Kickbacks - 27 January 2012

Monday’s New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board would that day begin trying to respond to the city’s aging infrastructure by more than doubling by 2016 the rates they charge the consumers its years of neglect has victimized, that former professional football player Reggie Williams is the cream of the crop among finalists to head New Orleans’ recreational program, and that Louisiana is one of but seven states to have increased its educational spending per student by 3.3% between 2002 and 2010.

Regarding the infrastructure, we should ask whether the Sewerage & Water Board will spend that money to improve the infrastructure, and we should note that construction projects are easy targets for government corruption.  Regarding putting a professional player in charge of recreational programs, we should ask how playing football prepares a person to guide youth into anything other than football, and what kind of role models professional football players are.  Regarding the increase in spending per student, we should ask why the New Orleans public school system is still nearly the worst in the nation, which is to ask where the money went.

Maybe all that money has gone or shall go into renovating the Mercedes Benz Superdome, or maybe it has gone into the pockets of corrupt politicians, but either way it isn’t likely to improve the general welfare.  And yes football brings money into the city, but it also brings people like the Alabama fan who tea-bagged a passed out LSU fan at the Krystal burger joint on Bourbon Street, winning the sympathy of someone I know who works for the Las Vegas franchised strip joint down the street.  The days of Huey Long were pastoral compared to these.

War and peace - 26 January 2012

I’ve taken recently a literary tour through the Indian religion Hinduism and plan to take in August a physical tour of the land of the Buddha.  The scriptures didn’t disappoint my understanding of the notion of absolute unity to which the words “yoga” and “karma” refer.  But the introductions to the translations I read suggested to me that their authors missed the point.

They seemed to me to think that the “is” in the Hindu assertion that the Atman is Brahmin doesn’t mean identity but similarity.  To my mind, the whole problem with humanity is that humans seek differences rather than unity, bigotry rather than coordination.  It’s like football players limiting teamwork to their own team.

NBC’s Nightly News often closes its shows with a segment its producers call Making a Difference.  We should stop trying to make differences, further dividing the world into irrational divisions, which Hindus call Maya.  Karma should be getting along with yoga.

Conscienceless - 25 January 2012

Smart people don’t call people they don’t understand stupid.  That Newt Gingrich does that habitually disqualifies him as an intellectual as his saying that eleven million Palestinians are imaginary disqualifies him as a historian.  And his claim that what he calls the liberal media picks on him more than it picks on other candidates qualifies him as paranoid delusional.

And there’s that he said that ABC’s reporting his second wife’s claim and CNN’s asking him about it is close to unimaginably despicable shows his lack of perspective.  Unimaginably despicable is his trying to erase his divorces and marital infidelity by joining the Roman Catholic Church.  And unimaginably stupid is Christian youth buying into that hypocrisy.  Uneducated white guys vote against Romney not for Gingrich.  Pseudointellectuals vote for him.

People CNN calls expert have said that CEO’s are more sociopathic than any other class of people and that Casey Anthony is sociopathic because her behavior aside from the question of whether she killed her daughter is like that of many U.S. women of her age.  Gingrich, who’s never been a CEO in his 68 years, is sociopathic.  Nancy Grace should manage his campaign.

By reason of insanity - 24 January 2012

Friday afternoon, I drank a PBR at Aunt Tiki’s, a French Quarter bar with a reputation for degeneracy.  I ordinarily do that once or twice a week to see a barmaid I’ve known for years who is raising Aunt Tiki’s customer base from degeneracy to dereliction.  I met Gracie when she was mother henning derelicts at the Abbey bar before she got into a row with its degenerate owner who used to own a bar called the Morgue.

An Aunt Tiki’s customer told me Friday that he’s looking at a plea bargain to reduce to fourteen years the sentence he expects for whatever he did.  I told him that a Vietnam veteran friend of mine is stuck in prison perhaps forever for killing his policeman father when his father pointed a pistol at his head and ordered him to stop living in a VW Microbus in an abandoned gravel pit.  Mike took the pistol from his father and shot him with it, and the court decided Mike was guilty but mentally ill and so must remain in prison until he stops being mentally ill, and he told me he won’t let mental health professionals work on him because they don’t believe that the little green demons with long tails who visit him in his cell are real.

