A liberal on a bike

Went on my almost daily now long hardcore walk on the beautiful and rustic bike path here that stretches on for miles and the usual crowd: rollerbladers, joggers, old couples walking, fat folks doing the slow shuffle, hounds taking dumps and your ever present bicyclists. It is the law in NYS now that bicyclists have to wear a helmut (that's another issue for another day) so anyways these two young black fellas are peaceably riding along on their two bikes without helmuts of any kind, more like baseball caps and this yuppie on a bike coming the other way, you know the superfit kind without an ounce of lard with the silver designer helmut passes them and right before passing them goes "your heads!! Guys where are your helmuts?!?" and he then proceeds on his way shaking his head, the roving lecturer. Now a libertarian would never do this, I can't imagine soapie in a million years doing this and I could care less. "Where's the condoms guys?" Busybodies, nanny-staters, buttinskies, benevolent stalkers, overall Pains-In-The-Asses.

Listening to Hannity years ago and they were talking about the fat of the land so the caller goes when he walks into a restaurant and sees a Mom giving her fat daughter an ice cream sundae he wants to go up to them and say "what are you doing?" and Hannity apparently agreed. Why do they care so much? I have as my new thesis that Sarcasm is the Defense of Right Order and the two black bicyclists could have said "fuck off hedge fund manager" but didn't but they would have been well within their rights. Libertarianism is looking better to me day after day and would have absolutely nothing to say to that Mom and her porker in Friendly's.

On my leisurely walks among the babbling streams and the forested trees with the goldfinches darting about and the turtles basking on their logs I'm generally mulling over problems, Life's overall suckiness condition. Folks not wearing their helmuts or husketeers sucking down a banana split at Carvel doesn't enter the whole existential picture here. I'll bet most folks are like this, it's my ex just made my life hell and Why the Hell Am I Here not that guy just took a piss in the woods. There was a guy at Barnes & Noble once sitting in one of those big soft comfy chairs reading a mag. He had shorts on and his sack was hanging out. I didn't even say anything.

Get involved.

Specifically why is the Tea Party a bad thing?

Addressed mainly to Shaw and Saty and other like-minded folk. A few weeks back my conservative friend (see even he is confused) asked me what the Tea Party is and I gave him a kind of general answer but I was somewhat at a loss too. All I know is that it's supposed to be

a Bad Thing

and it reminds me of the whole deal with salt. By now it's a universally recognized truth that salt is bad for you but nobody explains why so we go into the store looking for low-salt items, low-sodium cold cuts but nobody really knows why. All I know is that the Tea Party has largely avoided the social issues, seems to have moved beyond the whole pro-life/pro-choice matrix whereas I think and I've always felt that conservatism without pro-life is an empty victory. So for me without this foundation the Tea Party leaves me more than a little spiritually unfulfilled. I'm not a tea partier myself but I don't have the same hostility to the movement the msm has and most liberals. It's definitely a counter-Obama movement but it really started before Obama, with those bank bailouts and folks being asked to mail in a tea bag to their representative's office. I'm also hearing about race alot but this is like an old TV Guide still hanging around the house, why not just chuck it? or maybe it's kept around for nostalgic purposes. This whole teabagging thing, that might have been mildly funny when it first came out but I was a little surprised liberals would make a popular gay sexual practice into a pejorative.

I don't want mental, emotional diarrhetic dribblings here. I want DETAILS.

Zesty swordfish with roasted asparagus

I love to experiment while cooking. You're not being judged on Master Chef on technical presentation, you're in your own private kitchen fulfilling the #1 Rule of Cooking which a Jamaican chef explained to me once and that is whatever pleases your palate. Cooking, dunno know why but it's alot like politics - My way of cooking is The way - when just give me something good to eat, something that sticks to my ribs. Anyway bought a swordfish steak last week and here's what I did:

Diced up a small tomato, 1/2 a white onion and a jalapeno, all small dice (on Master Chef they'd have to be perfect squares but I ain't into the ocd style of cooking). Put them in a small bowl and added some olive oil and mixed it up. Drizzled everything on top of the swordfish and then some bread crumbs and even some Parmesan (dunno if Joe Bastianich would approve but fuck him), the whole idea being to give it that toasted appearance. Got my oven preheated to 400 (don't tell anyone but it was actually a toaster oven) and then put the steak on a foil tray. OK oven ready and so on another tray just below that was my asparagus which was drizzled with some olive oil, salt & peppa and a freshly crushed garlic clove. I prefer freshly crushed garlic to the bottled kind but whatever. So I'm watching the thing for about, oh I don't know 10 or 15 minutes, even used a small flashlight to see what's going on in there and towards the end just cranked that baby up to 450. Total time about 20, 22 minutes and put the bad boy on my plate with the asparagus kind of on each side. I actually think Gordon Ramsay would have liked it and the guy in the middle but Joe would have just taken a bite and walked away. You know I do my own thing in the kitchen and it rocked!! The cat outside even smelled it from all the way out there and came in and jumped up on the table. The things you can do with such modest equipment and it's good for you too. I didn't do anything radical like you see in some cookbooks and put a pineapple on top, chefs must be getting bored or something these days. Bon appetit!

