Posts Tagged ‘religion’

THE NON-PRESIDENT

Posted: April 10, 2020 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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The following will be excerpts from an article penned by Mr. Peter Wehner, a lifelong Republican. He is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

He writes, Trump is fundamentally unfit—intellectually, morally, temperamentally, and psychologically—for office. Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them!

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism, and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

He states that Trump could not have prevented the coronavirus from happening or entering the United States. That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain.

We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)

The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Dr. Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” 

The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

This from me, the lies just keep on coming!

From the article, Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low! Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.

The following excerpt is one I have long agreed with and promoted in my blogs, on Facebook, Twitter, and anyone I could get to listen. Here is what Peter Wehner had to say;

Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

Now for my personal closing for this blog.

From the first time I saw Trump in action, long before he became President of these United States, I saw him as an immoral con man. He was always suing someone or being sued, more than any professional entity ever in history! He mostly threatened to sue because he had not paid his debts, knew that a lengthy lawsuit would ruin the people he owed, so he was able to get them to agree to pennies on the dollar for their debt! He has done this time and time again. He has also been sued by the federal govt for refusing to sell or rent to people of color, with his Daddy once, and Donald himself twice! He has cheated on each wife! Usually with the next wife, and the current one (The First Lady) with a porn star while she was pregnant with their son! He has had black people removed from the floor of his casino while he and his wife were there, made remarks in public about how blacks could not help it, they just were not equipped to handle anything complicated. And this is the guy you voted for? This is the guy you think is your moral compass. This is the guy you think has been sent by God to save you? Well, my friends, you are just not thinking. And what your support says about you is not flattering, by any definition!

 

 

 

Does College Make you Liberal

Posted: October 4, 2018 in News and politics
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There are several reasons that the answer is highly educated may make you liberal, not the college experience per say! The conservative mantra that colleges are nothing more than evil liberal training grounds is a political move. It gives their base someone to hate for their plight, along with immigrants and people of color being the reason for all of the ills in life confronting them!

One of the reasons is, as you get more educated, you are introduced to a wider variety of cultures that you might have been afforded living in a microcosm before college. Your parent’s friends would tend to only be people who mirrored themselves! They would also tend to live in communities that also mirrored their belief system if possible. It is also true that high school students who are liberal tend to also go to college in much greater numbers! Hence a more liberal college population results! It has nothing to do with the college experience itself in that case.

Another possibility might be the growing numbers of women getting college degrees. Women, in general, tend to vote with the Democratic Party more than men. So as the population of highly educated people grew more female, that may have swung it left.

Third, the mainstream population that is conservative tends to be less educated! They do not tend to trend towards the highly educated or attend college, 31 percent of people with post-grad educations are consistently liberal, compared to 5 percent of those with high school educations or less according to the poll I saw! My own research tends to tell me this is factual even if the figures are not exact! Take that as you will, but it was not meant as any kind of detrimental slight! I myself have no college degree. I have gone to college a lot off and on, been to and graduated from several trade schools, let the military educate me to work on computer warfare aircraft in avionics, but basically, I am self-educated. I am liberal in case there was some doubt, but I have no formal college degree!

Yes, rich kids tend to be conservative also, and yes they tend to get educated, but they also tend to stay away from science-related pursuits! They tend to favor education that will help guarantee them a lifetime of successful avenues to get money and to keep it. Ok, not a sin, but you take a look at your GOP Senators, for example. A lot of lawyers, business majors, etc., you find not many scientists among them, no evolutionary biologists, no paleontologists, no teachers, you see where I am going. So you tend to only get a House or Senate with people of one mindset in that party. The other side of the aisle has a tendency to also come from that same background I freely admit that! You will find in the Democratic Party, however, more than a few with degrees in education, or science degrees, way more than you will in the GOP.

Also, if you are religious, especially those influenced by evangelicals, you will, even though highly educated, shy away from any form of study that makes you uncomfortable with what your Bible teaches! So we tend to have a lot of politicians who have absolutely no background in science as it makes them uncomfortable. It also makes them dangerous when it comes to being put in charge of entities whose whole being is based on science. NASA and the EPA are prime examples. You can talk about big government and over-regulation all you want, but big government is what you have right now under the current administration, and getting bigger and narrower in its scope and understanding every day!

