Tagged: life

“Right Under Their Nose Rings”: LOL! Let’s Hope Bill Maher Just Became the Savior of Muslim Women.

Here’s the monologue, if interested.

In sum, Maher argues that the youth of the nation would spend their natural energy better if they called for the end of what he calls “Gender Apartheid”, but really is “Sex Apartheid”, that is, “Islam”.

Before he accomplishes this—and I cannot be more sincere in my hope that he does—he needs to address a simple fact which he did not mention in that monologue: Muslim women, en masse, are satisfied with their shitty lives.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not mean that all burqa’d women love life. I do not mean that I believe the majority would say that they are living their best life or some other Western, constant-self-evaluation BS. I mean that, like the poor, like the ignorant masses of humanity, especially considering access to the internet and books, these fully covered women have “outs” but do not seem to have the motivation or work ethic to take advantage of them. Again, I am not “blaming the victim.” Instead I am declaring that unlike racial apartheid, the so-called victims of sex apartheid haven’t indicated on any meaningful scale awareness that they are victims. In other words, I am leery of another Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan attempt at helping people who don’t know they need help.

In the end, if I could say one thing to Bill it would be this: “I wish you luck. More than luck, I want to record here that I thank you for your bravery and wish you safety and wisdom.”

One Set of Lyrics to Newsies’ “Carrying the Banner”

“We need a good assassination
We need an earthquake or a war
How ’bout a crooked politician?
Hey stupid, that ain’t news no more”

****

The young kids were taking so long to eat dinner that I three on this oldie but goodie soundtrack from childhood in the hopes of keeping my sanity.

Two, No, Three Claims I See As Inconsistent in This Moment

Firstly, the Left’s incessant claim than the Right are Nazi’s. On one (completely unrealistic) level, I can see the similarities. But even on that (totally irredeemable) level, what exactly is there to fear? We beat the Nazi’s. The Nazi’s lost. To my thinking it would be like claiming the Right were slaves-as-slaves, or the Indians, or Communists, or polygamists, or any other of the innumerable losers of history. But let’s run with it. Say, for argument, they are Nazi’s. What is there to fear? What has changed? Why will they “win” this time?

Secondly, everyone keeps saying that Charlie believed “that when the conversation stops, violence starts”. (Or similar.) But I haven’t heard anyone mention that this is, unfortunately, demonstrably untrue. I’m not asserting anything about Charlie’s overall character or positions, but I am saying that I won’t be repeating that claim as if it is founded upon reality.

Thirdly, for my entire life people have loved to talk about civil war. But no war is some unforecast meteorological event. By definition, the actual government will begin overtly planning an actual war. Until this overt government action begins (with real, illegal actions—not just “he’s not allowed to do that!” bad interpretations by paid hypster-pundits), I think it is more than safe to say, “Calm down, folks. It’s just life. It is probably time to take a break from screens for a week or so to cool down.” I, for one, am tired of this atmosphere of people star-gazing to find the next civil war. America is fine. The future is fine.

One Macro-Scale Reason Charlie Kirk Was Killed

Check this paragraph out. It is from Robert Shaplen’s New Yorker article “Life in Saigon: Spring 1972 We Have Always Survived”, April 15, 1972.

There is no need to complete the paragraph. You get the point.

This was 1972. This was the behavior of the “good guys”. This was conducted in essentially a third world, war torn country, without computers.

I don’t know about you, but I am astounded by the (new to me) information therein.

So I want to ask you: What do you want, my fellow Americans? Do you want to continue to feign outrage at the Left and its lunatic adherents and make wild claims about a coming civil war? Do you want to teach each other that there must be a response, even if it is simply at the polls? Do you want to appear totally shocked by the fact that someone who wasn’t a threat to anyone was assassinated? Do you want to task Tan’s special police to find the next lunatics?

What do you want?

I’ll tell you what I want. I want to be left alone. I want to have a private life. I want my thoughts about, my opinions about, and mostly my actions while living life on this third rock from the materials fusion process we call “the sun” to be officially unknown to any government entity.

Will you give me what I want?

Because of my desire for privacy, I am not particularly concerned about the Left and their lunatic adherents. Because of my desire for privacy, I am not particularly interested in pontificating about the meaning of assassinations. And I am not particularly surprised that harmless people are murdered.

In place of these concerns, I am particularly concerned that my kids grow up understanding that while there might be a way of life which tries to prevent assassinations (or keep the peace in general), that way will never be the way to live life. Practically, then, this means that I spend time preparing to teach them the history of the Vietnam War. Will you join me?