The guy facing the fourteen year sentence replied to that by telling me that the demons only visit him at home.  The previous week, a woman who’s often at Aunt Tiki’s replied to my introducing myself to her as Crazy Bill by saying that she’s related to Wild Bill Cody, and I didn’t point out that she had Buffalo Bill Cody mixed up with Wild Bill Hickok.  And neither have I ever disagreed with my friend Mike.

Catch 22 - 23 January 2012

I minored in English at David Letterman’s Muncie alma mater and minored in psychology.

A hobby of mine is hanging out in French Quarter bars.  I do it on a schedule, about three hours per afternoon on four afternoons per week, and I do it because bars are pubs and therefore an opportunity to learn public points of view.  And I introduce myself as Crazy Bill.

The reason I introduce myself as Crazy Bill is that I’ve learned the basic perversity of humanity.  Were I to claim to be sane, patrons would call my controversial talk crazy, but they generally respond to my calling myself crazy by saying I’m not.  Recently, Dan Quayle’s brother told me I risk being killed in a bar by saying in bars how things seem to me, but Chris apparently doesn’t see the method to my madness that my life in the murder capital of the United States has proved.

I think sports are basically bigotry, and a few days ago enjoyed a conversation with a crazy woman in one of my favorite bars, and my sensitive response to her drew from another regular in that bar, the bar where Coco Robicheaux died, an assertion that I don’t like myself.

I also can’t stop thinking that liking oneself doesn’t require disliking less fortunate people.

Sylvester and Tweety - 22 January 2012

So Rick Perry is shifting his support to Newt Gingrich.  Perry claims to be a Protestant while Gingrich claims to be a Catholic.  Perry washed out in debates while the media call Gingrich the smart guy in debates.

But look at Gingrich on both counts.  He didn’t claim to be a Catholic until after two divorces, presumably to increase his credibility by claiming repentance, but actually indicating hypocrisy.  And he fools no reputable historian into thinking he’s a historian, and he fools no intelligent person into thinking he’s smart, but stupid is the new smart.

“Smart” has become a buzz word for persons who agree with the notion that being unable to make an argument in 140 or fewer characters isn’t clever.  That’s for people too lazy to think or to learn.  They ignore.

PFC Wikileaks - 21 January 2012

CBS’s New Orleans television affiliate’s morning news anchor said of the mother, who required her son to wear a sign labeling him a liar and a thief, that he’s glad she cared about her child.  If the child is a liar or a thief, his mother should take some responsibility for that, not exacerbate it.  That child, for the rest of his life, probably will resent his mother and rebel against guidance.

The captain of the Costa Concordia is a despicable coward.  But, like the mother who refused to take responsibility for having guided her child, the company owning that cruise should take responsibility for hiring that captain but is trying to shift all the blame to him.  The United States military lost a lot of loyal soldiers when it court-martialed Lieutenant Calley but let Captain Medina walk away free after ordering the My Lai massacre.

Both law and ethics include a long tradition opposite to such irresponsibility. The legal term is “respondeat superior,” and the ethical term is “noblesse oblige,” and both go back to feudalism.  They are the ethical foundation of the Magna Charta, which is a legal foundation of the United States Constitution, and the Roman Church still denies responsibility for its pedophilia.

Professing mental health - 20 January 2012

Among the many things I enjoy about New Orleans’ French Quarter is that it’s a breeding ground for people who live perhaps mindlessly by their hearts.  My favorite, of those I’ve known here, was Ruthie the Duck Lady who roller-skated the quarter with ducks trailing behind her.  And she didn’t do that for for money or beg.

