The Overregulators don't see themselves as having a problem

I've been running this through my head yesterday and decided to use it as an analogy of what's been bothering me about this group of benevolent nanny-staters who are pretty much regulating or trying to regulate every area of our lives right now. It's the example I love to use of the Hannityland political forums with its myriad rules and regulations and I'll get to the Crux of the Problem in a minute. Lista has been commenting on blogs that move too fast and she ain't seen nothin' yet. At say the Hannity Forum on Politics let's say you're a little slow or have been away and you see an older thread you think you could constructively contribute to that'll move the topic back to the front page and everyone gets annoyed and complains to a mod there (dunno how many they have at this point but they keep recruiting more) and it becomes a Violation. You see the front page moves so fast that you post a new thread and check in on it after two or three hours and it's already on page two or three. So in our example which is a perfect one btw (not like some Carvel shit) here's the reason why things never get better over there like some overregulated workplace where nobody has any fun anymore.

They don't know they have a problem, that they're overregulating.

It's done with benevolent intentions of course, it's necessary. They can theoretically see that overregulating can be a problem and they'll agree with you but that's just theoretical, they themselves are not overregulating. So you don't want people to buy sugary drinks with food stamps, that's not overregulating (although I have a problem with the original welfare and that's an even bigger crux of a deeper problem but for another day.) No liberal thinks of himself or herself as an overregulator, just perfectly reasonable rules and laws being codified here. It's like Saty sees herself as a socialist but not the kind who wants to run your life for you so it's like a nice positive twist to an old definition that nobody likes anyway (cake/eating it too). If you support drug testing in order to become a deli clerk or a cashier for God's sake that's not overregulation just having a reasonable policy in place because we want to see what people are doing and want to hire the Best. A bicycle helmut is for Your Own Good, it's a reg but not an overreg until we pass the next reg and We Will but that too would not be an overreg...geez what is an overreg anyway? and it's like Pink says, "you're just like a Pill, instead of making me better you're making me ill." It's like alcoholism and denial, we can never become what we're criticized to be. It's like how much masturbation is too much masturbation? One dude masturbates 2X a day and another guy masturbates 5X a day, who is one to criticize the other? If you go to the top Overregulator if there is such a thing he'll just tell you to accept your confinement, it's a perspective thing anyway and what one person views as a cage another will see as a mansion. In short a Liberal can never actually become a Liberal, that's just a dirty word anyway.

In short the moral of our little story is that it's not the Mods at Hannityland who are the Problem, it's YOU. The problem ain't LEE, he's just keeping YOU guys in check. You just have a bad attitude.

Some miner points

Nobody cared about Politics in that Chilean mine. We are human first and liberals or conservatives second. Should the liberal miners have been the last ones to get in that capsule?

Next time you have trouble sticking to your diet consider that these brave souls were rationed two spoonfuls of tuna, half a glass of milk and a couple crackers every 48 hours at the beginning of their ordeal which as ABC's 20/20 told us last night was not enough for nourishment but to prevent the body from going into withdrawal and shock. This has inspired me to not see only one main meal every 24 hours as that big a deal. Had some Muscle Milk this morning, banana creme flavor. Tasted more like paint but I'm not complaining.

Si es Goya tiene que ser bueno.

Oh God, now we have to relive the social issues with another Cuomo?

Background: NY GOP gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino as you may have heard spoke to a Brooklyn Hasidic congregation the other day and said some things. Kids should not be "brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn't." They'd "be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family." Emphasized that he chose not to march in New York's Gay Pride Parade whereas his Democratic rival Andrew Cuomo did. Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto said his speech was "stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality. These comments, along with other views he has espoused, make it clear that he is way out of the mainstream and is unfit to represent New York." The Paladino spokesman shot back that Cuomo should discuss with his pastor his support for partial-birth abortion.