These are a few ideas that have come out of this administration. Radiation is good for you, just like sunlight as long as it is moderate! Asbestos, one of our biggest killers, is safe! Dumping into streams and rivers is ok again! The clean air initiative is too extreme, so just get rid of it altogether. Oh, and let’s sue any state that still wants to make clean air a priority! Some GOP states have actually made mentioning climate change illegal; one has stated that you cannot connect rising sea level data to any study of climate change, even though their coastlines are in extreme danger! The white house has actually instructed that anything to do with climate change should just be ignored!
Is this really what you want? Sure the government is full of red tape and it is cumbersome and that does need to be fixed. But these cuts in protections all have one thing in common, a greater profit margin for big business and no concern for health issues. That cannot be the standard!

So, my point is, getting educated in itself tends to make you liberal, it is not that colleges are some kind of evil cabal indoctrinating our youth, they are just thinking for themselves, which has never been good for conservatives. Red states tend to be less educated with a poorer population on average! They also tend to be in need of more welfare than blue states, so why would they want to leave control in their state to the GOP whose leadership is responsible for the condition they find themselves in! Well, in this case, I say they are the ones being indoctrinated, why else would they vote against their own well-being!

I will not go into any moral issues I have with the President and the GOP, as they are more numerous than snowflakes in a blizzard! I just have to believe we will come to our senses at some point!

Two Funerals and a Wedding

Posted: August 28, 2018 in News and politics
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This is an excerpt from an article written by Noah Bierman and published in the L.A. Times!

“Sen. John McCain’s decision to exclude President Trump from his funeral is an extraordinary moment on its own; a posthumous rebuke from an American icon that regarded the presidency as sacred, and believed its current occupant defiles that office!

Yet Trump’s exclusion from such high-profile events of mourning and celebration — where American presidents are typically counted on to stand in for an entire nation — is emerging as a pattern over his 19 months in office.
In April, Trump was asked to stay away from the funeral of Barbara Bush, wife to one president and mother of another, leaving it to former Presidents Clinton and Obama to serve as national consolers to the Bush family. In December, he opted to skip the president’s traditional attendance at the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala after several of the artists being feted threatened a boycott.
The British royal family dispensed with inviting foreign dignitaries to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in May partly to avoid having to invite Trump, whom Markle had attacked as “divisive” and “misogynistic.”

End of Excerpt!

In the words of John Love for the rest of the article, there are several more examples, but two funerals and a wedding pretty much sum up how Trump is viewed here and abroad!

Trump got into office by using fear of race, religion, resentment, insults, and lashing the immigrant to his whipping post for most of our problems, anyone not Christian for the rest!

This is indicative of how he is seen, and an embarrassment for the U.S. on the world scene and yes, here at home. Despite what Trump says, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, he is alienating our long-time allies, making a world war more likely again, and in the long term his bullying, because that is what it is, using tariffs to do so, is going to backfire on our economy. Trump has always been a bully and dreams of being large and in charge of the world! Beware your support you are only endangering yourselves.

When has the United Nations needed to castigate the United States for human rights violations before Trump? Never in our history before is the answer! Why would the United States, a champion of human rights pull out of the U.N. Human Right Council? Because it does not go along with Trumps hate and fear policies, think about it!

So our allies exclude him from what is normally a President’s privilege, and a President’s family and Senator from his own party have excluded him from attending their funerals. Trump, exhibiting his total lack of class, refused to lower the flag at half mast for John McCain until he was lambasted with complaints from both political parties and veterans groups! Again, think about it, is this the man you want representing you to the rest of the world, or a man you believe is really interested in helping anyone but himself? Do you get it now?

Forbidden Writings of Jesus Discovered

Posted: December 7, 2017 in Christmas, Life, News and politics, science
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Biblical scholars at the University of Texas, Austin have discovered an oldest known copy of a heretical Christian writing that describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his brother James. The biblical texts, which relate to the First Apocalypse of James, contain information about the heavenly realm and future events, including James’ inevitable death, according to news…

via Researchers Discover Forbidden Texts Of Jesus’ Secret Revelations To His Brother James — Sparkonit

I Look and Listen Differently, then Think!

