In Memorium Dr. George Tiller

I am going to do two things tonight that I don’t usually use this space to do… a second blog entry in a single night, and an absolute, unquestioned rant.

A note of explanation before the rant.

The reason that I’m doing a second entry tonight is because I read something in the news after my earlier entry that shocked, appalled and angered me. I have been simmering about it all evening. It is about the cold-blooded murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller. As the evening progressed, I became angrier and angrier. When a loved one in Kansas, in an entirely innocent, inoffensive fashion referred to the suspect, Scott Roeder as “pro-life”, I flipped my lid. I need to rant, or my head is going to explode. If you decide to hang around for it, thanks. Does my heart good. If you don’t… if, for instance, you are (with all due respect) one of the simple-minded, knuckle-dragging, idiotic, murderous, moronic amoeba-brained CHICKENSHITS who sees no problem in referring to yourself as pro-life when you can justify the murder of a HUMAN BEING in your mind, then you may not want to read anymore. What I say is just going to MAKE YOU FUCKING THINK, AND WE CAN’T HAVE THAT, CAN WE YOU COWARD?!

Rant follows…

First off, for the keyboard monkey who wrote this piece for the AP, ROXANA HEGEMAN (I copied this idiots name so that I could be sure to get it right)… Dr. Tiller was not, as you idiotically referred to him in the headline of your piece, an “abortion doc”. Sounds fucking slimy, doesn’t it? Sounds like some dude named “Slick” that woman would visit in a back-alley in 1948 when she found herself knocked up, who was chased out of the medical profession for fondling little girl patients. This guy was not some sleazy “abortion doctor”, okay lady? Get your fucking terminology straight. I FUCKING WRITE BETTER THAN YOU, AND YOU SOMEHOW MANAGED TO FIND YOUR WAY INTO A PAID WRITING POSITION WHEN I CAN’T? He was a DOCTOR who worked at a WOMEN’S CLINIC. One of the tasks that he performed, along with hysterectomies, prescribing birth control, and women’s pelvic health exams was ABORTIONS. Instead of the sleazy, innuendo-filled “ABORTION DOC”, why not say “Doctor who performed abortions”? Oh, I know. Not as many IDIOTS would read your piece unless you used the loaded phrase, right? Well, FUCK YOU LADY! You gonna be a reporter? Then get your own personal SLANT out of it and fucking REPORT!

Next, although I don’t know this for sure, I’d be willing to bet a week’s pay against a week old copy of whatever news agency is stupid enough to pay Ms. Hegeman for her slanted, biased writing that Scott Roeder considers himself “pro-life”. NO ONE WHO KILLS ANOTHER PERSON CAN BE CALLED PRO-LIFE YOU FUCKING IGNORAMUS! PRO LIFE MEANS “IN FAVOR OF LIFE”! You think that God is going to be happy with you for murdering another person? Especially in a FUCKING CHURCH?! YOU IDIOT?! “I’m pro-life. Except for him. Oh, and condemned prisoners on death row. Kill those bastards. What? One of the kids that I saved from being aborted by Dr. Tiller grew up to be a doctor at a women’s clinic who performs abortions? See? I’m pro-life.”

Oh, and another thing? The Bible never condemns the modern medical procedure called an “abortion”. There was absolutely no analog in Biblical days. AND WHO DO YOU THINK GAVE US THE KNOWLEDGE TO PERFORM A SAFE AND CLEAN ABORTION, YOU MORONS? God! Why? Maybe to save his daughters a lot of grief and heartache? Yes, yes, I know the slaughter of the innocents and all of that other crap, but that is all very, very loose interpretation. YES, INTERPRETATION. And if any of you idiotic “literalists” want to take me up on my use of the word, DO IT! I KNOW THE BIBLE BETTER THAN ANY OF YOU LAME-BRAINS! I’m going to say it right here and now… if you think that the Bible can be taken literally then you have the approximate IQ (and probably personality) of a pile of diseased, maggot-infested DOG SHIT! I tell you one thing that the Bible does say… over and over again… very clearly… THOU SHALT NOT KILL! HUMAN BEINGS! And no, stupid, a fetus, as wonderful and precious as it is, is NOT A HUMAN BEING.

