My Safe, My Documents

I love science fiction. Absolutely, love, love it. People that know me ask, “why don’t you write science fiction instead of the silly piffle you do write about.” The piffle part is silent of course, but I know what they’re thinking.

The truth is, I can find ample topics to amuse/bore my readers with without having to conjure up wormholes and sentient robots. Here’s some science fiction, sentient Republicans. Ha! Gotcha!

But that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t have to travel to Westworld to get an unbelievable story, they’re right here all around us. You just have to follow the news and cock your head a little sideways and you’ll get the story in perspective.

Will Rogers once said, “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” My God, how we could use a man like him today, or a woman like Molly Ivins. Those are two people who could look at the facts and get right to the true essence of the matter. Most importantly they did it with humor, which allowed the person being pilloried the opportunity to laugh at themselves. The medicine goes down a little easier if the administrator can add a little sweetener to it.

This week’s absurdity comes as we find out that the “twice impeached, disgraced former President” AKA the Donald has been hoarding more than empty Kentucky fried chicken buckets at his compound at Mar-a-Lago.

I feel like a fly in a nudist colony, never has there been such a target rich environment. We are talking TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS here people, like the kind of stuff that sent an Army private to Leavenworth for thirty-five years. The kind of stuff when published sends the publisher into exile, hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for seven years. Said publisher is now fighting extradition back to the U.S. where he faces 18 felony counts. Each count carries a sentence of ten years. Of course, these are “little people” not the Donald.

As long as he is outside of a jail cell the Donald will continue to have ample opportunities to display his self-serving ignorance on almost all topics and the press will proudly broadcast his drivel to his minions. What I am unable to comprehend is how the grandchildren of WWII veterans, Vietnam veterans, the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan can give the Donald a pass on this one.

“Loose lips sink ships” pales in comparison to the security bombshells that the Donald had spirited away with his broken golf clubs and Whopper wrappers. Reportedly some of the documents dealt with “sources and methods”. A source is someone spying for the good guys. We’d really like to keep their identity a secret. We all remember when we had to bring our top Russian spy home after the Donald took office. The intelligence people felt that it just wasn’t safe for him anymore since the Donald was sitting in the oval office.

This theft of documents was a willful action, not an accident, not an oversight. As dumb as the Donald is he knew the documents had value and that’s why he spirited them away with him when he was forced from the White House.

Did some of the documents provide the basis for the 2 billion dollar Saudi investment in the Pale Prince? Did the Donald plan on selling off secrets to keep his properties afloat? Were any of the documents used to re-negotiate his billion dollar debt? Would any of the documents provide the Donald with the ultimate get out of jail free card? Extortion is just part of the Art of Making a Deal right?

The Donald’s hubris, like his sense of ignorance, knows no bounds. Taking documents that are catalogued seven ways to Sunday and not expecting the intelligence services to come looking for them is delusion on a whole new level. Espionage, I think we will agree, is the lowest of the low.

Sadly, I feel the Donald will find a way to sink lower.

Evolution

There are people that are secure in their belief that evolution is just a scientific theory. Not a theory like gravity, because they can drop stuff and see it fall to the floor. They see evolution as more a theory like the destruction of the ozone layer is causing climate change. They can see the climate change as it effects their daily life, they just can’t see how the use of fossil fuels makes things worse. I just can’t abide that.

Georgia has a Senatorial candidate that has dispelled the theory of evolution with the logic that “if man was descended from the apes, how come there’s still apes?” That’s not the most Herschel thing he’s said, but it does give an example of a person that is ignorant about a topic pontificating to a group of similar minded folk. Their ignorance confirms their suspicions, and everyone is happy to move along.

From Wikipedia: Is the theory of evolution a scientific fact?

Biologists consider it to be a scientific fact that evolution has occurred in that modern organisms differ from past forms, and evolution is still occurring with discernible differences between organisms and their descendants.”

It’s fun to discuss whether babies have innate fears of snakes and spiders and how those fears got planted in their little brains. My take is that it’s a survival of the species, natural selection type thing, but I’m willing to listen to the other arguments. Where I’d like to detour the argument/theory of evolution is in the area of personal growth and how that personal growth affects the general zeitgeist.

We use the word “evolving” all of the time. An artist might say, “my work is constantly evolving”, a politician might say “my position on the matter is still evolving.” What we are referencing is personal growth. We are gathering information; our opinions are becoming more informed and we’re able to make better decisions because of the increase in knowledge. At least that’s how I think it’s supposed to work.

