A trite piece about Obama calling Kanye West a jackass

I’m taking a break from the regularly scheduled, heavy  handed preaching to say that it is kind of awesome how the President called Kanye West a jackass (audio) for interrupting Taylor Swift’s VMA award acceptance speach.  Obama has always been good with words, and this time he chose the perfect one.

I love the word “jackass.”  I use it regularly to describe a plethora of jack-assery.  In addition to our shared penchance for Honest Tea, this is yet another reason why Obama and I should be buddies!

I do sort of feel bad for Kanye at this point, being shamed by Obama, who he undoubtedly admires.  I wonder if he cried.  I would have cried.

Oh, this just in, Kanye gets his revenge.

Dear Mayor Bloomberg: An Open Letter From Bed Bug City

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

The front page of the New York Times Real Estate section on August 23 featured the article “Buying and Selling in Bed Bug City”.  It explored the exponentially increasing rate of bedbug infestations in New York City residential buildings and how the pests are affecting condo sales.  The people interviewed for this piece had the financial options to buy a condo, or pass in favor of an apparently bedbug free home.  Most New Yorkers, such as working families, young people, and students do not have such options.  We live wherever we can afford.  We do not have the means to buy private houses, or spend thousands of dollars to treat bed bug infestations with the two most effective treatments; Vikane gas, and Thermapure heat.

From the New York Times:

“Most residential buildings in New York City have had bedbugs,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a real estate lawyer at Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman who represents 300 Manhattan co-op and condo boards.

Also from the Times:

The bedbug epidemic has smacked around New York City for the past five years or so, a seemingly unstoppable scourge flourishing in the absence of a coordinated city effort to control it. The City Council created a bedbug advisory board in March, but has not yet announced its members. Complaints to the 311 hot line shot up by 19 percent for the fiscal year that ended in June, on top of a 33 percent increase the year before, according to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Other cities have already begun concerted efforts to tackle their bedbug infestations.  The Central Ohio Bed Bug Task Force is an excellent example of what New York City should have put into place years ago.  Its basis of collaboration among government, pest control operators, landlord and tenant rights groups, etc…is the only common sense way for a large city to overcome a bedbug infestation.

I appeal to you to appoint members to the Bed Bug Advisory Board immediately. Please make bedbug control and eradication a priority.

I leave you with some examples of how bedbug bites can appear.  But for many, the most trying aspect of the bedbug experience is not physical, but psychological.  In fact, an Ohio County Health Official recently called bedbugs a “psychological disaster.”  New Yorkers are suffering.  Please help end the bedbug scourge on New York City.

Senator Says “Dumbest Thing Ever”

In Bill Maher’s funny/scary “Religulous”, Mark Pryor, Senator from Arkansas, had a rare moment of clarity sandwiched by bumbling confusion in response to Maher’s statement that he’s worried there are senators who believe in a talking snake (clip here):

But you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though.

It’s one of those statements that on the surface seems a stupid gaffe.  A horrible misstep coaxed out of a man of lesser mental faculties by Maher’s lighting quick jabs.   And then you laugh.  And then you realize that it’s funny because it’s true.  The simple and utter truthiness of it brings us full circle to what now looks like a rather intelligent gaffe, indeed.

I bring this up because keeping in mind that no IQ test is required to be in the Senate may save us from confusion and frustration when dissecting Senator Burris’ words to Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade on Sunday.  In what may have been the first time a sitting US Senator has attended the event, Burris sure didn’t go out of his way to make a good impression.  In an argument that transcends bigotry, to lack even the most basic reasoning, Burris has effectively stuck his foot down his throat with one absurd sentence.

My concept of marriage is a male and a female for the perpetuation of the species, for children to be born and identify the bloodline and the heritage.

By Burris’ screwy logic, marriage should be denied to any opposite sex couple who does not desire children, are infertile or sterile, couples who wish to adopt only, women over 50, and the list goes on.  And what of the countless gay couples who do have children, often biological?

Since marriage plays no role in procreation, and procreation plays little role in lasting marital love, this is the dumbest argument against gay marriage… EVER.  It might be one of the dumbest arguments against anything I’ve ever heard.  Was this speech written beforehand, or was this unrivaled specimen of incoherence thought up on the spot?

Just when you think your head is about to explode in a cacophony of idiocy, take a deep breath and repeat this mantra.  ”You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.”  Sometimes, you just have to wait until a seat opens up.