Also, I realize that so-called “late-stage” abortions, which is one of the many procedures that Dr. Tiller performed are controversial. I’m not crazy about it myself, except when the health of the mother or the child is in danger. But you can be damned sure that I won’t kill anyone over it.

On a final note, I would like to take a calmer moment to express deepest sympathy to the widow, children and grandchildren of Dr. Tiller. By all reports that I can find, your husband, father and grandfather was a fine man, and pathetic actions like that taken by Roeder make me want to shake the name of “Christian” off in shame, as I did years ago because of actions like this and endless rants against homosexuality by “Christians”. But I refuse. As a CHRISTIAN, you and your family will be in my prayers tonight. God go with you and bring you peace. And, although it sounds a little stupid, since I have utterly failed to do this in this blog entry, please remember that Christ commands us to love and forgive one another. I figure that I’ll have my own Karmic reckoning with God over the hatred and bile that I have vented here tonight, but trust me… I feel no better for it, much as I wanted to. And Roeder, if you’re reading this on a prison computer somewhere, you will be in my prayers tonight too… but only a prayer that you can see the error of your ways, and maybe realize and preach to others that pro-life means PRO-LIFE. Not “pro whatever I want and I get to kill whoever disagrees with me”.

Okay. Done. Feel like shit. Didn’t help with anger. Gotta pray.

Peace.

Randal

American Jurisprudence

Let me start this off by saying something about my loved ones. I tend to surround myself with people that I perceive as being as intelligent as or more intelligent than I. If I spend my time with you, you're smart in other words. I don't waste my time with dummies.

Here's why the preface... I was speaking to one of these loved ones the other day... someone that I love and admire... about the Guantanamo Bay situation, and he said the same thing that so many others have said. “We can't release these TERRORISTS in the U. S.”

I was a little shocked to hear him say this, and reminded him that the people in Git-mo are not terrorists, because, under American law, they are innocent until proven guilty. None of them have had trials, so none of them are guilty of a crime. Also, the majority of them were not even ACCUSED of a crime before they were imprisoned. Most of them were simply turned in for a bounty. Strangely enough, when America went to the middle east and started offering thousands of dollars in rewards... in some of the POOREST economies of the world... suddenly we had a flood of accused terrorists. One taxi driver in Afghanistan turned in ten or fifteen completely innocent people before we caught on to him.

Now I know the argument offered by the Bush administration apologists that we don't have to treat these people according to US law because A) they are not American citizens and B) Git-mo itself is not on American soil. I find these arguments fallacious... which, if I'm interpreting it correctly, means that the propagators of this argument can BLOW ME!

How many times do I have to say that WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOOD GUYS! If we start making excuses not to play by OUR OWN RULES, how do we maintain a high moral ground? Don't we lose the ability to say “We rock and you suck” if we start doing the same things that the sucky people do?

So, a quick review of American jurisprudence, since our justice system seems to have gotten so far out of whack.

1) PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. Innocent until PROVEN guilty. One thing that I hear frequently that bugs me on this is “Well, if the person was arrested then they HAD to have done SOMETHING.” Wrong. Innocent people get arrested sometimes. It sucks, but it happens. Our founding fathers said that it was better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to imprison ONE innocent man. None of the people in Git-mo have been convicted of a crime, therefore they are ALL innocent.

