Blog Baby

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 19:35:26 GMT

You want waffles with those eggs?

I have not blogged here for a while now. But the recent attacks on John Kerry cause me to take pen in hand again. The fact is this country has lots of problems. And there is blame on both sides of the political spectrum for them. But the most current ads claiming that John Kerry is someone who waffles mystifies me for the following reasons.

Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.
Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.
Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.
Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.
Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.
Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.
Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.
Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.
Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.
Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits.
Bush: "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush: "I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care."
Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island. Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.
Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will
Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.
Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote.
Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.
Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

If that is not waffling, I don't know what is.

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 17:14:23 GMT

Reality? Please leave me to my Fantasy.

Last night saw the launch of a new reality series. I have a confession. I have never watched a full episode of any of the so called ‘reality’ shows. I have never even watched a single minute of “Survivor” or “Fear Factor” etc. I did catch a few minutes of one of the “Bob the Bachelor” shows. But those few minutes confirmed my self-assessment that watching them would be too agonizing to waste my time on.

This new series has the dubious distinction of trying to pair a beautiful woman with several men who do not have what might be termed as good looks. Just watching the promos is nearly as painful as watching the show. These shows seem to be filled with the most debasing kinds of revelations of personal feelings.

However, I doubt that the male participants of “Average Joe” will get so emotionally involved with the object of the show as the women who seemed to all fall madly for Bob. Will their emotions get trashed? I doubt it.

Also, while the idea of putting a woman up and humiliating her expectations is about as low as you can go. Oh wait. There is one more floor on the descending elevator for reality television. How about a show called “Plain Jane” where they put up several average looking women for a hunk to pick and choose from? Somehow I doubt that will ever happen.

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 16:05:18 GMT

The Dream

For a time I have considered letting the Baby die. But I have been having this dream. I am at a political fund raising event honoring the President. It has a long line at the banquet table and I have gotten a plate and am sitting at my appointed place. I am trying to be polite to the perpetual smirker and his cronies. He is out on the floor having eaten going from table to table with his plate in his hand.

He comes up to my table and starts making conversation. I am highly uncomfortable in his presence. Then all of a sudden he starts eating off my plate. That is not the worst part. I don’t really say anything to him about his gauche behavior. But after the party is over some reporter comes up and asks me about what happened. It appears that someone got his actions on tape and wants to know my feelings.

Of course I can not just keep my mouth shut no matter how I think I should. So I tell the reporter that I think the President is working his butt off to destroy the future of the social progress in this country. I tell her that I think he is turning the country into a wealthy class and the poor and I do not qualify as wealthy.

Then my nightmare begins. It seems that perhaps especially because the President and his followers do not believe in the government or believe that it is evil, they are quick to use the power of the government to harass me. None of that is specific in the dream only that my fear really starts the moment that I am done talking to the reporter. After that I seem to recycle what happened at the banquet until finally I wake up in a cold sweat.

Perhaps now that I have purged myself of this dream I will stop having it. But I don’t know.

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:01:56 GMT

Slow blogging

I have not felt much desire to write for a while. It is a combination of things going on in my life none of it very interesting. My liver seems to be acting up. The tests my doctor has done have been going up and down for a while. I have been taking methotrexate for skin and joint problems. This is a very toxic drug that has a life time recommended dosage. It works very well to keep me from having problems for my problems which are chronic and incurable at the moment. My dosage is well over that limit.

For a while I have been injecting myself as my doctor felt this might be easier on my liver than taking it orally. I guess that has not worked as well as he had hoped. It was easy for me, both quick and cheap and it did not take me long to overcome the initial discomfort of stabbing myself with a needle (intra-muscularly).

I still have lots of questions about my liver. I know that it is an organ that will heal itself over time as it is not like some of the other namby pamby organs that once damaged never seem to get better. But methotrexate is a long lived chemical so it could go on doing damage over time I think at least. I wish my doctor had email so I could pose some of the questions that I have. At least I have the kind of doc who holds nothing back, but you need to also ask the questions as he never seems to have the time to volunteer answers.

The only other treatment that has worked for me in the past is much more expensive as you have to go into the office three times a week. The medicine that you have to take makes you sick to your stomach for hours which really cuts into one’s day. It is a very irritating problem and I have been mulling over my options.

I can just stop taking the methotrexate and hope that I don’t get sick right away. That is the way I am leaning at the moment. If I start having problems I will go back in for treatment I guess. Maybe by then my financial situation may have improved. One can hope for a miracle. Given how generally depressed I am at the moment, adding further depressive stress is not something I am looking forward to.