Posted: October 8, 2017 in Health and wellness, Life
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I look at things differently than most folks. But here is my quarter cuz 2 cents won’t do it! The world is overpopulated, people are just not going to give up sex, just is not gonna happen! Our resources are already strained and our planet being too crowded causes most of our pollution. So, what do you do to lower the world’s population? You make birth control and sex education available everywhere to everyone. Now certain religions harp on you to have a dozen or so kids. This was their effort to make more Catholic babies, or Protestant babies, Muslim, Hindu; you see where I am going here! They wanted a majority, so they mandated large families within their respective religious communities. Going to have to get over that! I am not talking abortion, to hot to handle! If you are going to start talking birth control is a killer, well you are a problem that has to be dealt with. I personally do not believe I have any right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her own body, so I will leave it at that! We are scheduled to double our population in just a few decades, and your children’s children will be living in chaos! Now some white folks are saying that only white people will hold back on large families and babies of color will overrun us, and eventually we will be a minority! So what! I am already a minority in California and it has not hurt me one bit! I say everyone marry outside your race, so in a few generations everyone has a nice light tan and the race issue goes away! If you notice, mixed race marriages make some really beautiful and bright children! It is like Mother Nature said wow, you have finally quit marrying into the same gene pool, and look at me cook now! I would have said to also marry outside your religion, but I did not want to start another war! However, after a few generations, everyone would have a totally different attitude about religion. I mean, how do you wage war on your spouse or your own grandchildren. I guess waging war on a spouse is not unheard of, but you get my drift!

 

Dictatorship!

Posted: February 7, 2017 in News and politics
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You see the word dictatorship and immediately think of those other 24 countries in the world under a dictator! Well I am here to tell you that somebody in the White House thinks we should be one too! I say someone because I am not absolutely certain who it is that’s in charge! So let me remind you of how certain things have gone in the first few days of Trumps Presidency that make me think this might have weight!

Do not fool yourselves into thinking that this is not a serious discussion because it is way beyond serious! This is a disaster of epic proportions. Most recently our President was telling the military that the media is covering up terror attacks to make him look foolish! As if they could stay away from the type of news that increases viewership and rakes in the dough! You know where our esteemed leader got that information? He got it from avidly watching Alex Jones, you know that guy from Infowars! Yep the guy who says Sandy Hook never happened, that every law enforcement entity in the country and President Obama faked the whole thing! He also thinks that the Super Bowl halftime show by Lady Gaga was a message straight from the Goddess of Satan! Trump is, as I said an avid watcher and where he got the idea about media covering up terrorist attacks. It is a shame that we are now setting policy for the United States of American from information we got from a guy with a microphone, the internet, a few flat screens for a backdrop, and a garage to put them in! As a result Trump has been attacking the media as dishonest anytime they disagree with his alternate facts! He claims the polls were fixed; voting totals have been skewed in Hillary’s favor, I mean he thinks he actually won the popular vote! Now he is calling out the judiciary. Not for the first time, but it is getting worse. He is now labeling a federal judge a “so called” judge! He also put the blame for any attack on the U.S. directly on this man’s shoulders, giving him someone to blame when all this hate he spews backfires in his face! He might get this judge killed with his recklessness. At the very least it will garner him some threats! Trump, as any citizen, has the right to disagree, but he is calling out this man’s right to be a judge as President of the United States! Checks and balances of the office of the Presidency and political parties are a separate judiciary and an honest and engaged media! So if you want to be a dictator the first thing you do is surround yourself with a small cabal of cronies, you demote the people who are actually qualified to be making policy and could point out your flaws, then you attack the media and the judiciary! Look up any strongman regime past or present and that is how it has always been done! So now, for my part, I am trying to decide if Trump is trying to set himself up as a strongman dictator, or is his mental instability the problem? He definitely does not know what a democracy is! He does not know how to use the tools at his disposal because he cannot give up the absolute control he craves and use the CIA, the Pentagon, FBI, or Homeland! He wants to tell them what to do, and what conclusions to draw, basically castrating them! It will all end badly if we get lazy and quit. Those people that say he is our President now so let it alone and quit crying are dead wrong. It is our duty to hold an immoral mentally unstable man to the fires of truth, moral fiber, and national stability! All this constant spewing of hatred will sour our national resolve, change who we are at our core! Instead of the land of the free, we will be known as the land of the vindictive, the do as we say or suffer the big stick we swagger about with! Let’s not forget stay the hell out if you are not white and Christian!

Just Think About It!

Posted: February 5, 2017 in News and politics
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The latest executive order signed by Trump orders the labor dept. to explore ways to either get rid of the Feduciary rule or reduce its effectiveness. It also orders the date it was supposed to go into effect to be put off.