This cult of negative non-inspiration out there

What d'ya think of this sermon? This past Sunday the pastor got into a whole homily on narrow is the gate that leads to heaven and few there are who enter it. Now that's fine as it was the reading for the day but I never heard one like this one before. He said what he's about to say is gonna sound somewhat harsh and he proceeded to say not all our friends, relatives, not even everyone in this parish who has passed on are in heaven. So I felt maybe he's alluding to Purgatory but then he went on -- "and not all of them are going to heaven." I started gauging the audience, hard to read but I did hear a couple of positive reviews afterwards which surprised me but let's put the brakes on this theological locomotive before we careen off into the ravine. Since the sermon was so unrelievedly negative, bleak I had this thought that yeah maybe the gate that leads to heaven is indeed narrow in which case it just might take that much longer for everyone to enter through. A single-file deal but that's not what I thought he had in mind and I would have been shot down if I raised my hand and offered my heretical counterdeal.

Who winds up in heaven, who doesn't, how many, all these are theological mysteries and it is the height of theological arrogance for a pastor, any minister to opine such. He knows this? God told him this? and what about him, hmmmmm??? This was crossing a line but organized religion does cross lines every now and then. How is this different from the radical Muslim believing all non-Muslims are infidels headed for the pit? So there I was sitting in the back of the church getting uninspired, depressed even. I've suffered enough in this life, you mean there's more to come in eternity? It was a surreal moment and so I was going over my tinnitus-like condition, my irregular bowels down through the ages, all those nights of poor sleep, psycho bosses and all the other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the icing on this crap cake of Life, woes in the romance department but you mean to tell me that's only a warmup?

You're killing me!

There's something about Robert Gibbs' comments that have been bothering me

Just because President Obama has apparently managed to piss off the left-wing blogosphere doesn't make him a conservative or even a moderate (Shaw is a notable exception but then again Shaw is Shaw). Gibbs' remarks that they won't be satisfied until we have a Canadian style health care system and Dennis Kucinich as president, well if you deconstruct that that doesn't mean Obama wouldn't prefer to have the public option. Indeed he's on the record as supporting such but basically he saw the political handwriting on the wall and to borrow a page from Patrick M he went with practicality over principle. If I say or do something that pisses off the soapster let's say, I get Mal's knickers in a twist too, hell let's say I got under Beth's skin as well, I just got geeeeeZed and the Zep bloviated on me well that doesn't mean I'm no longer a part of their world. I'm beginning to think this is the whole point and maybe Obama actually welcomes criticism from the left-wing blogosphere as this will make him appear the pragmatic moderate, the realistic centrist by comparison. It's like with the gays, they like him and all but every once in a while they feel he doesn't go far enough. Obama himself likes them but there's always a little pragmatic distance in between, some political breathing room. He's not gonna put the jelly fist in himself or slip on the semen in the boomboom room during a campaign stop. Though he's gotten a 100% positive report card from NARAL on the topic of abortion he's barely spoken and the one time he did he acted the aloof intellectual above it all, maybe even vaguely pro-life in a misty morning sense. I think Gibbs believes his own comments but his boss knows the real deal.

Consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds

Ah sweet consistency! Dave Miller searches for it, the soapster is probably more consistent than most, most hold it up as a virtue but there's just a little something I've discovered quite on my own. In fact it's rather disturbing, unsettling even and it's something we'd rather not face. It's