We then take our growth and share it with our children so that they don’t have to learn by repeating our mistakes. It’s bad enough for one generation to test sticking a paper clip into a wall socket, no need to let our children experience the shock of learning the hard way. We can inform them of a dangerous situation, and they can put it into their lexicon and pass it to their children. The family evolves and prospers from not continually repeating mistakes made by the previous generation. At least that’s how I think it’s supposed to work.

Think about the things we’ve had to learn over the centuries that we bake into our daily lives to keep us safe. Fire, floods, lightning, high winds are natural occurrences that our past experiences have formed how we prepare for them today. Past experience forms current policy, and we learn “never get involved in a land war in Asia” and to “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” I digress, but only to point out that as we evolve, we learn what works, but more importantly what doesn’t work.

On August 25, 1994, the assault weapons ban was signed into law. We can argue at length why a sunset clause was written into the legislation, but let’s just agree that the sunset clause allowed politicians to “do nothing” and allow the manufacturers of assault weapons to continue on as before. I can just visualize the NRA congress critters meeting with the weapons manufacturers over brandy and cigars explaining to their donors, “It’s just for ten years and then think about the pent-up demand when the law is repealed. Here, we’ll sweeten the deal with constant ads appealing to law-and-order acolytes.” The death-dealers took a ten-year hiatus on some of their wares and then this happened:

We’ve seen the videos of the Uvalde police, et. al. paralyzed by the fear of facing an assault weapon while children were being slaughtered. A suggested cure for their paralysis was to up armor all police with assault weapons. Watch this video to see how that might not really be a viable solution. The chief of police in the video recognizes he has a teaching moment.

We learn what works, and what doesn’t work and then we pass that knowledge on to our children and their children and collectively as a society we grow and prosper. Banning assault weapons works, unrestricted guns don’t. It’s time to evolve to where we were in 1994, with no sunset clause. Evolve.

Persecution Complex

The way I see it, there’s nothing good going to come from allowing a minority group of small thinkers to determine big decisions for the rest of us based on their limited understanding of a topic. I bet you could still find people that think the Earth is flat, or that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Just because these people believe what they believe with all of their hearts and souls, doesn’t make their conjecture right, right?

To give another example of small-minded thinking that is not only wrong in its supposition but runs contrary to the values that it states to purport, are the assorted Religious Freedom Bills that are being proposed in various states around the country.

First we have to lay to rest this silly idea that the Christians in this country are being persecuted and that they need a special bill to “make them free”. Nothing further could be true.

Sadly, the only the example that I can give for the Christians behavior is similar to when a child tries to run across the street against the light and you grab them and keep them from being crushed by a truck. Rather than thanking you, the child screams “you don’t love me”. The child doesn’t understand that society has created rules for behavior that are for the betterment of the group, not just him.

The reality of living in Democracy or a civilized society is that not everyone gets their way all of the time. At least that’s how it used to work before this group of simple-minded politicians took office. Now the zealots are trying to claim their “religious freedoms” are being impinged on when they are required to allow others their basic civic freedoms. 

According to the title, “SB 129 “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act”; provided for the preservation of religious freedom” and was pushed through the legislature ahead of other bills more worthy of consideration. The immediacy of the bill was that “religious” shop owners needed the “right” to tell gay people to go to hell when they requested service. Perhaps, I oversimplify, but I like to cut to the quick of the matter.

People who have been taught to “love others as themselves” want to deny service to gay people because their “holier than thou” sensibilities are offended. I’m not sure how religious people resolve the “what would Jesus do?” component of this question. Maybe they’re tired of trying to do what Jesus would have done because it doesn’t feed their bigotry and homophobia. Maybe this group of “Christians” just needs to bash folks who are different in some way to feel better about themselves.

Outside of reestablishing segregation, I don’t know what the long-term purpose of this bill, and these simple-minded individuals, hope to accomplish. You can’t make gay go away. You can’t pray it away, and it won’t starve to death because you didn’t make it a wedding cake. It is the Civil Rights issue all over again with a different victim, a different face. It is quite easy to see how these types of bills can be extended to refuse service to blacks, Hispanics, anybody that didn’t pass the shop owners narrow spectrum of approved people. That’s fine if it is a private club, but, once you are open to the public, you must serve the public. A lot of people lost their lives to gain this right. We don’t need to relive this period of time again.