Meghan McCain: How Much Can You Torture?

During a brief interlude to the cafeteria I caught Meghan McCain guest hosting on The View.  Ms. McCain has been garnering a lot of attention lately for her supposedly young, modern take on the Republican party.

This is what she had to say on The View regarding torture:

It’s a complicated issue, I mean, how much can you torture, what is torture…

I couldn’t hear the rest over  my own shocked laughter.  How much can you torture?  I’ll tell you, Meghan.  None.  You can torture zero, not at all, nil, zip.

Something tells me that McCain is about to find that the road to becoming the face of a new Republican Party is not going to be as easy as she thought.  It’s all fine and dandy when she can take her time to write on McCainBlogette.com, but when actual words come out of her mouth in real time, she just sounds like a bozo.

McCain has been using her socially liberal values to gain popularity among liberal bloggers, even being praised on Huffington Post.  What I want to know is, if she’s so damn liberal, why is she a republican?  She isn’t in the New York Mayoral race, so there is no reason for her to be a RINO.  Maybe it’s a holdover from her formative years, although she’s a bit old to still be trying to please daddy.  More likely, she is a Republican in a moderate’s clothes.  Even supporting gay rights is not enough to make you hip when you are in favor of torture.

Glenn Beck Doesn’t Really Like You

As I make my morning web rounds the emotion that strikes me most is frustration.  

On Facebook a friend has posted, without any sense of irony, yet another Glenn Beck article.  Hysterically entitled “The Battle for America’s Soul”, Beck writes with his familiar mix of faulty logic and empty rhetoric.  He likes the word “values”, and he likes to say “we” a lot.  Of course, a “we” implies a “they”, and if you listen to Beck for long enough you might begin to believe that the “they” is anyone born in Mexico.  This  guy  needs to see the wonderful movie A Day Without a Mexican.  Then again, it would take more than a movie to knock the hatred out of Beck.  In the Glenn Beckverse, “values” translates roughly to “Grab all you can for yourself.  If your neighbor doesn’t have health insurance/is unable to pay their rent/heat/electric bill/buy enough food for their children, then it means they simply aren’t working hard enough and  don’t deserve to live.”  The scariest thing about Beck is the spidy- sense I get that he could be dangerously effective at convincing working class citizens to vote against their own interests, a goal wealthy, right wing talk radio hosts fantasize about while they jerk off (right after grubbing exorbitant amounts of  money.)

And yet, after making his position blindingly clear by declaring that there should be no new taxes on the wealthy, he oddly closes with this:

Right before the Revolution started, some of the Founding Fathers were starting to second guess the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson went out to take the pulse of the people. Franklin talked to regular Joes and Jefferson spoke to the rich and the powerful, but they both got the same message back: People not only believed in the common sense concept of freedom, they were also willing to risk everything to get it. 

That’s when they decided to craft this now famous phrase: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” 

Once we start to live by those words again, we will win this new battle for our country’s soul. 

Does anyone else notice the part about mutually pledging to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor?  

  There is much debate and different interpretations of what our forefathers had in mind when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.  While their thinking was modestly ahead of their time, my contemporaries definitely see the ever-shrinking world from a new point of view.  A modern day interpretation of the famous phrase may sound like this:

Mutually pledging our fortunes to each other means that in hard times, those who have more will pledge to give more (a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% is a great start).  The good fortune of this nation is linked to each of us.  Mutually pledging our lives to each other means that we will, collectively, take care of our fellow humans when they are ill (and the President’s health-care proposal will attempt to do just that.)  Honor is a funny word.  Too often it is linked to violence.  Between honor killings, and the honor of serving in the military (legalized murder), the word itself has hardly any honor to it!  I reinterpret a mutual pledge of our sacred honor to each other to mean that we hold each other accountable to ensure that we all have equal rights under the Constitution, despite our differences in gender, skin color, or sexual orientation, to stand firm that no majority will dictate the rights of a minority.  That would be a truly honorable way to live.

So, to the friend who posted the article that inspired the above, I would like to thank you. Sometimes it takes something truly frustrating to inspire me.  This has been a fun writing/thinking session.

