January 27, 2024

What the Bible really says:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:34)

January 20, 2024

They don't care.

Dolt 45 makes his supporters feel powerful in a world that doesn't care about them & has left them behind.

November 10, 2023

This quote says it all:

“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in god, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake don’t try to improve their minds.”

--Robert Penn Warren, "All the King's Men"

October 8, 2023

Today is my birthday.

I started the day running a 5K to benefit cancer research, something personally meaningful to me. After getting the outdoor furniture put away for the season & finishing cleaning the house (it had to get done today!) I went out for Mexican food & margaritas with my husband & best friend whose birthday was yesterday, came home for birthday cake, & talked with my college kids. It was a good, full day!

September 18, 2023

Yes!

We started dating in high school. I went to college & he went to art school, & that led to the demise of the relationship. We reconnected again as young adults, but stayed friends only. We're both married to other people now & are friends on Facebook, but a small part of me will care for him forever. No one has ever made me laugh as hard or appreciated in me what few other people did. I smile every time I think of him, even though I graduated from high school 40 years ago.

November 9, 2017

That's part of it.

So many of them have tiny, depressing lives. They smoke, drink, & work their dead-end jobs. When there's no job, heroin & opiates enter the picture. They don't read, travel, or even go to the movies. They go grocery shopping, to Walmart, & to church.They're content not to know anything about the big, scary world.

I know this to be true; my father's family was full of people like this. He got an education & a profession & got away from all that. We saw them on holidays until my grandmother died, as did a lot of those relatives.

November 7, 2017

They're authoritarian personalities.

...There are various different related concepts to that of authoritarianism. These include conservatism, dogmatism, and ethnocentrism. Some focus on thinking style, others on prejudice. Most argue that this “attitudinal syndrome” rather than a personality trait, occurs for both genetic/heredity and environmental factors. At the core of the theories is the idea of a generalized susceptibility to experience anxiety and threat when confronted by ambiguity or uncertainty.

Thus for various reasons – a person’s ability and personality, their early life and current circumstances – some people feel inferior and insecure and fearful of lack of clarity. Therefore to avoid uncertainty authoritarians dislike anything or anybody that advocates complexity, innovation, novelty, risk or change. They tend to dislike conflict and decision making and subjugate their personal feelings and needs to external authorise. They obey the rules norms, conventions and more importantly insist others do too.

So conservatives and authoritarians get obsessed by ordering and controlling their internal world and external world. They like simplistic, rigid and inflexible duties, laws, morals, obligation and rules. This affects everything from their choice of art to how they vote.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sideways-view/201502/the-mind-the-authoritarian

September 1, 2017

U.S. Employers Struggle To Match Workers With Open Jobs

In the United States, there's a record number of jobs open: around 6 million. That's just about one job opening for every officially unemployed person in the country.

Matching the unemployed with the right job is difficult, but there are some things employers could do to improve the odds.

Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist for the job site Glassdoor, says U.S. employers often complain that workers don't have the skills needed for the jobs available. That is true for some upper-level health care and technology jobs. "But for the most part, it doesn't look to be like there is a skills gap," Chamberlain says. "That's not the main reason why there are many job openings."

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/31/547646709/u-s-employers-struggle-to-match-workers-with-open-jobs

August 31, 2017

Trump Raises an Army

Trump’s supporters see him as vector; he sees them as market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/trump-harvey-storm-army.html?mcubz=1

August 20, 2017

Explaining, Again, The Nazis' True Evil

Nazis don't always look like bad guys in funny helmets. The Nazis and other bigots in khaki slacks and bright polo shirts who marched in Charlottesville chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans I'd rather not repeat on a Saturday — or at all. But it's discouraging to feel that you have to explain, more than 70 years after Nazi Germany was defeated, why Nazis are still the menace that embody evil.

The 20th century saw a lot of state-sanctioned mass murder: Stalin, Mao, Mengistu and Pol Pot, Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Ethiopia's Red Terror, the Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution, and more. In America there were lynchings and the cruelty of official segregation, which followed the end of slavery, and the massacre of so many Native Americans.

To cite one or another doesn't excuse any. But Nazism was something extraordinary. The laws on race and citizenship they began to impose on taking power in 1933, which were encoded in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, invoked blood, soil and the twisted science of eugenics to make anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy the law. They used those wicked decrees to begin to engineer the murder of millions.

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/19/544641070/explaining-again-thenazis-true-evil