The overreach of the persecuted Christians has now gone to reproductive rights. Tantamount in their view of their persecution is the belief that blacks and browns will outnumber the “superior white race” and that the white Christian’s “way of life” will come to an end. I won’t get too deep into the illogical assumption that denying people the ability to control their population will somehow help reverse the demographic trend, I’ll just point out that nothing short of genocide will change the “minority” becoming the majority. I guess the “persecuted” will be ok with the genocide component. There’s probably some Bible verse that can be re imagined for their use.

I’ll leave you today with the definition of persecution from the webmd website: “The most common is delusions of persecution. It’s when you’re convinced that someone is mistreating, conspiring against, or planning to harm you or your loved one. Another type is grandiose delusions, where you have an unrealistically inflated sense of yourself or your achievements.”

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms please report them immediately to your health care provider, not your preacher. The world will be a better place.

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Imagine

“Imagine there’s no heaven”, the song appeals to our higher level of consciousness. It asks us to discard the notion that there is an all-powerful benevolent father figure that has prepared a life everlasting in a land of milk and honey, free of want forever.

The Lennon dichotomy challenges the Christian belief that all we have to do is successfully negotiate the minefield God placed before us on Earth to attain our reward. Complete the course under par and you’re in. Unless you’re a Catholic. If you’re a Catholic, you can admit all of the bogeys recorded on your scorecard as par at the time you sink your last putt on the 18th. The act of contrition will gain you admission to the club house where seventy to eighty virgins will attend to your every need. Whoops, I combined religious philosophies.

I ramble into the religious because of a post I made a while back that brought brimstone down on my head and apparently a pox on my house. I refer to my “If Men Could Get Pregnant” post.

In the post I posit the theory that the Christians are acting very un-Christian in the rabid pursuit of overturning Roe v. Wade and the controlling of the process we will generically call “birth”. The Christians will have us to believe that conception (or birth as it is known to the Evangelicals) begins with the look across a darkened room. Anything that impedes that furtive glance from resulting into a potential acolyte is anathema. There is no scripture to support this philosophy, they just “imagined” it. I’d like to imagine further.

Imagine you saw your child blazing an ant hill with a magnifying glass. You might watch out of amusement for a few seconds before recommending the child pursue a better activity. Imagine you saw same child pulling the wings off of fly. The child argues they’re not killing the fly like they were the ants, but you would still discontinue their behavior. Next you catch your little darling tying tin cans to the dog’s tail. “It didn’t kill him or dismember him” your precious argues, but you still send him to time out because you know cruelty when you see it. Particularly when it involves animals.

Now imagine all of the stories you read in the Bible are true, gospel as they say. Start with Genesis when God’s perfect creations are found to be guilty of lust (you didn’t really believe the snake story did you?). God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden because he knew (all-knowing remember) that someday that lust was going to become an issue. Why he didn’t order the Adam and Eve models without lust mode is open to interpretation( free will, yadda, yadda, yadda).

Humankind bops along for a few millennia until the lust situation becomes such an overwhelming concern that God decides the answer is a complete reboot (see Genesis chapters 6, 7 & 8). Now with Earth 2.0 and an almost clean slate, God watches his experiment with eager anticipation. Humankind eventually reverts back to its sinful self and God decides to correct course using a different tack. He sends his “only begotten son” to die a cruel public death. We assume there were some serious “perks” involved in getting his son to endure the corporal plane. Imagine explaining to Jesus when he got back to heaven why gnats were necessary or hemorrhoids?

Anyway, Jesus died for our sins, and we are all square with God except for the occasional World War, small war, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, typhoon, flood, tornado, and school shootings. We do have that big bang foretold in Revelations when “the earth shall be scorched by fire and the blood will run to the horses mane” to look forward to. Don’t wait, you need to get all of the lust in you out before then. Just be sure to keep track so that you can confess it all at the end, if you’re a Catholic.

“Confession is good for the soul” and it will help you to ascend into the kingdom of heaven. Just don’t try to sit in the chair on the right side of God. That seat’s reserved. One of the “perks”, remember?

Imagine that I have been astute in my analogy of the cruel child to the “just and loving God.” Imagine my incredulity that so many people need to force their personal beliefs on others? Beliefs that were imagined.

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try.

Delta Is Not Ready When I Am

Isolation due to the pandemic has gratefully allowed me to ignore the destruction of our airline industry firsthand. After a weekend trip from Atlanta to Boston, that returned me to Birmingham, I can report firsthand that the friendly skies are no longer friendly, and the ground is even worse.

