Category Archives: politics

The Unique Joy of Having Redneck Friends

redneck friends

Yes, I live in Texas… And yes, I know a redneck or two… or 600.  But it is a unique joy that almost has to be shared to be believed.  They do not think like I do.  To them, I am just a commie, liberal, tree-huggin’ atheist with very bad hippie-hair.  But not all of them are automatically unkind to me for who I am… in fact, some of them are my friends.

Now, I have to say that, being a Texan is not an advantage for making friends with rednecks.  The home-grown brand of Texas Mexican-hating, gun-loving redneck are suspicious of me because I was a gol’ dang Texas edjumacator for so many years.  You gotta be suspicious of anybody who teaches, cuz they want to make our children smarter than us.  That’s a gol’ dang liberal trick from way-back-when.  Who knows what kind of communist liberal ideas a communist liberal college edjumacated idiot wants to plant in the heads of our kids?  Oh, and people who are smarter than us are all idiots, because they have all them new-fangled ideas and facts and some-such, but we got common sense.  That makes us better’n them no matter how gol’ dang smart they are… gol’ dang ’em!  (I can’t even write these words without hearing that South-Texas Winchuk-family-from-the-Brush-Country accent in my head.)  Texas rednecks are hard to warm up to unless they’ve already reached the stage of wanting to grill your ass on the Winchuk family barbecue pit.  Then it is entirely the wrong part of you that gets warmed up because they don’t accept that the word “ass” is the Biblical word for donkey.

The majority of my redneck friends are actually from Iowa.  They are the people that I grew up with who knew me as a boy.  They know I am intelligent all the way to insane levels of intelligence.  And while they also believe their common sense trumps my intelligence, they have a soft spot in their hearts for the old egghead Superchicken they used to know in high school.  They mistakenly believe I am still a Republican by nature and probably support Ted Cruz for President, because he seems like a good Christian conservative fellow.  They argue with me about why they have a right to keep their guns and refuse all background checks or gun registration or licensing of guns because, sure you have to have a license to drive a car and get married because those are seriously important and potentially dangerous things, but we are talking about guns here.  They argue about why I should not be offended by their Confederate flags and why I really ought to listen to Fox News because they don’t lie to you like the rest of the liberal media.  And how did they get to be so sunburned on their backs of their necks and all over their political ideologies?  There was a time I voted for Charles Grassley.  But Republican Iowa… the Iowa of Republican Governor Robert Ray in the 70’s and President Eisenhower supporters in the 50’s… has changed right along with the entire Republican party.  They are now goose-stepping along to the conservative beat of drums worthy of Hitler and Goebbels politically.  But they don’t identify with fascism.  They believe conservative means good and liberal means bad… so Hitler was a liberal, right?  They vote in a way that allows racist-fascists like Iowa Congressman Steve King to goosestep all around the country saying ignorant and destructive things, and think that General Eisenhower wouldn’t shoot King as if the Iowa Congressman were one of the enemy were he to hear some of King’s rants in favor of the military industrial complex that Ike himself warned us against.  You can’t convince them that they’re wrong.  They are louder than you, and that makes them right.  But I love them.  I grew up with them.  And I know they are too Iowa-stubborn to ever change their Iowegian minds in a direction that might actually make their lives better.  So bless them and take care of them for me, Lord, because they have common sense… which makes them better than me.

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An Anatomy of an Angry Argument (The Stars ‘n’ Bars Controversy)

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I get a little tired of friends, family, and especially online acquaintances calling me a liberal and meaning it as a severe antonym of a compliment.   They are basically conservative by nature and they are trying to hurt my feelings by calling me liberal.  (Or “libtard” or “libturd” or “liberaloon”)  They don’t like my fact-based arguments and strike out at me from the deepest depths of their deeply-held-and-so-long-stored-in-the-same-barrel-that-it-fermented set of conservative beliefs.  Often they pull potentially intoxicating talking points out of the well of watching Fox News and expect me to drink it… even though I know it has intentionally been laced with poison.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  It was a part of the Civil War that fascinates me and still stands for the brave regiments of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg who marched into a hail of cannonball-laced death to prove once and for all that an entire way of life can be destroyed on the battlefield.  It was a terrible tragedy and those men paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of that argument.  I believe we should honor them and reconcile ourselves with what  remains of them.  They are indeed still out there.  But we do not have to honor the thing they were fighting for and ended up losing.  Slavery is inherently unjust and evil.  And the racism that is its aftertaste is just as despicable.  It is understandable that in that long gone culture it was normal to view black skin as the sign of an inferior creature.  They treated slaves as working farm animals, like oxen or donkeys.  It is the way they thought of those… actually people… whom they failed to accept as fellow human beings.

