F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

No cake, but I did make eclairs with kirsch soaked cherries.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.

I’m really thankful that my grandmother isn’t alive to be reading THIS story about a Florida sheriff and his police terrorising undocumented workers-it would bring back too many traumatic memories of Cossacks swooping into the village on horseback looking for Jews to kill. In this new twist, the police are pulling up to construction sites in force and chasing down anyone that runs.

There is absolutely no justification for this behaviour, whatsoever. Civilised human beings do not treat fellow human beings like rabbits being hunted. Civilised human beings do not find this amusing, which clearly, from the article, these thugs with badges do:

"It’s not wrong for them to run, but it’s not wrong for us to chase them either," said Sheriff Frank McKeithen, who created his Illegal Alien Task Force in April to target construction sites in this Florida Panhandle County."

Hilarious.

It doesn’t help matters much when an AP journalist uses the charged term "illegals" in their headline. That’s a value judgment. I’m not enough of a fool to believe the Associated Press is some sort of objective news service, but "illegal" certainly sends a loud message, even before reading the article. Quoting someone from the ACLU hardly makes up for it either. Why not just go ahead, embrace our ugliest tendencies, and call the undocumented workers "sub humans?" We’re already detaining them in work camps/prisons with their children, and terrorising them with raids and house-to-house searches in the dead of night. If the hip boot fits, wear it.  The best the journalist can come up with is calling the practice "controversial"? Shame on the editor as well.

The only reason the sheriff and his police are doing this is because the sheriff is an elected official and knows his constituents well enough to be certain his inhumanity will be rewarded come election time. This is happening because people are permitting it to happen. Because people at some level enjoy seeing it happen.

Some years ago (maybe ten) a friend of mine decided that her ability to remain employed would depend upon her willingness to undergo plastic surgery. At the time, laser wrinkle removal was gaining in popularity and so at fifty-five she underwent a series of treatments that effectively burned off a layer of her skin. I saw her after one of these procedures and was shocked to see bruised and scabbing cheeks. It was painful she admitted, but worth it she was certain.

She moved abroad for a couple of years and when I saw her upon return, the wrinkles had come back, bringing a few new friends along. She began the routine anew. Mind you, anyone could have looked at her resume and discerned her age, yet she was convinced that a first impression was a big risk. Perhaps she was right, but I always wondered about it. She was an ESL (English As A Second Language) teacher-not a Fortune 500 CEO.

Until someone planted the idea of plastic surgery in her head (and I have a pretty good idea who it was but I won’t name names-no-good-ex-husband) she’d never so much as coloured her hair or worn makeup beyond a little lipstick. Suddenly, she was over at Filenes’s buying face cream. Sure, she’d show up at my house before an interview looking for something to wear (why buy an "interview suit" when you can borrow one?) but that was a far cry from having wrinkles burned off her face. It would have been one thing had she actually wanted the procedure done-but to feel compelled to undergo something like that-to in a sense disfigure oneself, to remain employed in a society that values appearances over competence (for women anyway) was really quite depressing. My heart broke for her every time she’s trot off to the dermatologist for another round of lasers.

Newsweek, that wonderfully accurate, in-depth magazine that can always be counted on to examine a story from all possible angles (ahem, ok maybe not) has a story on Botox and how it is being marketed, largely to women.

There are so many statements that go unchallenged in the article that I have to wonder if it is largely re-printed from press releases by the drug manufacturers, with a couple of weak, opposing views tossed in to make it look "objective." For example:

":Medicis, for its part, has created a campy reality show called "Hottest Mom in America"—a cross between "Desperate Houswives" and "American Idol." Winning moms audition for a spot on the show by demonstrating that they do a great job balancing their family and work obligations while taking care of themselves. In return, they can receive cash prizes and a year’s supply of Restylane."

"Taking care of themselves?" In what sick, demented universe could "taking care of themselves" translate into having large breasts (well look at the photograph accompanying the article where they are all wearing tight, white tanks tops and cut off shorts), dyed hair and a face full of botulism toxin? I realise "hot" is pretty subjective but why not simply call it "America’s Most Objectified Mothers?" Do they have to shave their pubic hair into the funny stripe like porn stars as well? It implies that failing to wear revealing clothing and cosmetics is somehow not taking care of oneself, or to use my father’s favourite phrase when he wishes to insult a woman’s weight; "Letting herself go." I mean, that’s really it, right? It’s about what men determine "taking care of themselves" means, and it probably has nothing to do with adequate sleep and personal fulfillment.

