Plymouth Cops

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s no secret I dislike cops. I have ample reasons for this but I do accept that we need them. I also understand by far and away, most police officers are professional and do far more good then harm.

My father took his dogs with him to the grocery store today because they love to go for a ride in the car. For the 5 minutes he was in the store, he left all four windows down and the sunroof open.

Some animal crusader decided to call the police and when he got out two of Plymouth’s finest  were at the car ready to break into it.

Instead of being professionals and either citing dad or not they took the low road and started bitching at him expecting dad would break down in tears and beg forgiveness.    Yeah not so much.    Dad didn’t play along and was probably fairly antagonistic (like father like son).

The younger and dumber of these two seemed to feel dad may spend time in the work house for his atrocities against the animal world.    Then he realized it’s a $25.00 fine.

Our family has rescued 5 unwanted dogs and have always been excellent pet owners.

Finally these two idiots got tired of hearing their own voices and let dad go.

Do you suppose they could be out trying to catch bad guys instead of this kind of crap?

Mormons ARE Christians… duh!

This is a pretty interesting article, if only because it addresses an image issue the Mormons have — and shows the truth of the situation..

I’ll say right up front that I’m not active in the LDS church — for my own personal and philosophical reasons.  I’m close to some very active members and I’m still on the official roll of the church, but I haven’t been active for a long time.

I’ll also say that I do have political disagreements with the LDS church — especially their activity in defeating the pro-same sex marriage initiative in California.  I’ve also seen how they come very close to violating their non-profit status by advocating voting Republican.  Both of those choices seem quite unwise to me.

With all that in mind, I have to say that the Mormons are generally some of the nicest folks I know — as a group.  Their basic ethos is to be welcoming.  They are very family oriented and concerned about others and overall, they just want to share what they see as the truth about the world and God.

It’s also not the case, in my experience, that they play “I’m a Christian and you aren’t”… unlike many other supposedly “good” “Christians”.  Sure, they think their church is the truth — who doesn’t?  But — they also make a sincere effort to try to introduce people to their truth in non-offensive ways.

The article that prompted this post is about a non-Mormon (who identifies herself as a “Christian”) who seems to think that Mormons aren’t Christians and that they’d be less than welcoming of her and her partner at a large Mormon pageant held in upstate New York.  Her observations were interesting, in that the only folks who were angry or otherwise offensive were the “Christians” outside protesting.

It seems to me that Christian is as Christian does — and if the Mormons think Christ is their savior AND they are treating others with love and respect, then the Christians were inside the pageant — not outside protesting.

This is so true about Cancer…

Permanent link to this comic: http://xkcd.com/931/

I had no idea about this — and, since my chemo was 3 years ago this summer, I’m happy that I’ve had clean scans so far…

But the idea that I’m in “remission” is kind of weird… I just had to put this out here… ’nuff blogging for the night!

Duck Camp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In High School I spend some time at the duck camp with my dad.    The adults liked to stay up late drinking whiskey and telling lies. Then they would send us kids out at 0-dark :30 (a half hour before they went to bed) to sit on the bog and save a spot for them.

There were only two rules:

If a man takes a playboy to the outhouse………..Do Not Disturb……unless you want to see something you can’t unsee!

Second, I got mine, where’s yours?

What this rule meant was your responsible for your own crap……..if you didn’t get enough to eat or you can’t find your hip boots……….tough shit.

Duck Camp is a lot like politics:

Democrats – I have less but I’ll help you find yours.

Republicans – I got mine and yours – Where’s yours?

Tea Baggers -  I’ve got mine and Ill shoot the first black lesbian who tries to take my guns!!!!

Paternalism or a good idea?

There’s an idea floating around out there to dispurse student loan / grant money every two weeks…

In some ways it seems to make sense — students aren’t as likely to blow their living expense money at the beginning of the semester and then have to drop out to pay the bills.

On the other hand, it seems as if the “paycheck” wouldn’t be all that wonderful anyway — and coming every two weeks it might not be enough in two weeks to cover rent — and the students would have to get a job anyway.

Andy’s take on it is that they don’t pay it back for you, so you should be able to choose how you manage your money.  I tend to agree — for the most part.  What should happen is that students should have more access to meaningful work-study jobs — thus, they’d get both a paycheck AND student aid…

Solving the worlds problems.

Politics continue to be a major source of stress and frustration for me, so today I spent a lot of time coming up with the answers.

There needs to be a living wage guarantee. The concept of Minimum wage has failed.  In my younger life, working in food service, I had a deal with myself. The job I accepted would have to pay 10.00 per hour. There was hardly ever an issue with that and I usually did much better. We are more then 20 years past that now and I regularly see jobs posted for 7 bucks an hour. Costs have outpaced our shrinking wages. In 1987 a year at St Thomas in St. Paul would cost you 10 large.  It’s now 45k. I bought a brand new car in 1991 for 9000. A Kia now is 19.

How about a flat tax?  Nobody get’s a break. Everyone pays his share. Exceptions would be…….if you are an unfortunate or have a legitimate reason, you go to social services and you are assigned an advocate. This persons job is to figure out what your malfunction is and support you in getting your issues fixed i.e. treatment for illness, education, daycare etc. etc. We already have this, it’s called welfare and it is a sleazy poorly run bureaucracy. Why not just do it right?

