10:01 – Yesterday, of course, was very hard for Barbara, as it was her first Mother’s Day without her mom. We did a Costco run and dinner with Mary and Paul. Neither we nor they actually needed much at Costco, but I think it did Barbara good to see them and relax over dinner.
Kit sales remain very slow, although we’re building like crazy. Come July, August, and September, things will reverse. We’ll be shipping kits much faster than we can build them. We’re in pretty good shape on component inventory, so for now I’m concentrating on bottling chemicals that have long shelf lives.
Here’s an article from Forbes about a survey that says 3/4 of Obummercare signups already had insurance. I wonder if the White House will admit that or yell “Koch Brothers!!!”
It’s all just a gigantic scam. Eventually we’ll realize that what Bob said is true: they’re gonna end up grabbing everyone’s retirements, pensions, SS, Medicare/Medicaid, 401ks, etc., etc. and lumping it all together for easier and faster looting. We’re basically on our own for med care and personal/property protection now and any honest medico or cop type will admit as much; we’re all just swirling down the toilet. That womb to tomb socialist nirvana is only for the One Percent; the rest of us have a dog-eat-dog version of capitalism gone berserk in favor of the former and against the rest of us. Our corporate fascist oligarchy supports and pushes this completely.
Minor clarification, OFD: what we have in the US isn’t really capitalism and hasn’t been since before I was born. It’s currently some blend of crony capitalism, fascism, socialism, and treason. (That last bit is a reference to Clinton and other politicians and businessmen declaring various information to be national secrets and then selling it to the Chinese and others for personal gain.)
Speaking of BJ Clinton. Biden has been throwing jabs at the BJ era as the beginning of the financial crisis. 2016 primaries should be popcorn chomping fun.
Agreed, SteveF, that the current system is a blend of those ideologies you mention; I persist in calling it capitalism because its basics are still observed to an extent; but yeah, it’s a bastardized mix of stuff and not nearly what it was supposed to be. The treason goes back further, beyond Larry Klinton and his Star Wars bar scene entourage (apologies to Don Imus); at least as far back as Pharaoh Roosevelt II in 1933 and the virtual capitulation to Stalin’s Soviet regime for all practical purposes; see Diana West’s volume on that for a very good treatment.
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character
by Diana West
Link: http://amzn.com/0312630786
That’s the only reason I’ll pay attention to the coming election charade debacle; for popcorn chomping fun.
Have any of you been told to “check your privilege?” You know, like mine, as a straight Caucasian male who’s had everything just handed to him?
http://takimag.com/article/how_to_check_your_privilege_every_3000_miles/print#axzz31RVhP6CQ
Interestingly, “check your privilege” came up elsewhere recently.
I’m just waiting to be told this chit. I will probably just tell them “Fuck off, cupcake” but I could go into a pretty decent summary of my family’s struggles to get to the lower middle class and more or less stay there, as none of us have gone beyond that yet. From the early colonists facing brutal savages (after that first generation, anyway) and all the country’s wars, and the whole Westward, Ho thang, to my paternal grandpa being orphaned and sent out to foster families and working on farms, separated from his siblings; to my other grandfather doing three years in North Afrika at age 39 with five kids at home. Or my dad getting back from the north Atlantic when the Good War ended to dig ditches for the city’s water lines and later becoming a senior supervising boiler and machinery engineer without having finished high school. My mom having had her legs broken as an infant to straighten them out; that’s how it worked back then.
Etc., etc.; I’m sure most or all here have similar or worse tales to tell of struggle and heartache and misery and death and destruction. These ass-hats telling us to check our privilege can go piss up a rope.
So far as I know, none of my ancestors were involved in expanding the settlements against the resistance of the savage natives. So far as I know, none of my ancestors were here until about a century ago. White ancestors, that is. My amerind ancestors, to the extent that they existed and were not a figment of my mother’s increasingly fragmented and inconsistent memory, were the savage natives. Your ancestors were involved in oppressing my ancestors. I think it’s about time for you to check your privilege, mister.
Don’t you feel privileged? Someone’s finally told you to check your privilege. No, wait, something’s recursive in that…
Hey OFD, you might like this:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
“Your ancestors were involved in oppressing my ancestors.”