Post Sinks to New Low

Oh, NY Post, nobody could accuse you of lacking balls.  In the city with the largest population of self-defined black residents of any US city, you publish this cartoon:

At best, it’s a claim that the stimulus bill is so bad that it was written by a monkey.  At worst, the cartoonist has capitalized on the tragic tirade and death of a drugged chimpanzee to make a blatantly racist jab at President Obama.  Since this is the Rupert Murdoch owned Post we’re talking about, I’m going to bet on the latter.

No Compromise for Obstinate, Partisan, Obstructionists

 

Lolz Obama

 

I have some very exciting news!  Thanks to my ceaseless obses…achem…researching of everything President Obama,  I have unearthed something incredible.  President Obama and I share the same favorite bottled tea in common!!!  That would be Honest tea (a bit ironic for a politician, eh?)  The tea lives up to its name, being the first bottled tea manufacturer to market a fair trade certified tea.  While President Obama favors Black Forest Berry and Green Dragon, I prefer Moroccan Mint.  Mere technicalities.  In other good news, President Obama has enacted a business casual dress code for those busy weekends at the White House.  That means he’ll be sauntering around the Oval Office in sassy slacks, stylish button downs topped with so soft to touch v-neck cashmere sweaters, and all of it layered by a thin but impenetrable veneer of cool.

I would like to put a shout out out to my mom for sending me a President Obama refrigerator magnet.  It really adds pizazz to the kitchen.  Our refrigerator has never looked so presidential, or so handsome.

Cuter than human baby, but more likely to be devoured by flock of seagulls.

Now that all the good news is out of the way, let’s talk about the couple who recently spawned a litter of octuplets.  Who do they think they are, sea turtles?  Unlike the beautiful, long lived creatures of the sea, human babies born in the US have a significantly higher survival rate than 1 in 4000.  Why anyone in these overpopulated and harsh economic times thinks to themselves “I’d like to breed a litter of children who I will then dedicate everything in my life to for the next 18 years” is beyond me.  Oh wait, it’s  not.  I will commence judging strangers…NOW.  

First, this couple most likely used multiple fertility treatments, and when they were told they were pregnant with seven babies (the eighth was thrown in at the end for good luck), rejected the choice of reduction, selfishly allowing all of their children to be born with the inherent risks of prematurity rather than giving two or three a chance at a healthy life and lessening the financial burden on society.  Yes, we the taxpayers end up footing the bill whenever some anonymous couple deems their genes more important than anyone else’s to be passed on…eight times.  People, if you are infertile, maybe that is mother nature’s way of saying “Hold up…nope, we don’t need any little yous running around.”  Not every person’s genes are meant to be passed on.  If they were, there would be no natural selection, no evolution.  There may be something faulty going on to cause the infertility, so why would anyone want to risk passing that on?  

When so many children need families,  fertility treatments are the epitome of selfishness expressed by people who don’t want to be parents as much as they want their genetic legacy to continue.  If parentage and caring for a child was the true motivation, why go through grueling procedures, tens of thousands of dollars, and the heightened risk to the baby itself?  If parentage is the true goal, then adopt.  Nia Vardalos did it, and she’s glad she did.  In conclusion, it is not the genes that make the parent, it is all in the love.

Obama sandwich!  Bad news.  The President’s stimulus package received not one House republican vote.  After all of his compromises on the package, they still would not budge.  President Obama’s message of bi-partisanship and compromise was swell, but I knew this day would come, and he must have seen it too, for he is a smart guy, to say the least.  Simply put, compromise gets you nowhere if only one side is willing to participate.  I haven’t got any analysis on this.  It is too depressing.

BREAKING NEWS:  Mother of octuplets has 6 children already!!!  

OK, so I don’t know what’s going on here, but this sounds fishy.  Out of her 6 older children, two of them are twins.  While the hospital has not disclosed the use of fertility treatments, there is no known case of octuplets being conceived naturally.  This is really confusing.  Why?  Why?  WHYYYYY????

Edit:  It is now unclear whether the mother of the octuplets even has a partner.  She seems to live with her parents.  No father is mentioned.

The Miracle of Human Competence

I want to write about fine lines.  They have been on my mind a lot, lately.  The fine lines of a freshly sharpened pencil on a crisp off-white page.  The fine lines between emotions whose dictionary definitions put them at opposite ends of the universe.  And of course, the fine line between stupid and clever.  

miracle n. An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God.

Is he amused or not? Damn this straight faced moose.