2) TRIAL BY JURY. Everyone in America is guaranteed a trial by a jury of their peers. Preferably an impartial jury. And I remind all Americans that you have two sacred duties that you MUST perform in order to be a true patriot – you must vote and you must serve jury duty when called upon to do so. Now the idea of a trial by an impartial jury is in deep trouble in the United States, thanks to a sensationalistic and corporatized media. I do not believe that the media as a whole has a liberal bias or a conservative bias... I believe that they have a “getting as much money out of their sponsors and viewers as they can” bias. Part of that is keeping your ass glued to your couch and your eyes glued to their news. For instance, who among us can truly be said to have NOT made up their mind about Michael Jackson before his trial even commenced? To me, whether he did what he was accused of or not is secondary to the question of “did he get a fair trial”? The answer, in my opinion, is “No, he did not. COULD not in America.” And one of the worst enemies of both trial by jury AND the presumption of innocence in this country is... oh, what's her name... on CNN... face of the Wicked Witch of the west... voice of a hyena... brain of Hammy the squirrel from “Over the Hedge”? Oh yeah, Nancy Grace. With her constant, shrill screaming about everyone's guilt who's arrested for ANYTHING, she contaminates our jury pool like raw sewage dumped into a reservoir contaminates our drinking water.

President Obama has stated that he is going to hold some of the prisoners indefinitely, without a trial. You know, kind of the SAME CRAP THAT WE HATED ABOUT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION!

His reasoning? He's concerned that the manner of their arrests and detainment, along with the fact that so many of them were tortured may “contaminate” legal proceedings. You know what, Mr. President? TOO DAMNED BAD. If you arrest someone with dubious evidence and then coerce a confession out of them, you don't say “Oh, well now we have to keep you in jail forever without a trial”, you apologize and release them.

WHAT? RELEASE THESE HORRIBLE TERRORISTS? Yes. What I said under Mr. Bush hasn't changed under President Obama... they are being held illegally and we need to try them or release them. Let them stay in America with a healthy settlement for their illegal treatment if they want, or a free ticket back to wherever they came from if they don't. And as for you whiners who say that you don't want them in your state, shut up. There's an apartment behind mine that's coming open at the end of June, stick one or two of them there. But only if they speak English. So that I can visit them and convince them that not ALL Americans are immediately ready to presume them guilty and torture them. Maybe then they won't hate America anymore.

Well, at least no more than I do when we do this stupid shit, anyway.

Peace.

Randal

Voting on Rights

I will never understand, to my dying day, why people feel that the civil rights of homoamorous people should be left up to the voters. America has NEVER let civil rights depend on the good will of the voters. Why? Because if we did, no one would ever gets rights except for the people who already have them.

Think of this... in 1863 if Abe Lincoln had said “I think that the slaves should be free... why don't we vote on it, north and south”, what do you think that the outcome of this vote would be? Even in states like Massachusetts and New York, which were among the first to outlaw slavery, there were laws limiting the number of “free negroes” who could live in each area. I think that it wouldn't have happened.

And what about women's sufferage? Bear in mind that the only people who could legally vote at that time were WHITE MALE LANDOWNERS. Do you think that, out of the goodness of their hearts, these white men would vote women (granted, only WHITE women at this time, but women nonetheless) part of their power? I think not.

And then the same thing when the civil rights bills were passed, first giving African-Americans the right to vote, and then equal protection under the law. To this DAY, there are people who resist this. Would the voters at large have EVER given equal coverage to black people?

One universal constant is that people in power tend to hold on to that power with all of their might, and only give it up unwillingly. This is why these issues need to be left up to the federal government and NOT the voters at large.

Which begs another question... why don't homoamorous people vote? I mean as a block. I hate to use blanket terms like that, but... as far as blanket terms go... it's more or less true.

Less homoamorous people vote than heteroamorous people, less poor people vote than well-off people, less black people vote than white people, less women vote then men, less young people vote than older people. Of course, the 2000 presidential election changed (although did not overturn) several of those, thank you Barack Obama. What does that leave? Old, heteroamorous, mostly well-off white male voters.

This is an issue that has ALWAYS confused me. Why do the people who would benefit the most from NOT having yet another hidebound old heteroamorous rich white man in the white house leave that decision up to me and my fellow old heteroamorous white men? (Not all of us are hidebound or rich.) I realize that I seem to be drifting afield of the point here, but what would have happened in the election of November, 2008 if the homoamorous people of California had turned out in DROVES (and, if they preferred, in drag) to vote on prop 8? I think that it would have gone down FLAMING (pardon the quite intentional pun).