The fiduciary rule simply requires the retirement fund managers overseeing your 401(k) or IRA to actually act in your best interest—rather than sacrificing your interests for their own personal gain. It is estimated that retirement accounts across the country lost a total of $17 billion per year due to investment advice that clearly isn’t in the consumer’s interest. The reason is rampant kickbacks that financial advisers receive when they recommend certain financial products to their clients. It’s far too easy for an adviser to sell just one annuity, regardless of whether it is a prudent choice for the investor, when a free vacation or an international cruise is waiting for him on the other side of the sale! So why would anyone in their right mind want to get rid of such a common sense ruling to protect our hard earned investments in our future! See next paragraph and I will tell you!

Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs president who now heads Trump’s National Economic Council rolled this out Thursday night. You got that right, a former president of an entity this rule was supposed to protect our retirement and IRA funds from! Trump is already working on getting rid of Dodd-Frank, which prohibited banks from gambling with our money, and having to be bailed out when the gamble failed causing the whole depression in the first place, I am sure under advisement from the other Wall Street people in his administration! How bad do they think our memory is! Even worse, how stupid do they think we are?

I know you guys, by you guys I mean Trumpers, because all conservatives are not Trumpers, think the ban on refugees was the thing to do. We will not get into the religious test, you know, priority to Christians on immigration status, which is expressly forbidden in plain language in the constitution, we will save that for another time. Besides Christians are not innocent when it comes to terrorism! Now Buddhists should be a better pick! They have engaged in wars, but not terrorism in the modern sense, although they have been known to set themselves on fire in protest! But instead lets focus on just who got banned! Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Two things immediately standout with this list of countries! The most glaring is that not one terrorist who has been tracked or caught attacking the U.S. has come from any of these countries! The next little fact is that Trump does not have any major business interests with these countries! The 19 terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks however, were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates and these countries were not included, why? Well the fact is that Trump has business dealings with these countries that have actually spawned terrorists, but somehow got left off the list of banned countries. He is also actively looking at future opportunities in those countries. So if you hold that a ban was necessary, then you have to concede that this executive order was ill conceived and worthless in its power to protect us as written!

So I ask you, is this good business for you and me! Think about it, hasn’t Trump already done in two weeks pretty much everything he was accusing Hillary of doing? Private phone, private email, filling his cabinet full of wall street millionaires and billionaires, targeting the pre-existing medical restrictions he swore he would not remove. He is also working on reinstalling limits on how much paid healthcare you can get before being cut off and left to die, and deciding after meeting with big pharm lobbyists, to go back on his word about getting drug prices competitive, the list is endless!

So all I am asking you to do is quit listening to it’s the biggest, best, most fabulous, outstanding, fantastic, believe me, I am the greatest bullshit, and actually look at whether this stuff hurts or helps you! I mean he tried to blame Obama for the disastrous raid he commanded. Sure it was a plan made under Obama, but Obama shut it down because they did not have enough feedback on the ground, and it also was a full moon at the time. But that is what the daily security meetings are for, you know, the ones Trump is too smart to have to go to! Plus he demoted the people who should be advising him on the security council and promoted a white supremacist over them. Trump would not even go to the situation room while the action was taking place. Hey when you’re the President, you’re the President. Sure he put on a good show by going to meet the remains of the Seal being returned and meeting his family because that is something he is good at, putting on a show! But he made that raid when he did because he could not wait to use the big stick, and you all know it!

Musings About my President

Posted: January 30, 2017 in News and politics, Uncategorized
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I am talking to you about a President who is referencing 3 to 5 million illegal votes he claims were cast for Hillary (but none for him) because he has to be number one in everything all the time and so he just pulled those numbers out of his ass. There is no evidence of such a thing. I can tell you I have looked! Plus voting is run state by state, independently, sometimes district by district, all with different methods of checks and balances and voting machines, or manual apparatus. So they will all have different software running them and different providers for example! So even with a super computer Trump has no way of knowing any such thing! So there is no real way to have those numbers, and he can investigate all he wants, it will just be expensive and nothing else.

Speaking of expensive, the wall is going to cost billions and will serve no purpose. His claim that illegals are streaming across at increasing numbers are absolutely false! Those numbers are dropping and have been for years. It is just his insane ego at work and a scare tactic he used to get elected. The fact that he lies and people do not check for the truth of what he is saying is our number one problem! Even if you were saying it was to keep terrorists out, you would have to build another wall on the Canadian border, and lock up every port and airport until they could not function properly, if at all!

He has twitter wars over every little thing! As a private person, fine, kind of weird for a mogul such as himself to be doing, but fine. But as a President when Wall Street and the whole world hangs on every word, dangerous is not a strong enough word! Everything is the greatest, the best, the smartest, and the only way is his way. There is a condition for this type of attitude, and it is a mental one. A top psychotherapist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University says that our President has malignant narcissism. John Gartner went on to say, and I quote, “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president,” citing his movements and behavior, pointing out the president’s tendency for grandiosity, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia, and anti-social behavioral patterns. We’ve seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably”.