The Infrequently Discussed, But True (If Mean-Sounding), Reason For Some Blacks’ Inability to Understand the Context of Kirk’s “[Black Women] Do Not Have the Brain Processing Power” Claim

Faithful readers know (and should be able to predict) what this post is going to assert. To them, I say, “Thank you for paying attention.”

To the rest of you, please pay close attention.

We’re all watching with amazement as Black preachers lead the way in calling Charlie Kirk a racist. The particular phrase these men use to defend their claim is in my title.

Now, every good little literate “whitey” knows how to call up the full conversation/debate from which the phrase came and determine for themselves the context within which Kirk uttered his assessment. That’s step 1.

Step 2 for those of us who were pretty sure Kirk was not a racist, but have been wrong before and so wanted to check for ourselves, is felt utter confusion (not me, mind you) at how even our “black friends” are siding with these ignorant preachers instead of the plain meaning of the English language.

Here’s what is going on. There is no need to be confused.

Bluntly: Some Blacks (maybe most) still believe in incantation. Incantation, recall, is context free.

To flesh this out a bit, let’s review what incantation is all about. In short, the phrase “abra cadabra” (that we all know from some Disney movie we all watched years ago) is a phrase that we, as children, used to magically turn objects into other objects. Or the like. For us, it was a game. We usually had a wand or our finger cocked in a special way as we said it. “Abra cadabra, and POOF!, you’re unfrozen.” Sometimes it was in finding oneself holding what appeared as a wand which caused our utterance of the phrase. Like we’re in a gift shop, see a stick with a star at one end and suddenly are inspired to grab it and tap our unwitting friend on the head and say, “Abra Cadabra, you pay for Starbucks after we’re done here.”

What were we doing? We were playfully using what people in antiquity seriously used, that is, we were incanting. Even as children we knew it wasn’t merely the phrase but the specific sounds, the way we said the phrase, that mattered. In fact, this feature of incantation often explained why the change didn’t happen. “You didn’t say it right!” we would explain. Again, as children, we knew that you couldn’t achieve the intended result by an all business-like or all medical-assessment-like utterance of the phrase. No. It had to be said a certain way. Plainly, it had to be uttered intoned with belief.

The point here is that we (the confused, literate whites) don’t believe incantation works now that we’re adults.

But many Blacks, of all ages, do.

And that is how even your “black friends” do not budge when they are shown the full context of Kirk’s remarks.

For many Blacks, there is a distinct evil associated with such a phrase (“black women do not have the brain processing power”). The context doesn’t matter any more than it does for abra cadabra.

By way of another example, Shakespeare’s “Double, Double Toil and Trouble” comes to mind as something similar in Western culture. Did the witches’ prophecy actually cause MacBeth’s troubles? No. Now, it’s true that there was a coincidence, but this is merely a cerebrally fun feature of great storytelling. On the whole, though, while we servants of the West would never think twice about saying, “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble”, our Black neighbors (keep in mind they also don’t know Shakespeare—and this is not coincidence) believe there are certain things you just don’t say. Again, this is not because of the meaning’s of the words, it is because of an exceedingly old school (Old Testament and older) belief in how human speech works vis-à-vis the invisible world.

Please don’t let the NSFW part of my claim cause you to miss the actual significance of my claim. You are now no longer confused why many Blacks don’t care about context. But this clarity does not reveal the solution to the larger problem that still remains: Many Blacks don’t care about context.

What can be done?

I have no idea.

Let’s Chat About Power

X is filled with conspiracy theory lunatics. I didn’t realize how bad it (X) was until I recently got an account. The feeling I have while surfing it has been odd. I tell myself, “I just want to see what people are saying,” as if I was a social researcher. But I am not conducting research, there are no projects, no boundaries, and no method. It’s the complete opposite of social research—gossip.

Anyhow, one of the threads which I hate to share, but feel compelled to for illustrative purposes, is the claim that Israel somehow had a hand in the assassination. The clip often accompanying this claim is one where Kirk is on PBD podcast and uses the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s goal in Gaza.

Does everyone remember the scene in Dark Knight where Morgan Freeman recounts the blackmail proposal to the accountant? Yeah, same thing here.

So let me get this straight. People want me to think that Podcaster/Conversant/“You Should Vote”-advocate extraordinaire Kirk has some opinion about how Israel’s government—the real one, not podcasters—has a plan to kill millions of people and yet this government is afraid of one person? By my thinking, if Kirk’s analysis was correct, then Israel’s government isn’t afraid of anyone or anything, including their own god.