This is why we have a representative government, folks. I hate to sound like an old-school, big-government democrat here, and I really DO hate the concept of a “daddy” government, but this is why we have a government. To make those tough decisions for us, and yes, sometimes to force change on an unwilling nation. I use the upcoming digital transition as an example. If left to our own devices, we would have been perfectly happy to remain on the analog standard forever, constantly bitching about dropped cell phone calls and lousy internet availability, and not being able to have enough good stuff to watch on our five hundred channels of cable. But wiser heads in our government saw how badly we were starving for bandwidth, saw how much the digital standard improved countries like Japan and said “Okay, let's do it.” As a people, we whined, we bitched, we moaned, we complained. There were proposed lawsuits to stop it. Conspiracy theorists went nuts talking about how this was all a conspiracy between government and big business to FORCE us to pay for new TV's. (This strikes me as the funniest, considering the millions of dollars that TV manufacturers and broadcasters had to go out-of-pocket to upgrade their manufacturing facilities and equipment.) And then, after all that bitching and moaning, the average American with a 32 inch analog TV is not satisfied with a perfectly good $399 32 inch HDTV, but they want a 58 inch monster that swallows their family room.

Get over yourselves, folks. Civil rights have NEVER been decided by popular election. They should never BE decided by popular elections. And, like it or not... I've said it before and I feel doomed to say it again... AMERICA IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION!

Which reminds me of another point.

I have recently become aware of fringe groups out there who want to “return” America to being a nation whose legal code is based on the laws of the Old Testament, similar to Sharia law in Muslim nations. Please allow me to say that America's legal code was NEVER based on Old Testament law, and never should be. Also, these groups want to make it so that only “Christians” can hold public office and even VOTE.

So now, let us for one insane, irrational moment pretend that this happens, okay? For a few years, the fundamentalists are happy. Prayer is reinstated in public schools, the “ten” commandments are posted on every available surface in public offices, and people who are either non-Christian or athiest are forced to take a pledge of Christianity at the polling place. Then a question arises... WHOSE interpretation of Christianity holds sway? My guess is that protestantism, being the largest sect in America, would hold sway. So Catholic kids would be forced to say the protestant version of, say, the Lord's Prayer in school. Then someone like Mitt Romney would not only not be allowed to run for office, he would be denied his right to vote. After all, very few mainstream protestants consider Mormons “real” Christians. Then we have women. Yes, a woman's right to choose a safe and clean abortion would be gone, but so would a woman's right to vote, to petition for divorce, to own property, and to attend church, all per the Old Testament. Yes, the death penalty would be put in place for homoamorous people, but also for football players (touching the flesh of a pig on the sabbath) and people like me who love shellfish. And if your child rejected Christianity (or, if you want to REALLY go according to the Old Testament, Judiasm), then not only would your child be put to death by stoning, but you would have to throw the first stone. It's there, folks. If you don't believe me, go look it up in your Bible. I'll wait.

…

Photography and film would be illegal according to the second commandment. Good God, taking the Lord's name in vain would be punishable by death! Women on their periods would be required BY LAW to remove themselves to the wilderness until their cycle passed.

Do you see the utter insanity that I'm talking about here, folks? So please... once and for all.... can we get off of our holier-than-thou high horses and just allow these people to marry? Please.

Peace.

Randal

What EVERYONE Knows

I heard the odious phrase again today… “Well, everyone knows…”

No. Everyone doesn’t know. ANYTHING.

Another one is “Of course, everyone agrees…”

What the meaning of these two phrases are is that if YOU don’t know, or if YOU don’t agree, then you’re obviously the only one and there’s no point in paying you any credence.

