My daily life got easier when I stopped fighting with my hair.
No matter what you do, there is always someone who thinks you should do something else.
Imagine thinking the actor who played a surgeon on TV is really a surgeon who could operate on you. Dumb, huh? Yet many people still think the actor who played a businessman on TV is really a businessman who could make good decisions.
Ableism is expressed mostly through architecture and interior design.
I was just a kid playing the piano. They never taught me that music is mathematical. I still remember the moment I saw it. My playing got better after that.
Sometimes I think I'll never need to blog again because "they" can't come up with anything more ridculous or evil than they already have. And then....
You never really know what someone will do until they do it.
Is your yearly budget less than a million dollars? If you had a billion dollars, you could spend a million a year for a thousand years, and you still wouldn't run out, because all that time, your money would have been invested in accounts that pay interest and dividends, so more money just keeps rolling in.
Now, imagine you had not just one billion, not two billion, but a hundred billion, or three hundred billion. With 300 billion, you could spend a million dollars EVERY DAY, and you'd have money left over at the end of 22,000 years.
That sure seems like enough money, doesn't it? But the guys who have that much, or close to it, don't think it's enough at all. They can own dozens of homes in different countries, buy private islands, own personal jets and huge yachts, indulge in collecting rare automobiles or historical jewelry, go anywhere they like, purchase any clothing, any food they want, get cosmetic surgery every year, send their children to the greatest universities, spend the night gambling in Monte Carlo, ski at the most exclusive resorts, get the best medical care in the world, bribe politicians just about everywhere, build stadiums and skyscrapers with their name on it, and - just for a change of pace - donate millions to charity. But they still don't think they have enough. They are constantly scheming to get even more. Many of those schemes require taking away what other people - you and me - have.
They want the power to make us pay for the infrastructure and institutions that make modern life possible for them. While they make $5000 a minute, they begrudge us $15 an hour. They want to eliminate the rules that keep our food safe and our water clean, because they can make bigger profits if they don't have to be clean or careful.
Why? Why do they want to cancel the retirement income of the elderly, cut off health care for the middle class, or withhold food from schoolchildren? They want every possible penny in their own pockets. They already have more than enough, more than too much. But they aren't satisfied. Greed gnaws at them the way hunger gnaws at a starving animal. More, more, more, howl the voices inside them. The sight of comfortable people enjoying safe, healthy lives fills them with anxiety. Those people driving nice cars and living in pretty houses represent pennies that should be in the billionaires' pockets. Your retirement account is cash that they want.
They are much happier when the world around them is populated by hungry peasants dressed in rags and dying young, because then they can feel assured that they have taken everything for themselves.
Imagine you have a problem with the electrical wiring in your home. You call a company that advertises as an electrical contractor. However, it turns out the owner of the company is not an electrician. He's a guy who used to manage a pizza place, and he often talks about the "concepts of electricity."
You're not worried, because he won't be doing the actual work. He just hired a head electrician. Until recently, this guy was a swimming instructor. He has never attended a trade school to learn the electrician's craft, but he does have several family members who are plumbers or carpenters, and claims to have some important ideas about electricity.
There is another recently-hired electrician who is actually a lawyer, not a licensed electrician. He writes a blog explaining that county building codes do not protect public safety. He thinks building inspectors should be replaced by yoga instructors and nutritionists.
The third employee was a licensed electrical contractor, but his license expired three years ago. According to Yelp reviews, he often tells customers that spaghetti is a good substitute for copper wire.
Knowing all this, would you go ahead and hire this company, or would you look elsewhere?
When I was in college I had a 4.0 GPA. I'm not a genius! The main difference between me and the guys who flunked out was that I paid attention in class, and I studied.
Once in algebra class, after a big test, everyone was comparing grades. Most of the
people around me had scores below 60. Mine was 85. One guy asked me how I did it. I explained to him that I had spent approximately 16 hours studying. "Well then, you deserve it," he said. He looked very sad, though. I think he had been hoping
I would reveal some magic trick that anyone could do. Actually, that's what it was.