I am not offended by the Confederate flag.  But I am upset at the most common uses of it.  Klansmen use it as a symbol of their race-hatred.  They fly it at their protest marches along with the Nazi swastika.  The flag at the South Carolina capitol building went up during the equal rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s as a defiance of the entire movement.  I am not offended by the flag, but I do not like when it is used as a symbol of redneck America believing they’re better than blacks and Hispanics because their skin is white, and that their conservative white values are superior to the values of Jews, liberals, and intellectuals.  I don’t like being told that their heart-felt hate trumps my nerd-boy thinking-too-much.  I don’t like the way they believe they win the argument by shouting at me in a louder voice than I am capable of shouting back.  (Watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and see if he doesn’t do exactly that.)  I don’t like the way they don’t listen to me in the same way that I try hard to listen to them.

People I care about and even love in Iowa are posting things on Facebook about liberals attacking the Confederate flag, and how terrible it is that liberals are trying to take away “our heritage”.  But wait a minute… At the Battle of Shiloh in Missouri, the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment and the Iowa 13th were embroiled in the Hornets’ Nest, the intense fight all along the “sunken road” that ultimately tipped the horrible battle in favor of the Union.  Iowans were shooting at the Confederate flag.  Many of them were killed by it.  How can that flag possibly be “our heritage“?

I believe the rebel flag is not an appropriate symbol to be used in government buildings or 4th of July parades.  It is a symbol of more than one thing… and some of those things are terrible things.  I am not advocating making the flag illegal in the U.S.  But, consider, the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany.  It is the flag of a defeated rebellion against our government, fought for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery.  Why are my conservative Iowegian friends supporting such a flag?

And I refuse to be insulted by being called a liberal.  Conservative doesn’t mean “good” while liberal means “bad”.  Conservative means wanting to preserve the good things about the past and not change them without good reason.  Liberal means wanting to change things for the better.  I used to be a conservative.  I am only comfortable being a liberal now because conservative powers are trying to protect things that have to change because they are hurting us.  I love all people in general… and I don’t want to see them hurt by their government or their society.  So, if you feel the need to argue in the comments… or if you feel you have to call me a libturd… feel free to do so. But please don’t call me a libturd in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

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Have No Fear, Mickey is Here

Beauty and Beast

I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear.  He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)

I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot.  Fear tells me he likes shooting.  He is a card-carrying member of the NRA.  Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th.  He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans.  We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them.  Fear likes conservatives in politics.  He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”.  Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful.  We hate them.  Let’s kill them.  Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too.  But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.

superchick2Superman 2In fact, I want to stand up to him.  I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life.  I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back.  That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas.  Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid.  But she had more reason to be afraid than he did.  So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose.  This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed.  I am not afraid.

minotaur

And here’s the reason why…  I love people.  I don’t hate them.  I don’t fear them.  I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear.  I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation.  When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die.  He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway.  Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away.  Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight.  The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with.  All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor.  You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation.  If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart.  If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway.  It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun.  So I say this without fear.  “Fear, you do not have a say in my life!  I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”

Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof.  But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics.  I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear.  And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for.  I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).

Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live.  I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.

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Why You Should Shoot Yourself in the Foot Rather Than Vote for Donald Trump

I confess.   I am subject to the annoying liberal belief that if I check my facts and make properly reasonable arguments, I can save the world from all the political idiots and partisan clowns that are filling the American scene with horse poop.  Of course, I just got back home to Texas from a week-long visit to Iowa, and in both places there are people that I respect and love that feel that everything conservatives and even Tea Party Republicans say on Fox News makes sense.  How deluded can you be?  It almost makes a loony liberal communist anti-Christ like me start using the other word for poop.

political insanity  The problem, I believe, lies in the -ists and the -isms.  For example, racists and racism or anti-Zionists and anti-Zionism (words that I believe Hitler chose to describe how he felt about ants who were from Zion… or something) are -ists and -isms.  The kind of -ists and -isms that makes people from Iowa argue that the Confederate flag represents culture not hatred, even though that particular flag killed a large number of Iowans in the “Hornet’s Nest” at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 in Missouri.  Iowa was on the Union side.  That war, by the way, was a war of rebellion by the South who wanted to be a separate nation so they could keep buying and selling people like they were pet hamsters and working them like they were mules.  (See what I mean… loony liberals let facts get in the way of all the really cool ideas?)