On the other side of the bank account you have the extremely wealthy. You are subject to the same flat tax, but if your lifestyle requires 12 cylinder sports cars, mansions and yachts you will be exposed to a luxury tax.

Businesses too, no excuses, you have to pay.

Our Declaration of Independence suggests that we should all have the opportunity for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. These are called unalienable or natural right’s.

In my thinking………..the natural right to be healthy is included in our right to life.   I do not think our health is a business proposition or by definition, insurable.

Shortly after Patty found out she has serious breast cancer, she found herself in the business office at the Oncologist’s office having a discussion about the amount of equity in her home and 401k program in case she had to spend her last dime to stay alive. She did not celebrate her unalienable rights that day.

When you get a job these days, you get a thick booklet written in lawereese that describes what your not going to get. It also describes how they are more than willing to help if you get injured on the job. Silly really, because that is already covered under workman’s compensation.   So for $50.00 a month you can get what  you already have.

How about the simple idea that as Americans we take care of each other? My friend Pat would not agree with one word written here, but he is taking care of me by serving our country. He knows he has my respect.

On turning off the Cable…

I’ve been thinking about my expenses lately, and I came to realize that I’m not getting my $87 worth out of the satellite TV — it’s going… soon.

Andy and I don’t watch a lot of TV — his parents have it on nearly all the time — so we end up listening to it, but not actually watching.  The thing is, especially since our Media-free adventure in the mountains, along with our summer vacation without TV, we’ve come to see that we really kind of prefer not to have one…. so, I’m going to turn it off.

We noticed that without TV on, we found other things to do — work on photos, read stuff, have a conversation, listen to music or just enjoy the quiet.

I told Max I was turning off the cable — and he was kind of horrified — what, no cable?  He had a little fit at the thought that I may not have TV at my place… not that he spends a lot of time here, but the general concept seemed barbaric to him.

I’m not one of those academics who rejects screen time — I like my video entertainment as much as most folks, but the fact of it is that I can use Netflix and DVDs for my entertainment and get exactly what I want to see.  No commercials, no news breaks with hysterical interpretations of world events, no re-runs… none of that.

Netflix and DVDs also give me exactly what I want, when I want it.  Feel like a movie, snuggle up to the computer and make it happen –

So — soon, the satellite will be gone — and I’ll be without cable TV for the first time since I was in middle school… hmmmm….

Really, IT — seriously?

I kinda think this happened to me… and worse…

Grade entry drama…

Before we left on vacation I tried to enter grades — the system rejected me saying the grade window wasn’t open for my courses.  I e-mailed the Registrar and got a “it should work now” response.  I tried when we got back and it didn’t work — the registrar thinks I’m doing something wrong and I need to CALL her… umm… nope.

Today I sent a screen shot of the rejection message – we’ll see how this goes — meanwhile, it’s been nearly a month since the end of classes and some students are getting a bit tense — and I don’t blame them.  We’ll see how she responds, or doesn’t to that message… frankly, I don’t want to rearrange my general lazy summer pattern to call her when it’s convenient to her –

School e-mail fail..

While on vacation I tried to access my school e-mail — once it worked fine, but the second time it was a no go.  I figured that there was some decent reason and didn’t sweat about it…

When we got home, I tried again — and again… at odd times of the day.  Each time, rejected.

Today I finally went on campus and found out why — my password was expired.  No e-mail notice — nothing… just rejection.  Ummm — I’m faculty,  I don’t sign into the mother-ship-system all summer — and that’s the only means of notification that our passwords are expired…

Ummm… yea — smart, eh?

 

The founding fathers…

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The conservatives, tea party people and all the other right-wing wackos seem to be all about the founding fathers’ intentions for the country…

For them, it’s mostly the case that they want their guns and they don’t want women to have abortions — because those are the conditions that the Founding Fathers had for themselves…

Andy got me thinking (in a post he hasn’t published yet) about the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — from the Declaration of Independence.  Some folks would argue the the Declaration isn’t the Constitution — but, I think it’s a good indication of what the founding fathers were thinking.

The context for the statement is important (yep, I’m a philosopher… get over it..)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

There’s a lot in this paragraph… for my purposes, the idea of unalienable rights stands out.  This means that simply by being a human being you have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Just by being born human — to put it simply ALL human beings have a right to these things…in Venn diagram speak, this is an A claim… see below…

If every S (person) is P (a thing that has these rights) — then, there are no people who don’t have these rights…

The tricky part is that our system seems set up to be that only folks with cash have access to the means to continued life..

If you are in the lower-middle class economically, your healthcare is quite precarious.  You probably have a job that pays your small bills, but you have no savings.  You have no real safety net in case you miss a week or two of work for something like a mastectomy or chemo.  You’re faced with the prospect of being evicted because you can’t pay your rent, or death…

Not exactly a decent choice in a country with plenty of resources.

I’d also like to note that the Declaration indicates that the justification for government is to secure these rights for ALL persons… not just the wealthy.  If it’s the case that the government acts counter to this purpose, changing the government is justified.

hmmm…. revolution anybody?

I now own a couch…

I didn’t buy this one…. although it looks like a fantastic “egg” couch — but, kind of complicated for long movie watching sessions…

I did decide to buy a couch today — and, ta da… I bought one.  It’s off-white leather, comfortable and very affordable — all in all, a good deal…

It will arrive on Monday or Tuesday — I can’t wait!