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Some Tumblr Thoughts

1. Do not kill yourself. Killing yourself is very messy and your friends and family will cry over you. It is not beautiful or brave, and even if it was, you will not be around to see that.

2. Washing your hair is going to be a chore. But you should do it anyway. Because you will feel better about yourself.

3. Get up late. Have a lay in. Sleep past your alarm. You have a very long life ahead of you and for now you should appreciate the cold side of your pillow.

4. He is going to break your heart but he’s just another male human who finds it hard to deal with Mondays, too. So in a month you’ll wake up and you won’t even remember that little scar on his knuckle you kissed.

5. Don’t spend hours looking up what your name means on google. Your name is your name and you should go out there and do heroic and good deeds and give your name your own meaning.

6. Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.

7. Music is good for your soul. Rap music will energise you and boost your ego and pop music will cheer you up. Indie music will make you think and emotional songs will make you cry and think about that boy again. It’s healthy.

8. Victim complexes are not attractive. Boys and girls will not date you because you are sad. They are not going to date you and kiss your aching bones and cure you of your dragging depression. Wake up. Take a bath. Do your hair. Be attractive.

9. Sadness is not poetic. Depression is not beautiful. Laying in bed all day and eating too much is lazy and disgusting and it is not tragic or pretty. Get up. Go outside. Let the sun warm your bones. Live.

10. If it makes you happy, buy twenty of it. Dedicate your life to it. Print it on T-shirts and collect things and draw art of it. Do not care what people think. They are the unhappy people you need to avoid. The abuse they will hurl at you is painless compared to how sad they are. Pity them. Remain happy.

11. You are allowed to he angry. But the world is not working against you. The flowers do not bloom for you and when your mother shouts ask her if she is okay instead of thinking she hates you. She never will. The world walks beside you and is silent. It does not trip you up or carry you.

12. Day and night cycles are natural. Humans only sleep at night because we used to avoid predators in the dark because of our poor eyesight. Stay awake until 5am watching bad reality shows. Wake up at 7pm and have breakfast.

13. Eat when you are hungry. Being bored does not constitute a chocolate bar. Sleep when you are tired. Do not mindlessly obey the sleep at night rule. If you are not tired, do not sleep.

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The More Things Change…

From Eclectablog, October 2013:

I’ve had it. Enough is enough. Our country has been held hostage since the 2010 midterm elections by a vocal minority that somehow thinks if they scream loud enough, waving woefully misspelled signs and threatening their puppet-strung representatives with primary challenges, the rest of us will just have to fall in line.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched Tea Party extremists put gun targets on maps of the districts of people like Gabby Giffords. Even before she was shot in the head, a reporter asked her if she was afraid of rhetoric like that. I’ve heard the shouts of angry mobs suggesting a female candidate be raped with a hot curling iron. I’ve heard lie after lie after lie about nearly everything imaginable, many coming from my own U.S. Representative, Kerry Bentivolio, who won his seat in large part by spreading lies and creating fear Because his opponent, Dr. Syed Taj, is a Muslim.

The extremists tell us over and over that this is a Christian country. No other faith — or a lack of faith — will be tolerated, apparently. We must live by their rules or suffer the consequences. I have no problem with whatever faith someone chooses to practice or not practice. But my beliefs are my choice, not theirs.

In Michigan, there’s been legislation proposed that would let healthcare providers and hospitals dictate medical decisions for the rest of us based on their religious or moral views. Similar legislation may move forward letting adoption agencies use the same criteria for making placement decisions.

Right to Life of Michigan is trying to force legislation on the state that would require women to buy a separate insurance policy for an abortion, bullying their way past both voters and Republicans like Governor Rick Snyder. Because they don’t believe in abortion, they want to make it harder, if not impossible, for women to have one — even though it’s legal for any American woman to make that choice. Many groups like this don’t think employer-provided insurance should cover birth control, either. Yet many of these same people are claiming that Obamacare “gets between you and your doctor” in making medical decisions. Setting aside the fact that it’s a complete lie, explain to me how that isn’t completely hypocritical.

The anti-Obamacare extremists have spread more lies than I can even keep track of, because they “don’t want to pay for everyone else’s healthcare.” Well, neither do I. But I will be until the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate kicks in on January 1, every time someone uses the emergency room for a routine health matter because they don’t want to buy insurance. I’m not talking about those who can’t afford it, who will be covered by Medicaid expansion in Michigan. I’m talking about people who choose not to buy insurance. I pay my premiums every month so I can get care when I need it. The penalty imposed on those who can afford insurance but choose not to buy it is a small price to pay for unlimited free visits to the expensive emergency room. Tea Partiers claim to be all about individual responsibility, except when it comes to paying for their own healthcare, it seems.

This weekend, Members of the U.S. Congress will speak at the Values Voter Summit, where they will spread despicable lies about the LGBT community, African Americans, Hispanics, women and anyone else they choose to vilify — all in the name of “family values.” It’s a conference of extremism, and these representatives will stand up proudly and display their hate for all to see, encouraging their followers to take that hate into the streets.