This kind of goes back to Sarah Palin’s “real America” bullcrap during the last presidential election. The people in the heartland, the so-called “real” America, consider what they believe to be correct, and everything else to be incorrect. But this is not because that belief is RIGHT, it is because it is all that they know. For instance, the claim is that there are no homoamorous people in the heartland, or very, very few. This is not because there are any less homoamorous people in the heartland, simply that they are less open about it and more spread out. I believe that the statistics say that 30% of Americans are homoamorous. (I have taken to using the terms “homoamorous” and “heteroamorous” because these designations are about love and comfort, not strictly sex.) So if you take, for instance, San Francisco with its roughly 800,000 people, you have roughly 240,000 homosexuals statistically. If, on the other hand, you look at Ames, Iowa with its population of about 50,000, you are stuck with a mere 15,000 homosexuals. And you can bet that none of them are participating in what passes for a “gay pride” parade in Ames. They’re all hiding in their little closets, beating off to gay porn, thanking God for the internet so that they don’t have to risk mail-order. And some of these people have their sexuality so deeply buried that even THEY don’t know that they’re gay. All that they know is that things don’t function as well with their opposite-sex partner as they should, and they usually feel immensely guilty about it.

You can correlate that to drugs, as well. Everyone knows that there are more drug addicts in cities than in small towns, right? I would say that there are as many POTENTIAL drug addicts in small town middle America as there are in Los Angeles, Seattle or New York. But most of these middle American drug addicts have to be satisfied with beer or the skunk-weed that their buddy grows in his basement, because if they want to get meth or coke or something more serious, they have to DRIVE somewhere to get it. That’s right, I believe that the difference between the drug problems in urban areas and the drug problems in rural areas is largely a matter of availability. If you walk down the street in Seattle and don’t look like a straight-edger or a cop, you’re going to have eight people offer you crystal meth. It’s supply and demand, folks. If that same meth dealer were to travel to Lenexa, Kansas he’d probably have to wait three hours in between viable customers instead of three minutes. It’s just not financially feasible.

And, of course, EVERYONE KNOWS that in a small town you can leave your door unlocked, right? Right. Because a random stranger trying doorknobs is going to stick out like a sore thumb in a small town. In a big city, that random stranger is one of hundreds or thousands that you see everyday.

What I’m trying to say here is that “common knowledge” doesn’t really exist. It was, for instance, common knowledge less than a hundred years ago that black people are intellectually inferior to white people, period. If George W. Bush and Barack Obama don’t conclusively disprove that, then I don’t know what will. It was common knowledge a hundred years before that that women were nothing more than receptacles in the reproductive process. Go back a few hundred years before that, and it was common knowledge that the Earth revolved around the sun. It was also common knowledge at about that time that for a man to have sex with another man was nothing more than a viable alternative to having sex with a woman and running the risk of getting her pregnant or catching VD. See how our “common knowledge” and views of things change?

The same thing applies to polls. I always have to grit my teeth, for instance, when a Fox News poll claims that “Forty percent of AMERICANS” whatever. What they mean is “Forty percent of Fox viewers” whatever. Same with CNN. And then you have to add the codicil “… that answer surveys” on to that. There’s a large percentage of Americans out there who would NEVER answer a survey. Me, personally, if I’m asked to answer a survey and it will take less than fifteen minutes, I’m all over it. But to (I would say) many to most Americans, this is nothing more or less than a waste of their valuable time. So do yourself a favor… next time that you hear a statistic on, say, CNN that is based on a survey, add the phrase “…percent of CNN viewers who will answer surveys” to the end of it, and I think that you’ll see that the statistic isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

So, instead of basing what you know on “common knowledge” or what “everyone knows”, why don’t you try learning as much as you can on the subject and knowing what YOU know instead?

Peace.

Randal

Desecration of the Flag

One of the managers at my day job desecrated a flag yesterday.

I'm sure that he didn't mean to, but he did, just the same. What really gets my goat, I think, is that when I told some of the other managers to try to get it corrected, I got nothing but blank stares in response. Now bear in mind that these are all pro-Bush “If you ain't with us you're with the terrorists never burn a flag in my presence of I'll use my Constitutional right to bear arms to shoot you and if you think that Americans shouldn't be allowed to torture than you're not a real patriot” kind of people.