A barmaid in my second favorite French Quarter bar says that Ruthie inherited money and sometimes shortchanged bartenders by two bits when she bought beer and that she wasn’t a street performer because she didn’t perform for money.  That bartender admires instead some people who made balloons resemble animals and acquired enough money from doing that in malls to buy two homes.  And she says all that is reason to hold Ruthie in contempt.  She says Ruthie had undiagnosed mental health issues.  She says something was wrong with her. 

She calls me a curmudgeon and says that anyone would be stupid not to sell out the Quarter’s ancient culture for money from sports fans.  And I have learned from many conversations with her that she doesn’t believe in magic.  The best thing I can say about her is that she isn’t a sports Fan.  She worships money.  That’s all.

Abstraction - 19 January 2012

The unpresidential campaign is getting less and less presidential.  Gingrich took it to a new step into the ditch by advertising against Romney’s speaking French.  And he took it one more step by saying he was trying to be funny as Cain was with his campaign manager smoking.

And Romney has taken his campaign one more step into the ditch by trying to buy votes for pocket money.  At a rally, he said he saw a needy woman he’d seen before, and he gave her all the cash he had in his pocket.  He could be less insulting by giving pocket change to homeless people begging on the streets and including a Romney button with it.

I have often said that sports is a model for bigotry, and Romney showed his bigotry against the dignity of people with monetary wealth less than his, by making that woman’s poverty public for his gain.  Some people call such bigotry competition.  Spades are not shovels.

This Week Sunday - 18 January 2012

Sports and Ronald Reagan fan George Will said something’s wrong with anyone who criticizes Tim Tebow.  “When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men,” says Jesus in Matthew 6:5.  Reagan also prayed on television, and called pacifists “grass-eating know-nothings,” as Tebow is in the business of beating other people out of fame and fortune.

Economist Paul Krugman said that the current economy is like the Great Depression.  During the Great Depression, people went door to door begging for food and sent their children into the streets to beg for money, and men left their families to hop freight trains to other cities in a desperate search for work.  Now, families with more money than most families had then can get food stamps, and people are living on welfare rather than relocate or accept jobs for less pay than they received before losing their jobs by failing to prove themselves competitive.

And pundit without portfolio Peggy Noonan presented her usual tangential absurdity with her usual smugness.  Cokey Roberts pointed out that Rick Santorum is a Roman Catholic, a fact discordant with other media reporters calling him born again, a phrase more common to Pentecostal Protestants.  But no one pointed out that many South Carolinians are Pentecostal Protestants while no top tear candidate on their primary ballot for the Presidency is a protestant.

Intelligence - 17 January 2012

The United States government’s support of Israel provoked 9/11 by threating Islamic homes.  Now, Mossad’s assinations of Iranian nuclear scientists has provoked the Iranian government to threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States government is supporting Mossad by threatening military action against Iran.  Supporting the Israeli theocracy against the majority population of the region is not in the interest of the United States and will always provoke jihad.

Arizona’s government, while legislating to treat as drug traffickers workers in the United States because they can’t support themselves in Mexico or afford to jump through legal hoops to get here, has legislated not to celebrate the birth of the Junior Martin Luther King.  And Alabama’s government is still doing everything it can to reverse the success of its capital’s bus boycott.

Yesterday an Alabama drug addict bragged to me about AU’s football team’s kicking LSU’s ass.  In the sixties and seventies, drug addicts were pacifist hippies, but now they’re bellicose football fans!  But what can we expect in a nation eating Advil while calling such bigotry school spirit? 

Vectors - 16 January 2012

There she is again, graceless Nancy Grace, returning like Freddy.  She’s still calling Casey Anthony Top Mom and saying she was blasted cheerful through her trial.  And her media sponsors remain complicit in her crap.

ABC has another person it calls a legal expert frowning at graceless Grace and often disagreeing with her.  But ABC also says Anthony sat stone-faced throughout her trial while truth is that we could see tears on Anthony’s face during the trial.  But, anyway, anyone who listens to Grace is as graceless as she is.

She calls mental health professionals shrinks and says we should look up their jargon on dictionary.com.  And she calls facts supporting Anthony perfume on a pig.  A pig is graceless Grace trying to dance with stars.

