NEON GODS

Still waiting for that NYTimes gig...

Like you I get lots of spam.  Most are obviously spam, but every once in awhile one looks almost legitimate.  And sometimes legitimate emails look like spam.  A few weeks ago I got a suspicious email from a magazine reporter saying he had read one of my blog posts and asked if I would agree to an interview with him. Yeah, Right! Do I look like a fool?

But my ego got the best of me and I replied.

It was legitimate.  He was a reporter for a online religious magazine and he wanted my opinion on a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who was questioning the existence of hell.  I had written a post about the preacher about a year ago.  As it turns out I declined to be interviewed because I didn't feel qualified to discuss something I knew little about. In the end we agreed to let him include a paragraph in an email I had sent him as part of our discussion.

The reporter, Raymond Billy, notified me yesterday that his article had been posted and sent me a link. I just find it ironic that I'm quoted in a magazine about religion. What I really want is for the NYTimes to drop Ross Douthat and give the slot to me.

Still waiting...

--Trakker

WOW!

Way to go Giants!

I've never seen a team turn their season around as abruptly as the Giants did this year.  What a great game!

(I just want to remind everyone the Washington Redskins beat the Giants twice this year.  Guess what team I follow?)

--Trakker

 

What's behind the tea party's rage?

Things have been kind of tough for us liberals lately, haven't they?  The right has been  pecking away at a lot of the progressive programs and regulations and environmental victories we've won over the years, and they've done a pretty damn good job of demonizing us at the same time.  However, with the advent of the tea party they have gone from being extremely annoying to outright nihilistic, even to the point where many were advocating that America default on our debt payments and bring down the government!  Wow!!

How about a little perspective.

I'm 66 years old and in my lifetime liberals have had a lot of successes and have made a HUGE difference in America.  When I was a kid Jim Crow laws were enforced in the south, now we have a black President. When I was a kid women were stuck in the home, or could work as nurses or teachers, little else.  Now women are CEOs, scientists, and run for President.  Today abortion is legal, gay marriage is fast becoming acceptable, interracial marriage is not even controversial anymore.  And for every major liberal win, the conservatives have been getting more and more pissed off about how the country is going to hell!!!  

Put yourself in their place.  How would you feel if our side kept losing year after year after year?  And not small losses either, but huge monumental losses such as complete equality for blacks and women, and the acceptance of gay marriage by a slim majority.  These and other major progressive improvements have been huge, humiliating losses for conservatives and hard core bigots over the years.

But now they believe they have FINALLY managed to get the upper hand, and By God they're going to punish us liberals and Democrats, even if it means destroying our country, because chaos and anarchy is better than seeing blacks elected president and gays getting married, and having lawyers tell them they can't force kids in school to pray to their God.

This is all about pent up anger and frustration, and those on the right, especially in flyover country, somehow believe that 90% of the country thinks like they do, and in 2012 they are going to finally wipe out the left once and for all!

They don't realize that the pendulum is beginning to swing back our way and is just about to smack them in the head and squash them flat.  You can bet the farm on that!

--Trakker

Starve the beast, gun violence, and hot, hot weather

Usually July and August are slow and quiet when it come to politics.  Whew, not this year!  We are seeing just how rabid the right has become, willing to crash our economy to make a point: no new taxes, not now, not ever!  Starve the beast.  Never mind that the "beast" they want to starve created the middle class, and made us no.1 in the world in almost every measurable category.

Fortunately we've been too busy here to pay much attention to the debt ceiling show.  We spent the past week getting the West Virgina cabin in order for family and friends who will be visiting soon.  We had to move the kayaks to the lake, and once there we couldn't resist an afternoon paddle on a very hot day.  Thursday it hit 88 degrees here on the mountain.  I've never seen it hotter than 83 here before.  No one out here has air conditioning so we sweated along with the rest of the east coast, except 88 was far more tolerable than the 104 back home!

I'm beginning to wonder when the American people are going to realize that gun violence in America is out of control?  I get select Associated Press feeds on my Kindle, updated hourly, and it seems like every day now there are stories of mass shootings. Just from this morning's feed, here is the story of a gun owner at a family outing in Texas who killed 5 and wounded 4, before shooting himself.  Here is the story of a gun owner who shot 12 people at a car show near Seattle.  Also, the number of cops who have been shot and killed has been escalating for the past year.

Ever since the conservatives took over the country with the election of Ronald Reagan our country has been regressing in so many ways.  And this is just the beginning, If the right gets it's way.  Our infrastructure will crumble, we will be sponsoring less and less research, and fewer of our kids will ever get a college education.  This is our future unless the American people rebel and push the loonies back under their rocks.

--Trakker

How can I bame this on the Republicans?

The temperature here in DC hit 99 yesterday.  I was packing up the car to head for the cooler temps in West Virginia when I noticed the house was getting uncomfortably warm.  Found out our air conditioner compressor died.  Called our AC company and they said Tuesday at the earliest - unless we're willing to pay overtime rates.  If so, then maybe Saturday.

Today is even hotter. We have all the fans going but it's still damn uncomfortable (how did I survive my whole childhood without air conditioning??). 

It seems to be harder on the cats than us.  They look like limp rags.  Poor things can't take cold showers like we can!