the Quirk,

oooooohhhhhh!!!!!! and many times it leads to Icky Things. Basically I've come to the realization over time that quite a few of our positions if logically applied to their stretching points have quirks, in fact they're built-in and it doesn't really matter where these positions fall on the political spectrum. If you're a bona-fide libertarian then you readily accept the premise that there's something wrong with our civil rights laws at least the parts that forbid private companies from discriminating against African-Americans (Rand Paul kind of acknowledged the quirk and then ran away from it). If you're a federalist then you have to accept miscegenation laws should they unhappily make a return. If you're for the gay marriage then you have to welcome the brother and sister team, even polygamy. While we're on the subject of Sex if you're a Catholic and don't accept artificial birth control as morally licit then you have to accept the notion that you should only have sex when you want a kid. Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a loophole and I once received a newsletter in the mail from some ultra-traditionalist Catholic sect that had a problem with even Pope John Paul 2 pushing NFP as basically it's just what I said: you should only have sex when you want a kid which is not the Z-man position of course but we are discussing quirks here. Terri Schiavo was a vegetable and not even human, a common enough position at the time except that you'd also have to accept the scenario then of somebody walking into her hospice room and then stabbing her to death and not having to face prosecution. Chris Rock talks about niggers, I should be able to as well. Now it's not the Z-man position that Chris Rock should talk about niggers but once you accept the Premise......I could go on. Pro-choice would mean you'd have to accept a world without abortion if let's say pro-lifers won in the marketplace of ideas and then every doctor on the planet for reasons of conscience refused to perform the procedure. I left Pro-life out you say? I leave that to Miss Saty. Quirks are political particles shooting around the political universe but we refuse to even acknowledge their existence and people (like me) who bring them up are accused of slippery-sloping. It's why a Protestant minister I once worked with said to me he doesn't believe in logic, he seemed to know. This list is very incomplete, quirks are EVERYWHERE but just to get things started let's go with gay marriage and a brother and sister wanting to marry each other, hell let's throw in some happy polygamists too for good measure. What some people call slippery-sloping is simply the acknowledgement that quirks exist and we'd better start addressing them. The slippery slope, you're skiiing towards the Quirk anyway. Doesn't matter either if the theoretical scenario under discussion is absurd (for the time being) or otherwise not realistic, quirks exist at the very end of many positions on the political spectrum these days. It truly is a funkadelic world.

Even mass murder has to be racially politicized

No sooner were the bodies cold then the CEO of Budweiser there in Manchester, CT had to address reporters at a press conference saying no, the Hartford Distributors of Bud aren't a bunch of racists. What's wrong with this picture? Thirty-four year old Omar Thornton who was black, on the job for two years and caught on video surveillance stealing beer and fired that very morning shot eight co-workers to death and then offed himself. His motive? they were all racists and his only regret was that he couldn't get more as he said to that 911 dispatcher. He claims to have seen racist scribblings on the walls of the men's room and complained to his long-time girlfriend that he was subject to constant racial harassment on the job and claimed to have logged a complaint with the union and they failed to followup. Here's two theories: either he was a delusional paranoid/schizophrenic or on some psychedelic like LSD or PCP or both. You know I'd do an autopsy just for the hell of it. A constant obsession with race is unhealthy and it'd be easy enough to blame liberalism for the tragic events but while I won't make that connection let's discuss liberalism anyway as it pertains to race. You know the disturbing part though? in the last two days I've talked to people who seemed rather sympathetic to the shooter not in the sense that they condoned what he did of course but the racial stuff ya know and unions we all know how they are. This is how far liberalism has corrupted our national psyche and in liberal calculus people like Don Imus and Andrew Breitbart are somehow more evil than mass murderers who somehow slipped through the system and didn't get the help they deserved and had a right to (recall liberal commentary on the Cho and VA Tech matter). Strong shades of the LI Railroad Massacre and Colin Ferguson's black rage, an exculpatory term coined by the late radical lawyer William Kunstler. I wasn't even gonna do a blog on this until Race entered the picture. I have no words, I am so SICK of this!!! If anything I would have thought the usual liberal push for stronger gun control measures in the wake of these type tragic events but seems we have to discuss race first. Talk about it all you want, these folks didn't deserve to lose their lives:)

Thoughts on mortality

At 45 when you have the pleasure of getting your first prostate exam you can kind of feel the crooked bony finger of the old Grim Reaper caressing your behind. Death and food - we're nervous, let's eat. We've developed weird cultural formalae for dealing with the inevitable. You'll be driving along with your friend and pass San Giannini's Restaurant and he goes "we ate there." "Oh, what was the occasion?" "My sister got hit by a Budweiser truck." Dunno man, I'm in mourning right now and don't need to go to some fancy Italian restaurant but that's just me. Went to a wake once with my Mom and we're sitting there and she whispers to me "this is macabre" and it is. Worked in a library many years back, the interlibrary loan department and one of the more popular books was, I kid you not, Mortuary Science. I've been meaning to do a blog for some time now on Weird Careers like you're some guy who works at the local animal shelter and part of your job is euthanizing perfectly healthy dogs and cats. Now I can't judge but how do you go home at night and like yourself? You work in a slaughterhouse and day in and day out the cows are hung upside down and you slit their throats. Later on you have sex with your girl but it's existential sex, some bleak black and white passionless thing and there's some angst eating away at your soul and she can sense it. You're a fuckin' monster but there are lesser careers you could have chosen like cleaning up in the porno booths after a long hard day of a bunch of lonely men jacking off to bad porno loops. Ya got your bleach, your spackle bucket and you drop the quarters in and stir everything up with that big pole they give you. At least you didn't kill anybody though.