Balaam’s ass - 15 January 2012

Jesus said that, if we have faith no larger than a mustard seed, all things will be possible to us.  Romney says he’s a Christian, but he engineered Hillamneycare in Massachusetts, showing that his faith isn’t as large as that of the woman who healed herself by believing that touching Jesus’ clothes would heal her.  Of course, Hillary doesn’t claim Christianity, but the issue is separation of church and state.

And, of course, supporting the Israelis against the Palestinians by calling Israel a democracy also violates that constitutional mandate.  Netanyahu, who as Prime Minister of Israel ought to know, says that Israel is a Jewish state and accordingly a theocracy and not a democracy.  And the Palestinians have behaved far less murderously toward the Israelis than the Israelis have toward the Palestinians.

But people calling themselves evangelicals in South Carolina campaigned against John McCain by saying McCain had a black child.  They should note that the Bible says Moses married an Ethiopian woman and that Moses ordered the massacre of his in-laws and  blood relatives who took him in after he fled Egypt before the Exodus.  They should take the Ten Commandments to heart.

Hillamneycare - 14 January 2012

NBC’s Brian Williams responded to Romney’s saying we should be able to fire health insurance companies for not doing their job by calling health insurance companies consumer companies.  Health insurance companies take money from consumers and invest it on Wall Street while doing everything they can to avoid giving the consumers what they pay for.  That makes them investment companies and not consumer companies and by no means liberal.

I’m a veteran of Vietnam and Afghanistan and rely entirely on the Veterans Administration for my healthcare.  The Veterans Administration doesn’t gain by denying me care I need or by selling me care I don’t need or by stilting its behavior for fear of law suits.  And, because it has its own specialists, I don’t have to pay for referrals from my PCP.

If Democrats wish to promote healthcare rather than mercenary greed, they should live up to their socialist reputation, by recommending government healthcare.  But instead they’re doing what they say Republicans do.  But they always do that.

Low and outside - 13 January 2012

Romney should have said that he likes to fire people who don’t provide services we pay them to provide.  But the point he nevertheless obviously tried to make is that people should be fired for not doing their jobs.  And that notion should have applied to the Wisconsin teachers who by their example taught their students to play hooky by turning in counterfeit doctor’s slips.

MSNBC, the Democratic Party’s main media propaganda machine, said that more important than the point he tried to make is was how he tried to make it.  And MSNBC also keeps hitting him for saying that corporations are people as though chief executive officers and directors on corporate boards and employees of corporations aren’t the corporation.  That’s all propaganda.

But Romney is wrong anyway, because few patients choose their insurance companies, but rather accept whatever their employers subsidize.  And insurance companies always charge patients more than they pay for their care and use all of that money to increase corporate income by investing it in the stock market.  Insurance companies compete on Wall Street.

McCainia - 12 January 2012

A symptom of PTSD is delusions of persecution, and McCain has responded to his time in the Hanoi Hilton by xenophobia, allying himself with Brewer against Mexicans and Lieberman against Palestinians and now Romney against China.  The United States accomplished our legitimate mission in Iraq when the Bush administration ran Saddam Hussein into a hole in the ground.  Xenophobic paranoia undermines national security and world peace.

The United States should not have stayed in Iraq to force the Iraqis’ reaction to their new freedom.  Obama let his administration get away with the lie about killing Osama bin Laden and replace Gates, who surely knew it was a lie and advised against it, with politician Panetta.  But the policy Panetta and Dempsey announced this week accords with the United States’ approach to Libya whether or not they recognized that Gaddafi wasn’t as dangerous as Saddam Hussein.

Except Paul, who hasn’t indicated that he knows the difference between offense and defense, every Republican candidate is promoting boots on the ground when drones in the sky can be more effective at less cost of life or money.  So I’m willing to find out what Obama will do after relief from needing to depend on Dean/Reid/Pelosi for reelection.  I have a hunch that he’ll break free into good sense and give all of Earth a breath of fresh air.