My children and I had a discussion of -ists and -isms at the Burger King today, because the Princess didn’t want to sit next to her brother, because… well, brothers are stinky and bother you and she would just end up being unfairly in trouble for pouring her medium soft drink over his head.  We talked about how people are prone to let prejudices control their behavior instead of using civil, loving, Christian values.  The Princess was being a seat-ist and subject to seat-ism.  And then we noted that if she hopped from seat to seat, she would be a repeat-ist seat-ist.  And if she took a real disliking to the seat, she might turn into a seat-ist beat-ist.  And if she obsessively tried to clean the seat of big-brother cooties, she was being a neat-ist seat-ist.  And we got a good laugh at the expense of seat-ists everywhere.

animal.kukuchew.com

animal.kukuchew.com

And taking Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate this last week is the same stupid thing.  The man opened his mouth during his announcement speech and proceeded to spew horse poop about Mexicans being rapists and drug-dealers and other criminals coming across our borders to take our stuff and rape our women and do all kinds of evil horse poop… because he was reading from a carefully researched speech foot-noted with crime statistics… or possibly because The Donald would never just speak boat-loads of horse poop hatefully off the top of his head.  (Notice I resisted the temptation to use the other word for poop three whole times!  I am a slave to political correctness and need to be called out for it.)

I learned a few things about immigration over the last decade of being an ESL teacher (English for non-English speakers).  If you come from a properly white-skinned country like, say, Finland, you have a relatively easy time immigrating to the U.S.  If you come from a brown or black country, you face a barb-wire-shrouded mine field in the form of a legal immigration process, and once you make it legally to this country, any little slip-up or typo… even those you don’t make yourself… can get you re-classified as illegal and deported.  Parents are deported away from their children.  Children get deported even though they were born in this country and speak only English.  My own Filipino wife is still not a citizen after twenty years of marriage.  And most of those “illegal immigrants” that so disturb The Donald (and Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry. and the rest of the Republican Clown Alley) do important jobs that employers have a hard time filling otherwise.  If they are actually illegal, they pay into the system in the form of income tax and are unable to claim any benefits because they risk discovery and deportation.  Thinking these hard-working, under-loved people are all criminals is horse poop.

But enough with the horse-poop discussion.  I hate when my posts end up full of poop.  Donald Trump is the worst kind of -ist and full of the most terrible kinds of -isms.  If you shoot yourself in the foot, it will heal, at most, in a couple of months.  If you vote for Donald Trump, you may end up having to live in a horse-poop factory for four years.  Do you really like man-made horse poop?  It is a lot more toxic than the organic stuff.  (Dang!  Even loony-liberal political correctness doesn’t keep the danged poop from piling up!)

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Evil Lizard Politics

tedcruzThere are conspiracy theorists out there, like one David Icke, who will tell you the Queen of England, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama are really reptilian aliens who can shape-shift and take the form of our world leaders.  According to these “experts”, the world is secretly ruled by alien lizard-people.  Of course, these experts are filled with the most aromatic sort of logical fallacies and anti-reasonable total Texas horse-poop that it is possible to be filled with and still be a functional human bean… er, being.

Their intelligence is gathered mostly by marijuana-fueled revelations that they obtain with the same sort of spiritual clarity that led to the foundation of the Heaven’s Gate Cult, but typically result in hefty speaking fees for David Icke and friends, because they never quite drink their own Koolaid.  That doesn’t rule out lizards from controlling our politics, however.  How else do you explain Ted Cruz for President and the majority of the Republican Party?

Here is the really bad news;  If you look carefully into what politicians are doing in the world today, particularly Republican politicians in the U.S. (although they are by no means alone in this) you discover that secret agendas, alien or otherwise, are enslaving and even killing us.  Let me give you some good ol’ Texas ferinstances to choke on.

!.  Evil politicians named Rick are making sure the middle class and the poor get so screwed that all the nuts and bolts in our society are stressed to the point of breaking.  Ferinstance… I came across this eye-opening article about what Republican Governor Rick Snyder is doing to Michigan.