Later, when I became a teacher, I noticed there were many students who believed the only way they could get good grades was by cheating. They would put a lot of energy into devising clever
ways of cheating. Sometimes they got away with it, but in the long run they did not do well, because they didn't learn much. They were never able to pass the carefully proctored final exams.
If only they had taken all the time,
effort, and ingenuity that went into cheating and used it for actual studying, they would have easily graduated with honors. Instead they had to take classes over, and some never graduated.
There was a time when all our phones were landlines. We didn't call them landlines; we just called them phones. They were attached to the wall by cords. Some people equipped their phones with extra long cords so they could walk across the room while talking.
My friend Char, who lived in a small studio apartment, had a cord long enough that she could get to any spot in the apartment while she was on the phone. On a couple of occasions, while we were conversing, I heard the toilet flush.
"If you're going to use the toilet while we're talking," I told her, "I don't want to know. Please flush after we hang up."
Now that everyone has a mobile phone, it seems that making calls from the toilet is a common practice. I notice this in public restrooms, where I often hear the person in the next stall chatting away. Some women like to use the handicap stall as a phone booth. (These are probably the same people who use it as a dressing room.)
At home, it doesn't occur to me to carry my phone into the bathroom. In a public place, my phone is in my purse and goes where I go. If it rings while I'm busy, I don't answer.
Some people, though, can't resist answering a call. And if the call of nature happens simultaneously with the call of the phone, they multitask. Some see their toilet time as an opportunity for privacy, and schedule their calls accordingly.
A recent study suggests the 39 percent of people take their phones to the washroom, and that nearly half of those people have dropped the phone into the toilet. This isn't good for the phones. I once managed to accidentally drop my phone into a glass of water, just a week after I got it. Fortunately, it was insured, and I got a quick replacement. As silly as I felt at the time, how much more embarrassed would I have been if the phone had vanished into the commode?
Although the obvious solution is to stop making calls in the bathroom, it seems unlikely people will change that bevavior. I suggest wearing the phone on a lanyard. Many people have already thought of this, and there is a wide choice of suitable products available from all the usual places.
My college friend Eleni had both sets of grandparents who were immigrants from Greece. Both her parents grew up bilingual, speaking mostly Greek at home, and English in the world.
Describing her childhood, Eleni told me how annoyed she was by her parents and all her older relatives, because when she was little, they spoke Greek as a way of keeping secrets from the kids. "It was rude and sneaky," she grumbled. "They treated us like we didn't have the right to know what was happening."
One day I had a conversation with Eleni's mother. Reminiscing about the past and the days when her children were younger, she told me she felt sorry that her kids had never learned to speak Greek. "We tried to encourage them," she said. "We would often speak Greek around them, hoping they would pick it up, or that they would get curious and want to learn it. But they never did."
Historically, authoritarians have censored dissidents and others they dislike by accusing them of being pornographers who corrupt children.
Something many people don't know about Project 2025 is that its authors intend to make pornography illegal again, but not before they first change how pornography is defined.
Pornography is typically defined as sexually explicitly material (video, written, or audio) that is intended to cause sexual arousal. Educational material, such as medical books or sex-education texts, are usually exempt from being considered pornography, as is material which has "socially redeeming value".
Currently in the US, pornography is not usually illegal, unless it depicts children, or if it is provided to children, or if it depicts people who did not give consent, or if it is determined to be "obscene" - completely lacking artistic or social value and offensive to community standards.
The key thing to remember is that, legal or not, throughout history, pornography has been understood to be explicitly sexual, or to be "indecent" in its portrayal of the human body. (There are longer discussions to be had about how different societies define indecency, or what kinds of things were or weren't taboo in other places at other times.)
Project 2025, however, would expand the definition of pornography by including anything that depicts or mentions gender identity or transgender information. Christine Jorgensen's autobiography would be labeled porn, as would the song, "Take a Walk on the Wild Side", as would my posting an anecdote about how my nephew became my niece. Librarians who allowed people to check out these newly forbidden books would face prison time and would become registered sex offenders. See Page 5 of the manifesto.
This new concept of pornography is just part of the Heritage Foundation's drive to demonize LGBTQ (with a particular emphasis on the trans community). On page 4, they claim that certain words and phrases - sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights - "deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights" and must be purged from "every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists."