The melting pots - 11 January 2012

Iowa is mainly farmland.  It’s hinterland dependent on agriculture and literally dependent on pork.  So its electorate hardly represents the others of the United States.

New Hampshire is also mostly rural, but it’s within commuting distance of Boston and was significant in the American Revolution, and it’s been more libertarian than Boston for decades.

South Carolina was also one of the original thirteen colonies, and it has a rural economy but also has on the edge of its capital the United States Army’s largest basic training center, and it was a slave state.

Florida is more cosmopolitan than any of those other early primary states.  It’s full of Cubans and gangsters and drug traffickers and retired people and college students on spring break.

But none of those primaries represents the general electorate.  And none of the candidates shall win all of those primaries.  But they usefully draw general attention.

Little Las Vegas - 10 January 2012

In Search of Excellence, the book that popularized the MBA degree in the 1980’s, says that success in business depends on knowing what business you’re in.

For more than a quarter century New Orleans has had the highest per capita murder rate in the United States and a police force famous for murderous corruption and a government famous for corrupt political dynasties.  The current Landrieu mayor has done nothing to change any of that besides making the Pillsbury doughboy his police commissioner and increasing property taxes to drive off investment and promoting sports to cheapen tourism.  And his lip service is disservice.

He recently said that we should teach children not to hate and that the curfew his City Council has enacted to keep children at home after 8:00 p.m. until they’re sixteen is to encourage taking responsibility.  Promoting sports sets the example for children to behave as adult sports fans do, turning over cars and beating fans of other teams in parking lots and on public transportation, emulating and idolizing the violence on the football field.  That is, it encourages idealizing hate, by setting up such as Michael Vick and O. J. Simpson as role models for children.

The best thing about New Orleans is its French Quarter, the neighborhood that was all of the city when Bienville founded it in 1718, the neighborhood that established every genre of uniquely American music much longer ago than a quarter century.  And for much longer than a quarter century the Quarter has profited from tourists appreciating the music and cuisine and architecture unique here.  But Landrieu is turning the Quarter into one big sports bar with poker machines.

Low property taxes attract responsible residents, and responsible people are not couch potatoes from Metairie or Dearborn, and they prefer responsible governments.

Frostiness - 9 January 2012

“It doesn’t matter whether it was your department or another department,” said a police chief to ABC News about the death of a police officer, “You still feel the loss.”  That defines the sports attitude, the notion that normal is siding against anyone not with or siding with your own team, the perversion of bigotry!  Why doesn’t what he said go without saying?

“No man is an island,” said John Donne in his seventeenth meditation, the one in which he also admonished us to “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”  Jesus used his parable of the good Samaritan to try to make the point that the Samaritan, while Jews had said for centuries that Samaritans are all bad and enemies of Jews, was more of a neighbor to the wounded Jew than was the passing Rabbi.  But centuries and millennia pass with hardly anyone claiming any religion accepting that.

Now we have people calling themselves evangelical running for the Presidency of the United States claiming that we shouldn’t be neighborly to children of people who came to the United States from a neighboring nation because they came here illegally.  And they similarly support how the Israelis treat the Samaritans.  And no fences make neighbors.

PTSD - 8 January 2012

Post-traumatic stress disorder come not mainly from what others have done to military personnel but mainly from what military personnel have done to others.  Freud used the word “repression” to refer to denying oneself conscious thought of anything one cannot reconcile with one’s own conscience.  But now most of the repression and denial is on the part of the government and the mental health professionals and the media.

The media are using the word “swift-boating” to refer to any negative campaigning, but the veterans who referred to John Kerry’s cowardice were simply saying what they’d seen, repressing only denial.  Kerry, on the other hand, denied his complicity in Vietnam after begging medals for himself to get him out of their early and before calling himself a war hero.  Kerry, accordingly, confuses and contributes to the guilt feelings of all veterans.