Our Saturday flight left Boston relatively on time at 2PM and nearly three hours later we were ready to land in Atlanta. I had such high hopes.

The tag on my luggage said “ATL”, why were we landing in Birmingham? I and three hundred other lost souls still want to know the answer to that question. I know the plane information says it will only hold 200 people but believe me there was at least another fifty percent jammed on that flight.

My guess is we will all remain in the dark as to the actual reason why we were diverted from landing in Atlanta eight minutes before our arrival time. Seriously, we were descending into the Atlanta area, on time and everything good when our captain came on the loudspeaker to inform us that the Atlanta airport was being shut down due to severe storms in the area.

Having flown into the Atlanta airport many, many times during thunderstorms, (admittedly some of them quite scary) I conjured an EF5 tornado churning its way up I85 leveling everything in its path. The fact that we were caught short and not offered a holding pattern to the south and east of the monster storm (tornadoes travel SW to NE) was surprising. The fact that we were diverted to Birmingham and not Macon or Columbus which are an hour closer to Atlanta is also a question for deeper thinkers than I. I was able to focus on the calm air of the flight and no storms visible from the window. Could the Atlanta tower have taken their weather advice from those seldom right but never in doubt “Storm Trackers” at Channel 11 News?

We arrived in Birmingham without a ripple, a cross wind, a drop of rain. We sat on the tarmac for an hour and listened to the futile attempts of the captain to get us underway again. “Could we get refueled on the ground and return to Atlanta?” Nope. “Could we go to the gate and deplane so people could go to the bathroom and get something to eat?” Nope. Could we just stew in our own juices for an hour or so while funneling three hundred people through the three bathrooms onboard? Yep.

Eventually Delta Birmingham found a gate for us to deplane to while they tried to come up with a plan for the 8-10 planes re-routed to “The Magic City.” No one has any information. The captain presumes that the flight will return to ATL on the morrow. Delta does want its plane back but doesn’t really care whether the passengers come with or not.

Fortunately for some, Birmingham was the final destination for a large portion of the flight. They are arriving home early. The Birmingham residents are happy, if only Delta decides to off load the baggage. What to do with the baggage seems to be the next big challenge for the multi-billion-dollar airline.

After an hour and a half, we can see that Delta has decided not to hold our baggage hostage any further and they off load it to the carousel. Let me relate that there is not a Delta agent that we can tell that has been assigned to shepherd the group of lost sheep back to their shelter. Just random popups from uniformed people relating more bad news. The captain has long since abandoned his ship. We gather together and stick close to his point of departure hoping another shepherd will appear.

We are informed that because of some convention in town that there are not enough hotel rooms for Delta to put us up overnight. The smart crowd (seasoned Delta flyers, no doubt) had already seized all of the rental cars while we were waiting in line for the bathroom on the plane. We are a hundred or so now, adrift in the airport that appears to be closing for the night. My God, Chik Fil A has closed!

Finally, someone wearing a ramp agent vest tells us that if we can find a room that our flight will head back to Atlanta at 8AM the next morning, we are already ticketed. Otherwise, Delta was trying to secure a bus to carry those interested, first come first served, back to our original destination. Fifty-three or fifty-four of us. Weirdly, some of us hear that the bus will be arriving at the upper level. Primal survival takes over and we rush to be first in line at the door we presume will be our gateway to return home.

There are two reservation agents putzing around behind the counter who offer us water in massive bottles and snacks in bite-size packages. I muse that Delta is only offering snacks in hundred calorie packs as a means to fight America’s obesity problem and eventually get us all down to a size where we need no seat space at all, just slots like in a mail-room. We are told that the bus is on the way and that they are working on getting the manifest so they can check off who gets on the bus. The bus arrives but the manifest does not.

Let’s divert here for a moment to discuss the manifest. The manifest is the list of “souls” who are assigned to the carrier. It’s not magic, there are no spells or potions involved in producing one. You may have noticed assorted airline personnel like stewards checking them on their phone as they make sure you’re not sitting in a seat that has enough room, like first class. Anyway, it seems to be impossible for Delta to produce the manifest so that we can get on the bus. It is now 9-9:15 PM EST., and the bus driver is pointing out he’d like to get back home in time to go to Sunday services.