They do not explain how the existence or use of a word can deprive people of First Amendment rights (which include the right to free speech).
Project 2025 is no longer just a proposal or a looming threat. Donald's advisors and other Republicans have now openly stated that it is their agenda.
The Project 2025 manifesto is difficult reading, most likely deliberately so. It is over 900 pages of academic-style writing, heavy-handed propaganda, strange fantasies, and outright lies. It often uses code words and convoluted language to disguise its true intent. Nevertheless, we should all become familiar with it. A good way to start is to read the comic book version.
Maybe you don't care that donald speaks as if his sentences were produced by a random number generator. After all, not everyone can be a great public speaker, and there is no requirement that presidential candidates demonstrate English fluency.
And maybe you don't care that donald calls for the execution of people who disagree with him. After all, it's just a fantasy, and we have laws to prevent it from actually happening. At least, we do right now.
Maybe you don't care that donald has encouraged his supporters to shoot reporters. After all, it's unlikely they'll take him seriously, right? And if a few reporters are killed, so what? They probably deserved it for revealing how donald speaks, and for showing photos of his makeup. Anyway, we don't actually need to know about current events when we have social media and podcasts to inform us.
And maybe you don't care that donald has called for rounding up millions of immigrants and putting them in detention camps on the way to deporting them. If several thousand citizens get rounded up by mistake, it's a small price to pay for removing all those non-human vermin people from the country. So what if it requires sending the National Guard into neighborhoods to pound on doors and conduct warrantless searches of homes? You've got nothing to hide, right?
It probably hasn't occurred to you that the time will come when you, or people you like, are targeted for imprisonment, deportation, or execution. As time goes on, it could easily happen that your heritage (German, Italian, Armenian, Greek, Spanish, or whatever) could be labeled as a problem, especially if we have a political dispute or war with your ancestors' home country.
Or your church might fall out of favor. Or certain professions, not just reporters, but maybe doctors, architects, teachers, or farmers, could be denounced for not following the party line. Or maybe a spiteful neighbor could report you as a communist, even though all you did was laugh at a joke about donald. Not that you're likely to encounter many of those jokes, once all the comedians are in prison.
I want a President who loves this country, not one who thinks America is a garbage can.
People are so angry now, they will curse you for agreeing with them.
One of the ways Pol Pot undermined his country's economy was to deliberately assign people to work in jobs they weren't qualified for.
When we get our voter pamphlet in the mail, I go through it, research the candidates and issues, and then circle my recommendations. Hubby is, of course, free to take my advice or not.
I'm old enough to remember when people expected Presidents to be role models for their children, and every candidate behaved accordingly.
Can you imagine George H. Bush making a series of speeches and repeatedly calling his technical crew stupid? Can you imagine Gerald Ford in an interview suggesting his political opponents should be shot in the face? Can you imagine Ronald Reagan having microphone problems and then threatening to beat up the tech crew?
Stop putting bacon on everything.
A few weeks ago, there were a lot of news stories about the CEO of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Douglas Hamlin. When Hamlin was in college, he and some of his fraternity brothers tortured a cat to death. At the time, the story received quite a bit of coverage in the local news, with outraged citizens calling for harsh punishments.
The young men did not receive harsh punishments. They had to move out of the fraternity house, but were not expelled from school. Apparently, they paid small fines and were sentenced to community service.
Every article I have seen about this, whether from the time of the crime, or current, has included a description of what these monsters did to that cat. I'm sorry to have that knowledge. I will not repeat it here. Anyone who wants the disgusting details can look it up.
Some people say that this guy shouldn't be penalized for one thing he did over 40 years ago. I say that it probably wasn't an isolated incident. Animal abusers tend to start small and get worse over time. This was such an over-the-top act, it is impossible to imagine that it was the first - or only - time for the participants. Further, sadism is typically just one part of a psychopathology or a personality disorder that rarely improves.
People with antisicial personality disorder display a long-term pattern of disdain for others and violations of others' rights. It is probably no coincidence that a sadistic personality rose to a high position in an organization that habitually minimizes the suffering and deaths of thousands of human beings, and that asserts a "right" that it champions over the right to life.