I personally had hoped he would change after the inauguration but he is getting worse. Now he is issuing gag orders to scientists from organizations like the EPA because he knows they will say something eventually he does not like! NASA scientists are being told what they can study! Talk about chewing on the corners of the very paper the constitution is written on! His girl Conway said that any reporter disrespecting the President by disagreeing should be fired! You would have thought she would learn to muzzle herself after the alternative facts fiasco, but apparently crazy is catching! He also penned a religion test to get into the United States! Now Article 6, and I quote”, No Religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” So that is specifically prohibited by the constitution. He is trying to get around that by putting time limits on it. But he has even targeted green card holders, given priority to Christians in regard to immigration; all considered a test by legal definition! So I do not know what to say? All I can hope for is the chasing of actual facts. You cannot depend on the news anymore, or those opinion shows! You have to dig into the congressional record, the voting record, watch C-span until your eyes start bleeding, and actually read the laws enacted or going to the Presidents desk. Daunting to say the least and most people plainly do not have the time. So you just have to slog along as best you can. I am retired so I do attempt to stay informed. I still cannot read everything or listen to every argument being made. So have picked seven news outlets that I try to sample on any major news story, these six from opposing sides of any argument. Example; Fox versus MSNBC! Then I try to go to the source material if I can find it so that I can decide what it says instead of, lets say, Hannity!

The latest is Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, is now invited to sit in on all meetings of the National Security Council, while officials like the director of national intelligence and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will participate only when summoned. Now how is that a good idea! The former head of Breitbart instead of the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now that is just what makes me feel secure, let me tell you!

I should tell you that I am not an academic, so there are lots of writers well informed who will argue both sides of any argument. I welcome any and all comments. Having an open mind is how I got it filled in the first place!

 

 

 

Homo Sapien Prevaricator

Posted: September 23, 2016 in News and politics
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(A New Sub Genus of Human Beings)

Prevarication means that the subject under scrutiny is a lie. A prevaricator is the person or persons extolling the lie. In this case I am using it to describe a whole new species of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Yes look it up, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the correct nomenclature for modern humans, to differentiate us from our direct descendants, Homo Sapiens Idalta. We are mistakenly called carnivores. We are of course carnivores, but since we also each veggies, we are more accurately described as omnivores, basically we eat everything!

So my premise is this. Since we can be classified by what we put in our mouths, we should also be classified by what comes out! Now all mammals, which includes humanity, also expel air, mostly carbon dioxide, in some cases spittle, and in extreme cases vomit when we have either contracted an illness or omnivored ourselves on just a little too much too fast!

However this premise will be based on the vocal content of what comes out of the mouths of modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens either vocally or in certain cases in writing to be vocalized later! Since the dawn of time, or since men and women learned to speak, and then later to write, prevarications have been told. Now sometimes this is just a storyteller’s way of making the story more enjoyable for his audience, the audience is generally aware, so we call this fiction or artistic license! It is generally accepted, even encouraged in writers of novels of fiction. Even plays and literary works based on actual historical events will have fictional sub plots to make them more interesting or exciting! All of this is expected and accepted.

But there is now a more sinister Homo Sapien out there. It is a Homo Sapien belonging to the family Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but does not know what the truth is anymore, or even if they did know they where lying the first time they told the prevarication, after they repeated it two or three times, their brain flips a switch and accepts that what they are saying is the truth! Unbelievable you say! Well there is more! There are receptors to this kind of vocal prevarication within the same classification. Although they did not invent the lie, just like the originator, after they have heard it two or three times they also believe it! Even when evidence to the contrary is given, if it does not align with what they prefer to believe, they still cling to the prevarication. The truth has no weight with either the originator of the prevarication, or the receptor of such information!

