Archives for category: The kind of world we live in

the-most-corrupt

“Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the Presidency… she is protected by a rigged system” said the paragon of free trade who attempted to use eminent domain in order to evict an old lady from her house so that he could spare a few hundred thousand bucks… and who later bragged about ‘women allowing him to “grab them by the pussy” simply because of his status’.

His competitor, whose slogan reads “Stronger Together”, is a former Secretary of State who has been accused  by both the State Department and the FBI of ‘gross negligence’ and ‘extreme carelessness’ towards important matters of national interest.

89797467_emailclinton

“Mrs Clinton failed to comply with rules on record-keeping, the inspector general found, and used private email for official business without approval.”

So, one of them thinks the system is rigged only when it cannot be twisted to suit his own interests while the other believes ‘togetherness’ can be build around someone who completely disregards the existing rules…

I’ve been asking myself, for some time now, ‘what’s going on there‘?
How come so many intelligent people have allowed themselves to be sucked in this extremely dirty game of deception?

In fact the answers are so obvious that I’ve lost interest in them.
(“The 2016 presidential election has seen a strange flip-flop with respect to conservative and liberal voters. In many ways, even though Trump is the nominee on the right, he is running to the left of Hillary on many issues. Hillary represents the status quo mainstream, usually denoted as the Republican nominee position, while Trump is the obvious “change agent” of the election. Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have been seen by many government officials as being more conservative than liberal, even though they use the Democratic platform to advance their hold on power.”)

But what consequences will arise from this mess?

Is Putin going to be the sole real beneficiary of this electoral process?
Because, regardless of the outcome of the vote, America has made such a fool of herself that she has already lost much of the huge respect the rest of the world had for her?

But what if, again regardless of the immediate outcome, enough Americans will eventually wake up from their slumber and bring things back on their right track?

Don’t count America out just yet.
Hitler and the Japanese militarists  have been only a few of those who had fallen into this trap…

On the other hand too many trips to ‘the brink’ are not ‘good for your health’. The Western part of the Roman Empire had fallen apart in almost similar conditions while its Eastern half had been able to post-pone  its own agony only by becoming a dictatorship.

OK, then please someone explain to me what the heck is going on here.

“Other researchers have pointed out the correlation between education rates and declining female health outcomes. The most shocking study, published in August 2012 by the journal Health Affairs, found that life expectancy for white female high-school dropouts has fallen dramatically over the past 18 years. These women are now expected to die five years earlier than the generation before them—a radical decline that is virtually unheard of in the world of modern medicine.”

femalemortalityratesmaplg

(Health Affairs/The Population Institute, University of Wisconsin)

“…women in parts of the country have been left behind, and in some cases, they are dying younger than they were a generation before.”

swing-states-20161

 

This map shows the probable number of votes each parties candidate would win in the Electoral College if the meeting of the College were held today.  If you live in a red state on the map above you probably do not have to vote for anyone for the office of POTUS but you should vote for a candidate for all  the other offices on the ballot.  – Abyssum

ballancing-act

As long as we haven’t yet managed to find alternative energy sources to cover all our needs we still need to transport oil and natural gas from one place to another.
How we do this is the result of the continuous struggle between the ‘tree huggers’ and the ‘global warming deniers’.
north-dakota-protest1
Without the tree huggers our planet would be a lot dirtier that it already is
shutterstock-133485692jpg-0443e596dea017ff
while without the ‘deniers’ it would offer us a life a lot less comfortable than the one with which we have already been accustomed.
uncomfortable
It’s our job – yes, ‘ours’, the ones whose asses are still comfortably glued to the proverbial fence – to maintain a reasonable equilibrium.
vaideeni_interior

Unfortunately, sometimes essential meaning is lost not only ‘in translation’ but also during ‘interpretation’.

While reading an excellent article about Zineb el Rhazoui, a Charlie Hebdo survivor, I encountered the notion that “Islamophobia is not an opinion: it is an offense.