And one Kerry supporter is Chris Matthews, who calls his show by a sports metaphor and showed this week how he feels about patriotism, by responding to a presidential candidate’s quoting the song “America the Beautiful” by mocking the song.  Obama’s administration has demoralized the SEAL’s by making them complicit in its false claim to killing Osama bin Laden.  And now it’s quit on the SEAL’s mission.

Mitch Jackson - 7 January 2012

New Orleans’ French Quarter celebrates each New Year by dropping a statuette of a baby from the top of Jax Brewery as a sadistic perversion of the tradition to put one in a king cake to symbolize the body of Christ the king in the Eucharist.

And I heard a rumor last week that the mayor is considering dropping from a fleur de lis instead in future years, not to symbolize the saint who designed the fleur de lis in fifth century Reims, but to symbolize the football players calling themselves saints.  And that mayor recently said his Pillsbury doughboy police commissioner is trying to stop children from hating.  We need to stop inspiring children to behave as adult football fans.

The corrupt political dynasties of New Orleans are steadily chopping away at the historical heritage of the French Quarter.  The Landrieu family could less sacrilegiously drop a football from that roof.  And they should let it lie as they do.

Jackasses in elephant suits - 6 January 2012

Virginia, the Old Dominion of Robert E. Lee, has permitted the Party of Ulysses S. Grant to require signing an oath to vote for that party’s candidate in the general election for permission to vote in the primary.

And that beltway state’s weird ballot criteria have kept Newt Gingrich from the ballot.  That means Gingrich, who is a Virginia resident and presumably will vote in the Virginia primary, won’t be able to vote for himself in the general election if he wins that party’s nomination.  That’s crazier than voting for Gingrich.

And Fox News, the main media propaganda machine for that party, called people disinclined to sign the oath riffraff.  But Iowa doesn’t permit soldiers in Afghanistan to vote by absentee ballot.  That’s crazier.

Fiddling while burning - 5 January 2012

Pastors are campaigning from the pulpit.  Gingrich, presumably to dump the baggage of having divorced twice, converted to Roman Catholicism.  And, while also calling himself a historian, he denied the existence of a people whom Egyptians forced into Canaan from the southwest at about the time that the Israelites invaded it from the northeast.

Romney while calling himself a Mormon, and Santorum and Perry while calling themselves evangelical, preach the sectarian violence that Gingrich used that denial of history to preach.  Bachmann also preaches sectarian violence and homophobia while Paul preaches for homophobia but against sectarian violence.  Christian faith has nothing to do with any of it.

Jesus preached against violence and used the parable of the good Samaritan to try to define neighborliness.  The evangel John, whether or not Jesus accepted homosexuality, called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved and bragged about leaning on Jesus’s breast at the last supper.  Politicians, Christian or not, could learn from the gospels.

Yoga - 4 January 2012

Judaism is not a monotheistic religion.  Consider the first of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  The Tanakh does not say that no other gods exist but only that we shouldn’t worship them as it says many of the kings of Israel and Judah did.

Hinduism is not only monotheistic but also monistic.  Translators of Hindu scriptures use the word “god” to refer to countless entities, but Hindu theologians say that those entities are not gods but aspects or activities of the one God, which they call Brahman.  And they say that all selves are one self and that the one self is Brahman.

Christianity, but not Paulism, is also both monotheistic and monistic.  The Gospels say that Jesus said that he and our Father are one and that we’ll be as he is if we do as he did and that the kingdom of God is within us.  But Roman Catholics call that the pantheistic heresy.

Desperate diction - 3 January 2012

Neither “pro-choice” nor “pro-life” accurately describes what persons who claim to believe in them support.  Choosing to have an abortion for no reason other than convenience denies responsibility for choices and deprives the fetus of the choice between living and dying.  And, if the choice is between death of the mother and death of the fetus, denying an abortion deprives the mother of that choice of life.

Similarly, the distinction between “conservative” and “liberal” is a distinction without a difference, because persons calling themselves conservatives wish to conserve the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights while persons calling themselves liberals wish to liberate them.

