Rand Paul is an idiot

Today or yesterday Randall Paul gave a talk to a group of Latino business people to whom he read a poem by the great Pablo Neruda. My guess is that Paul was the only business person in the room ignorant of the fact that Neruda had died a Communist--murdered by Fascists.  That raises a question: what does Rand Paul know?  Not much--the little squit is an idiot.

Gays Are Us

Why do we give a damn if two gay people marry?  On the face of it, marriages should be the least of the problems between gays and others, including closeted gays. There is no passage on gay marriage in the Bible; the religious aspects of the dispute are a smoke screen. The historical one-man, one-woman argument in the land of divorces and single parents is absurd, especially when it comes from a Mormon who tells us that humans have always married that way. How many wives did Solomon and Joseph Smith have? The claim that people marry in order to procreate is upside down. Most people marry for love and companionship, and in some cases kids come later.

Yesterday it occurred to me why certain confused people among us oppose same-sex marriages. I recognized something in myself. There is a considerable difference between tolerance and full acceptance. Let's start with ignorance. My father, a machinist, was a racist, but for some reason he was fine with gays and Jews. My mother once told me that he did not grasp what gays did for sex. Thanks to my parents I grew up tolerating gays. I believed they had rights. I didn't care if they married, but here is the change. I started to think about it. If gays can marry and raise children, then they aren't different. They are us. They really are us. That whips the bigots into a frenzy: gays are us.  




i? On the

What Is Marriage?

My mother died in her early seventies. About eight years later my father married again to a woman his own age. They had no children together. When manipulators on  TV  claim that the purpose of marriage is to have children, they insult older couples and all couples who choose not to have kids or cannot have them. I find that level of deep stupidity irritating.

Let's Cut Social Security So We Look Good

I read a newspaper every morning, so you would think I like newspapers. I do like them for the sports pages, the comics and the puzzles. I do not buy papers for political news. There are no good papers in that respect. I read the NY Times for 30 years, and it was, on a political level, a load of road apples.  What you get is a circle jerk of reporters and lame commentators repeating tips from one another that often have no relationship with reality. 

If I want political commentary, I go to magazines, which publish writers who have their own brains.

Recently the Washington beltwayers have decided that cutting back Social Security--in the richest nation in history--is the responsible thing to do.  Next, as J. Swift might say, we will be cooking and eating plump babies.

Below is a comment by TRUTHOUT.

"There are few areas where the corruption of the national media is more apparent than in its treatment of Social Security. Most of the elite media have made it clear in both their opinion and news pages that they want to see benefits cut. In keeping with this position they highlight the views of political figures who push cuts to the program, treating them as responsible, while those who oppose cuts are ignored or mocked.

"This pattern of coverage was clearly on display last weekend. Both the New York Times and Washington Post decided to ignore the Senate's passage by voice vote of the Sanders Amendment. This was an amendment to the budget put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that puts the Senate on record as opposing the switch to the chained CPI as the basis for the annual Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA)."

Brisket

My wife, who is Jewish, has cooked a brisket to take to a Seder in San Francisco (or, as my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents called it, "Frisco"--that was before the joint got prissy). Anyway, I am not Jewish like my wife and daughters and granddaughter, but they did invite me to join them. They did not encourage me to come, just invited me. Fortunately my granddaughter, who is six, was there to help me decide what to do. She complained that, among boring meals, Seders rank in the top six. That tempted me. In the end I have decided to stay home and contemplate the fate of the greatest Jew of all time.

Chinese Anchor Babies

I have no good insights into why the Republicans lost the Asian vote in the Presidential election.  Asians used to vote Republican. Maybe American Asians grew disgusted with the racism the Republicans boasted about so proudly. My brother did suggest an interesting factor in all this. Apparently wealthy Chinese and other Asians have started up a large regular system of anchor babies. That is, wealthy men fly their pregnant wives in from China. The wives are met at the airports by a helpful service that will house and feed them for the remaining month or two of pregnancy. And also take them shopping and so forth. It adds up to a nice holiday. In the end the mom and child return home and the child has dual citizenship. (I admit to admiring the Chinese.)  Now if I were Asian, I might notice that Latinos catch hell for anchor babies (largely a Republican myth). I might, just for pragmatic reasons, vote for a less dangerous group of foolish candidates.

Personhood

The current personhood movement is an attempt to grant full citizenship to a fetus at the moment of conception, which would ban abortions. What enrages me about personhood movement is that it--with its Orwellian name--actually removes personhood from women, half of our population. Personhood re-enslaves women, turning them into the mechanical baby factories preferred by old white men.

Most Americans understand that slavery is the original curse our ancestors put on this country, a curse that has warped everything since. The greatest crimes in our history were committed against people with black or brown skin. But next comes the denial of personhood to women, gays, Asians, and minorities in general. Today the typical American rejects the surface manifestations of slavery, yet fanatical Republican office holders are deeply committed to the enslavement of young women of all colors. The personhood laws they are passing are currently unconstitutional, but three or four of these women-hating nutters sit on the Supreme Court, where anything can happen.  We can thank the Reagan Revolution.

The Cheetah's Best Friend

Yesterday I read in our paper that cheetahs are becoming rare in the wild. Maybe 12,000 left.  Zoos and related cheetah breeding programs have found it hard to get the animals to mate. Apparently cheetahs are skittish, nervous, not quick to befriend one another. They have trouble relaxing and making love. This surprised  me--I remember reading about the domestication of cheetahs. African kings used them the way we use hunting dogs. I assumed that cheetahs were calm animals.

Fortunately some smart fellow has come up with an answer. You don't put a bunch of cheetahs together to reassure them. They don't like one another. Instead you assign to each cheetah a large loyal companion dog. This gives the cheetah a friend to comfort it. And if something bad comes along, the dog will roar and fight. Of course the relationship is somewhat one-sided. While the dog is loyally defending it, the cheetah will depart at speeds unknown to other land mammals. The cheetah is a cat.

A cheetah with a companion dog is a cheetah at ease, ready to date. At meal times, though, the two have to be separated. Otherwise the dog will eat two meals.

A LIVING WAGE

In the United States one per-cent of the people own 50% of the stocks, bonds, etc. They sit on 40% of the nation's wealth. But they are hard workers. They must be. The average person (a lazy taker) has to work for a month to earn what a 1% guy earns in one hour. But the pay balances out in the end, to some degree, because the 1% guy lives, on average, four or five years longer than the ordinary person, while continuing all of that really hard work. You know how difficult it is to get up in the morning and walk outside to the limo and so on.