Snakes and Ladders

[pan]

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
Steven Weinberg

[pan]

I pretty much hate all holidays, especially Christmas. Perhaps its because we never had kids. The enforced gift giving has been reduced to just gifts for my parents (my mother mostly) who are in their late 80s and give almost everything away but you still have to give them a gift.

I thought it was going to be easy this year. Mom tells me she accidentally broke the cheezy Idaho mug I gave her last Christmas that was a perfect size and she really loved but the stupid Rite-Aid where I bought it last year went out of business. So I have been going to all over town trying to find a stupid cheezy Idaho souvenir mug that is just the right size with absolutely no success. Now I'm panicking because I know that if I don't give Mom a gift (and she has to like it) she will get completely depressed because it demonstrates that we don't love her.

[Cal]

Comforting to know I am not the only one battling with christmas. Don't flowers make the grade? I am a real sucker for getting flowers.

[Mouse]

Haven't even begun Christmas cards yet, planning to make my own. Barely been out since bike prang. Smallest, who had her first birthday a couple of weeks ago, is on the way to hospital in search of antibiotics, the same influenza her Mummy has been fighting I think. Fingers crossed.

It would be unfair if I didn't tell you the best bits. The last couple of days I've been looking after Smallest in the afternoons. In a couple of weeks I'll be there while her mother returns to work part-time. Smallest is actually small for her age, as many family members have been through various strands but it is best to keep away from health visitors and doctors in that regard because people have got into trouble for not obeying instructions to feed cakes and crisps to fatten a child in other parts of the country.

The smallness of Smallest makes it much easier for me to do what I like best, just standing there holding her, singing sometimes and looking out of the window together while we sway to the music or the rhythm of our hearts. We have been watching snow flurries and hurrying people sliding on ice, and boys throwing snowballs. We have been watching the wind in the trees and the birds and leaves scattering out above. And Smallest has fallen asleep there, so I kept her quiet and slid across some cushions carefully to have still hours beside and below, a summer meadow for her dreams.

[Mouse]

Limp and comatose baby arrives at hospital, opens her eyes, gives doctor a huge smile and claps her hands.

They don't give antibiotics to babies anymore, so they are told, because babies are so changeable, but given prescription for useful medicine to lower temperature.

Last year I gave several people rooted cuttings of my scented geraniums, favourite houseplants. They may not have been impressed but I do appreciate these plants for their sweet smell and marvellous contribution to privacy.

[waldopaper]

Worthless waste-of-time dept.:
:
...today's LTE response to "representative's" spam-email is as follows:

Regarding Senator Evan Bayh’s 12/18/09 email titled “Fed Up With Spending,” the word is disingenuous –adjective-- lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere: Her excuse was rather disingenuous.

There is hypocrisy pandering to “such fiscal irresponsibility” when, according to Hellman and Sharp of The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the USA represents 48% of all “military spending” on earth.

While any criticism of the Sacred Pentagon Cash Cow brings out the usual slag about how “freedom isn’t free,” no one on earth robbed our rights as much as our cowardly “representatives” did with the USA PATRIOT Act and similar “legislation.”

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have written about the “Three Trillion Dollar War” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom” which the Lancet report says resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths. Maybe freedom isn’t free, but our hypocrisy is costing us trillions.

So while the US continues in clear violation of every single one of the Nuremberg indictments, we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace with a road-rage rush to buy Chinese-made merchandise for usury-level at interest rates.

I wish Senator Bayh and my fellow US Citizens a Merry Disingenuous Christmas.

(sig)

brevity is most definitely the soul of wit when getting LTEs published in the local fishwrap. We got on "senior Republican" and one "junior Democrat" Punch-and-Judy "representative" in Senatorial Clownland, and as Collins has so wisely maintained: there IS only ONE "party:" the MONEY "PARTY." And now each lip of the MP is flapping about "government spending."

What a fucking joke. They've shoveled TRILLIONS down the outhouse-hole of the "GWOT," and now they're all "parsimonious" when it comes to providing citizens with the means to life itself, Fuck them clowns and the horses they rode in on. Of course pointing this out to "Joe-thePlumber" dominionist krakkers is explaining math to dogs.

Fucking idiots.

[pan]

I still post at the Tacoma newspaper site. The town is surrounded by military bases and most of the site posters are rabidly Libertarian or claiming that fascism is an outgrowth of socialism so they don't have to realize that their neo-Bircher views are, indeed, just like Pinochet, Franco and the rest. A well meaning, very defensive, conservative Xtian posted on the Merry Christmas (never Happy Holidays) to the troops that our military is what preserves peace for everyone throughout the world. I didn't even bother to respond as I tire of the anti-American, socialist-commucrat responses.

[BO]

There was a holy roller with a big sign hanging off an over pass just south of Tacoma as we were leaving town this weekend. Said Honk if you love Jesus. Couldn't believe all the cars that started honking around us. Of course this was pretty close to FT Lewis where they train and ship out tons of numbskulls for Iraq and Afghanistan. God, guns, and fast cars make for the worse stretch of highway from Seattle to LA. You take your life in your hands every time you pass through.

Always said that christians were the most predatory race of people on the planet. Not surprising that they are also the most predatory capitalists. Well, except for jews. It's tribalism, pure and simple. Anytime us humans form groups, we start looking for another group to annihilate.

Don't matter what anyone calls it.

[pan]

Ms. Medusa used to commute from Seattle to teach in Tumwater. Quite often she would come back with stories of some crazed military man in a pick-em-up truck that tried to kill her near Ft. Lewis on the I-5.

It's tribalism, pure and simple Which is what Malcom X tried to get the American negro to understand - to only shop at stores owned by your own. I'm thinking that's why he scared the bejeezus out of us white folks - he was cutting into the profit margin.

But, what are we non-joiners here at RBC to do? We are too damn ornery and independent to go off and join a commune. (or - been there, got the t-shirt already)

[BO]

Speaking of communes. I watched the movie "Taking Woodstock" last night. I loved it despite its so-so reviews. I thought it was hilarious.

There's a dance troop depicted in the movie that you got to see Pan. You'll die laughing.

[BO]

Oops. Theatre troop, not dance troop.

[BO]

Yay! Score one for reason...

Furor Erupts Over Atheist Display At State Capitol
Comptroller Candidate William J. Kelly Tries To Take Down Sign, Is Escorted From Building

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. ―
A conservative activist and Illinois comptroller candidate was escorted from the Illinois State Capitol building Wednesday when he tried to remove a sign put up by an atheist group.

The sign reads: "At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

link...

[BO]

Been watching 'The Atheism Tapes' this season in order to keep my sanity. Good to know there are still a few reasonable souls left on the planet--albeit a shrinking minority. Here's a description of the series...

"In these off-the-record interviews, playwright, filmmaker and self-described atheist Jonathan Miller filmed conversations with six of today’s leading men of letters and science: the biologist and New York Times best-selling author Richard Dawkins, philosophers Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn, distinguished playwright Arthur Miller, theologian Denys Turner and Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who discuss their personal intellectual journeys and offer an illuminating analysis of nontheism from a wide range of perspectives."