Obviously, patriotism no longer extends to knowing how to show proper respect to a flag.

I finally found one manager who listened to what I had to say, and he corrected it this morning. I think that what really made an impact on him was when I said that the way that they had the flag displayed “offended” me. I am NOT an easily offended person, so I think that he grokked the seriousness of it.

So, for both my liberal and conservative friends out there, here is how to show proper respect to the flag and how not to. This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it the “official” flag manual. It's simply some guidelines to follow, from what I remember in my days in ROTC.

1)It is not okay... EVER... to pierce the flag with anything. Staples, nails, tacks, all no-no's. If you want to display a flag on a wall, then buy a frame for it. Or, alternately...
2)It IS okay to display a flag banner-style, by putting something through the grommets on the back of the flag and hanging it so that the stripes point down.
3)It is NOT okay to allow the flag to touch the ground. The flags that we're selling at my day job are standard size parade flags, 3 X 5. One customer commented that she wanted a bigger flag. I WANTED to point out to her that your patriotism doesn't reside in the size of your flag, but instead simply pointed out that if she got one larger than five feet, odds are that, when hanging, the tip of the flag would rest on the ground, which is a no-no.
4)It is okay to fly the flag upside down when you are in distress. It is an internationally-recognized signal. This was also used by Viet Nam vets to protest the war... they felt that our nation was in distress.

What I didn't address above, but will quickly is the hot-button topic of the ULTIMATE desecration of the flag... burning. Personally, I could never burn a flag. It's simply not in me. According to the Flag Manual, burning is the only permissible way to destroy a flag. If a flag has been desecrated, or if it's going to be retired, you burn the flag in order to prevent it winding up in a landfill or as litter somewhere. There's a ceremony attached to this and it is not done lightly.

Burning the flag in protest is not something that I agree with. I think that the vet's method of flying the flag upside down is a much more appropriate, not to mention CLEAR protest of our nation's actions. HAVING SAID THAT... I will fight ferociously for your right to burn a flag if you feel that it is your last recourse of protest. I don't like it, but my like or dislike does not altar the fact that the first amendment guarantees your freedom of expression.

Peace.
Randal

Let's Miss Miss USA

How can we miss her if we don’t let her GO AWAY?!

This woman has been occupying the news for what now… two… three… years?

I’m proceeding from the assumption here that this won’t do any good… it hasn’t so far, but that hasn’t stopped me, so here goes. Let’s see if, after I tackle all these stupid non-issues at once, we can just stop talking about them.

1) The “Gay Marriage” thing. She did not say or do anything wrong. She expressed an opinion… one that I happen to disagree with… in a respectful and courteous manner. She was asked her opinion and gave it politely. Personally, I don’t know why they even expect these girls to talk or behave as if they have a brain AT ALL. The size of their SOMETHING that starts with “B” matters, but it ain’t brains. But we’ll get to those other B items in 2. I realize that they’ve changed the name of these things from “beauty pageants” to “scholarship pageants”, but that don’t make it so. You can rename dog food as “caviar”, but that doesn’t make it anything other than fish brains and pig snouts. I think that she showed the kind of simple-mindedness that a beautiful woman who’s OBVIOUSLY never been asked to think would display. And if you’ve never actually sat down and THOUGHT about the gay marriage issue, it’s easy to parrot what others say, which is exactly what she did. Okay? So what she said wasn’t bad or mean or wrong. It was just a little… well… dumb. And what else do you expect from a contest that has a swimsuit competition, but no solve-the-quadratic-equation competition?

2) Breast implants. IT’S A FREAKING BEAUTY CONTEST, OKAY? Obviously WHOEVER paid for the new boobs didn’t feel like she had what it takes to compete in a swimsuit competition. WHO CARES?!

