would you “play” the lottery if it was just a box with a hole in the top of it, and the deal was you could just walk past periodically and toss $5, $10 or more into the hole? Yet this is almost exactly what millions of people do. The weakest among us, those incapable or unwilling to analyze what’s really being done to them, throw their money into a hole.

But because a myth is built up around this “game,” the myth of “You could win millions of dollars,” and because so many of us are suckers for a myth, especially one that tells us we will almost certainly win fantastic wealth (or immortality, or paradise), it works. We can be manipulated into GIVING AWAY billions of dollars of real money, money that could be spent on our own needs, or on real charity, or hell, on building a city on the moon.

I know what an idiot I am. But it’s when I see what idiots other people can be, millions and millions of us, that I really start to get disturbed. If the world is crazy enough to accept something like the Lottery, because “Hey, it doesn’t matter, it’s only a few dollars a week,” because “I only buy a ticket when the jackpot is really big,” I really do despair of anything good coming of us.

Posted on

4th Grade Quiz: Four Ways Not to be Fooled

“What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhino?”  goes the old joke. The answer: Elephino (hell if I know)!

To the question of whether the attached image is the real thing, that’s the best I can figure out. (Click to see it full-size.)

I saw it this morning on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason Facebook page, a link shared by J.O., commenter from Gothenburg, Sweden. The original image appears to be from Imgur.

The Imgur side-caption says the picture was posted 14 hours ago (from the time I write this), and has 473,915 views.

Both images are purported to be an “Actual 4th grade science test from a school in SC.”

Real or not? I’m still looking into it. The thing is, the image strains my mind enough that I’m afraid it’s a fake. Nobody could be teaching THAT, could they?

On the other hand, for entirely different reasons, I’m afraid it’s real. Yeah, they COULD be teaching that.

But is it real? Given the daily demands of our individual lives, most of us will gloss over the question and settle for our simple reaction. But … for every lie tossed out there, someone has to look into it and report back to the rest of us, and maybe sometimes that person should be you. First so you can satisfy yourself about what sorts of things take place in the real world, second so you can report back.

But also, and very importantly, so you can defend yourself against manipulation. If you have a “button” that can be pushed, so that you react in a predictable way every single time it’s pushed, there are people who will find a way to use that against you. There’ s a whole industry of button-pushers out there, sad to say, and they’re experts at getting us to jump in ways that benefit them. And jump not just as individuals, but as HERDS of us, stampeding here and there at the will of the whip-wielders driving us.

There are a few powerful tools that can keep you safe from that.

First is Reason itself. Consider the thing before you on its face, calmly and carefully looking for logical fallacies, faulty assertions, outright lies, all the hints of falseness and foolery.

Second but simultaneous is the willingness to look beneath the surface of the thing, to seriously investigate it, to follow leads in as many directions as you can, so you’ll have something to reason about.

Third is this: Band together with a community of like-minded reasoning people so you have brothers-in-arms to wade into the thing with you, or in your stead. Trust them to help you. Encourage their own trust, in return, by being trustworthy.  (Never lie to them, never fool them, never play jokes on them for your own amusement.)

Fourth is your own individuality, which serves as your personal defense against both the original whip-crackers and your own people (who sometimes make mistakes, and even conduct their own stampedes, as I hope we all know).

So here’s me investigating: I first looked at the Dawkins page, then the Imgur link, enlarging both to be sure I was looking at the same image.

The sheet looks real enough. The “Smile” sticker is a believable touch, as is the “100 A+” in red pencil. The handwriting might be a bit too good for a 4th grader (10 or 11 years old, here in the U.S.), but it’s within the range of possibility. I noted the date on the page: March 28, 2013. Recent. But again, where?

Second, I read the caption and comments on the Dawkins site. One suspicious detail is that there’s no further information. South Carolina where? Which school? Who originally found it and brought it to light?

I clicked the link and went to the Imgur site. No detail there, but there is a second page attached, a partial page showing the question “18. The next time someone says the earth is billions (or millions) of years old, what can you say?” With a scribbled-in answer: “were you there”.

Next, I opened a Google Image Search, dragging the image from the Imgur page into the search window, where I got a small number of hits, only one of which was new, and germane.

Look at comments on the Science Fact page. Though most are of the shock-and-horror variety, there is one that appears seriously sympathetic to the religious viewpoint:

Lee Swanson: There are so many theophobes and anti-religious bigots here. It’s hard to believe all the hate. I think what I am seeing is that many are offended, probably because you don’t like the implication that you were created. If you were created, you might have to change your like style because there is a God from whom you need forgiveness. Also, do all you evolutionists really think you are so logical and scientific when you believe in any idea except the one that make the most sense. For example: There are only four logical possible explanations for the existence of the universe. 1. It came from nothing by nothing, which is what many evolutionists believe. This is scientifically impossible. 2. It is eternal. Finite, contingent things cannot be eternal. We still acknowledge a cause and effect universe, so eternality is not an option. 3. It is an illusion and the universe really isn’t here. (eastern religions). 4. Someone or something (God) outside of the universe brought it into existence. Go ahead, evolutionists, pick option one, but then you have to acknowledge you are clinging to your own religion based on faith, not fact or science.