I’d never, ever tell someone what to wear, whether or not to colour their hair, or even in the case of my friend, whether to burn off the top layer of skin with lasers-it would be as condescending of me to tell a grown woman how to look as it is for these bastards to convince women that they are somehow inadequate if they do not. Of course, their mission comes with the lure of huge profits.  What’s the matter, did they run out of anti-depressants and "PMS" drugs to load women up with.

Remember a few years ago when everyone debated whether it was appropriate to call women "girls" or "ladies?" Perhaps we should have just started calling ourselves "marks", it’s a more accurate reflection of our place in Western culture.

From around 1981-1986 I had an uncontrollable eye twitch that would come and go in concert with the risk of nuclear war. I’m not making this up. After Reagan made his quip about "We start bombing in five minutes", I twitched for hours nonstop until it was clear he was joking. I remember watching The Day After, and my eye wouldn’t stop for days. The twitch was clearly a manifestation of stress, yet only in response to things out of my control-I suffered not a single twitch through deaths, divorce, serious illness-but plant the suggestion of nukes in my head and off goes my eye.

It’s not actually my eye that twitches, but the baggy skin beneath. It is visible as the skin flutters away-something my friends always found thoroughly amusing:

"Hey, Armageddon must be around the corner-Jen’s twitchy eye is at it again."

Oh ha, ha, ha.

Anyway. It’s been years, (well, since around 1986) and my eye has largely left me alone, until recently. For the past week my twitchy eye has been back in full force. Of course my family isn’t helping matters much. I looked up one evening last week to notice my husband reading…On The Beach.  Then, because the Universe obviously has a perverse sense of humour, I see my son hunched over a volume from our set of "The United States Encyclopedia of History" (catchy title, eh? It was published in 1967). Curious what he found so interesting, I get up to have a look and he has the book open to "Atomic Age" with a photograph of the launching of a nuclear submarine (decked out in red, white and blue for the occasion) on one page and a mushroom cloud on the facing. I never heard of "Operation Desert Rock", -see you can always learn something you didn’t want to know about. Oh my twitchy, twitchy eye.

And I am worried, very worried. Much like the 1980’s, there isn’t much I can do about it, but sit here with my eye fluttering away.

Interesting post by Bruce Schneier on the arrest of William Hogarth in 1748 for sketching the fortifications at Calias.

THIS is what happens when schools eliminate physical education and allocate all their resources to coaching children to pass standardized exams. Still, I blame the parents:

"Kathleen Ballew decided her 7-year-old son, Jordan Sims, who will begin second grade in the fall, could benefit from some one-on-one time with a fitness professional. She had noticed he needed help with balance and coordination in soccer and karate. She’d also observed he was reluctant to do things kids normally do, like climbing on park equipment."

Oh, well if he wasn’t achieving in soccer and karate, what with already being seven years of age, his future was probably on the line. Over-scheduling much? Come on, he’s seven. It must be costing the parents a mint to send the kid to both soccer and karate classes but what the hell difference does it make if he’s coordinated-unless he’s enrolled for competitive reasons?  There are plenty of ways to work on coordination without hiring someone to "fix" your kid’s inability in sports.

Where I live, if your child has not been enrolled in a sports programme from pre-school age, it is almost certain that he/she will not be able to play school sports-they won’t even be considered for the team without the proper "training." Parents dole out large sums of cash for the chance that their child might be able to play sports in school years down the road. Hiring a trainer is a way of ensuring the money already invested in all those soccer camps will pay off.

Then, there are the parents that want to micro-manage every pound on a kid and send them to a trainer for exercise because they are terrified the child will become fat (i.e. ugly and unpopular) and that would reflect poorly on the parents.

"I also just want to get him in the habit of making exercise part of daily routine," said Ballew, who described her son as just a little overweight. She fears it’s something he’ll have to struggle with as he grows up."

Frankly, I’d think that there are much greater worries a parent could have for their child than being "a little overweight" (or even substantially overweight for that matter). I dunno, just off the top of my head I can think of a few:

-Being drafted (into the Army, not the NFL)

-Receiving a quality education

-Nuclear war

What’s worse is she’s given her child’s name to be printed in the damn newspaper and all over the Internet! I’m sure little Jordan is going to be thrilled when future employers Google his name and read that he was uncoordinated, didn’t like climbing on monkey bars, and was "a little overweight" at seven years of age. Thanks Mom!

Perhaps he’ll get hired by a sympathetic HR person that had an equally overbearing mother.

Will someone please buy Jordan a jump rope and leave him the hell alone? Poor kid.

In fact, the headline was nauseating enough-I don’t have the stomach to click the link.