Actually, my son has been in the process of going into a training program. He is in about the last stage of the application process and so far they seem to think he will do well. If all goes the way we are hoping he should start in September and be working after a month. That would be very good news indeed.

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 16:10:28 GMT

Free Trade

The promise was that this would make us all First World Nations. It appears more and more each day that it will lead us all to Third World Status.

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 21:12:09 GMT

Coping...

I read somewhere that there are three ways that people cope with the death of a civilization. The first is that they try to fight the dissolution of their society by creating a moat around those values that they do not wish to lose and then fight to the death to defend them. The second coping mechanism is to cling to those things that lend one personal satisfaction while you watch the rest of your social communities crumbling around you. The third is to join those who are looting the values to grab what you can.

Sadly, I do feel like we are standing on a precipice where we risk the very fundamental freedoms we have taken for granted for the past 50 or so years. Those who do not share my feeling of loss will argue against my position I guess. I would offer to take any of you who disagree with me on a little road trip where I can show you what the devastation of clear cutting can do to pristine forests. I will even take you to areas where the forests were clear cut nearly 80 years ago to show you the difference between old growth and second or third growth forests. And forests are only one of the things that we are poised to lose.

If we were being attacked by outsiders it would be worse I guess but here we are being destroyed in a non-civil war of words over issues where the arguments are anything but logical. Global warming is one good study. Whenever I bring up global warming I am told by my conservative chums that volcanoes produce more green house gasses than our use of fossil fuels. Well, yes. That is a fact. But we can do nothing to prevent a volcano. Volcanoes are an act of nature that are going to happen no matter how many SUVs we drive. We can only control our own contributions to the problem. And we need to look at those scientists who have no vested interest in the issue and discount those funded by groups who benefit from pro green house gas policies.

The economic gains we have made as a people are unprecedented in history of human society. No where has there been such an effort made to support public policies that lead to the possibility of all of our people benefiting from our efforts to provide decent jobs to everyone despite their native abilities. What is appalling to me is that the same people who decry our animal nature use a natural law argument to defend our pressing more and more people into destitution. The irony is that those who are harmed the most by such policies are those who stand on the side of those who promote them.

I would argue that there is a fourth coping mechanism when you see your culture being destroyed by forces either from within or from the outside. You lie down and stop fighting.

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 20:40:03 GMT

Decks in August

Not in the heat of the day do I sit on my deck in August. I go out close to bedtime to let the dog wander about a bit before we both retire. As I sit out there I think about how I used to love to stargaze as a child. Last night the clouds were scudding along and the whiteness coupled with the lights from the city made most of the stars so dim that there were just a few out that I could recognize.

It is getting cooler now a bit in the evening at least. We have had nearly a week of intermittent rain on a daily basis. This is not unusual for August at least around this area of the west. In a week or so the heat will return with a vengeance and stay that way until the end of September at least. This has become the pattern over the past twenty or so years that I can remember. It was not that way when I was a child.

In the late 50’s and 60’s August was always a scorcher. That was when you really could cook eggs in the street. We did not have real pavement then. Either the oil machine would come by two or three times and spray down the dust with oil until we finally got some asphalt. The asphalt was always warm and gummy in August I recall. When you walked on it the edges of your feet got black gunk attached sometimes with little pebbles in it. It was hard to scrape off but no one seemed to notice much. We always went barefoot. I still eschew shoes to this day because of the way I was raised.

Mostly I wear Birkenstocks all year round any more. The number of days when we have snow that I have to drag out my boots for has become so infrequent that I have been wearing the same pair of hiking boots since 1984. Other than the boots I finally let my REI membership lapse when I realized that I had not even bought an air mattress or any other camping equipment. My van is pretty self-contained but I don’t use it as much as I thought I would. Gas is just too expensive to feel like I can go gallivanting around much.

I will take it over to Montana once more before the fall snows start to build up in the pass though. My last uncle is not expected to live much longer. Pretty soon most of the people that I will visit make their homes in the cemetery. There are still reasons to go though. The next time I always say I will drive Going to the Sun in Glacier. I have been saying that for far too long.

Not a lot to blog about. August tends to be a slow month over all. Bush is in Texas where I wish he would stay. It must be damned hot there. It is better here. He can have Texas. Maybe Lincoln was wrong. We might have been better off if we had let the South go.