Deconstruction: Kids are being brainwashed into thinking -- Well that really is undeniable when you consider the thrust of modern-day sex education.
Kids would be better off and more successful getting married -- Not quite true if you're looking at it from purely the financial angle. Seems alot of gay men are rather affluent, cultured and successful in their own right. Going down the old poop shoot and having a respectable bank account do not seem interrelated or maybe they are.
Stunning homophobia -- There's that word again. Eye of the beholder stuff but hey it's a buzzword to appeal to a certain base. You have four urinals at a rest stop along the Interstate and two guys naturally space themselves apart. Are they homophobes? who worries about this stuff?
Glaring disregard for basic equality -- Has Paladino advocated discrimination against gays in the workplace? reinstating anti-sodomy laws? seems he's just voicing a POV at odds with, well liberalism. Cuomo should stop talking smack.
Way out of the mainstream -- It is clear Paladino is appealing to the social conservative base part of which is the Hasidim. If the social conservative base in this country were that tiny and out of the mainstream he wouldn't waste his time appealing to it. Remember he is campaigning for a high political office and if his views were really that far outside the mainstream he wouldn't have said it. Makes no sense.
Unfit to hold public office -- In what way? because he has politically incorrect viewpoints? What about Charlie Rangel? Cuomo was last seen hobnobbing at the Harlem Congressman's 80th birthday bash and this guy wants to clean up Albany?
Partial-birth abortion -- My thing is I don't want to go through another Cuomo explaining the Social Issues. It's grueling, the sophistry and obfuscation is a slow form of torture and Once Is Enough. It's like Gaga replicating Madonna, do we deserve this?
& finally a word about societal mores: Be that as it may there will always be some residual cultural distaste for rectal activity among the boys. Combined with the civic virtue of tolerance this amounts to at worst being mildly anti-gay. That's a social more, always has been and so Paladino, agree or disagree with him here is not outside the mainstream. Liberals have a problem with social mores, always have and if Cuomo were say carpetbagging and campaigning in Ohio or Wisconsin would he be saying these things? Should Paladino have gone here? who knows but there was Meredith Vieira interviewing Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann this morning about basically her views on all this even though her thing ain't New York and as I said it really is a tempest in a teapot. You should be able to raise your kids any way you want. They're not wards of the State after all and this really is the libertarian position here.

probably has a wide stance.

daytripping

Went up the line yesterday and stopped at the Military Museum of Southern New England in Danbury CT. This place should be a required class trip and then some as it really breaks down WW2 in all its stages. There are tanks outside in the yard, British, American and Soviet models and all kinds of military artifacts in the museum itself. Of course some Nazi memorabilia is displayed but it's in historical context and you really get a sense of the tragedy of war here and the sacrifices men made for our freedom. That cyberslut over at Duke should really come here, get some perspective on Life and then we hit the Danbury Fair Mall. In the car my friend started doing Shock the Monkey in an Irish brogue ("cover me when I sleep...") and so how are you giving back? Saw a road banner in the big YO, St. John the Baptist Casino Night. Why not just have a Whorehouse too to benefit the school and church? So we're on Rte. 6 coming from Danbury heading into Brewster and the road is sparse, lonely and desolate with a few scattered businesses and dwellings here and there and it's like a UFO would land somewhere here at 3 in the morning (State Trooper: "Holy Shit!!!"). My friend goes this place is nice but weird like you'd have a longtime married couple here without any kids and so you heard of the Bigfoot Belt, there's a Porno Belt here. Starting just past the Danbury border ya got one and when you head on into the Village of Brewster itself there's another one. A real hole in the wall place, some claustrophobic dump with the usual generic porn and there's like some exhaust fan here or maybe that's the Mexican deli next door, you're thinking bedbugs. This is the squalor part of Town but then you got your more upscale Giggles ("Why not?") in Carmel, Wappingers Falls and Hyde Park just past Po'town, things the weary traveler needs to know. Just because it's the Country doesn't mean it doesn't have an Underbelly, some David Lynchian cavern where some guy with an apple in his mouth just crapped in a diaper. These food courts in the malls, heavy on the Asian cuisine and Southwestern grilled fare. He pigged out, I held off. The Diet you know. Dunno what it is but malls get me depressed after a while, must be that existential vibe you got as a kid when your Mom and Dad were parking in the waffle-ceilinged parking garage at the Galleria and then later on you saw some gay-oriented graffiti in the Men's Room ("watch the monkey get hot, monkey"). The historically-minded traveler, the porno venturer, the spiritual-seeker, the cultural researcher, the consumerist, it's all here. Did you know Sears actually sells jeans already with rips in them? back in the day you would've thrown them out. Hey it's another Travelblog!