A youth gets the finest education money can buy.  Goes on to med school and works night and day.  Has the social life of a Norwegian moose.  Studies, trains, lives medicine.  Makes a proper diagnosis, catches something early, performs a successful surgery.  And what does the ungrateful patient say?  It’s a miracle!  I prayed and prayed.  And other people prayed for me, too.  And God listened to each individual one of us, because our voices are really nice, like the recording who prompts you to pay your phone bill.  And it’s a miracle that I’m still alive today!  

Tastes like KFC...extra crispy.

A youth has a dream.  No, it’s not for racial equality, although he wouldn’t mind that, either.  No, his dream is to fly, high, in the sky, with the birds who, ironically, will also be his downfall.  But alas, a miracle was performed, at the hands of God.  Praise the Lord.  Hallelujah.  Wait…what’s that?  The pilot did everything right?  Well, then that plane should have had one of those bumper stickers on it that says “God is my co-pilot”, because there is no way a mere mortal with decades of experience and training could have done everything right all on their very own.   I don’t believe it.  Must have been a miracle.  That pilot isn’t a hero, he’s just tight with Jesus.

Fred Greenbaum

And some of us are lucky enough to be born as puppies.  And some puppies are so fortunate as to find a caring home, even if it’s later in life.  And those very fortunate puppies don’t have many worries.  They just go about their happy lives.  The smallest things bring them immense joy.  A romp outside.  A trip in the car.  A house guest feeding them under the table.  So many mornings on my walk to school or work, I’ve watched the sparrows.  They just hop around, tweet tweeting.  Pecking at this and that.  Is it edible?  Is it shiny?  So many mornings I’ve wished I was one of them.  But those were in moments where I desired to evade my uniquely human responsibilities.  Ask if I would like to part with my uniquely human privileges, and you’d get a different answer.  Is the experience of other animals as two-fold as ours?  Does Fred experience lows that are equal to his highs?  Does he ever gaze solemnly at a circling hawk and think that he wouldn’t mind being able to spread some furry little wings of his own and soar away?  Probably not.

Am I Not a Woman And a Sister?

Struggle in the face of wars waged by governments and leaders far more powerful than the individual has an air of futility.  Learning about people who are enslaved, either as workers, or in this case young women and children held as sex slaves, inflames a tangible sort of passion in me.  Here is a situation we can DO something about.  Here are people we can help.  Here our voices, our money, our pure will to end slavery can make a difference.  And this is what you need to read to see how urgently your help is needed: The Evil Behind the Smiles.

It’s difficult to decide which pieces to quote because the entire story is so immediately necessary, but here goes.

Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.

Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn’t know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.

But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.

If Sina refused to smile alluringly and have sex with customers, she would be tortured.

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

Sina was eventually rescued in a police raid on the brothel.  The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who escaped slavery and has devoted her life to helping other victims.  In Somaly’s interview with Tyra Banks she shares that after her first rape she died inside.  She said that she is still dead inside.  With tears in her eyes and shaky voice, Tyra told Somaly that she seems so alive to her.  

Somaly Mam appears on the outside as a well put together, professional young woman.  Looking at her, you would never be able to guess that she had once been tortured and held for years as a slave in a brothel.  She looks like you or me.  She could be us.  We could be her.  

I’m currently reading Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks.  It’s a novelization of the life of famous American abolitionist John Brown.  Brown organized violent attacks against slavers and anyone who was pro-slavery.  While some call him the father of American terrorism, I can’t say that I disagree with his tactics.  Who reading this would condemn a slave for killing their “owner”?  If you were enslaved, would you not feel just in that particular action?  I can’t even call it murder, as it is self defense. 

Now we have modern day slavery.  A case of supply and demand,the supply being kidnapped children and women, and the demand partially made up of Western men, some of whom know they are in the wrong, and others who actually believe that these women are happy with their “jobs”.  They believe the smiles that are worn like masks.  Regardless, they are participants and supporters of the crime of slavery and should be looked upon unsympathetically.  

Please donate to the Somaly Mam foundation.  Appeal to President-Elect Obama and Hillary Clinton to take action on this matter.  If you are traveling in areas where there are known sex slaves, do not partake.  If you know someone who has, ostracise this person.  Publicize their support of slavery.  Make it your Facebook status message.  I don’t care how you do it, but anyone who doesn’t help bring this out into the open is passively supporting the third largest illegal industry in the world and one of the most evil crimes against humanity, slavery.