A Magical Mystery Tour of American Austerity Politics by Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch

Michigan is gutting programs for the people; reducing police forces, closing schools in favor of for-profit charter schools, and lowering environmental protection standards to the point of poisoning entire cities, all in the name of budget-balancing, while at the same time giving millions, if not billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very corporations that are causing pollution and out-sourcing jobs.  The cancer is spreading through lizard-like politicians named Rick.  Rick Scott of Florida has campaigned vigorously against the Affordable Care Act, claiming it is a looming financial disaster waiting to happen.  Of course it hasn’t happened yet.  Still, financial disaster remains a distinct possibility because Rick Scott is one of several Republican governors that refused Federal funds to set up a working health insurance exchange for those without health insurance, and then also refused to set up an exchange of his own for Florida.  It looks suspiciously like a Governor using his Goobernatorial powers to make the thing fail.  Of course, no governor named Rick can even come close to Rick Perry, former Emperor of Texas.  Perry has done all the same things as Governor Scott and Governor Snyder, but has one-upped them by leaving office with a cloud of indictments over his head for abusing his power to get revenge on employees in the justice department for being Democratic in nature.  And he doesn’t have to worry about his former empire because he left it in the scaly hands of his chosen successor and probable clone, Greg Abbot.  The creature-feature cowboy will now ignore his indictments because he appointed all the judges that could possibly try him, leaving him free to run for president.

2.  There is a big although to the Rick Perry presidency, though.  It is this.  Jeb Bush wants to be the next President of the United States.  And he will be.  There is nothing anyone can do about it.  Why do I believe it is inevitable?  His older brother, Larry the Cable Guy… er, I mean Lonesome George W. was defeated in the 2000 election by Al Gore.  He got to be president anyway.  Why?  Because Florida made the difference.  Jeb was governor of Florida before you had to be named Rick to be truly evil.  Jeb promised Florida to his brother, and when the election was called in favor of Gore, Jeb said, “Whoa now!  Let’s just take a little look-see at those results one more time.”  With the help of black voter roles being reduced wherever and whenever possible, along with suppression of the Hispanic vote, and taking a hammer to voting machines, and counting every hanging chad as unscoreable, and having Republican political operatives doing the recount, and having the Supreme Court’s conservative wing as an ace in the hole, and… well you know, he delivered on his promise.

My Republican friends think I am nuts when I say these things about Republicans.  Why do I take the word of the “liberal media” just because they document things and back them up with verifiable facts?  Republicans are not in it just to enrich their campaign-donor billionaire friends at the expense of everyone else.  Of course not.  But, just in case, I drew a Paffooney for today of what I think Ted Cruz  looks like in his alien lizard-man incarnation.  See what you think.

Senator Tedhkruzh

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Finding the Truth

Ted Cruz articlelaOu4vk

I am an intelligent human being and I understand a lot about science and how to do research.  Unfortunately, I am also now retired with time to burn when I can’t make much use of any physical activity other than surfing the web and finding out things I have always been wondering about.  I say unfortunately because I really dislike most of what I have discovered and found corroborating evidence for.  I have become, for lack of a less loaded-with-excess-baggage sort of term, a conspiracy theorist.    Aliens did crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and the American government did recover the craft and alien crew.  JFK was murdered by a hit squad working for and with the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, whose father was a Nazi supporting Adolf Hitler during World War II, was most likely the event controller on scene that day, although he claims he wasn’t in Dallas that day or wasn’t even a CIA operative at the time, despite photos and a letter from J. Edgar Hoover that disprove both of those claims.   And most disturbing of all, the attack on the U.S. on 9-11 was a fake terrorist attack perpetrated by the elements of the American Government that Eisenhower warned us about, calling them the “military-industrial complex”.    Three buildings fell down in a manner that suspiciously looks like a controlled demolition done by professional demolition experts, and only two of those buildings were struck by airplanes.  The sheer weight of evidence generated by the cover-up alone guarantees that we are looking at an event papered over with falsehoods that we are expected to accept and not question.  Is it a coincidence that George W. Bush was president and his brother Marvin Bush was in charge of a company that did security for the World Trade Center complex?   Architects, airline pilots and plane manufacturers, and law enforcement personnel have all ruined their careers (and some even lost their lives) by expressing publicly their doubts over the government’s version of events.

Here is a Youtube video you might want to check out if this is totally new to you;

9-11 WTC -0151 04

So what does this mean for pointless little people like me?