The entire American economy is headed for a freefall if the extremist factions of the GOP get their way and don’t fund the government, which they say they’re determined to do if their demands aren’t met. This is extortion, plain and simple, and it’s a plan that’s been in the works for months.

They claim President Obama is unwilling to negotiate, but he’s rightly said he’ll gladly negotiate if extremists stop holding a gun to the head of the American people. Not to mention that President Obama and the Democrats have negotiated, time and time again. The GOP has run out of “good faith” negotiating tokens. And if those of us who are sick of the extremists’ reign of terror vote against them in 2014, they’ll run out of power, too.

The Affordable Care Act is the law. Roe v. Wade is the law. The right of Americans to practice the religion they choose — to lead the life they choose — is woven into the fabric of everything we stand for in this country. Yet a few extremists are willing to tear our entire country apart just so they can force everyone to live they way they think we should, instead of letting each of us live the way we choose.

I never again want to hear Tea Party extremists claim they’re fighting for their liberty. Because they’re actually fighting for their narrow-minded beliefs and, in the process, they’re trying to take away the rightful liberties of everyone else in this country who doesn’t share their views.

That is as un-American as it gets.

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Quote of the Day

He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations.  A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America…He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.” ~ Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking about Donald the Cheeto-faced Shitgibbon in a Wall Street op-ed, Friday 16 September 2016.

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Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories and Urban Legends: I admit to loving them. I don’t believe a word of any of it, but they often make for good “what if” thought exercises and are clearly the 21st century version of ghost stories.

One of my favorites revolves around and grows out of the 1947 Roswell incident.

FYI, I do believe something not of this world crashed in the New Mexico desert, but what it was will probably remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time. And frankly, long ago I came to the conclusion (based on the numbers alone) that we aren’t alone; that the universe is teeming with life and we’ve undoubtedly been visited at some point by a civilization or civilizations that somehow managed to make it out of the childhood humanity currently finds itself in. Such hubris to believe otherwise! And if it wasn’t by chance that some Galactic Survey Vessel stumbled across this unremarkable little out-of-the-way rock, our detonating nuclear weapons would certainly send out a wake up call saying, “Hi, we’re here!” (Our nukes bring all the tripedal Reptilians to the yard.)

Would I like definitive proof of alien life or having been visited? Of course. But unless an unambiguous radio signal is received (much less announced by our governments), a saucer lands on the White House lawn or motherships appear in the skies over our cities, I doubt that’s going to happen during my lifetime.

Anyhow, one particular tale goes something like this:

The aliens piloting that crashed ship brought it down on purpose. Why? To seed our civilization with their technology—but not out of altrusism. It’s all part of an elaborate plan to take over the planet.

The narrative states that during the process of reverse engineering the downed saucer, various bits of alien technology were secretly farmed out to several U.S. corporations for research and exploitation—and that’s exactly what the aliens knew would happen.

Okay, sending the bits out for R&D without actually letting anyone know where it came from sounds plausible enough in a post-WWII mentality if something from “out there” actually crashed, but I still cock one eyebrow at it.

Anyhow, among the items recovered were supposedly things resembling modern integrated circuits; devices that were unheard of in 1947.

The first integrated circuits and silicon transistors appeared only a few years later. Co-inki-dink?

As the story goes, the aliens seeded this technology knowing what clever little apes we were. They knew we’d eventually figure it out and build our own versions.

Further, they somehow knew that because our entire civilization would eventually become so dependent on this stuff (I guess they’re masters of human psychology as well) it would be a simple matter of simply turning the switch off when it was time to come for the harvest. And who’s to say there isn’t something hidden in the fabric of the physics behind all this tech that our science is completely blind to that would allow such a thing to happen?

Without electronics and the always-on interconnectivity it provides, you’ve gotta admit that our current society would collapse pretty rapidly. I’m not just talking about the cell phones that everyone seemingly has their noses glued to 24/7, but pretty much everything. There are electronics in your cars and trucks; without them they won’t run. Electronics monitor and control the flow of water, gas, and electricity. Electronics (fly-by-wire) control our airplanes. Electronics monitor the processing of our food, the distribution of our money, and the gasoline we pump into our vehicles. Everything. Society is so dependent upon the flow of electrons that if they were to be shut off, collapse would be imminent. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t rebuild and regroup, but it would take time.

Yeah, I’ve read a lot of sci-fi over the course of my life.

As I said, this is just a thought experiment. I seriously doubt aliens would travel the impossible distances involved to get here just to implement a century-long (centuries-long?) plan to make us what’s for dinner unless they have the long game in mind and equally long lifespans. If they have the technology to travel here and want to take us over, they certainly have the technology to make that happen without all the cloak-and-dagger drama.

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As Ben Teaches His Students…

…actions have consequences.

