Personal Musings category archive

One of the first signs of civilization was clay pots. After all these years, one would think humans could make a coffee carafe that didn’t drip when poured.

Pretty much what John Cole said.

My fellow lefties need to live in the real damn world, for Christ’s sake.

You don’t like the way your Congressperson votes. Write a letter to your Congressperson, don’t blame Obama. It’s easy with these here computer thingees to write letters.

You don’t like that Obama has trouble getting stuff through Congress. Write your Congressperson, for heaven’s sake.

Obama ain’t voting against Obama’s initiatives. Your Congressperson–yes, you, your Congressperson–is.

You don’t like an Obama policy. Write the White House.

But don’t act surprised that’s he’s turned out to be a slightly left-of-center moderate (at least as viewed through a reality lens, as opposed to a wingnut lens).

That’s what he campaigned as; he did not pretend to be otherwise. If you have forgotten that, read the campaign speeches, for Pete’s sake.

If he has failed as a unifier, it is because some have refused to be uniter, not because he has not tried to unite.

Has he made mistakes? Sure.

I made one just last year. It happens to all of us.

Don’t blame him for not trying to do what he didn’t promise to do (such as leave Afghanistan, which falls into the mistake category but that’s for another day). Blame yourself for not paying attention and for building castles in the ai–oh, never mind.

And grow up, for Heaven’s sake.

Think back over the past decade:

Do you really want Republicans to be in charge again?

Anne Rice falls into a trap that many persons have fallen into: Confusing those who call themselves “Christian” with the teachings and example of Jesus Christ.

Afterthought:

Sadly, those who call themselves “Christian” (and whom Andrew Sullivan calls “Christianists“) are the often the strongest argument against the teachings and example Jesus Christ.

Where he was gentle, they are harsh.

Where he was kind, they are cruel.

Where he was forgiving, they condemn.

Where he loved, they hate.

They cause me shame to profess my faith.

In a related vein, I listened to this interview Friday.

It is worth your while, if not to listen, to read the excerpts from the transcript; the subject of the interview gets the difference between Chrisitianism and Christianity, and it cost him his job.

It’s not black folks who are afraid to confront racism in America. They confront it every day.

It’s we white folks.

That’s the reading on the electronic thermometer on the deck, which I have calibrated. It may not be the official reading, which I think comes from closer to the beach. We are within a couple of miles of the Norfolk Airport and our temperature is usually closer to theirs.

When I was a young ‘un growing up on the other side of the Bay, it would get this hot.

But it wouldn’t stay this hot for weeks at a time with no break.

Read more »

It would be easy to denounce this as a “blame the victim” article, but it’s really more than that.

. . . who is to blame in the story of the U.S. Agriculture Department employee who got fired for being a racist for a few hours and then became an apology sponge when everyone everywhere realized how wrong they had been?

I think it’s us.

(snip)

Nope. It’s us.

The thought that people get the government they deserve also applies to media: People get the media they deserve. We seem to be fleeing substance at every opportunity, perhaps because substance is painful and hard to read and understand.

In its place, we embrace whatever is put in front of us and treat it as real and bathe in it for a while until another reality presents itself. Remember health care? Death panels were a big part of that debate until they weren’t. Then there is our compelling Kenyan president. Tea party people still believe that one.

Part of what makes a cliche a cliche is that it states a truth so well that repackaging that truth is difficult. Two cliches:

• Don’t believe everything you hear (though a chestnut too many ignore). These days, it’s a good idea also not to believe everything you see, even if you see it in person (research shows that eyewitness testimony is quite unreliable).
• Consider the source, especially when the source has a record of unreliability and an ax to grind. Even reliable persons of good will can make mistakes. To an ax grinder, everything is a new sharpening wheel.

I make no claim that my choice of topics here is fair and balanced. This is a hobby; I’m a loudmouth with a website. I don’t claim to be a journalist.

This blog is opinionated; I have my own axes that I sometimes grind.

I do try

• to pick axes that deserve grinding,
• to get facts straight (and correct errors when I learn of them), and
• to make clear where facts stop and opinion begins.

One thing I’ve learned in 50 years of following news is that, if it looks like it doesn’t make sense, it probably doesn’t.

Serendipity is needing to mend something and finding a needle already threaded with the proper thread in the sewing box.

I’m much less offended by language I hear on the telly vision (the stupid is far more offensive) than I am by the language I hear from middle schoolers at the school bus stop.

And it’s a pretty good bet that they didn’t hear it on telly vision first.

The “middle” is not between Republicans and Democrats.

The middle is where the Democrats are. Republicans have left that building.

Voting is not a right. It is a duty.

Several weeks ago, I was chatting with an acquaintance about politics (imagine! me talking about politics).

He was most distressed with a local Democratic candidate for Congress over the candidate’s votes on several major issues and was planning to express his discontent by not voting in that race in November.