We are increasingly being treated as farm animals.  Rich people have taken over control of our government and society so that profit-takers can continue to do whatever it takes to continue reaping all the rewards while we do all the work.  Keep in mind that pigs and calves are kept in pens where their movements are completely constricted, not even able to turn around and face the other direction, all so their muscles are never exercised, and their meat remains as tender as possible.  We have no say in what happens to us.  We are merely here to do the work, and be as productive (and possibly tasty) as possible for the least amount of compensation possible.

Ted Cruz as Grandpa Munster is such an apt image for this problem.  He is a laughable clown throwing Texas cow poop all over the American government.   But he is also an un-dead blood-sucker with no human soul (at least that he hasn’t already sold to someone).   Will he be the next president of the United States?  I sincerely hope not.  He is totally owned by the powers in the darkness (dark money providers like the Koch Brothers who are so dark that the Koch Brothers are probably only the outward face of the problem and someone else is behind the scenes).  But it appears to me that he is only the joke candidate that is there only to guarantee that we are forced to choose either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, both of whom accept and represent financial interests and bankers who melted down the economy in 2008.

The scariest thing on the web, I think, is the message in the Georgia Guide Stones.  Who put them there?  What do they mean?  Here is what Wikipedia says are the inscriptions on the stones;

A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: EnglishSpanishSwahiliHindiHebrewArabic,Chinese, and Russian.

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

How are we supposed to get the world population from 7 billion down to 500 million?  We are not going to murder everyone not a U.S. citizen, are we?  Or everyone with a economic worth below a million dollars?  I would like for some of these guidelines to come into play.  4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 are all very good ideas.  1, 2, 3, and 10 all chill me down to the marrow in my bones.  I am not cancer.  And now might not be a good time to be a farm animal… particularly not Daffy Duck.

So make of it what you will.  I believe these things are at least partially true.  Am I a loon?  Yes.  But don’t let that keep you from looking into these things yourself.

Georgia_Guidestones

Guidestones article

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Banned Breakfast-Table Talking

Prinz Flute22

At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff.  That was a given.  It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s.  Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values.  Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy.  We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.

And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself.  Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school.  I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends.  My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid.  His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor.  And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user.  I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford.  It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.

Religion, too.  In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos.  The man bedazzled my father and I with Science.  He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars.  He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of.  He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity.  He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone.  And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God.  But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us.  To me, that seemed to define God.  My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism.  Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”.  Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments.  We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air.   Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.

tedcruz  So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today.  This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind.    I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs.  My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God.  It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths.  I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.

Will_Rogers_1922I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst.  The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer.  But they are comedy gold.  Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves.  All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper.  I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter.  And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016.  Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running.  That doubles Texas’ chances, right?  With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak.   But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.

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Damn Lies, White Lies, Stretchers, and Wild Hoo-Haws

Millis 2

There are limits to what people will believe.  No really, there are, I promise.  You can believe me because I’m a fiction writer, a story-teller, and I therefore tell lies all the time.  I was a teacher for thirty-one years, so I not only tell kids how wonderful they are in order to get good behavior and real learning out of them, but I have been told some of the most convoluted, inside-out, purple-in-the-face hoo-haws that are ever told anywhere in human culture throughout human history, and told them by a child with a straight face, perfectly seriously, and with little red horns holding up their crooked golden halos.  We are taught to misrepresent the truth from early childhood on.

“Do you have to go potty, sweetheart?”

“No, mommy, I jest like to dance.”

“Do you love me, Mortimer?  Or do you just want to get me alone in a car after the prom?”

“Oh, I love you, Alicia.  Really I do!”

“So are you in favor of taxing the oil companies at a fair and balanced rate, Senator, so we have more money to spend on Education and public works?”

“Why, I most certainly do, young voter.  Ignore that man with the “I Love Exxon” button trying to bash me over the head with that Tea Party campaign sign.  Let me kiss that darling little baby of yours.”

mrFuture

This post was inspired by all the lies told in the State of the Union speech last night by President O’Bama (He’s Irish and a conservative like Bill O’Reilly, isn’t he?)  Now, I am well aware of the white lies the President buttered our bread with.  The economy has actually improved, but not nearly as much as was claimed.  And not nearly enough for someone like me, a white male retired educator with significant health problems living in a Red State under Republican-Nazi governor/emperors who want to privatize education and spend my pension money on tax breaks for billionaires.  But those lies are nothing compared to the damn lies told by the Republican response lady, Ernst from Iowa.  She laid out a plan for undoing everything that’s been done to improve my life by the government since 2008.  The Affordable Care Act is to be repealed.  Tax breaks for “job creators” are going to be re-instituted.  We are going to heal the middle class by deregulating industry and predatory banks and by giving more benefits and goodies to the rich folks who will treat us better than those horrible Democratic liberals who want to turn us all into socialists.  This is coming from the Iowa Senator who won her seat by promising your average pork-eating Iowan to use her “hog-castrating skills” to motivate Democrats in congress to see things her way.  Iowans (of which I once was one of) know good fertilizer when they smell it.  It makes you want to shout, “Hoo-Haw!”  (Yes, it’s true, I once knew an old farm hand that, when he heard a ridiculously contorted lie, would shout “Hoo-Haw!” as a sort of derisive laughter to hear such a funny truth-twister.)