Judge in California just killed Prop 8, you know the ban on gay marriage there. I don't lobby for it, I don't lobby against it. It's not my thing but I do think we reserve the right as a society to be tolerant but mildly anti-gay. A week ago my NYC government station, Ch. 25 here ran a whole evening's worth of gay programming and you can take this stuff in small doses but my overall reaction was why don't they just put on some cooking show instead? Ever since I can remember my bowels down through the years have been, shall we say irregular? (Dannon - Activia). God bless 'em but I don't know how they do this stuff day in and day out. The occasion when I'm even ready for a butt plug roughly coincides with the whole lunar eclipse cycle. Friend and I hiked up Mt. Spitzenberg in Peekskill last winter and somebody told him "that's a notorious gay hangout" like you go up there and expect to see a bunch of Mad Max biker dudes with spiked collars and nipple hooks brutalizing each other. Probably more and more states are gonna go with the gay marriage with friendly activist judges enabling the whole process and I don't see that we can do a whole lot about it. Things are just too gay lately but hey they're citizens right? ain't sneaking over The Fence like some others but it's like when you're out with your buddies at the Palisades Mall, you all don't have girlfriends and you begin to feel like a roving fag pack so why don't you just go to the rest area on 684 and get it over with?

The colonoscopy is old Mr. Death getting gay with you, he's sexually harassing you now and it's a topic I look forward to blogging about in a few years or so. There are other things to be concerned about like I'm just worried about the next workplace psycho getting ready to rock. There really is no game plan in place, no self-defense scenarios to work with (when was the last time you even had a meeting about this stuff?), it's just Ortiz comes to work a little upset today and Katie Couric is talking about you at 6:30 in the evening.

Sex, Food, Death -- whatever you want to talk about today.

Thoughts on unions

Since I blog about work alot, not the most popular threads since most folks seem to prefer straight politics, I've always had a running concern about how specific to get so I'm usually fairly vague for obvious reasons. Now I've had two jobs in my life that had major unions behind them, the dues always go up of course and there is the endless politicking for Democratic politicians (I'm beginning to think my union is socialist) and so I've come to two conclusions. Unions are corrupt and they don't help you. Now as the story goes back in the day one union for food workers was having trouble with the funds, going under and the very food company they were always at odds with at the negotiation table bailed them out instead of letting them go under......hmmmmmm......Now if you ask most workers do you work in a better workplace environment with good morale because of your union they always hesitate and pretty much the only thing they can come up with are those automatic raises you get even the slackers (and that's ANOTHER problem). Now I've seen folks whom the manager didn't like, he or she is on the firing line for whatever reason (manager ain't getting laid, whatever) and there has to be a union meeting set up of course before they can fire you and the union instead of fighting for the worker practically rubber-stamps the decision of management. As my friend says about unions, priests and lawyers you go to them with a problem or issue and they have this retarded clown look on their face - "I can't help you" - and though I've been pro-union my whole life I'm beginning to think we'd be better off without them. Went to a shop steward once with a legitimate issue and he warned me against pursuing it - "Joe's gonna cut your hours if you do" - but I was only discussing it, hashing it out because, well you're the shop steward buddy. Sure you will always have injustice and unfairness in the workplace but when the union doesn't care or backs up the management side instead of hearing out and fighting for the lowly worker you know something's up, something ain't right and it's a sage piece of advice I proffer to others before pursuing something know what you're dealing with. Hell they might all be having sex with each other and the rightness or wrongness of an issue may be as plain as day to YOU but cha'know. Oh doesn't matter if you're black either, not in the world of thuganomics. You simply want more bang for the buck and you can do without that socialist newsletter you get every month.