Kindness and Deceit or Cartoon a Go Go

It is accepted among biologists that homosapien has evolved to be a cooperative, social animal.  If we weren’t so adept at cooperating with one another, we would not have developed such an intensely complex social structure, or maybe it’s the other way around.  From group hunting, to group movie watching, we are an animal who relies on each other for optimal survival.  There are some interesting clues hidden in plain sight that give this away.  For example, humans are the only primates who have whites of the eyes, allowing us to know what another person is looking at.  This would not have been of benefit to us if we were prone to taking advantage of each other often, stealing, for example, the very last coconut that a friends’ gaze alerted you to.  For the white of eye trait to evolve it had to be beneficial to the survival of the species.  Explained here:

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Why am I thinking about this?  Because public disgust at political corruption exposed is not unexpected.  Nobody can deny the wrong doing of Governor Blagojevich.  Humans generally expect others to be cooperative instead of deceptive cheaters.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that most of you are cynical pessimists who trust humanity as far as you can throw it.  I’ll go on an even shakier limb in saying that you are more trusting than you believe.  Think back on your life.  Think of all the individuals who have helped you for no apparent reason.  The motorists who lent a hand in the middle of the night when your car broke down, at potential risk to themselves (YOU could have been a serial killer).  The stranger who appeared out of nowhere to help carry your stroller up the subway steps when you were struggling.  The woman who let you skip her in the bathroom line when you clearly needed it more than she.  The man who asked if you needed help when it seemed you were being harrassed.  My personal favorite, the very nice gentleman who offered up his seat on the subway when you told him you would puke if you didn’t sit down soon (that one might have been mostly in his self interest).  In some of these scenarios I have been lucky enough to be the recipient of kindness, in others I have been the giver.  Some are merely imagined, and they might have happened to you.  

The truth is that the world is chock full of ordinary people who regularly go out of their way to help others, with no apparent benefit to themselves, and often with a chance of risk.  How else do we explain ordinary people who hid Jews during WWII, at risk to their own lives?  Do the brave people who built the underground railroad out of their own homes, horses, carriages, boats, and whatever other means of escape they had fit into a cynically one sided world view?  My own grandmother, a school teacher who helped smuggle refugees out of Cuba with no benefit to herself other than the knowledge that one day her family would be the refugees, and the peace that comes from doing what she believes is right, is a good example of an ordinary homosapien who has evolved to work together with others of her species not for a selfish cause, but a common one. 

Most of us don’t follow the “golden rule” as strictly as we should, but our brains are wired to at least follow it roughly.  For the most part people treat others as they would like to be treated, showing a surprising lack of self interest in the moment.  Most humans aren’t as selfish as our sophisticated, cynical selves would like to believe.  That’s why Blagojevich’s self-serving scheming is and is not surprising, and it is also why people are appalled by it.  

Thankfully, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald seems to have a strong moral compass (although we thought Elliot Spitzer did, too!).  Fitzgerald successfully prosecuted Scooter Libby, who was sentenced to 2.5 years for his role (doing his master’s bidding) in the Valerie Plame leak.  Despite a livid public perception of Libby, he was still granted a pardon by our dear President, who is somehow so compassionate and forgiving to his criminal buddies, yet shows murderous tendencies toward civilian women and children.  Maybe the pardon is symbolic of the one he hopes to receive from the American people.  Maybe Bushie’s light hearted reaction to the pair of shoes that hurtled towards his head on Sunday doesn’t necessarily mean he LIKES having objects thrown at him.  And maybe I just lost my train of thought.

On that note, let me end this gimmicky, cartoon themed, scattered mess of an entry with the solution to ending all war, in the form of a gimmicky cartoon:

      

Who hasn’t felt like this at some time or another?  It evokes the helplessness that civilians feel in the face of war.  I try to imagine what life must be like for these poor people, thrust into violence, when all they want is just to live.  They want to go to work, fall in love, take care of their children, go to the movies on a Friday night, sleep in late on a lazy Sunday morning, celebrate their respective holidays and traditions, and generally live in peace.  It has always been hard for me to comprehend why, if almost every person in the entire world simply wants to live in peace, there is so much war?   Then I remember that I’m a spoiled American, and most of the world’s population is living in poverty…they simply want to live!   Forget about peace, how about some food?  And then I really get depressed.