Mystery guy dressed like a ramp agent reappears and allows us to start boarding the bus. We are the lucky fifty-three that heard correctly that the bus would arrive on the upper deck. We believe there are others waiting on the lower deck, but we don’t seek them out. We squeeze into seats that are even closer together and narrower than airline seats. I know you don’t think it’s possible, but we’re sitting in seats designed for second graders. In spite of the discomfort, we are still elated to be leaving for our homes. Just one more bit of business keeps us tied to the Birmingham airport, the manifest.

The manifest has been supplanted by what we all know to be a legal pad. We spell our names as they appeared on our ticket to the agent that gathers the details for all of the fifty-three lucky survivors of the flight. I casually comment that had our plane gone down the manifest would have been published within minutes to a department at Delta charged with notifying next of kin. The agent is not amused, but then, neither are any of us. Being “stuck inside of Birmingham with the Memphis Blues again” was not on the schedule. Before we pull away from the curb, I get a text message from Delta that the 8AM departure for our flight the next day has been delayed. Who could have predicted that?

The bus ride is mostly uneventful with the exception of various body parts cramping and/or going to sleep. The bus driver knows what the ATL tag on our baggage stands for and gets us to the airport as quickly and safely as possible. The airport has chosen to have all Uber and Lyft transactions take place at the far end of the North Terminal parking. We are at the South Terminal. What’s a little schlepping at the end of a journey? It’s now 12:15AM on Sunday and we are finally breathing the hot humid air of our hometown.

The Uber driver is a chatty fellow and after I give him some of the high spots of our journey, afterall, he did ask, he informs us there had been no storms in the area that day. He had been at the airport around the time of our scheduled arrival, and everything seemed to be normal. No EF5’s, no active shooters, only normal business. Who am I to believe?

The next day, Delta sent us some apology sky miles and the excuse that the problem was due to the crew potentially going to overtime. We’ll just call that one bull-hockey while we muse on some of Delta’s past prevarications:

1984:     Delta Is Ready When You Are

1984:     Delta Gets You There

1987:     We Love to Fly, and It Shows

1992:     Ready When You Are

1994:     You’ll Love the Way We Fly

1997:     On Top of the World

2005:     Good Goes Around

Current:  Keep Climbing

The re-flight arrived about 1PM on Sunday delivering Delta’s equipment back to its original destination. Pick one of the catch phrases above.

A Change of Venue May Be Order

Thank God there is the occasional good news to offset all other news. This week we are confronted with the Uvalde report. The report is complete with the pictures confirming what we already knew. Children suffered and died because of the cowardice displayed by a vast assortment of men chosen for their qualities to protect and serve. Before we delve into that misstatement / misunderstanding, let’s look at the good news.

By all means watch the video, multiple times. What you are watching is a pizza delivery driver that just happened to be passing by realize that there was the possibility that he could do some good if he threw himself into action. He saved five children from a certain fiery death.

Most importantly, he raced back into the raging fire when he found that there was a six year old still in the house. You can see him bring her out as the firemen are putting on their fire-retardant gear for their assault on the house. Nick Bostic is the hero’s name and you can see from his shorts and t-shirt he didn’t need to suit up to go into action.

“I was ready to lose my life that night,” was what he said after the ordeal. He didn’t die, but he did receive a broken arm while jumping out of a second story window while cradling a six-year-old that now has a chance to grow up, graduate, marry, have children of her own. The Bible says, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I’m sure that now Bostic can count the children among his friends, but at that particular moment, Bostic was prepared to give his life for strangers. An example of pure bravery.

Now we flip the coin:

Note the difference in urgency between a house fire and a psychopath shooting children. Honest to God, watching these police it’s like they’re checking to see whose turn it was to bring snacks. With each piece of information revealed we find out more and more that the first order of business was not to stop the killing of innocents. Even after the child inside the class room got a call into 911 to explain that they needed help, the police just meandered about like neighbors at a yard sale. No urgency here, just innocents being slaughtered. “Let’s be careful out there.”

Forgiving the possibility that the “first responders” were not adequately armed for the situation, although two of the three officers do have semi-automatics and body armor, how can we forgive the inaction of literally hundreds of up-armored police who arrived on the scene minutes later?

The Texas Rangers have made hay off of the phrase, “One riot, one ranger” for over a hundred years. How do they justify not one ranger being willing to confront the killer? How do they rationalize taking the weapon from an off duty officer who wanted to go in and get his wounded wife? How do they explain arresting a mom that drove forty miles to the scene that was frantically trying to free her child? It seems that the ones that had the courage to do something were pushed aside that day.