So these individuals need a new classification, because there are millions, maybe even a billion or so of the 7.8 billion on the planet who fall into this new classification! This new classification would be Homo Sapiens Prevaricator! Now this classification can be variable! Just like some choose to be vegetarians and give up being carnivores, education can protect you from this affliction. Education in world history is of particular importance, in geology, the study of early man and how we eventually evolved into what we are today can effect whether or not we will become a member of this new classification. And please forget monkeys when considering evolution, we did not evolve from monkeys, and no real scientist ever said we did! We can get into that some other time! Other sciences such as biology, physics, chemistry, aerospace, all are important! All education in general, so you will know that Columbus did not discover America, for example! Never even laid eyes on it or set foot upon its shores! The educated in the time of Columbus did not even think the world was flat; it had been common knowledge that it was round a long time before Columbus set sail. He was actually looking for a faster way to the East Indies by heading west rather than all the way around Africa! They just did not know there was a whole continent in their way, or the vastness of the planet earth! So if all of these things are understood by having an education system that is not rated near the bottom of the pile compared to other industrialized nations as ours is, it will help you understand the world around you! Most importantly it will help to better recognize the prevarication as it is uttered!

I will give an example of why just history, the real history of the world is so important. It can shed light on why our enemies are our enemies and point to ways to alleviate at least some of the animosity! Ancient Persia was a center of science, math, and language, education was alive and flourishing in what is now Iran! Our modern plumbing and irrigation, road building, almost all science, was influenced by Persians, or some of the greatest scientists of the time who lived and worked in Persia. You see, when it was one of the greatest and largest regions on the planet; they welcomed all religions and all nationalities of people, including the Jews, into their schools, universities, and halls of science. Then as time passed they had what we are now experiencing, their versions of Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, and yes their Trumps. Science and education was placing religion on the back seat and power was not concentrated as it once was. So in order for a small percent of the population to gain control of the empire, this smaller influential group taught them to fear their neighbors, to ignore science and education, put all their energy into their religion! Education of all types was frowned on because they did not want thinkers, they wanted a large force of people they could control and prosper from. Then they concluded that it could only be one specific type of religion, this so that even a smaller percentile could concentrate their power over the rest of population! Everyone in the empire, even the known world for that matter, had to accept their particular brand of religion or face holy war! So now you have what is now called Iran instead of the largest most powerful forward thinking empire on earth. Sound familiar? You bet it does! We have our 1%, the methods of control are more subtle, more in tune with mass media outlets and politicians who can be bought to maintain their control!

So register to vote, all of you! There is no such thing as two bad choices when it comes to this presidential election. No matter how much you dislike Hillary, she is at the very least qualified for the job! We must reverse the trend I have been talking about in this article or this nation is headed for a downward spiral we will not be able to recover from. And you also need to pay attention to your senate and house seats. We cannot have a do nothing congress again! We need to get moving and Trump is not the man to it. He will run this country into the ground. He is a con man, an egotistical narcissistic one at that, and cannot be given the reins of power! As my story points out, he wants to rule with intimidation and fear. He wants to narrow the power in this country to a very specific group by fomenting hate of anyone not like himself! We have to learn to fact check, not just think someone is what lobbyists or talk show host says a person is. Ask for actual proof, if all you get is, well I feel this must be true, or I heard this, I heard this a lot, that means that what you just heard is made up! It is a prevarication by that new portion of humanity I call Homo Sapien Prevaricator. Just keep in mind that none of our living Presidents, both Democratic and Republican, will endorse Trump. That every major country in the world does not understand why Trump is even being considered for President! That he changes policy every week or so as his old ones get him into trouble, that he knows nothing about world politics, or the history that goes along with understanding it. He knows no science, he is not well read, well he does own a copy of Hitler’s speeches, if that is any indication! Almost all of Trumps bad actions can be verified with facts. Almost all of Hillary’s supposed bad actions have no basis in fact. Email is one, I give you that, but not as bad it is being made to seem. Benghazi, well even the House Intelligence Committee, controlled by Republicans by the way, exonerated Hillary completely. She actually had been trying to get congress to increase the monies for the security at Embassies and missions for months on end, but was always stopped by the GOP. So who is responsible again? Actually that report, over two years in the making torched all the conspiracy theories put forth by the GOP members. You go down the list of supposed Hillary crimes there is no evidence of any kind! Just the innuendo and prevarications told by her enemies and her political opponents. A crime in itself!

When I was young & How I Got Old

Posted: July 1, 2016 in Life, Uncategorized
Tags: , ,
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A friend of mine was asking a question about remembering some of the old style things as kids, like eight track tapes, etc. Hell, I still have an eight-track player that works, and a box full of tapes!