What are your thoughts on unions? (soapie must have a few)

Anthony Wiener's tirade on the House floor

It was shameful, not Wiener but the House vote dealing with health care coverage for all those 9/11 first responders. This shows the perverseness of our political system, corrupt beyond all hope that Bush bailed out the banks, then Obama bailed out some major financial firms and a large part of the auto industry and all these literally billions of dollars could have been used instead to cover first responders' health care needs which are considerable. In this day and age if you express emotion you're irrational but I do respect raw emotion when I see it if it is based on principle. The New York Post editorial today took some sarcastic jibes of course at this Brooklyn Democrat saying he needs some meds (haha) but that's what the invalidators do even if you're 120% right about something but make the mistake of showing passion - "he's crazy!!" The target of much of Wiener's ire was the Republican Congressman from Long Island, Peter King who retorted that it was the Democrats who changed the rules to require a 2/3 majority to pass. Now the Post's main gripe against the so-called Zadroga Bill is that you can have scamsters come in and take their piece of the pie (WELL DUH!) but the answer to this one is really quite simple, require medical proof that you were effected by 9/11 toxins. You see here's a basic fact about human nature as applied to our health and really Life in general -- if you're not experiencing something yourself, if you're not suffering in the same way then you have the leisure to talk about it in the abstract. Happened to me at work quite recently. Talked with the boss about some personal health issues mostly related to the psychedelic water I along with a few others drank and while it wasn't denied there are problems you and the others still have to work nights, don't leave early, here's the work you have to do. It's over their heads, it's not relateable and so I have more than a passing bias here about this important legislation in the Congress. Corruption is the natural order of things, it's human nature to first cover things up as it is alleged happened in the Yonkers Fire Department about ten years ago. It is alleged that a group of Yonkers firefighters dosed other Yonkers firefighters with LSD without their knowledge. The predictable health effects and it is alleged the YFD knew about the results of the bloodwork but the YFD chose the route of saying "so-and-so was a heavy drinker." As this relates to the concerns of the Post about scammers and 9/11 you can then turn that around and say those with bona-fide health problems relating to 9/11 will have their stories questioned too because government coffers are tight. After all we're dealing with human nature.

What a shameful chapter in our political history, that Goldman Sachs and General Motors got millions and millions of dollars in bailout money but our 9/11 first responders are still suffering from effects of 9/11 toxins while somebody in Congress who is justifiably outraged over this is told to take his meds. Of course it's all Abstract. It's a Dali thing, you wouldn't understand.

What the critics of the critics of the Ground Zero mosque don't get

Islam is problematic.

You have two major schools of thought on Islam. One, that at the very core of Islam right there in the Qu'ran itself is a call for violent jihad. This is a question that the mods at Hannityland in their infinite wisdom have refused to allow an open discussion of. In fact it will get you banned there but that only has the effect of having it percolate somewhere else rather than openly and honestly addressing the question. Having known a few Muslims in my day it's not my view and so to borrow a page from Wikipedia this article needs attention from an expert on the subject. See the talk page for details. The Z-man Portal may be able to recruit an expert (I wonder who, hmmm??). The second major school of thought is the pc one, that violent jihadists are a terrible minority within the larger peaceful Islam but this begs the question if the psychos are really such a tiny group you'd think they would have petered out or died off by now. The Z-man position happily splits the difference acknowledging that most Muslims are perfectly peaceful but that that radical minority is a substantial minority. It's not enough to paint critics of the Ground Zero mosque as a bunch of hateful Islamophobes, rather it's to acknowledge that Islam is problematic.

Discuss.

Immigration, the new abortion

Really the hot-button and most controversial issue of today. Oh God the heady days of Operation Rescue and a used-car salesman named Randall Terry but that was back in the day. That issue is now in a Tupperware safely tucked away in the back of the icebox. We all have our positions as is well-known and we don't belabor it anymore. George Will believes the issue has become stale, not so immigration. There's also the same polarization, the same division and passion which is why the issue never gets resolved. The way I see it EITHER round up and deport all those, what is it now 12 million? illegal aliens or better yet (my position) regularize the majority who are hard-working and responsible and family-oriented. Problem being half, probably a majority would really like the former and the other half (or less) is like me. Now if the 12 million are allowed to stay here in their twilight legal status this is in effect affording them a privilege, the privilege of living and working here and we'll look the other way. My position is this is phony, better to make them official. As regards the AZ law while I'm no constitutional scholar my gut tells me they have the right to set their own policy. Sure it's a police state and I deeply disagree with it but for the Obama Justice Dept. to take them to court strongly smacks of racial pandering in an important midterm election year. I'd like to do something with these folks and rounding 'em up and sending 'em all back home doesn't seem feasible. Perhaps it does to you, dunno if this is the official right-wing position but it seems to be. Si es Goya tiene que ser bueno.