But maybe the craziest misnomer is using “left” and “right” as though they’re political terms since left and right are directions that change depending on whether you’re facing or following someone.

Nonsectarian hypocrisy - 2 January 2012

Newt Gingrich, with his denial of the existence of eleven million Palestinians, has complained that Ron Paul has suggested that the United States motivated 9/11.  Gingrich, while calling himself a historian, says that Paul is anti-Semitic while most Semitic people are Arabic.  That the United States government supports such nonsense certainly partly motivated 9/11.

But the United States government motivated 9/11 more tangibly than by propaganda.  It consistently supports the Israeli effort to oppress anyone not Jewish living in what three religions call the Holy Land.  And the Tanakh is far more bellicose than is the Koran.

Consider also the difference between Gingrich’s insanely denying the lives of eleven million people and Ahmadinejad’s insanely denying the deaths of six million.

Resolution - 1 January 2012

The United States Constitution makes freedom of religion and separation of church and state integral to the law of the land.  Yet for 63 years, while proscribing Christians’ praying in public schools, the United States government has supported a Judaic state’s oppression of Islamic people.  What we call the war on terror is a war on Islamic terrorists trying to defend Islamic people against Judaic terrorism.

Yasser Arafat formed Fatah to retaliate against Menachem Begin’s Irgun’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel.  The United States declared Irgun to be a terrorist organization, and Irgun gave up its name but in 1948 became the government of Israel, and Begin became its Prime Minister.  The situation became part of the Cold War arms race when Israel’s invasion of surrounding Arab countries prompted the U.S.S.R. to arm Arab countries while the U.S. armed Israel.  The dissolution of the Soviet Union partly motivated the formation of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and 9/11.  And that motivated the U.S. incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan.

This new year is an election year, and that gives us a huge opportunity at least to slow that grotesquely hypocritical cycle of violence, at the polls.  The world’s economy is in a shambles, and the United States is a huge part of the problem for all of us, partly because of the financial costs of that war costing us also lives.  We can vote against anyone promoting any sectarian violence by anyone anywhere.

Such as these - 31 December 2011

CNN ran a story showing pictures of children with Down syndrome in a psychiatric hospital with other children.  It said that the Down syndrome children didn’t belong there but didn’t question whether the other children did.  Down syndrome is more demonstrably psychiatric than is schizophrenia.

So close to Christmas, another question is what would happen to Jesus, were he doing now what he did two millennia ago.  A probability is that he would be not crucified but confined to a psychiatric hospital.  The diagnosis would be schizophrenia.

And another weird thing about the CNN story was that it called the psychiatric hospital a mental hospital.  We don’t call other hospitals body hospitals.  And the brain is physical.

Juvenile delinquency - 30 December 2011

Presents we return are gifts we reject.  It’s a little like adolescents routinely rejecting their parents.  You don’t get to choose your parents as you don’t get to choose your Christmas gifts.

But you can’t return your parents as you can many of your Christmas gifts.  But the cause of the wish to do either is lack of appreciation of friends.  But that’s assuming that your parents are your friends.

And, with all the child abuse and neglect and abortions, that assumption is questionable.  And it’s questionable because many adolescents never become adults.  Maybe because of their parents.

Kicking cans - 19 December 2011

The day after Christmas, CNN presented someone it called a financial expert, offering two pieces of fiscally unsound advice.  He said that employees should ask their employers to postpone from December to January payment of their Christmas bonuses.  And he said that companies should delay until January billing for their December sales.

Postponing the bonuses until next year will reduce taxes for this year but increase taxes for next year, and employers aren’t likely to comply with the requests, because that would increase their taxes this year.  And postponing billing until next year will decrease this year’s taxes but increase next year’s taxes.  It’s all like the current congressional behavior.

The CNN anchor pertinently asked what we can do now to decrease our taxes on 15 April 2013, and an answer is that we should ignore the advice of that so-called financial expert, but the so-called expert didn’t own up.  And, of course, another consideration is that tax rates are likely to be higher later.  The recession tax cuts will expire.