Life is short.

Pro-choice and pro-abortion

Re Pro-Lifers
Soapie: "...they demonize Pro-Choice advocates (even calling them pro-abortion in some instances)..."
Satyavati: "It's proCHOICE Beth. Can you stop with the hyperinflammatory rhetoric now? Please?"

It's not demonizing or hyperinflammatory. If we called them pro-death it would be but pro-abortion in most cases is simply accurate and objective. Let's break it down:

IF you say you're personally opposed to abortion but support abortion rights you are by proper definition pro-choice and not pro-abortion. People who work for Planned Parenthood are not personally opposed to abortion otherwise they wouldn't be working there. To say they are pro-abortion is not a pejorative simply that they have no moral objections to the act otherwise again they would be doing something else with their lives. Planned Parenthood is known for pushing abortion but let's say they didn't, just presented all the options. Then they would be pro-choice but would also at the same time be pro-abortion because, let's face it that's what they do. If you're not against abortion then you're something else. If you present neutrality on the act then that makes you morally indifferent to the act and in a roundabout way makes you pro-abortion. You can be against porn but be for Free Speech. You can also be for porn and obviously for free speech. You can be indifferent to porn and be for free speech in which case you're not against porn. If you work in a porn shop you cannot in any way be said to not be pro-porn. ONLY in the first case though can it accurately be said you're not pro-porn. If you do not in some sense oppose something then you are for it. In all his years of journalism I've never heard Bill Moyers voice a personal qualm about the act of abortion so it's fair to conclude he doesn't oppose it in even a personal way. That's not demonizing or hyperrhetoric just a fair verdict. I have not yet called Saty with her preternatural compartmentalization pro-abortion because in the past anyway she made it clear she feels killing any living creature is wrong and carries with it bad karma. That's a clarification or important nuance most pro-choicers never make but for Beth and me we just find her fascinating as well as perplexing. It's interesting and curious why the very label "pro-abortion" conjures up such feelings since there would seem to be something wrong with the act itself if one shies away from the label. I'm very pro-heart surgery and pro-appendectomy ya know? Trouble is Pro-Choice doesn't tell me much and can run the gamut from personally opposed as I said to gungho. It's the safest thing to say at a Manhattan cocktail party and you don't have to go out on a limb, it's like some safe box you check off on some questionnaire. In my labelling system though I call them pro-choice and pro-life and that works. Perhaps anti-anti-abortion?

The latest chapter in why we really don't have free speech in this country

As you well know by now CNN host Rick Sanchez, a Cuban-American has been axed for comments he made this past Thursday on the satellite radio show "Stand Up! with Pete Dominick." He called Comedy Central pundit I guess you could call him Jon Stewart a bigot who has "a white liberal establishment point-of-view" and said the media in general is filled with "elite Northeast liberals" but here's the kicker. He pointed out that Jews like Stewart don't face the same discrimination as Mexicans and implied that CNN and the msm are being run by Jews and elitists who look down on Hispanics. OK so deconstructing and soapie can help me out here:

Jon Stewart is a bigot - anybody's opinion
who has a white liberal establishment point-of-view - obvious
msm filled with elite Northeast liberals - the sky is blue and the earth is round
Jews don't face the same discrimination as Mexicans - would seem to be true although for some reason you can't say this
CNN and the msm are run by Jews - you'd really have to do a complete ethnic breakdown of news producers and directors and presidents of news divisions here. Anyone wanna do this? Saty?
and elitists who look down on Hispanics - entirely subjective but hey it's the man's opinion and last I checked

About the only place you can talk freely these days is in your living room but be careful of your cable guy, he might report you. Some elements of truth, overall it wasn't great, kind of icky but I've heard worse. For me it's a Free Speech thing and basically Rants are covered. What do you think?