When does life begin?

Which set of statements is true?

(a) You came from a fertilized ovum. You came from an embryo. You came from a fetus.

OR

(b) You once were a fertilized ovum. You once were an embryo. You once were a fetus.

If you make a timeline of your own existence and then go backwards in time that timeline will obviously begin at Conception. Now some pro-choicers would have it that at the very beginning of that timeline, perhaps up to about 6 or 7 months if you use the outdated Roe model still in popular use today then within that 6-7 month timeframe you were something else entirely, came from something else. In other words there was a point in your existence when you weren't even human (evolution in the womb? dunno) but since statement (b) above is obviously correct how does this square with the choicer's view? If you once were that fertilized ovum, that embryo, that fetus then YOU were still YOU, it's the timeline of YOUR own existence beginning at Conception. You can't argue with the Math.

So begin but be well-advised that when you advance your traditional pro-choice views I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Don't just throw it out there all confident-like. Think of it like a chess match and as I already know what your answers are going to be I already have my countermoves set up.

A TRUE conservative would......

This is a rhetorical blog and sometimes a liberal on the board will misread (not mentioning any names but it's not the nurse) and so the following does not necessarily represent my own views but how do you feel about the following statement? (I can make a fairly educated guess as to soapie's position):

A true conservative would get rid of --

All welfare and unemployment benefits
Medicaid and Medicare
Social Security
Get rid of all minimum-wage laws
Abolish the Dept. of Education
Abolish the IRS
Ban abortion

and for good measure would also get rid of the Post Office as it currently exists by privatizing it.

OK you get some wiggle room here so if not now then over time. Personally I'd get rid of the IRS in a heartbeat and instead of the cost of a first-class stamp going up practically every year now I'd privatize this racket, open it up to more competition and I would also send abortion back to the states where it belongs. As for the first three, the Big Three, those all began as liberal big-government programs and I daresay it'd be a rare conservative bird indeed who would call for their outright repeal so really everything trends towards liberalism in the end doesn't it? Yanking the Big Three would cause massive social upheaval to put it mildly. Of course liberals would argue banning abortion would also accomplish that but that's for people who have made a habit out of the practice imo but I want to get to something the singer Seal said in 2007 in an interview on A&E's "Private Sessions", in fact it stunned me when I caught a repeat the other night. Now don't get me wrong, I like the man and his music, his haunting vocals, his rich and humanistic lyrics but in the middle of the show he talked about happiness and how you have the right to be happy, have the right to whatever you desire, it's your birthright he emphasized as if this is self-evident and I think without knowing it he really tumbled across the essence, the very marrow of liberalism. You SHOULD be happy, nay you have the RIGHT to be happy (a good job with good wages, a good health-care package, a rock-hard erection, healthy food, great shelter, don't let an unwanted fetus stand in your way etc.). Now Seal didn't say these things of course, he never explained how your very birthright is to be enforced but by contrast conservatives must want you to suffer. "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps young man!" "Show your boss you deserve that raise by working your ass off" "Teach a man how to fish and he'll have food for life" and other nostrums and slogans. All those years of existential angst, if only I realized what Seal realizes I'd be having that poolside Asian massage right now, 'tis my right after all. Added a couple Seal songs to my playlist the other day to show I'm not biased but he really enunciated very well the endgame of liberalism even if he wasn't aware of it.

Just how long do you plan on being out of work anyway?

Certain thoughts form in my head sometimes while watching the news, not nice thoughts either. They kind of come out of the political id somewhere and so I saw a couple days back President Obama at the podium with some well-dressed, poised woman off to his side who was just overjoyed it seemed to me that the bill just passed restoring federal unemployment benefits for about 2 million Americans who've been out of work for more than 26 weeks. House vote 272-152, will add a cool $34 bil to the deficit and debt but hey. The spin: Republicans are being their usual harsh asshole selves. But wait a minute, getting back to that woman by Obama's side the other day she can't find work anywhere? I'm sure there's a deli who would hire her, some department store and so the question needs to be posed to the jobless: are you willing to take a job that you hate? Is it that you really can't find work or you can't find something that you like? Had a department head once, a young guy who felt unemployment insurance was a form of welfare but this other chef was a hardcore Dem and so they got into this political discussion one day and the chef's position was kinda you should plan on using it some day because in his words "I'm paying into it." I was out of work a few months myself back in the day and had credit card and other bills to pay and the reason why I took anything I could get was the simple motivation: FEAR. I never went on welfare or took unemployment bennies precisely because I took some jobs that I hated. All were on the lower end of the pay scale, one I liked but the rest was I had to do what I had to do. This extension is going to foster the culture of dependence on government even more since as was apparent during Obama's press conference the whole stigma of getting a check from the government for doing essentially nothing is pretty much gone.