 The first house I lived in that had a phone was the old crank style. Our phone number was one short, one long, and one short crank. There were about eight of us on the line. Anyone could pick up and listen in. We could only talk to those eight households or the switchboard board at Lucille Idaho, ten miles north of Riggins. Lucille had a permanent population of about eight people! The rest of us all lived up Cow Creek, which dumped into the Salmon River. The switchboard could call anyone and connect us to a regular phone. Oh yeah, we did have a radio that only got one station with elevator music on it, and then only when atmospheric conditions were right, no T.V. signal at all. We did have an old wind up Victrola with a few records like the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, some old German beer drinking songs, really great stuff! Not vinyl, the old hard platters that would shatter if you dropped them. Idaho is weird, even then all that was 50 or 60 years out of date. The water for the house came out of Cow Creek. It ran into a little catch basin with a screen on it so tadpoles or leaves did not come out of your faucet or plug up the plumbing, but no other filter. The electricity came off of a power pole, but that was kind of new, we still had a paddle wheel electric generator mounted over the creek that still worked. However it would only run the lights. The fridge and electric stove had to come from Idaho power connections. I had over an acre of lawns, a 3/4-acre garden, thirteen flower gardens, two wood stoves for heat, and just who do you think roto-tilled, weeded, harrowed, cultivated, mowed, and cut all that wood? All with a push mower, a two hand scye, one axe, (no wedge or mall) a hoe and shovel? Me, that’s who, I was thirteen! Rode my bike down the mountain to the bus stop three miles away every school day and pushed it back home at night. That was actually my best and most relaxed time. I would read a book balanced on the handlebars as I pushed the bike back up the hill, which was my entertainment time! There was always chores to do until it got dark, then homework! If I got done with homework before bedtime, or it was summer, I was allowed to read, which I loved to do! Oh, it rarely snowed there in winter over a few inches, it was too freakin cold to snow!

 This was the first family I lived with after leaving my mother and step-dad. We had some weird rules. First of all I admit to having some bad habits. I used words like dang and darn, tended to leave lights on after leaving a room, said pitcher when I referring to picture, evil stuff like that. So the rule was, for any infraction of rules to numerous to mention was a swat with pants down, bent over, with a wooden paddle with holes drilled in for speed. Second infraction was two swats, and then doubled again to four, then added four every time there was another infraction! Twenty swats became the limit. Oh I could be repeatedly paddled at the twenty limit, it just did not get added to once I got that far. I am not against spankings, just the sometime idiots who are in charge of the spankings. I also went to church four times a week. Sunday mornings and evenings, Tuesday was youth group, and Wednesday we had prayer meetings. You see I had run away from home and taken my sister, but that is another story. But since my mother and stepfather were sinners, well it was catching and I had it! So they prayed over me at all of these meetings, waiting for me to be visited by the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues. They were Pentecostal, you see, so no Ghost, no saving. Now my sister actually lived with the preacher of this church, he was the brother of the family I lived with, who was going to also become a minister, and did sometime after I left them. My point is, I can only imagine the hell she lived in!

 So one fine day, having memorized the Holy Ghost speeches of my little congregation, they always said the same gibberish, I proceeded to spout what I had learned, thinking they would now leave me alone. Well it appears my thirteen-year-old brain had not thought this through. Everyone recognized his or her part when it came up! I was literally thrown out of the front door and down the stairs of that church as the spawn of the devil. And this, as I said, at the ripe old age of thirteen! I was still required to go to church down the road at the Community Church. You could be any religion and go there. Not a bad church. The minister, a Mr. Prohaska was very understanding and made it plain from the git go that he did not consider me a spawn of the devil. He also never prayed over me. For me, but never over me. So I planned a new escape. Again, not really a plan, just figured no matter where I ended up had be better, at least that was the thought running through my thirteen year old head.

 So you must understand where all this was taking place, the Riggins Idaho area. One way in and one way out, no other civilization for miles and miles. So running away was a problem, whether north or south it had to be down highway 95 and I knew that would not work. Going overland to the west only got me up against the Hells Canyon, kind of a son to the Grand Canyon. Going east was what they call a primitive area, nothing doing there but maybe a meal for a mountain lion or bear! Or if you were lucky maybe just getting lost and starving to death, you know, the old fashioned way! But luckily the family I was living with had a reunion scheduled I was now fourteen. This took place in Greenleaf Idaho, southern part of the state, and all kinds of places I could head out to. So I packed a ditty bag, you know, with the toothbrush, the couple of bucks I had stashed away, the only other pair of jeans I owned, and some underwear. Which no one looked sideways at, basically what I would have normally packed! I took off in the middle of the second night there. It was a long dirt road and then some county paved roads leading to all kinds of exotic places like Caldwell or Jerome, I mean we were in Idaho spud country!