The more I think about it

the more Michael Kinsley's proposal makes sense. In order to "resolve" the gay marriage debate he has said why not have the government get out of the marriage business as in completely? no hetero or homo kind of deals. Now the conservative argument has always been government needs to recognize and foster the institution of marriage in order to promote positive social goods like social stability and procreation (the National Review argument) but while I'm not against the government officially recognizing this in some way is there really THAT compelling a reason for government to get involved at all? Full Disclosure - At work today I was minding my own business when a co-worker while working alongside the older lady manager (a curious sort) said "we're waiting for your wedding day" and a couple of other pertinent questions. However this would involve a whole sideblog about the DGTZ (or Don't Go There Zone) and the ever curious mofos daily buzzing around its perimeter, social conformist cops, folks who procreate somehow feeling more important than people like you, the desire to work in Peace, are they really talking behind your back when they should be working? & a Host of Other Related Issues. Suffice to say gays would make a far stronger case if they simply adopted the Kinsley Proposal. If the government should get out of My Sex Life then by the same token why should they officially sanction my arrangements? You could still get "married" if you wish but that'd be your business......social gnats......and divorce would cease to exist because its predeccesor, marriage, would cease to exist. You'd think conservatives would be making these arguments. With our track record of hetero marriage it's like gays serving in the military, WHY?

Stranded

Political correctness

Political correctness means

you have a bad attitude.

Take the title of Mal's latest blog - What the Hell Is a Black Caucus and Why Are They Allowed to Exist? - there's a bad 'tude going on there. It's like with the opponents of the GZ Mosque, pc is not interested in arguing the merits of the case, it's YOU have a bad attitude. No other possibility exists. IT permeates politics, the workplace, Life in general. IF you rebel against it you're a dark force. Stop hating. If you work with a dickhead or a getover smile and love your brother. PC means we won't hire you to slice bologna if you smoke a doobie in your downtime. It means if you ask a woman out more than once you're a stalker. It means you can't even say the word nigger even if you're only reporting that Chris Rock likes to say the word nigger but somehow he can joke about when he goes to the ATM he looks over his shoulder for niggers but you can't. Don't hate, participate. PC means love your chemo even if you look like an Auschwitz survivor afterwords. PC means The Customer Is Always Right, it means if you're a Muslim then we'll overlook your hatred of gays but not if you're an evangelical Christian. I saw a bumper sticker the other day - WW2 Vet, I Served My Country, Did You? WTF is that???

lose the 'tude!

Is the right to abortion self-evident?

I would submit that nothing is self-evident right off the bat. I'm assuming that all our respective political philosophies required a great deal of thought in shaping what they are today, the Final Version but I do get the sense liberals these days have it all figured out. Here's a kind of philosophical question: despite the millions of abortions in this country and the millions across the globe what if the right to abortion doesn't even exist? that all this time we were practicing a nonright? that this right never even existed in the first place? What are the consequences of this? Have to say this, millions and millions of people doing the same thing does not mean they have the right to do this or that the more common something becomes the more moral it becomes. Back-alley abortions, this may sound harsh but I really don't talk about it because I really don't care. If a pregnant woman wants to throw herself down the stairs just don't hit the cat at the bottom. It's not in my equation because the simple Nub of the Matter is is it right or wrong? do you have a right to do it and is it the taking of a human life? Is SEX necessary? I don't mean it feels good and all that, we all know the otherworldy pleasures involved and I'm not anti-sex by any stretch, quite the contrary but is it necessary? ties in with soapie's proposal of Sex as a Contract, you know what it is and you accept the risks going in. I would submit this: if you do not in some sense oppose the practice then you are not really a conservative. A libertarian maybe but not a true con and I'll give my reasons. I just wanted to let the Liberal on the Bike continue on his merry way lecturing the kids not wearing their helmuts and move This here. Before long The Impasse will have been reached and maybe by then I'll just be moderating. Should be fun:)

Is it more important to win the debate or have a discussion?