We’ve filed for bankruptcy.

Obviously this was not a decision that we came to hastily, but rather one that we’ve been mulling for nearly a year. The single greatest precipitator of this was the loss of income we’ve both suffered by moving back from Denver. Ben knew beforehand that he’d take a cut in pay by returning to Phoenix, but I foolishly believed that while I knew I wouldn’t immediately return to my pre-Denver salary (earned through years of raises at a single company), I would at least match what I was making in Denver; not have to return to what I was making in the 1990s.

Unfortunately our financial obligations were based on maintaining something close to what we’d been making in Denver, not to a combined yearly income loss of nearly $20K.

While we were pretty good at juggling our bills, it was obvious we were both slowly sinking into a black hole of debt that nothing short of a much better paying job, a winning lottery ticket—or bankruptcy—would ameliorate.

This is something I’ve never had to deal with before, so I am understandably upset—even though almost everyone I know (family and friends alike) have gone through bankruptcy at least once and has come out the other side okay.

Ben fell behind on his car payments to such a degree that the creditor was not only threatening immediate repossession, but also was also totally unwilling to even consider discussing reaffirming the loan until he brought it current—something we were financially unable to do. So Ben turned in his car. This was a sad day for both of us because many fine adventures were had with Marvin. (My Anderson is long paid for and considered exempt property, so I’m still good on the transportation front.)

Because of this (and any number of other things that have happened over the past nine months) 2016 will henceforth be known as The Year Of Suck in this household.  And we haven’t even gotten to the elections yet—that with Herr Drumpf’s recent rise in the polls in key swing states basically bringing him within the margin of error with Clinton—has me terrified.

“Never underestimate the stupidity of the of the general public.” ~ Scott Adams, (American Cartoonist, b.1957)

 

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Eight Years Ago Today

…I met this guy, and words cannot begin to describe how wonderful those years have been. Here’s to many, many, many more, my love!

“When I first met you, that’s what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I’m going to love this person because even the sky looks different.” ~Margaret Stohl

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Keith is Back!

Every few generations, we Americans are called upon to defend our country. To defend it not so much from foreign dictators or war or terrorism, but from those here who have no commitment to progress or democracy or representative government—no commitment to anything except their own out-of-control minds and the bottomless pits of their egos.

Our society has thrown up these people before: Joseph McCarthy. George Wallace. Father Coughlin. Jefferson Davis. Aaron Burr. The Know-Nothings. The Blacklisters. The America-Firsters. And we have always thrown them out. And now our generation has its own: the most dangerous individual ever nominated by a major party for the highest office in this country.

His base wants few details and fewer facts; they just want to burn it down and blame their failures on the collective other. And Donald John Trump is their demonic messiah in Oompa Loompa’s clothing. We must stop him. It is not pleasant. It is not fair that we have to do this. But it is our turn.”

This will have absolutely no effect upon the hard core fascist Trump supporters, but it is nice to know for all of us who live in the real world that not all of MSM has been overtaken by the creeping toxicity of their narrative.

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Late To The Party

Ben and I finally got around to seeing Star Trek Beyond this past weekend. Between procrastination and admittedly a certain amount of apathy, I was beginning to think this was going to the first big-screen Trek that I wasn’t actually going to experience on the big screen.

Before seeing it, I already knew the storyline: malevolent alien, disgruntled former Starfleet Officer, or unknown galactic entity threatens to destroy the entire Federation and only Kirk, the Enterprise and its valiant crew stands between it and total annihilation. (“You’ve seen this before!”)

Was I wrong? No. Did I walk out of the theater feeling like I’d been cheated out of my money? Not at all. It was an enjoyable—albeit fairly predictable in places—two hours of entertainment and something I will no doubt be adding to my collection when it comes available on disk. (Plus, pretty much all the lead actors bring a level of eye candy to the screen that is undeniable.)

But am I the only one to notice how a plot point from the Space Seed episode—that was not really utilized in Star Trek Into Darkness—showed up in a roundabout way in the current film?

I’m speaking about a group of people who for all intents the Federation abandoned. In Space Seed, it was Khan’s group that was left on Ceti Alpha V (which as we all know thanks to Wrath of Khan was a planet devastated by the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI some years after the relocation, rendering it nearly uninhabitable) with the Federation apparently completely forgetting about it—and with Beyond it was the ill-fated crew of the U.S.S. Franklin that was given up for dead.

And the brouha over Sulu being gay? Please, Mary. If you didn’t know to look for it, you wouldn’t even have spotted it.

Quibbles aside, I’ve come to love the “new” crew and it’s obvious the actors are developing that chemistry we have come to expect of the Trek franchise. How they will cope with the loss of Anton Yelchin remains to be seen; I know I felt a pang whenever Checkov was on screen, knowing full well that the fine young man who played him was snatched from our lives far too soon.

It will be interesting to see where future films take us. I’m looking forward to the journey.

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