Come again?!?

Is it possible that anybody might be offended by someone who’s being afraid? Regardless of that fear being reasonable or not?

Since that notion was said to have been promoted by Collective against Islamophia in France I checked their site, hoping to understand what they mean by that.

“For the CCIF, Islamophobia has a clear definition:
It consists of all acts of rejection, discrimination or violence against institutions or individuals on the basis of their real or perceived belonging to the Muslim faith.”
OK, so they are not offended as much by the fear itself but by the heinous actions some people take against people belonging to the Muslim faith, on the basis of the real or faked fears felt by the perpetrators.
But this is far from being OK.
What these guys are doing is confounding people’s minds.
They keep preaching that ‘Islamophobia is bad’ to people who are very naturally afraid of the actions perpetrated by some wackos who pretend to be Muslim.
This doesn’t make any sense.
It’s like saying that people living in a seismic area should not be afraid of earthquakes. And instead of building their houses in a certain manner they should go to the shrink and treat their unreasonable fears.
If some people who pretend to be Muslim behave in a totally unacceptable manner it is not reasonable to expect that all Muslim will behave in the same way but after so many bad things that have been committed by people pretending to belong to the Muslim faith it would be unreasonable not to try to understand what is going on.
On the other hand those who strongly disagree with the CCIF, Zineb el Rhazoui among others, make the mistake of deepening the confusion instead of calling the bluff for what it is:
“This is very dangerous because it has even entered the dictionary as hostility towards Islam and Muslims. Yet criticism of an idea, of Islam or of a religion cannot be characterized as an offense or a crime. I was born and lived under the Islam of Morocco and live in France and I have the right criticize religion and this dictatorship of Islamophobia that says I have no right to criticize! If we criticize Christianity it doesn’t mean we are Christianophobes or racist towards the ‘Christian race.’”
In real life criticism is one thing while violence – verbal violence, even – and rejection are completely different things.
Confounding these two categories is feeding the very monster who is menacing all of us – militant intollerance.
The article about el Rhazoui also mentions her latest book: “Destroy Islamic Fascism“.
I don’t agree with all the ideas excerpted there but there’s one which should grab the attention of all Muslims who describe themselves as being moderate:
“As for mainstream or moderate Muslim clerics, El Rhazoui tells Women in the World that during the Burkini debate in France not one Imam stood up and said “Hey, wait a minute, you can be Muslim and wear a [regular] bathing suit.””
She also says that ““The Muslim religion has its place in the modern world if it submits itself fully to the laws that rule humanity today: universal principles of equality between men and women, sexual and individual freedom, and equality for all, no matter your creed or religion. Until Islam has admitted this and accepted that the freedom of men and women is superior to it, Islam will not be acceptable.””
I’m afraid there’s a small problem with this.
A religion exists only as long as it has followers and inasmuch as those who belong to it choose to make of it.
It is not ‘Islam’ that has to ‘admit’ anything but the Muslim people themselves.
In this sense it is counterproductive for us, the free thinkers of the world, to peruse the Quran in search of violent episodes and then use them to demonstrate that ‘Islam is not a religion of peace’.
What we need to do, if we want to destroy the Fascism which happens to be of Islamic nature, is to win more and more Muslims to our side.
Making fun of their main Book and of their Prophet won’t achieve that. On the contrary.
On the other hand, giving in to even the most unreasonable things in the name of ‘tolerance’ isn’t helping either.
The Federal Court of Canada ruled in February 2015 that the policy requirement for women to remove their niqabs during their oath swearing at Citizenship Ceremonies is unlawful, as it interferes with a citizenship judge’s duty to allow candidates for citizenship the greatest possible freedom in the religious solemnization or the solemn affirmation of the oath. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration filed a notice of appeal to challenge this decision at the Federal Court of Appeal and the lower court’s decision is not in effect until the appeal has been decided by the Court.  As a result, women who wish to swear a citizenship oath may not do so with their faces covered.
What kind of oath is that which is pledged by a faceless person?
How strong is that person’s adherence to our value regarding ‘openness and transparency’ and how willing is that person – or her husband/father/mother/sibling who makes her wear a niqab, presumably against her will – to respect and promote our notion of gender equality?
PS I
And how about replacing ‘Islamophobia’ with ‘anti-islamism’?
PS II
Why is it that the spelling checker suggested me that I should write ‘anti-Islamism’ while ‘antisemitism’ is not usually written using a capital s?