Unless you're an amoeba most folks have what's known as a political philosophy but sometimes our so-called inconsistencies are simply the recognition that our philosophy may have a logical absurdity or two if stretched, the Quirk (e.g. brother and sister should not get married). One can be strongly libertarian in spirit but hate abortion and Saty and soap bring up the usual tried-and-true pro-choice angles, really the skip in the record as if we've never heard them before. If we don't agree with Shaw for instance she tends to think we haven't considered her points. Oh no darling we hear you loud and clear we just disagree with you. That's possible ain't it? There's no need to pulverize your opponent, this scorched earth policy (S-Block). I like to think of this place as a coffee klatch, a passionate but friendly cafe. There's no need to break the saucer or piss in the sink.

Debated with Saty at her blog a few months back and for me Michael Schiavo at best was and is a questionable character so we got into a whole medical discussion and before long you reach The Impasse, a ravine or chasm with a shaky footbridge. For me I've reached the end of my walk, may as well turn around and head back to the car. IMO nobody won that one and I'm philosophical about it. It makes for a good Google search and I'm glad I did it. Not her but if people want to hold his water for him I got no problem so long as you don't begrudge me my take. You can even bring your 9/11 Truther movement over here and I won't get personal which reminds me I have to check out Alex Jones' views on the Mosque.

There develops over time if you're a true conservative a certain what I call Conservative Convergence. By this I mean it's ok to question aspects of your own movement from time to time, I've done it many times myself but after awhile you find yourself agreeing more and more with your fellow conservatives and kind of put the old feuds in a shoebox. It's better for society to be pro-life, the GZ mosque, unions are bad, traditional mores should be defended etc. etc. My own definition of being a true conservative is this: libertarianism or maximum liberty but with respect for social mores which many times we get the first part but not that leavening factor. You can be for maximum liberty and still see the wisdom in that it's better off for society to be pro-life for instance and I'm not even talking about the finer points of that debate which have been hammered home time and again (Soapie's Foundry) but the general principle. There's no need for a porn shop to be located within close proximity to a church and angel dust needs to stay banned for reasons of public safety. Many times marijuana is mixed with phencyclidine unbeknownst to the pothead and if you think your local drug dealer has a moral code you're an idiot.

How would you like your coffee?

The near universal consensus in favor of Christ

Now before this blog gets quickly misinterpreted, mentally Sherroded I'll try to frame this in as objective a way as I can. You're a space visitor, you've been around for a few weeks now and you notice that if someone is writing out a check today they'll put the date at Sept. 14, 2010. Now you do a little research into their calendar system (yes Saty I know all about the Chinese calendar so before you get started) and it seems to be almost universally agreed upon, in fact it's not even controversial that on a worldwide basis today is Tuesday, Sept. the 14th, 2010. So there was BC/AD, Before Christ and Anno Domini or "The Year of Our Lord.". Raquel Welch was 1,000,000 years BC with her perfect cave hairstyle and shaved legs but you notice that this Christman, nobody else even comes close to his historical importance. I mean to rejigger the entire calendar system of the World, dividing all of Time and History into before his birth and after his birth, well we don't do that with Buddha or anybody else (BB- Before Buddha, AC - After Confucius) which is not to put the Buddha down but as a space visitor you come to the conclusion that this historical event of Christ's birth, life and death was so important, so pivotal to civilization that there must be some kind of worldwide consensus that still exists to this day in favor of that one man over All The Others. Do you personally know anybody who when writing out a check says "I ain't writing that" when jotting down today's date? In fact this is inarguable, has nothing to do with my personal views as a Christian but is simply the way we do things, an objective fact and I don't even hear atheists or nontheists protest the point.

OK, now attack!!! I've only two responses you are going to hear: What day is today? and Y2K.

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)