cudgels car

Lies are our way of life.  We lie about what we think.  We lie about what we feel.  We lie about how we view the world.  We lie about whether or not we tell lies.  Could we live a life without ever lying?  I hate to tell you this, but if I say, “yes”, then it might not be entirely truthful of me.

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Good and Evil

This was never planned to be a post by me on this blog, but sometimes you just have to respond to what what life and stupid people send your way.  I do not believe anyone should ever condemn a world religion.  Not even Islam.  Religion is a necessary evil in our society because it gives comfort to the suffering, hope to the desperate, and a way to combat the fear of death that plagues every mortal being on Earth.  But any time a fanatic uses religion as an excuse for violence, cruelty, or the kind of insanity committed against Charlie Hebdo magazine and its cartoonists, that is the very definition of evil.  No… not merely evil… I mean EVIL!

Those who do cruel, stupid, and selfish things in the name of God are blasphemers.  This is me, practically an atheist, saying this.  People who are the opposite of evil are in tune with the with the great silent orchestral arrangement that is our collective existence.  People who are in tune with the universe, one with the universe, truly at peace with the universe and themselves never use violence or terror or fear-mongering to change things.  If they ever do, they are no longer there in that eternal peace and shared wisdom that makes up the core of all that is good about mankind and makes us worthy.

Here is a good example of stupid and evil shared from www.facebook.com/pages/An-Uncloudy-Day.

10885091_1526831917574779_8054673923036807657_n We elected this smug, hidey-hole badger to congress and the conspiracy of stupid now in control of the government (GOP probably stands for “goofy old perverts”) put him in as the head of Senate Committee that looks after the environment.  Why does he believe what he believes?  Because of a great and unshakable faith in God and the infallibility of the Bible?  No.  That’s just the cover smoke that is meant to hide his real purpose from the GOP voting base who only hear the buzzwords and don’t realize that he is rationalizing the continuing rape and pillaging of the environment by oil and gas billionaires who want to continue putting profits as a priority above even the future of the planet we live on.  This is the kind of evil that threatens our very existence.  Does he realize that?  Probably.  Does he lose sleep over that?  No.  He looks well rested.   He believes that the consequences of his actions won’t be felt until his life is already over.  He only wants to make a profit and reap rewards while it still affects his own life… the rest of us be damned.  He is probably worse than the stupid-heads that killed the cartoonists because those deluded fools probably actually believe that when they are hunted down and killed, they will go to Muslim paradise and get their promised virgins.  Somebody evil and more intelligent than they are convinced them of that idiocy, even though that somebody probably does not believe it themselves.  Evil is self-interested to the exclusion of others.

What, then is the nature of the good?  No, not good… I mean GOOD!

Dansegawd 4Those who are good seek the good of others.  People like Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther King Jr., Francis of Assisi, Mohandis K. Gandhi,  and Joan D’Arc are good because they sacrificed their own benefits, comfort, and even their lives to benefit others.  Completely apart from faith and religion and politics, they chose to give away their precious lives and value to aid people, most of whom they didn’t even know and would never have a chance of meeting.  Love, self-sacrifice, and a peaceful means to any end are the very definition of what is actually GOOD.  If I harp too much on what is evil, and condemn it too strongly, then I can’t claim to be a part of that other side of the eternal struggle, the good.  I have to settle my anger and upset and be willing to forgive.

So what have I really accomplished in today’s un-funny rant and blistering attack on other peoples’ stupid beliefs and warped values?  Nothing important.  I have calmed myself down.  I have stopped myself from crying.  I have found my inner peace again.  And I have done one important thing… I have remembered to thank all of the good people who have ever existed because all of them benefit me and make my life better.  Thanks to all of them, and thanks to you who have put up with my stupid anger, and read… and understood.

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