A lot has been said about doors and keys and classrooms and/or offices. The first group into the hallway knew where the shots came from. They knew it was a classroom. The little girl begging for her life to the 911 operator told the operator where she was. Meanwhile, we hear Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Arredondo yelling into the void that he thinks is the shooter. Arredondo apparently thinks he can send the shooter a pizza and that after a while the shooter will fall asleep and the officers can slip in and take his gun away with no loss of life to the police.

Look at this timeline provided by the Texas Tribune and the Texas Department of Safety

12:46-12:47 p.m.

Arredondo gives approval to enter

12:46 p.m.

“I can hear the police next door.”

— Student who called 911

12:47 p.m.

“Please send the police now.”

— Student who called 911

12:50 p.m.

Officers kill gunman

I count three minutes from order given to situation ended. Imagine the difference in the situation if the breach order had come at 11:38 when Arredondo arrived on the scene? We don’t know how many babies would have been saved, but surely more than the final result.

A lot of times you hear that the cover-up was worse than the crime. All government agencies have been very reluctant in being transparent about the events at Uvalde. This is one time that I think the crime of cowardice, of shirking one’s sworn duty is far worse than the coverup. There will be trials. I’m assuming that the defendants will ask for a change of venue since the defendants have definitely tainted the jury pool. I’m a big believer of defendant rights, but this is one case I think should be tried where it happened.

Hopefully justice will be served and policies put into place to prevent this from ever occurring anywhere in our country again. Just remember if you’re ever in a life threatening situation, call Domino’s.

Sons And Their Fathers

Just finished watching the documentary “Unprecedented” directed by Richard Ray Perez. This is the documentary that has provided behind the scenes footage to the January 6th committee with regard to what was going on within the Trump camp on the day of the insurrection. Lots of “state of mind” questions seem to have gotten answered by some of the documentary’s footage.

The filmmaker was allowed to follow the Trump family all around the country during the 2020 campaign. The film gives the viewers a behind the curtains view of each family member as they stumped hard to Make America Great Again, Again. There were very staged sit-down interviews with the family, but the real meat came from the snippets taken before and after the individual rabble rousing.

What came through was how dedicated the children were to helping their father maintain his power. Their interest was not unselfish, nor was it sympathetic to the multitude of issues, mental and physical, the Donald exhibits. The “fifty speeches in forty-eight days” was the price the children were willing to pay for the family to maintain its stranglehold on America and continue the dynasty.

We all remember the Clampett Trump family visit to the Queen and what the Trumps felt was the opportunity for the two bloodlines to mingle and strategize. That’s how it works, right? One person is elected and then the family just takes turns being the supreme leader until they’ve all had a turn? The documentary makes the leap that it will be Don Jr. that will follow in the Donald’s footsteps, and not the fairest child Ivanka. Start popping the popcorn if they are both still free during the next election cycle.

It’s admirable that the daughter could be perceived as the heir apparent, and if you ignore all of the salacious gossip surrounding the pair, and I don’t, it would seem right and proper that Ivanka would win out over her mouth breathing brothers. But how sad for the brothers. Here are two guys that no matter how hard they try, they, like their father, will never win the approval or the love of their father. No amount of risk taking, felony committing, womanizing, race baiting, double dealing or cheating will ever be enough to win the favor of their father. How sad.

Like their father before them, the boys were instructed by a critic, not a promoter. The Donald only has time enough to promote himself and anyone that steals that limelight is suspect. It was very telling to watch the Donald viewing his son’s campaign speeches. The proud smile he had for Ivanka’s performance was turned into a grimace suggesting a bad bowel blockage after viewing his sons.

Not that the boys hadn’t thrown every accolade and hyperbole they could at the frothing crowd. The speeches promised “a chicken in every pot” in an America where only the “right” people could own a pot. The boys stood before God and everybody and promised that their daddy could walk on water, if the liberal congress and media would just get out of the way.

How the Donald was not overcome by the sheer volume of prevarications espoused by his heirs was amusing. These boys are world class truth benders and one would think that that alone would have put a twinkle in daddy’s eye. But alas the only twinkle in the Donald’s eye was for Ivanka.

We know that Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, drove his namesake to an alcoholic death. Fred Jr. couldn’t withstand the scorn heaped upon him by his dad who wanted him to follow in Fred Sr.’s real estate footsteps. From the looks of this video it looks like another generation of Trump sons is on their way to a substance abuse problem.

Sadly, there’s another generation of Trump sons being ignored by their father’s insatiable drive to measure up to their father’s expectations. All dynasties eventually fade away. The end of this one can’t come soon enough.