Finally a word about hatred on the Net. Just yesterday I was glancing over at Pam's blog and for some reason known only to Octopus the subject of Mad Mel brought out all his hatred for bluepitball practically calling blue a wife-beater. While probably not legally actionable it walks right up to the edge. I never got this. I mean I get the passionate, the heated debates but the visceral hatred for your political opposite is just beyond me, over my head and it's not like this is something new. It's been going on for YEARS. You know the funny thing about my Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod blogs is I think I came out fairly strongly against Breitbart so instead of finding common ground, something libs always say they want if only we conservatives would cooperate, it brought out some issues about ME. It's fucked up.

It's not so much that Mel Gibson and Shirley Sherrod are bigots

I just think we like to talk about Race. It makes us feel more virtuous about ourselves apparently. Mel Gibson's real crime in the past was that he said something against the Jews, don't go there. Shirley Sherrod was a great right-wing blogging topic until more came out. Samir Shabazz of the New Black Panthers is a racist psycho plain and simple and his type is the most dangerous not a drunken Mel or a heavily edited Sherrod is the way I see it. Might we expend our energy and our righteous rage on the folks who really matter? Jesse Jackson once infamously referred to New York City as Hymietown and while it was obviously anti-Semitic in nature I prefer to see it more in the nostalgic light of a brain fart. It's his liberal record that I'm against. Maybe an important part of a post-racialist America will be being able to laugh at race. Race is a quirky topic because it has been so heavily circumscribed by political correctness that we can't say much on it unless you're David Mamet. Sometimes I think we're better off not even discussing it. Fred Barnes is a racist? that's not even blogworthy in my book.

Hated in life, beloved in death - George Steinbrenner (1930-2010)

I heard some people complain because they broke into "Judge Judy" halfway through an interesting court case -- BREAKING NEWS -- because Derek Jeter had something to say and it wasn't just WCBS, all the major stations in New York cut in. Sure it was only a tiny fraction of the Jacko treatment but I thought the guy was no good after what he did to Yogi and taking away dental coverage for Yankee employees and firing Billy Martin so many times and he couldn't even appear as himself on "Seinfeld" and......God you know I remember in the Boss's heyday NY sportswriters always bashing the guy for this or that and now he's a Saint? I really don't have any overriding passionate conviction about the man. His passing is newsworthy of course just pointing out that his pre and post-death coverage seem to be about two different men but that's the way we are I guess. RIP

Sperm, War and God

Why atheism falls short

Had this thought this morning. My Dad served in the Navy during WW2 and I was conceived well after the war. Now if he had perished the atheist would say I wouldn't be here right now but I think most folks would simply say I'd have a different Dad. Now when my father's sperm cell united with my mother's egg that led to ME but if a different sperm cell of his had done the trick would I still be here? Again most people would say I'd still be ME but would have black hair and brown eyes maybe instead of blonde hair and green eyes, maybe I'd be shorter too. If you backed an atheist into a corner over this he might be forced to conclude you had only a 1 in a million chance of coming into existence since that one sperm cell that united with your mother's egg led to YOU but that would in effect make us all into a bunch of walking Lottos. The math doesn't add up, this science of probability that the godless would be forced to fall back on. So if my Dad had sacrificed his life in WW2 and I still would have been born in some form that'd point to Somebody being in charge. Likewise since he survived his tour of duty if another sperm cell of my Dad's had united with my Mom's egg and I still would have come into existence that all points to some type of principle of consciousness at work, the existence of some sort of soul dynamic and ultimately to Somebody being in charge. There's a spiritual, mystical sense to it all even if the rest of Life doesn't make sense. I just want the Bill Mahers and the Christopher Hitchenses to explain the Math. Religion isn't irrational, atheism is.

The Rehab Racket

Was debating whether or not to do a Lindsay Lohan blog. It was either that or I Love Obama/I Hate Obama and I sure as hell ain't gonna do a LeBron James blog (egotist!) so we're gonna go with the Lohan.