I remember well when that horrible, horrible song Don’t Worry, Be Happy was being played in what seemed an hourly loop by sadistic disc jockeys. Committed pacifist that I was, the song still created a strong desire on my part to slug someone. Oh, how loathed that horrible, horrible song. I already knew what an absolute sham self-help was.

A few years earlier, my mother arrived home from a rare foray to the bookstore with a volume that was going to solve all her problems (and no, I don’t mean The Joy of Cooking-though it would have solved some of our problems, no doubt). How to be an Assertive Woman became her companion for about a week as she did her best to follow the examples and let us know how we were making her feel.

My mother had no need of a self-help book to communicate how her family was making her feel. My mother was not shy-nay; she was pretty assertive long before laying her hands upon the book that was to liberate her from the imagined drudgery of her life. Perhaps a bit too assertive, depending whom you ask. That didn’t stop her from beginning each interaction with us by stating;

"What you’re doing now makes me feel (insert an emotion_________)."

After a short period it became obvious that no one gave a rat’s ass how we made her feel, and it is with great regret that I had not the spine to respond:

"And your incessant complaining about my existence in your life makes me feel______" but of course, I wouldn’t have dared.

Thankfully she bored of the book’s rigourous approach to alienating everyone with whom one came in contact, and returned to the tried and true method of screaming at us rather than using psychobabble to express contempt. Better. Much, much better. I can appreciate a pissed-off outburst, however rehearsed statements intended to elicit a certain response are insulting. Unless one is speaking of having traveled across North Africa with the Tuareg on flea-infested camels, in a sandstorm-whatever you’re experiencing probably isn’t worthy of being called "a journey."

So long as this rubbish remained a fad-one to be sneered at, I was cool with it. If Norman Vincent Peale made you feel better, great just keep it the fuck away from me. If you wanted to go start a Utopian community in Indiana ala Robert Owen-knock your socks off. It was only after these self-help/psychology cultists started imposing their idiotic nonsense on the rest of us that I became annoyed. Their obnoxious, in-your-face know-it-all unsolicited advice from those not content to screw with their own lives…well, it…it…made me FEEL really, really, really, IRRITATED.  I can’t harness my positive energy when I want to choke the living shit out of you, can I pumpkin? No, of course not.

Today’s Globe and Mail has a decent article on the nonsense of striving to be "happy."  I would add that the emphasis on so much personal happiness really does seem arrogant. There are people living daily horrors that really make you wonder where on earth they find the strength to go on (hey, I know-let’s send "life coaches" to the Palestinian Territories! Maybe the only thing keeping the Israelis occupying their country is a failure to think positively) and here are the Western Capitalist crybabies complaining because they feel unhappy. I mean, you do realise how utterly self-absorbed it sounds to complain about being unhappy, given the state of the world-correct?

Me: (calling to my husband) your favourite First Lady (Ladybird Johnson) is in the hospital.

L: Isn’t she already dead?

Me: Nope (pausing to think) the daughters must be collecting Social Security by now.

L: (sarcastically) They were beautiful girls.

Me: Oh God, the picture just loaded-poor thing is wearing the same hairdo she had in 1966. She’s not looking so good. Oh wait, you know, for 94 she doesn’t look so bad. Hey, do you remember when LBJ croaked?

L: Yeah, but I didn’t really know who he was-he was just one of those black and white guys.

Me: Huh?

L: The television-I only saw him on our black and white television. I always think of people like Johnson and Eisenhower as "black and white guys."

Me: Didn’t Eisenhower die around the same time?

L: No, I think it was Truman.

Me: I’ll do a search. (click-click-click) Nope, must have been Eisenhower you’re remembering (click-click-click) sure enough. Wait, when did Eleanor Roosevelt die? Wasn’t she UN Ambassador or something…before Stevenson…oh crap, let me check (click-click-click) nope-couldn’t have remembered her-you were too young.

The sad thing is that we have conversations like these all the time. Pretty soon we’re going to lecturing Danny about how we walked five miles to school each way in –40-degree weather. Yes you young whippersnappers, when we wore a hole in the soles of our shoes, we stuck a piece of cardboard in the insole and kept walking. It’s a weird nostalgia that makes mundane facts such as when presidents passed away interesting (well, except for Kennedy of course, which comes with all that "where were you?" business).

A number of years ago, we took a trip to Abilene, Kansas to visit the Eisenhower home and library (I highly recommend taking the available tours-well worth it). As we stood in line to tour his boyhood home (restored right down to the wireless his mother sat beside in the parlour listening for news of him during WWII) an old couple ahead of us were having a conversation. Obviously, this isn’t verbatim-but it captures the spirit of the exchange.