You’ve Done Enough

“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” was a rebuttal given by Joseph Welch to Wisconsin Republican Senator Joe McCarthy at the Senate hearings in 1954.

McCarthy, the lunatic Senator from Wisconsin, was distinguishing himself in front of America by conducting a witch hunt for communists. Lacking any of the qualifications normally found in a Presidential candidate, McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn plowed through people’s personal lives in an attempt to gain national recognition for a potential Republican party nomination. McCarthy and his chief counsel Cohn ran roughshod over witness after witness under the guise of ferreting out any communists that might be “hiding under our beds” in an attempt to gain notoriety for himself.

The McCarthy hearings were aligned with the Hollywood Blacklist and authors and actors had their careers cut short by the accusation, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the communist party?” Relentlessly grilling and insulting witnesses, McCarthy set a tone for the meanness, the pettiness, that lies deep in the soul of the Republican party today. Finally, McCarthy was brought up short by the question from Welch, “Have you left no sense of decency?” America heard the question and decided that they did have a sense of decency and the hearings were brought to an end.

This past week came the announcement that a ten year old rape victim was denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio because she was determined to be three days past the six weeks cutoff date. Take a moment. Get a drink of water and slow down your life long enough to contemplate what a full term pregnancy will do to a little ten year old’s body. Now, take another moment to contemplate the psychological damage done to the child through absolutely no fault or action of her own.

Somewhere in the bowels of hell the Republican party has deemed themselves to be the prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner and media rep, all in one for all of us.

I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican demographic that would be so heartless to enforce a pregnancy on a ten-year-old. I’d like to think that the majority of Republicans don’t think that rape victims should carry the child of their rapist, have to share custodial rights with the rapist, sit at the family dinner with their child’s father who might also be their father. I’d like to think that it’s only a sliver of the Republican party that is this cruel, this mean.

Evidence does not support my notion. Ronald Reagan famously said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left me.” Horse Hockey! Reagan left the Democratic party to quench his/Nancy’s lust for power, his need to tell everyone else what was right and wrong, to be the lead actor on the biggest stage in the world. Aided by unscrupulous individuals like Newt Gingrich, the Republicans set a course for dismantling all of the social programs so vital to the American poor and middle class. The heartless movement that they started has become the American Taliban we see today.

American Taliban, a bridge too far? What else do you call a society that is being governed by religious theories? If a sliver of society doesn’t believe in abortion, gay rights, miscegenation, a woman’s right to control her body and her destiny, and you have six Supreme Court justices willing to throw the Constitution aside in favor of dogma, what do you have?

When you throw in the sliver’s irrational support of guns, the guns that enable that sliver to have a “louder” voice than the rest of us, we wind up with daily crises that divert our attention from the main issues. These people want child rape victims to give birth to the consequence of their most horrible moment in life.

I ask you again, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Wah! Wah! Wah!

“Once upon a time” as most fairy tales start, there was a zeitgeist in America of doing good and being the “good guys”. Most people took pride in living honorably and in doing for others.

We all remember the cartoon about the Boy Scout that was so desperate to do a good deed that he walked an old woman across the street against her will. Such was the expectation for good citizenship in the community that the Scout saw an opportunity to do a good deed where none in fact existed. What the heck happened?

The persecuted Christian right wing is now wreaking havoc from the Supreme Court on the rest of us. The “righteous few” are doling out decisions for us everyday Americans who just want to muddle through our daily lives without the fear of our children being shot while they’re at what should be the safest spot in the world for them.

Now admittedly we had our fears as school children in my day. We hid under our desks to enhance our survival from nuclear attack. The likelihood of that attack was minuscule compared to the likelihood of being shot by an aggrieved shooter in today’s world. An aggrieved shooter that can’t get the mental health services he needs because “the money’s just not there,” but can buy a military weapon the same day he has his mental break, no questions asked.

More school children have been killed so far this year than on duty police officers. Let that sink in for a minute and ask yourself why the Supreme Court would tell the states they can’t regulate guns in their states. Juxtapose that ruling for FREEDUMB! against the very narrow view of freedom when evaluating a woman’s right to choose when to start a family. Somewhere in there the “right to life” has gotten muddled. It seems “forced birth” has become equated to a right to life, and the right to life is how well you can dodge a bullet.