In short, the sobering truth is Kirk (and his claims) threatened no one.

Two Updates on the Boy Child

First, during my attempt to get more of the cookie for myself, when I told him that the cookie was very big, J- innocently said, “My mouth is big!”

Second, we have this game Poop Tracks which is actually a pretty fantastic board game for little kids (if you care to have them turn into Tom Brown Jr.-like trackers). You spin a spinner and do what it says. The options are, “Draw 1 (or 2), Trade, Swipe, or Skip.” Naturally, I take it upon myself to teach my progeny the proper way to trade and swipe. And, naturally, the proper way to swipe is through distraction. So my kids now look forward to the spinner landing on “swipe” so they can say, “Look at that, Dad!” before proceeding to take one if my cards. Well, just now, as J- and I (A- is now in kindergarten 😦 ) were having a donut, he says, “Look out the window, Day-ad!” Obviously he was priming me for the take, but for what? I played along and then he swiped my napkin. What a guy!

Attention School Teachers and Administrators: The Emails Have To Stop

For fun, this week I copied the text from all school emails over to a MSWord doc in order to learn a word count. (I have two kids in this school. H- is elsewhere and I did not add that school’s emails. I didn’t want to come across as extreme. Time will tell.)

The total—not including a PDF attachment late entry of today—was 1410 words.

For reference, Cat in the Hat is 1600ish and One Fish Two Fish… is 1300ish.

Depending on your speed of reading aloud, those books take somewhere over 10 minutes, but shy of 15 for sure. In your head, maybe 5 minutes.

What were the emails about?

  1. The need to comply with unnecessarily dynamic drop-off and pick-up procedures.
  2. Visit to nurse for complaint of splinter.
  3. Homework completion is required.
  4. A case of head lice was discovered.

29 words. 5.2 seconds. And I wasn’t trying. Trying would be:

  1. Don’t be a knucklehead in the car line.
  2. N/A
  3. N/A
  4. Check your kid for head lice.

14 words. 1.7 seconds.

Please keep in mind none of our parents ever communicated with the school while we were in school. Parents, in the 80s-90s (and I’m sure many ignore everything today), could literally never talk to anyone at school, not just for one week, but for the entire year. And the school didn’t care. And the parents didn’t care.

The emails have to stop.

I am happy to report that in recent reading about Vietnam, I came across the best concluding anecdote I could ever imagine.

From a 1971 NYT article regarding border crossing operations in Laos:

“The sign ‘Warning! No U.S. Personnel Beyond This Point’…On the back, facing Laos, is a faintly scrawled message to the North Vietnamese Army: ‘Warning! No N.V.A. Beyond This Point.’”

In short, there are limitations to what the written word can accomplish. One would like to think the educators would understand this best of all.

Pilots—Hope Embodied

I’m at work today and was chatting with the mechanic. It got me thinking.

Man, this job sure requires me to place a lot of trust in other people.

This led to me wondering What makes someone want to be an aircraft mechanic?

This led to I sure hope the answer is ‘not being as brave or good-looking’ as pilots.

But I backed off that and landed on Flying the aircraft requires more trust in other people than mechanics usually possess.

There are surely other measures of trust or, more broadly, hope. But what I mean to call attention to is the why behind the quality of the trait that pilots necessarily possess.

Once considered, I say one must conclude that it isn’t merely the mode of travel, but the fact of travel that betrays the pilot’s special embodiment of hope. From the functioning of the aircraft, to the people at the (planned or unplanned) destination not killing you upon arrival, the pilot embodies hope.

From another angle, consider that Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejuidce, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

That’s got all the right words, but it’s backwards. From where I sit, “Prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness are fatal to travel.”

But, of course, by travel I mean more than the movement of the body from one location to another. I count as travel learning—even via books. I count attending different cultures’ events (ie, Chinamen moving to Chinatown is not travel, but one religious Chinaman’s visiting of a different religion’s Chinaman family—all who live in the same apartment building is) as travel. There are probably other meanings I would count.

Or not.

So I only mean three things count as travel. (1) travel, (2) learning, and (3) dually (i) meeting people who look identical to yourself but are, in fact, not you and (ii) meeting people who look nothing like you and finding out they are, in fact, your identical twin. And the connection which binds these three is not travel, but hope.

Do you see?