3) The old naked pics. Okay. We’ve established that this girl is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. We’ve established that she’s pretty enough to compete in a beauty pageant… er… ah… I mean “scholarship pageant”. So what happens when you combine a pretty, kind of dumb girl with some horny dude with a camera? You get naked pics of the girl. And let’s face it, guys… the idea of ANY kind of morals restrictions in a contest where the object is for the girl to basically strut around wearing as little as possible is ridiculous. I mean, I might actually watch the things if they drop the pretense altogether that this is anything other than a “which girl is the prettiest” competition and just have them strut around the stage naked for an hour.

Okay, can we stop talking about her now? Please? She looks like Barbie, which is all that these contest demand. (Even the black and Asian contestants looks like Black Barbies and Asian Barbies.) Please.

Thanks.

Peace.

Randal

Taxes and Torture

Okay, we’re going to a double-header tonight on two topics that have been in the news a lot lately, but no one really likes discussing – taxes and torture. And I would love to get some comments going on this stuff, get a nice spirited (but courteous) discussion going.

First on taxes.

Let’s be clear about one thing… taxes are a necessary evil. No society has ever or will ever exist without either a tax or a tribute system, and trust me… we don’t want to go to tributes. The reason that I say this is because every society incurs some sort of debt. Building roads, paying police officers and soldiers, funding libraries and schools, and yes (to the governor of Texas who threatened secession over President Obama’s tax policies) swine flu vaccines ALL COST MONEY. The money has to come from somewhere. Hence taxes.

The question is “Who should be taxed and how much?” Over the last eight years we have seen a huge shift in the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle-class, which I feel is unfair. Despite the fact that the wealthy are paying less taxes than EVER IN HISTORY, they seem to feel that they’re being treated unfairly as well. So what’s the solution to this?

Probably the most common term that I have heard thrown around in relation to this is a “flat tax”. What I discovered today is that there are actually two types of “flat tax” proposals being floated. I want to examine both and see what everyone else thinks.

The first is a flat income tax. In other words, regardless of HOW much you make every year, you would pay the same percentage of your income… say for the sake of no argument 23%... to the government. My problem with this is that the wealthy can afford to hire a tax attorney to find loopholes and shelters for them that the rest of us cannot. So their 23% becomes 20 or 15 or 10 or 5 or zero while MY 23% remains 23. I said to someone today that the only fair way to do that was to eliminate ALL tax loopholes and shelters. His concern is that, by eliminating these things, you would be eliminating the incentive for a lot of people to contribute to charities. Sad, but probably true.

The other type of flat tax that I have discovered for the first time today is a flat SALES tax. The income tax would be eliminated (which would mean that the IRS would be eliminated and don’t we love THAT idea?). All business taxes would be eliminated. Instead, everyone would pay a flat 23% sales tax on every non-essential purchase. So food products such as dairy, meat and vegetables would not be taxed, while snack food, soda pop and candy would be. Heat and power bills would not be, but cable would. A gray area to me would be housing and transportation. Would the purchase of a car be taxed, while the purchase of a bus pass not? And what about a house? If the purchase of a house is taxed at 23%, shouldn’t rent be as well? I think that an argument could be made that, up to a certain cost point, both of these things (as well as cars) would be exempt, but beyond a certain price point they cease being necessities and start being luxuries. For instance, if a cap of $20000 was placed on cars for exemption, and someone bought a $50000 Jag, then they would pay the 23% tax on $30000.

What does everyone else think of this?

Now… away from the torture of taxes and onto the taxing matter of torture.

America tortures.

There, I’ve said it. Boo me where appropriate. We SHOULDN’T, because we’re supposed to be the good guys, but we do.

How do we determine what torture is? Easy. If we don’t want someone else doing it to OUR people when they’re being held prisoner, then we shouldn’t do it to theirs. Period. WE are the ones who first determined, for instance, that water boarding was torture when the Japanese were doing it to our guys in WWII. If it’s torture, guys – IT’S TORTURE. No matter who does it.