--Trakker

Skull of Patron Saint of Genital Disease For Sale

Here's the headline:

Decapitated Head Of St. Vitalis, Patron Saint Of Genital Disease, To Be Sold At Auction

Yes, evidently Catholics have a patron saint for everything.  No doubt there is a person employed in the Vatican whose job it is to keep track of all these weird saints.  I keep telling my son, "NO, you don't have the suckiest job in the universe."  Maybe now he'll listen.  Oh, be sure to read the article, although if I had a choice between that and trimming my toenails with my teeth, I'd be taking off my socks right now.

--Trakker

Willing victims, asking for more.

One of the strangest truths I've learned in the last 30 years is that you can screw the American people and they will beg for more!

You can send our jobs overseas, you can declare war against any country and we'll send our kids to fight it, you can tap our phones, lie to us, keep secrets form us, throw our citizens in jail for the most minor infractions, you can tase us, break into our houses - and punish us if we fight back, you can crash our economy, you can destroy our middle class, you can cut our benefits, cut our pensions, reduce seniors to beggars, you can destroy our unions, you can demean our teachers, you can ignore our infrastructure, you can make us pay more for our medical care than anyone else in the world, you can ignore the uninsured and let them die prematurely, you can make our rich richer while the rest of us struggle, you can insist scientists are stupid and God created the earth 6,000 years ago, you can buy our political system, you can grant corporations citizenship and let them buy elections, you can abuse us any way you want and we will not get angry or fight back.  We are victims and many of us want even more abuse: turn the country over to the very wealthy and the corporations and let them make the decisions.  They know what's best for America. God, and St. Ronnie said so, so it must be true.

Am I right?

--Trakker

Rain, boring stuff, and the remarkable Cleveland Indians.

You don't care, of course, why I've been silent recently.  I'm at the cabin in West Virginia preparing for the coming Board meeting of which I'm a member (homeowner's association, an election even I could win).

The winters out here are brutal, and by April warm, sunny spring weather to us is like gold to a pirate.  But it is missing this year.  11 inches of rain in April alone and it has rained steadily for the last 6 days.  Argggggh!  The trails are under water, our dirt roads are mud.  Maybe that's good because preparations for the coming meeting have required many hours of conversations and even more writing reports (it's a rather large association). 

I have found a substitute for the missing sunny days however: the lowly Cleveland Indians.  My Indians have begun the season at 25-13 (best in the majors) and they won last night by the rediculous score of 19-1.   Even Mitch McConnell can't quell my baseball excitement!

--Trakker

We think 91% of Blacks are too ignorant to vote, but don't call us racists.

I think it is safe to say that the Republican party uses code words that appeal to racists.  It's pretty obvious that a fair number of Tea Partiers are racist.  But when you call these people out, you get outraged denials like, "We're not racist!" or "No, it's the Democrats and liberals who are the real racists."

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that racists don't recognize their racism.  For example, a great many believe that most Blacks in this country are welfare cheats, thus making hard-working (white) taxpayers pay for their food and shelter while they have trouble paying for their own bills.  So they aren't anti-Black when they demand that we end these programs, they are anti-cheating.  Do you see the logic?  Me either.

I just finished watching the Tea Party video below and it positively drips of hatred for non-whites and Muslims, and yet the asshole talking is certain he's not being a racist, just a good American fighting to keep his country white and Christian like it used to be.

Just a warning, do not watch this video if you are currently nauseated, or if you have a history of heart trouble, this might trigger something dangerous and I don't want to lose any of my meager readership.

(h/t angryblacklady.com)

--Trakker

Oh, NOW I understand.

Back when I was a kid going to school I was always a step behind my math teachers.  I never had a problem with real numbers: if I have 2 apples and Cindy takes 1 of them, I still have 1 apple, right?  Fine. 

Then came fractions.  How can I have 1 2/3 apples??  Like who's measuring?  But I finally caught on, just in time to find out there are also things called negative numbers:  If I have two apples and Cindy steals three of them....what?   Oh, I see, bad example.  Then they tried to convince me that there are letters that can be numbers, like x, but you don't know what that number is, and it is YOUR job to figure what it is.  OMG!  They are trying to destroy my brain!

But they weren't done, then came equations with more than one letter in them: a, b, c.  And then, once you finally accept that as fact (and hadn't dropped out of school yet), they  began subtly throwing in Greek letters that weren't even in our alphabet.  OMFG!

Yes, I was always a year behind and making a fool of myself.  My final wretched question was always, "What will I ever use this for?"

Then came the bomb, Imaginary Numbers, a concept so foreign to my literal mind that to this day I have never figured out what they are and who would ever use them.  The only time I ever tried using one was once on a math quiz there was an equation I couldn't figure out so as an answer I wrote "it's obviously an imaginary number."  There was nothing imaginary about the "D" I got on that quiz.

But now I know who uses imaginary numbers, and why.  The Republicans use imaginary numbers when they create budgets, and for that reason alone, I suspect, this is why the Washington pundits are so damn impressed with Paul Ryan's budget proposal that everyone is gushing over even though the numbers don't add up.  He actually used those Imaginary Numbers that stymied us all our lives. The man is a frickin' genius!  I'm even a bit jealous that he's been able to pull it off in front of the entire country, and I couldn't even trick my math teacher...  :(

--Trakker