(Frankly, I share his distress. Indeed, I had pointed out to one of the Congressman’s staffers that “. . . not voting for the health care bill because it doesn’t save enough money is like a surgeon’s refusing to operate because he can restore only 70% of a patient’s vision, rather than all of it.” The staffer was not happy.)

As Hamlet points out, there is a rub. We agreed that a victory by the Congressman’s opponent would be far more detrimental to the public good than the Democrat’s continued incumbency. Yet, he was willing to support through inaction the opponent.

It is simply not true that all politicians are alike and that there’s no difference between the parties. Anyone who believes that has slept for the last three decades or looks to avoid responsibility for his or her inaction.

Furthermore, anyone who expects a candidate, even the best candidate, to reflect perfectly his or her own views is living in WackyWorld. (John Cole has an excellent musing on that today.)

I cannot understand how persons can consider withholding a vote from a better candidate to the implicit benefit of a lesser one to possess any legitimacy as a protest. It’s “I’ll shoot the polity in the foot so I can feel virtuous” reasoning.

In the American electoral structure, the election goes to the candidate with the majority (actually, in most jurisdictions, with the plurality) of votes. Sometimes, indeed, the choice is indeed between worse and worst. In that case, worse is still better than worst.

Someone is going to win. Not voting at all because you don’t like one amounts to voting for the other.

The only choice may be to hold your nose and vote for the better of the two, even though, in your eyes, the better may not be good enough.

Worse is still better than worst.

Voting is not a right. It is a duty.

A truth that seems to escape some persons is that private actions do not always benefit the public good.

Covering every available bit of land with housing and shops, while destroying the wildlife and wildlife living space that helps make living in the part of the world enjoyable, does not benefit the public good.

The city, in partnership with several conservation groups, plans to buy 122 acres of environmentally sensitive land off Shore Drive that had been marked for a housing development.

The purchase would guarantee that the last major tract of undeveloped land along the Lynnhaven River, which boasts oyster beds, wetlands and a maritime forest, is preserved. It also means an end to Virginia Beach firm L.M. Sandler & Sons controversial Indigo Dunes project, which called for more than 1,000 homes.

Some things do belong to all of us and should be protected from marketeers. That’s why we have parks, and that’s why this is a good idea, even when times are tight.

When merchants reconstitute concentrated fruit juice, must they hold a reconstitutional convention?

I glanced at the stories regarding the recent report on Gatesgate and they did not stir my blogging nerve. Today, Joan Vennochi’s column in the Boston Globe helped me figure out why:

A NEW report on last summer’s arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white Cambridge Police sergeant ducks the main theme of their famous face-off.

Skin color.

That’s what made it international news. That’s what drew in President Obama, who got caught up in the story when he said the Cambridge police acted “stupidly’’ and then wiggled out of it by hosting a White House beer summit.

But the 60-page report on the show-down between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley barely mentions race. Instead, it’s all about respect and the need for more of it from citizens and law enforcement officials.

It is not just that color is what made it news.

It is very likely that color–a white cop and a black citizen–was a big part of what made it happen in the first place.

The flour, sugar, salt, and water in the recipe may have come from other sources, but I am certain that race was the yeast without which the loaf would not have risen.

Any “analysis” that avoided the issue of race was no analysis at all.
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If your cat won’t sit still, give your catatonic.

Dick Polman looks back at the America John Boehner wants back. A nugget:

Boehner was born in 1949. In the America he grew up in, southern blacks got arrested or beaten if they tried to share a luncheonette counter with whites. If they tried to eat at Lester Maddox’s restaurant in Atlanta, he brandished an axe handle and chased them into the street. Up in New York City, jazz great Miles Davis was beaten on the street with a blackjack by a city cop who saw him escorting a white woman to a taxicab. I am proud that America today is a place where such human rights abuses would be unthinkable.

Read the whole thing and ask yourself, do you want that country back?

I don’t.

I was cutting grass along the highways for the state–funnest summer job I ever had. I hit a drainage ditch that was completely obscured by honeysuckle with the right front wheel and the tractor went over to the right. I hit the dirt and headed into the soybeans on my belly.

Didn’t know I could move so fast on my belly.

My buddy, who was on a Ford, wrapped a chain around the frame and pulled the tractor back upright.

We continued cutting grass.

Decades ago, a John Deere tractor flipped over on Silas Fralin.

At the time his son Franklin Fralin, now 73, was in his early teens and working the family’s farm in Union Hall.

“It broke him all up and a rib went through his lung,” Fralin recalled. “I had to stay there after that. Daddy didn’t have but one lung. He didn’t have much breath.”

The Fralins, like many other row-crop farmers in Franklin County, often relied on the smaller Farmall tractors manufactured by International Harvester.

And Franklin Fralin’s restored 1949 Farmall Cub was among the antique tractors displayed Saturday during the seventh annual Southwest Virginia Antique Farm Days at the Franklin County Recreation Park.

What a great movie.

Simple, straightforward, lots of car crashes.

What more could a guy want in a movie?

Those who consider wind farms to be unsightly have likely never seen an oilfield.