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:09:22 GMT

Water

here is getting much more expensive by the year. It is still less than gasoline but it is increasing in price at a much faster rate. Now we are under requirements to reduce our use of it. I heard this by listening out of the corner of my ear as I was channel surfing yesterday. I figure I am ok on the issue of water conservation however. I gave up watering most of my lawn almost two years ago and have become content with looking at yellow dormant stubble. In a way it is much easier. It does not require constant mowing and weeds do not grow in it. At this point I have one small area that continues to get water. My dog seems to prefer having a green place to do his business. Of course our water problems may get worse in the near future. When they start threatening my source of drinking water I get militant in my thinking.

Being a cancer I need water. I drink a lot of water. I still drink from the tap because bottled water is much more expensive than what comes out of the faucet. I also like to immerse myself in it frequently. One of the things I miss most now that I do not go to work every day is that I have given up my daily shower (some people think they need these even if they do not work). I would not have to but it is part of that economy thing. I really can take a spit bath to get to feeling clean and it is better for the environment. I have settled for the moment on showering every third day or so. If I have somewhere to go or someone is coming over or I have been working hard I can always dash into the shower.

On another front my youngest grandson has another summer cold. I have sort of decided that this is a good method for Mother Nature to use to get rid of the older non-productive (as in non-reproducing) individuals out of the way for the younger generation. As sure as shooting next week I will be stricken. The last event resulted in a full fledged bout with pneumonia that I almost did not recover from. I note also that Bob Hope finally succumbed to pneumonia so I guess if I die from it I will be in good company. If I do I will do a better job of conserving water. At least one older person says that staying active is the cure for the summer cold so I could kill at least three of these conundrums if I do get the cold. How is that for circular reasoning?

My adult children continue to be permanently unemployed in our current economy. I have been working on accepting the fact and that I will continue to have to support them. My son has given up on his programming degree due to the fact that the percentage of these jobs seems to be going overseas. (Thanks to Dave Pollard for alerting me to that link.) He is again mulling what to do about an increasingly sad looking future.

This means that I will be blogging I guess for a while longer. As long as I can afford the cable modem at least there will be cheap entertainment for them to continue to play on line games to avoid the issue of not being able to find anyone who desires to employ them. Blogging has become my own brand of cheap entertainment.

Hopefully one will see this as sardonic humor. If not, and I sound bitter that is the way things are going generally.

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 19:09:32 GMT

Too Hot Here

It has been cresting between 95 and 100 for the past few days. In this kind of heat I can do nothing really but think of some nice shaded pool of water to go jump into. And sometimes the thought of getting out into the car to go there is entirely too much. I have been spending lots of time in my bathtub. I can remember when I first moved to Yakima and dealt with a summer without any air-conditioning. I found myself sleeping in the bathtub as that was the only way to get any relief from the heat. I moved back home after a year. For me Yakima is like California, a nice place to visit but I prefer not living there.

The heat is much worse for our troops in Iraq. Speaking of heat, it seems like things are heating up in Iraq for Saddam. I had this weird dream that he surrendered to the British in exchange for being sent to a prison in England. I wonder how that would work to get Tony out of trouble. It also might make things uncomfortable for Bush. Does anyone think that he would get a fair hearing either in Britain or the U.S..

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 21:16:59 GMT

Too Much Irony

Somehow this piece just touched so many issues that I have found to be particularly ironic lately that I had to blog it.

As I was waking up this morning listening to NPR I listened to Bob Dole (a Republican I have always admired) talking about civility in political discourse. I had to google civility and politics. Not only did I find his speech, but too many good articles to link to directly. I think that I might need to add this to my list of common google searches.

I don’t know about you, but I support the idea that I don’t want my taxes going to support companies who outsource all the decent paying jobs overseas. For a long time I worked really hard to ‘buy American’ even though that cost me more others who did not share my scruples. Lately I have given up even trying because there is no way that one can tell if a product is even touched by American hands. This is what free trade has gotten us I guess. While the conclusion of this article tends to minimize the affect of outsourcing I would be willing to set up a tour of American rust belt communities for the people who do not see this trend as significant.

Adding a “what is good for the goose clause” to the prescription benefit proposal is indicative of how bad the idea really is. No wonder that AARP is considering opposing it.

And finally, Wolfowitz lets Iraq’s neighbors know that they are not to mess with our new colony.