So there’s reason to believe that there are people out there willing to defend this stuff, if not on its face then at least by attacking any critics as mere haters.

I checked with Snopes.com, and searched “4th Grade Science Quiz” and “Science Quiz,” but got no useful hits.

I would strongly doubt it’s in a public school. Even in South Carolina, some parent would eventually react. If it’s real, this would be either a private Christian school or a home-school.

Okay, that’s the thing itself. What about the thing beyond the thing? In other words, who and why and where and when?

If it’s real, it’s scary on its own, and deserves further investigation about where and why this is being allowed. But there’s still the question of motivation.

One possible motivation is that it came from a parent who dares not get involved, but who wants someone to do something about it. So this would be someone on our side of the fence.

A second motivation would also involve someone from our side, someone not directly involved but who also wanted something done. This one seems less likely; one of us would have posted the full details of where and when this took place, so we COULD respond to it.

If it’s not real — if somebody faked it up — questions about who did it and why arise. The existence of it suggests that whoever did it would know there’d be some sort of shock-and-outrage reaction from people in the pro-science, pro-education, anti-religious-indoctrination camps. The joker’s motive is opaque, of course, but it would seem likely to be the simple tweaking of noses, the desire to stir up outrage and then laugh about it privately.

But the possibility that it’s a “herder” bears thinking about too. Just because you’re NOT paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t people out to get you. Or control you. And this thing is rather professional looking, don’t you think?

So: Are we being herded? Who would benefit? Not enough information; shelve it for now but keep it in mind. (Also keep in mind that it could even be someone in our own camp.)

Whether the joker is churchy or freelance, he/she knew we’d react to it, and probably how. We haven’t disappointed him.

Pending further information, I tend to lean very slightly toward thinking this might be fake.

I hope it is.

Posted on

Disturbing Early Morning Thought

great-ozIf you lived with someone who had done EVERYTHING, say a superstar father or mother – a famous author or adventurer or actress or athlete – how would you gain a sense of your own worth and value? How hard would it be to chart your own life course? To find and develop your own talents?

Would you live your whole life feeling inferior and lesser? Knowing that you could never do or be anything unique, that you would always live in the giant shadow of their spectacular accomplishments, that by comparison you were nothing and nobody, and always would be, would you give up even trying to write or act or adventure or compete?

If your father were a world-famous philosopher and and thinker, and you were made to believe over and over that your thoughts were juvenile and empty, that nothing you could think of on your entire best day could equal what went on in your father’s mind in one second, that all the amazing and profound and true thoughts about how to think and live and understand had already been thought, that you would be inevitably wrong in every new and different thing you tried to think, would you bother to try to think on your own? If you knew you could never match the power or understanding of this huge mind in your life, would you place any value AT ALL on your own inner voice?

It occurs to me that this is one of the hidden prices of religion.

Belief in an all-powerful supernatural superbeing might not have a definable effect on any one particular person, but as a statistical force, a steady pressure upon hundreds of generations of children and then the billions of adults they become – squeezing them down into that mindset of hopeless subservience, of creative and inventive futility – I simply can’t imagine it not having a blanket effect upon the people within it.

It would, without question, diminish and retard the progress of the entire civilization in which it took place.

Posted on

Adventures in Cholecystectomy Land – Part 2

Argh. Survived. Recovering. Also caught a cold, so that makes it extra fun.

Maunderings on Facebook and elsewhere, before, during (sort of) and after:

After my cholecystectomy tomorrow, I expect to make medical history by being the first person ever to suffer the gallbladder version of PLP (phantom limb pain).

A few hours sleep, then up early for surgery, something new and scary in my life. Dang it, wish I could talk to my Dad. I really am a little bit scared, and he’d tell me “You’re gonna be just fine, Hank.” Continue reading “Adventures in Cholecystectomy Land – Part 2”

Posted on

Interlude, With Gall Bladder

roboticIf you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting, I’m having a certain amount of pain pretty much every day, and it’s sharply diminished my writing output.

I feel like a sissy saying it, considering what Greta Christina and Ed Brayton have gone through recently (and kept writing!), but … you know, you have deal with your own experience, and this has been a low-level but definite ass-kicker.

In a few days, I’ll be going to the local hospital for the preadmission tests. My gallbladder and I are parting company a week from Friday.

I’ve had two actual attacks, and you DON’T want to know what it’s like. Women who’ve had ‘em have said the pain compares to that of childbirth. In my case, the last time it happened, the stabbing, blooming, attention-consuming pain radiated into my back and chest and just left me gasping. Continue reading “Interlude, With Gall Bladder”