 So I am trodding down the road, ditty bag in tow around midnight or so. I did not have a working watch. I see a car pulled off to the side of the road. In it was a lady, a school teacher, related by marriage to this family. I had met her before, so knew who she was as soon as she started talking to me. So on that dark night, she convinced me to go back and keep my mouth shut! She said she was in the process of trying to get them to let me come live with her and her family. She told me if I could just wait a couple of weeks that should come to pass. Their resistance had been that she was not religious, so she had joined the Assembly of God church in Council, which was also Pentecostal. I did not know this at the time. She then made me a deal that I would be treated just like her kids, and I would have some say over what happened to me. If I did not like living with them, she would help me find a place that did not include an orphanage. So we shook hands and that was the best damn deal I have ever made! Most of you will know who this women is, but as this will go public, I am not mentioning names.

 So I moved to Council Idaho. This very decent person kept working until she also got my sister, and then abruptly left that particular church. I did well. I had only been to two years of schooling and I was going to be fifteen that fall. Part of that other story I mentioned! So I had some catching up to do. I got straight A’s my junior and senior year. I was class president my sophomore year, editor of the school paper my junior and senior years, on the student council, science club, main string in three sports, and one of the football captains, we went undefeated by the way! So let’s just say I loved school, Council, and everything about it. It was a thriving ranching and logging town with a large mill at that time. I worked in the woods during the summer my junior and senior year. Fibbed a little about my age, but I was a big kid! All of the logging is gone now, mill torn down, so the town is suffering, but still hanging in there!

 So I went to Boise State, but ran out of money second semester. I joined the Marines for four years to get an aviation school guarantee, plus I also did not want to get drafted and become cannon fodder! I scored high so got into avionics working on a computer warfare bird. I wound up in Nam for two tours because my particular skills were hard to come by! They would bribe me with meritorious promotions to extend. I did that twice. So had been an E2 about two weeks before going to Nam and then promoted to E3, but it turned out there were no NCO’s in Avionics electric shop, so they promoted me to E4, a corporal so I could run the shop. So in six months my original one-year tour was up, so they promoted me to E5 Sergeant if I would extend for a second tour. I loved my job, however I did not like stateside troop and stomp. They offered me Staff Sergeant with guaranteed chance at Warrant Officer, but I was going to have to give them 8 more for all of that or four if I only wanted the Staff Sergeant, I was not willing. I should have at least stayed in the reserves, but hindsight is 20-20!

 So got out. Was always planning on continuing my education. Had been taking courses by mail while in the service. It turned out, even though I was not a grunt, but having a high stress job and hanging out on mission runs in Danang, lovingly referred to as Rocket City, gave me PTSD. Not that I admitted to that. However all I wanted to do was race my motorcycle, go boating, trash my 4×4, and was crew chief on a professional race boat, had the odd sand rail, etc. By the time I calmed down I was a daddy and had a mortgage. I had turned my military education into a career as an automotive computer and advanced engine diagnostics tech. I got my master ticket, became a smog tech, but mostly what I did was five gas analysis under load on a dyno. I could look at your tailpipe emissions and tell you what system was down, and usually what part. Once I got proficient at the dyno and 5 gas, I never used a scope again. Just my diagnostic computer and the dyno was all I needed. I knew how to do all the rest, brakes, alignment, pull an engine or trans out of a class A, the whole pie so to speak. But after my first year I was the shop foreman and usually the service manager, so if it was a dirty job, or heavy, I pointed and ordered someone else to do it. I lost nary a nights sleep over it either!

 So ended up working one job after the Corps for just under 30 years. The place closed down due to the owner’s ill health and being bought out by the State. I ended up as service manager for a private set of five Bobcat dealerships! It was stressful but the monetary reward was very, very, amenable! I retired after seven more years. This career did allow me to raise a daughter who has a Masters degree who became a teacher an now an assistant principal. She is the love of my life. Well aside from my wife, who I still have not managed to understand how or why I got so lucky!

 So in closing, I am not in love with religion as some of you may have guessed. As a matter of fact I am of the opinion that religion is the most dangerous entity this planet has ever experienced. Christianity just as much to blame as any other. So I do not begrudge you your belief, my daughter is devout, but for now I am not a willing participant. I am a good person and a great friend to have! I do not lie, well let me admit that I am a storyteller and will embellish if I think the story is boring. This piece is not one of those however, and my moral character, for whatever it might be worth, is a choice I make and not because I am afraid to be punished if I choose immorality!

 

 

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