Look I don't wish ill on anyone. I'm not from the Andrea Peyser School of Writing which even when I agree with her I think she's way over the top. Call her P-Block as she just wants to DESTROY whoever's on her shitlist for that day. So Lindsay Lohan has gotten 90 days in jail from a Beverly Hills judge for violating her probation over her two DUIs. Now these court-ordered shrink sessions, in her case rehab which she hasn't been faithfully attending, there's something vaguely police statish about forcing someone to talk to some bald-pated bespectacled pc creep (can we throw in "w/orange goatee"?) with advanced degress in what is basically a very inexact science. I say punish the person for whatever they've done and basically be done with it, save moral education for another day. The other thing that bothers me is this enforced puritanism. Puritanism has never really died in this country, it has just taken on new forms. Ms. Lohan is only 24, to expect her to never have an adult beverage for the rest of her life, well that's putting the demon back into the bottle when we need to demystify it. WHY do people drink to excess? THAT is the issue not the alcohol per se which in moderation has far more pleasant effects imo than getting stone-cold drunk (never understood this). It's a psychological issue but since we don't put it in its proper perspective we're left with rackets like Alcoholics Anonymous, a saccharine confession/sacrament of your sins in front of the class as your initiation ritual. It's time we grow up and eschew this creeping puritanism as the road to recovery when it only becomes more of a tempation since even one drop is forbidden. It's fashionable to be against the spirits, everyone at work acts like they're Mother Cabrini and never touch the stuff but I thought we were Adults. Can we talk?

Lindsay Lohan has done wrong and needs to be punished but not for skipping class. Punish her for the original misdeed and btw WTF's up with Mel Gibson???

abortionsport

In New York City it would qualify as an Olympic event. Forty years ago New York became the first state to legalize abortion, old news but as of 2008 according to the NYC Health Dept. there were almost 90,000 abortions in the five boroughs (- a few 100 but Z likes to round off, it makes the math easier). In other words 7 abortions for every live birth and among black women the ratio of abortions to live births was 3/2. Well abortion itself is old news but it's the liberal response to these numbers that, well let's hear what NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn (Democrat/Liberal of course) had to say:

"We can reduce the number of unintended pregnancies by expanding access to contraceptives and increasing sex education."

THIS is the standard liberal line when uncomfortable subjects like too-high abortion rates come up. On the surface this seems perfectly logical and who can argue with it although Z with his libertarian thrust opposes ALL sex education even if it comes from conservative chastity advocates simply for the reason that SEX doesn't belong in the classroom but in the home with your Dad finding your Hustler under your mattress and scolding you that you're gonna make some fat Jewish guy rich. Teach kids to make a living that's what I say. But whatever, the reason why this doesn't work in practice is that if abortion is widely available with hardly any social stigma attached to it at least in places like New York City people feel no pressing or urgent reason to use contraceptives in the first place. Abortion simply becomes A method of birth control, maybe THE method for some folks. You could airlift boatloads of rubbers over the Manhattan skyline and drop 'em down with little smiley faces on them but only a certain % are gonna use 'em, the whole taking-a-shower-with-a-suit-on thing, and well this might be a good time to get to Black Culture.

UH-OH

Like my bro worked for a company once with a few black co-workers, you had a black stripper who'd basically hump 'em & dump 'em, married women, didn't matter and he was party to at least five abortions at last count. It's not like my bro pumped him for information either, he was right upfront about his lifestyle choices, you know, bj's caught on cells, that kind of thing. Plow a different chick on the sofa every week, Springer on in the background and, oh yeah another one called out sick one day and said to the boss "I'm calling out sick today, I have to take my girlfriend for an abortion." Now to be sure

They're not all like this,

but I'm talking about a kind of ghetto mentality even if they're no longer in the ghetto, absentee fathers, you know the usual stuff Coz got in trouble over for even discussing. A subset of the population, all the negative social indicators writ large...hey don't get on my case Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate them. (Standard conservative racist line follows): Now most of them aren't like this, ya got your white upper middle-class Heathers chicks getting their "uterine contents" aspirated out on a quite frequent basis too but taken as a whole we got more methods of birth control than ever, sex'chal matters being discussed quite frankly in the Schools and we still got this abortion craze. I'm surprised Speaker Quinn being a lesbian herself didn't say Go Anal...hey I got The Weekend off, let me have some fun. Worked with a young guy a few years ago, white trash type who split up with his girl but made nice to her for "one last piece of ass" and so came to work one day and quite openly asked everyone how much an abortion costs. There's a thread in all of this if you'll notice, abortion being taken quite casually not the usual liberal line that abortion is this agonizing moral choice for people, Macbeth hallucinating a bloody dagger, existentialism and all that. I mean isn't it time pro-choicers take on their own side for a change? The widespread practice of abortion undermines social responsibility and ya wanna know something? I can't even blame Obama for this one. You ain't livin' right.

Happy 4th of July folks!!!