Just stumbled upon this joke:

One day, all the human body parts started arguing about who was on top… The mouth said, ”I should be on top because, without me, you wouldn’t be able to eat.” Then the stomach said, ”Ya but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to digest and transfer all the minerals and vitamins throughout the body, I should be on top.” Then the heart said, ”I should be on top because I’m the one who takes the blood from point A to point B. Without me, the body would die.” Then the brain said, ” Well, without me, you wouldn’t be able to move, eat, digest or allow circulation of blood, so I should be on top.” Now, the asshole was beginning to get annoyed, ”You know, I should be on top because I can just shut my hole and then shit will accumulate and block the digestive track and screw all of you up.” It was chaos, everyone was yelling and fighting. Finally, the asshole got fed up, ”That’s it, I’m fed up, I’m shutting up my hole.”

So for a few days, the body couldn’t shit and the brain had trouble moving, the stomach digesting, the mouth eating and the blood flow going, everyone was begging the asshole to open up, The brain said, ”Please open up, you made your point, your on top, just open up.” The asshole smiled, ”So everyone agrees that I’m on top?” ”YES” everyone shouted. ”OK!” so the asshole opened up and the body could shit again. The moral of this story is, you have to be an asshole to be on top…“

Isn’t this interesting?

A bunch of guys are too thick to understand that they cannot live one without the others and to learn what mutual respect really means, one of them decides to teach the group a well deserved lesson and it is he who ends up being considered an ass-hole…

On the other hand… there are so many examples of ass-holes who end up ‘on top’ simply because they are the ones willing to do anything in order to get there – not caring at all if their actions hurt everybody else who happens to be around… AND because those who end up being hurt don’t see it coming or are too lazy, too thick or both at the same time, to do anything about it…

A sizeable number of Americans, Republicans even, have understood that Bush 43 wasn’t such a great President. When leaving office he had the lowest approval rate “of any president in modern times”.

Yet he is a man who knows to atone for his mistakes.
He knew how to apologize after blurting, ‘under influence’, “how is sex after 50?” to his female neighbor when seated at his parents dinner table in Maine and he effectively extracted himself from politics at the end of his not so glorious mandate, even though he had started it “believing he was God’s agent here on Earth to rid the world of evil.”
By the end of it, Bush “had become much more aware of the limitations of the office and his own shortcomings” and had started to take actions “contrary to his deepest beliefs“.

Actually Bush’s excesses constitute, in part, the explanation for the huge number of people who showed up to ‘landslide’ Obama into the Oval Office.

Then why are so many Americans still endorsing Trump?
After failing to offer a plausible apology for the ‘locker room banter’ that had surfaced recently.
For implying that a woman was  ‘not attractive enough’ for him to ‘grab her by the pussy‘.
After accusing the press for “rigging the system” against him when all they did was to publish his own words…

The media could indeed do a better job at covering the entire spectrum – a lot of interesting things about Clinton are hardly mentioned while Gary Johnson is all but absent – only this doesn’t explain the insistence with which some of the Republicans keep obsessing about Trump.

Even after some of their own party bosses have started to ‘see the light‘.

Their hoping that  ‘he will defend the Supreme Court’ resides on assuming that ‘The Donald’ would act, if elected, as a bona-fide Republican.
What in Trump’s behavior ever made them believe such a thing?