In my twisted convoluted Judaeo-Christian belief system I’ve equated the Golden Rule as the only tenet I need to embrace. I should do unto others as I would want done unto me. I don’t want the court system telling me I don’t have control over my own body. That’s a bridge way too far.

If I don’t want the courts telling me I have to get a vasectomy or produce seed for a generation of super Americans, I should respect the rights of the female population to not have a group of religious zealots doing their thinking for them with regard to family planning. If they can tell you you have to have a baby, they can tell you which sex is acceptable.

As pointed out before, the absolute buy in of the mother is a prerequisite for me to the birth of a child. The state’s needs for children should not be part of the equation. Family planning shouldn’t be a consideration for future armies, or altar boys.

Not so for Justice Amy Cony Barrett. It seems that the gentle prevaricator outlined the shortage of children for adoption in her opinion of Roe vs. Wade. While commendable that she has adopted children of other races and with special needs, does she have the right to force her beliefs on the rest of us? I think not. The Constitution used to be pretty clear on the right of privacy.

Does Uncle Clarence have the right to finally get even with “the libs” after being subjected to their heretical viewpoints of freedom? Apparently he thinks so. It will be interesting to see his take on Loving vs. Virginia when it comes before the court. I may misunderestimate him. Ruling that blacks and whites can’t marry might have been his game plan all along to avoid a costly divorce from Ginni.

The wah, wah, wah, you hear is the unloved babies about to be born and those of us who remember when empathy for others was a thing. A Christian thing.

The Antichrist Had A Bad Hair Day

In news that we should all be concerned with, on a level that runs much deeper than our obsession with politics, it has been revealed on Youtube that any day now is the beginning of the “End of Days”. You’ve got to skip past all of the trailers for Arnold’s movie of the same name, but eventually if you keep scrolling you’ll get down to where the prophets are doing business.

According to some religious seers, the Antichrist will be unveiled today, or maybe tomorrow, or certainly by the end of next week, and with that revelation, Armageddon is just around the corner. While I do mental gymnastics with all of the possibilities of the Rapture, I wonder how the Antichrist will be revealed. For those unfamiliar with the scripture, I will defer to the secular humanists at Wikipedia to define the phenomenon .

“In Christian eschatology, the Antichrist or anti-Christ refers to people prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus Christ and substitute themselves in Christ’s place before the Second Coming. The Antichrist is announced as the one ‘who denies the Father and the Son.’ Jesus alerts his disciples not to be deceived by the false prophets, who will claim themselves as being Christ, performing ‘great signs and wonders.'”

According to “Christian eschatology” and Wikipedia, there’s millions and millions of people who are awaiting the return of Jesus Christ. Some are convinced that the second coming has arrived in the form of one Donald J. Trump. These people are so convinced that they’ve even erected a billboard declaring their belief to one and all that the Donald is truly the anointed one.

Never the one to let a quality scam get past the rubes, the Donald just smiles benevolently and accepts their adoration. Maybe in some corner of his Swiss cheese like brain, there is a neuron firing, “You are Jesus, you are Jesus.” That would certainly explain his miraculous escape from being held accountable for any of the multitude of sins he has committed.

I’ve often wondered how the faithful have ignored the Donald’s complete ignorance of anything regarding religion. In this video the Donald is being asked what his favorite part of the Bible is, his favorite verse. As you can see, the Donald won’t be pinned down, “he likes it all.” It might have been easier if the interviewer had asked the Donald if he could recite John 3:16. Any child that has ever darkened the door of any church knows the answer to that one. It’s a shame he’ll never get asked.

No, the Donald just likes the Bible, “all of it”. So much so that he felt compelled to carry a copy across the street from the White House to proudly display it upside down in the churchyard. Now there are those among us that see the symbology of upside down Bibles and crosses and such as signs of the Devil. I’m not saying the Donald is the Devil, but maybe he’s Devil adjacent. Or maybe he is the one prophesied, the one who parades as Jesus but is really the false prophet.

In news that you’ll never be allowed to see in the main stream media, the Donald’s normal stylist has replaced by someone who has been forewarned to cut around the two prominent horns emanating from the Donald’s frontal lobes. The paired hollow sheaths of keratin are currently hidden by the Donald’s coiffure. Those “Make America Great Again” hats aren’t just for advertising, you know.

I could be wrong, but I prophesize that at some point a really strong wind or perhaps a fall will unsettle the coif. Once confronted with the evidence, will the MAGATS believe the evidence of the Donald’s duplicity or continue to follow him to his just reward? Stay tuned. “But about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.”