There’s been a lot of back and forth in the news lately about who President Obama and the attorney general should prosecute for this, if anyone. President Obama, for instance, has vowed not to prosecute the men and women who actually PERFORMED the torture because they were, of course, following orders. But in the spirit of “what’s good for the goose”, when the Nazis tried to use that excuse during WWII, we cried “bullshit”, right? At what point does your individual conscience kick in and say “No, this is wrong, I’m not going to do it and I’m prepared to accept punishment for this decision if necessary”? What about that old saw-horse “personal responsibility”?

Finally, I’d like to follow in the footsteps of every experienced interrogator in the civilized world and say that torture is ineffective. Here’s an example… let’s say that you have a guy and you ask him if there’s an attack planned. He says no. You say “Look, if you don’t tell us the truth, we’re going to FUCKING TORTURE YOU!” He says “I am telling the truth – there’s no attack planned.” Do you believe him? Yes? No? Better to be safe then sorry, so let’s torture him. So we waterboard him for fifteen minutes. We let him up for air, he still says no attack planned. So we waterboard him for fifteen more minutes. Just to be on the safe side. He still says no. But that CAN’T be right, can it? There MUST be SOME sort of attack planned. So we waterboard him some more. Now, finally, when we let him up for air, he outlines an impending attack, complete with names dates and places.

Perfect. We got the information. Excellent. This exact scenario happened with Abu Zabadia (not sure that I’m spelling that right). Of course, the information that he gave us had one teeny-tiny MINOR little flaw… it was a complete fabrication. NONE of it was real. He told the torturers what he thought that they wanted to hear… imagine this… JUST SO THAT THEY WOULD STOP FUCKING WATERBOARDING HIM! What a pussy. “The truth obviously ain’t working, so let’s try a lie on for size.” To my way of thinking, bad information is worse than NO information because it has us squandering our resources on a threat that… well… doesn’t exist.

Peace.

Randal

Conundrum: Time Vs. Money

Many years ago, when I was in my late teens/early twenties, I made a series of decisions that are affecting my life now, and I still struggle with them.

The first was to never work a job that I hate, no matter how much it paid. The job that I work now is electronics sales. Don’t get me wrong… if they didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t go there and do it for free, but you can ask my friends… it’s hard to shut me up about electronics. I wake up almost every morning excited to go see what new stuff we have in and talk electronics to the customers.

The second was to value time over money. As long as I had my basic necessities covered, I reasoned, I was doing fine. I like toys and stuff, but can live without them. I am also a freelance writer and have been convinced my entire life that it would make my living one day. (Frankly, at this point in my life, that’s beginning to feel like a delusion.)

I was always confused by people who had jobs making lots and lots of money and all of the toys that any kid could ever want… but no time to enjoy them because they were working so hard making money. I never could figure out why one would bother making money if one didn’t have the time to enjoy it.

And then there’s stress. Most people that I know HATE their jobs. They hate their boss, their customers, the work, whatever. They just wake up every morning DREADING going to work. Don’t get me wrong – I think that my job would be about perfect if my supervisor and manager would just leave me the hell alone and let me do it.

Which leads me to another point – climbing the corporate ladder. Is there ever a top to the corporate ladder, or do you just live your life striving for that next step, that next goal?

Now, at the age of 44, I still find myself stressing occasionally over money. It’s not bad, and it IS only occasional, but it does happen, and I wonder if I made the right decisions years ago. I wonder if I shouldn’t have sacrificed time for money and climbed that old corporate ladder? Of course, over the last several months I have watched friends who are at a much higher level than me either sweat or lose their jobs, while mine is secure.

I guess that ultimately it was the right decision. This was verified for me when I self-published my first children’s book (“The Cat and the Dog: A Fable”, illustrated by R. C. Troutman – if you’d like a copy, paypal $25.00 ($20 for the book and $5 for delivery) to dragonfoureyes@gmail.com). If I hadn’t made these decisions when I was younger, who knows if I would even still be writing. Of course, I think that if I stopped writing, I would go mad from the voices in my head telling me stories. As it is, if I don’t write for several days running, I can’t sleep and I get migraines.

Thanks for reading – I guess that I made the right decision.

Peace.

Randal