Do they really want to relieve the Bush experience, only at a different – a lot lower, that is – level?

Specially after more of his antics have came to light…

I couldn’t find any current data so I’ll have to make do with what the Atlantic had published a month ago.

trumps-base

So, a little over 12% of his votes come from college, or higher, educated women while the total is no less than 48%.

Now, would you care to guess which of these women will continue to disregard his being ‘automatically attracted to beautiful’ and keep rooting for him?

Would you even consider Hillary Clinton as a likely candidate?

“Even though she found the job distasteful, Rodham mounted what she felt was her strongest possible defense of Taylor. As Newsday reporter Thrush wrote in 2008, “Her approach, then and now, was to immerse herself in even unpleasant tasks with a will to win.””

At that time Clinton had been ordered by a judge to defend a rapist – which all practicing lawyers can expect to be asked to do.
“Once she no longer had a choice in the matter, Clinton said in a 2014 interview that she had a professional obligation to give Taylor the strongest possible defense.

“I had a professional duty to represent my client to the best of my ability, which I did,” she said.

Gibson (the prosecutor who tried the case)  recalled that the young lawyer worked overtime on the case in hopes of impressing the court, which might them help establish the reputation of her new legal aid clinc.”

Further more:
“Despite her discomfort with the case, Clinton aggressively defended her client. In an affidavit to the court, she said a child psychologist had told her that children “from disorganized families,” such as the victim, “tend to exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences.” “

In this sense is it possible that even a college educated woman, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, might vote for somebody like Trump, simply because she might consider other things to be more important than his bragging about ‘grabbing beautiful women, who allow him to do it because he is a “star”, by their pussies’?

OK, you’ll tell me that in the voting booth each of us should behave in a ‘personal’ rather than a ‘professional’ manner.

I’ll up the ante and ask you what kind of person is able to efface his/her personal self so efficiently, simply in order to ‘help establish his/her professional reputation’?

Or accept a gleeful ‘pussy grabber’ as the most powerful person on Earth?

Bill Clinton, that is.

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

Trump: “Yeah that’s her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Bush: “Whatever you want.”

Trump: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” “

PS

Listening to Trump describing his unbridled urges I couldn’t repress the memories of how we,  rambunctious teenagers gathered in the local park, drinking  under-aged beers and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, were bragging among ourselves about completely imaginary sexual exploits and how the older ones, those who had already experienced ‘the bliss’, were smiling when overhearing our pretenses…

It was only later in life that I learned the real difference between not being able to ‘keep it in your pants’ and not being able to keep your mouth shut about ‘it’.

Some 50 years ago Carl Andre displayed 6 stacks of bricks on the floor of the Tibor de Nagy art gallery in New York.

None of them was sold so the artist “returned all but 200 of the bricks to the brickyard to get his money back”.

They were remade in 1969, from a different kind of bricks – the factory had closed in the meantime, and one of them was bought, in 1976, by London’s Tate Gallery for $12.000 – the equivalent of $50.000 in today’s money.

Equivalent VIII 1966 by Carl Andre born 1935

Not without creating a lot of controversy.

what-a-lot-of-rubbish

 

Which ‘tripped’ me into writing the present comment.

I’m not going to discuss Andre’s art or philosophy. It’s so obvious that you can actually trip on it.

What’s bewildering me is the intensity with which some people contest the things they don’t even understand.
OK, each of us have the right to express ourselves. To criticize everything.

But why do it so aggressively?

What if we are the ones who don’t have a clue?

Who ‘are as thick as a brick‘, instead of as “Thick as a Brick” as we consider ourselves?

Could it be that it’s our own unwillingness to see which has allowed the ‘(thick as) thieves’ to bring the ‘Conspiracy of Fools‘ upon our heads?

ohms-law-illustrated

 

… unless ‘offered’ with a pointed toe cap!

 

pantof-ascutit