He: Wait. Who came after Ike?

She: I think it was Kennedy.

He: No, it must have been Nixon-he was vice president…

She: The guy from Texas maybe?

Oh ha, ha, ha how we laughed at them. Then. We’re not laughing now. We’re too busy trying to remember who Ford’s vice president was (Rockefeller? Maybe? Oh crap, don’t make me go Google that too).

The Australian government intends to ban alcohol and pornography for Aborigonies.

-But it’s for their own good. Geez.

Our roof is being replaced. It was starting to look like the roofers would never arrive (this was supposed to happen a few months ago) but at long last, the old roof is being pulled off, and a new one installed. Do you have any idea how very loud this process is? They were here from early this morning and a few men stayed until around seven this evening.

Today was beastly hot. Being a roofer must be one of the worst jobs on earth-they work in every extreme of weather (except rain, I guess) and today was miserable. I watched them go to take their lunch break (spread out picnic-style on our lawn) and before I could mix up a pitcher of cold lemonade-I noticed the coolers and beers! Really.

Assuming I could stand on a roof in 90 degree + heat doing hard physical labour-I most certainly could not do it with a couple of beers in me. These guys were professionals. I really am impressed. Still, I was sort of worried that every thud from above was a roofer passing out. I kept an eye to the windows looking for dangling limbs. I don’t know, I’m a mother-mother’s worry about these things. I’m sure their mothers wouldn’t be thrilled to know their sons were up on a roof in rural Nebraska on a hot day, with beer in their gullets.

At the moment my lawn is littered with old shingles (though most of them were tossed-down into a truck bed) and empty Budweiser cans. Anyone that drops by is going to think we’ve had a hell of a party.

*Bonus trivia-did you know they remove the old shingles with very large pitchforks? I sure didn’t.

There’s so much of this crap to blog, let’s just do a round-up instead.

FBI wants colleges to be on the lookout for potential terrorists-provide helpful tips for spotting potentially dangerous students.

Feds send tanks rolling into Detroit.

Ooops-turns out labelling toddlers as Bi-Polar and loading them up with drugs isn’t such a hot idea. Oh well, as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. It’s not like anyone would have seen this coming.

DSL for ten bucks!

Out of control police still issuing tickets for infraction even after state legislature ammends the law. Really, go read this article-it is unbelievable.

This guy was beat-up and tasered for riding his bike out of the airport.

Israel goes sci-fi to kill people more efficently.

Another reason to distrust the Dr. when he/she tells you that the anti-depressant or seizure drug will help your pain. So will a goddamned Ibuprofin-and Advil won’t make an otherwise sane person turn suicidal. But "off-label" use of drugs is so damn profitable.

Stories like THIS make me just want to crawl back into bed and wait to die. A school teacher is put on the terrorist watch list because she had a butter knife in her luggage at the airport. I like the part where she asks about her Constitutional rights and is told she does not have any.

There’s so much more-but I’ll save those for Thursday.

If asked to point to one specific reason we’ve decided to homeschool our son, the criminalistion of students would be at the top of the list. THIS article by Linda Flores at Counterpunch details some of the incidents taking place in the New York schools. I’m sorry to say that even here, in "the country" this police state bullshit is being employed, though here they have the absurd title of "resource officers" for the police stationed in schools. Some resource.

The odds of your child being saddled with a criminal record for childish nonsense (writing on a desk warrants arrest?) are increasing daily. I’d like my son to get more out of his education that learning to avoid notice, suck-up to power, and engage in a gigantic game of "gotcha" by police looking for any possible reason to make an arrest. Even if you’re found innocent of the charges in court, the arrest record will follow you for life. Am I willing to put my child’s future in the hands of some uniformed thug that needs to handcuff children to make him/herself feel powerful? Absolutely not.

We’re fortunate to be in a position to home school. For us, the loss of one income is worth what will be gained by keeping our child safe from the clutches of overzealous thugs. Not everyone can make that choice. Receiving the education that each child is by law entitled to should not entail risk of arrest and incarceration. The only thing being learned in this sort of an educational environment is submission to authority.

Do go read the article.

The following quote comes from the Archdiocese of Boston in response to why they are refusing to shelter sex offenders that have been released from prison in their homeless facilities:

"The archdiocese issued a statement saying it had barred sex offenders from the shelter because "this situation, which we became aware of, was in conflict with the Church’s commitment and policies to protect children."

I realise it isn’t actually funny, but I did laugh at the chutzpah of making that sort of a statement given recent events.