Well, first we oppressed them and then we married them. I am part Amerind, due to the intermarriages that took place in the early 18th-C in southeast Maffachufetts and the Islands. In fact, I look more Amerind than the local Abenaki peeps who live around here and a little to our north where they have an HQ (tribal council) in Swanton.
Lowest difficulty setting my ass. Not anymore, and not for most of us in this world. There is straight white male, say, at a prominent Northeast university grad school; then there is straight white married (breeder!) Christian (Christer) war-veteran ex-cop male. The atmosphere back then exuded poisonous vapors, I kid you not. Why I wasn’t simply assassinated is a mystery.
If all goes well I’m out of here in an hour. The physiotherapist wanted me to stay longer…
I thought I was hallucinating when I read this headline:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-13/pope-offers-baptism-to-martians/5448548
Far cry from the 50+ years my grandmother spent, being suspended from communion for marrying my grandfather, a Disciples of Christ Christian Church member, who refused to convert to Catholicism. After he died, the RC church let her have communion again.
That is why I am an advocate for open communion. Most Churches of Christ have open communions (should be all but I have no idea). Sounds like the new Pope might be also.
Chuck, it’s none of my biz, but it sounds like your grandmother got a raw (and wrong) deal; she should have been able to attend mass and receive communion on her own, whether or not she attended with her husband. He, of course, could not receive communion. This is not to say that in the old days and I’m sure currently, clergy did not make some horrendous mistakes like that. The only way she might have been denied, so far as I know, is if she’d been married before and then divorced, without the corresponding positive intervention of the Church afterward.
Incidentally, or not, what Francis said about baptism was dead on the money; we do not deny baptism to children. Any children. Martian or otherwise. Communion is a whole other kettle of fish.
“Sounds like the new Pope might be also.”
I take with a very large, jumbo, in fact, grain of salt what the MSM has to say about the Pope; seizing on off-hand comments he makes in informal settings and declaring them ex cathedra Holy Writ is totally bogus. There will be no big changes in doctrine or dogma during his leadership, believe me. Communion is not supposed to be taken lightly; I have to have a pretty clear conscience and preferably go to Confession (now stupidly called “Reconciliation.”) beforehand, which I do. It can’t really be prevented, obviously, but not every Tom, Dick and Harriet can bebop on into the parish church of a Sunday mass and receive communion.
As one might imagine, I am not an open communion advocate or supporter.
I went to a Catholic mass 20+ years ago with some Catholic charismatic friends and when the time came to have communion (just the bread) I declined as the priest believed (and I didn’t) that the bread was the actual body of Christ.
Nowadays I would take it – that the priest (wrongly) believes that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ is irrelevant. But there was no questioning of people presenting for the wafer, which is as it should be.
I guess I believe in “restricted” communion: anyone whose life doesn’t contradict their profession should be allowed to partake. I’ve been to a few different Anglican churches here in Oz lately and not been questioned before communion.
I object very strongly to so-called “infant baptism”, an oxymoron if ever there was one. Only those who make a creditable profession of faith are eligible, and of course that rules out babies, atheists, Muslims, etc.
If the bread and wine actually became the body and blood of somebody else, partaking would make the recipient a cannibal.
Which reminds me of a Demetri Martin joke: If you’re a cannibal, every fight is a food fight.
Standards are changing for radio broadcast. The classic rock stations around here now leave in The Who’s famous line, “Who the fuck are you.” We still take out (or alter) “fuck” and “shit”, but leave in “crap”, “ass”, “asshole” and “son of a bitch”. I recently redid the George Carlin 7 words comedy bit and edited only “fuck” and “shit”. As Carlin says in that bit, the whole thing started when a minister in Louisiana objected to the word “tits” in a broadcast and the FCC deemed it offense enough to start fining stations and compromise free speech. Carlin said there are two big knobs on the radio — one is the volume and the other changes the station, ‘but it’s not surprising that you’re uncomfortable with two big knobs, Mr. Minister.’
I seriously doubt we Catholics will ever see eye to eye with some of y’all on such topics as baptism and transubstantiation. Thus mote it be.
I agree with the late George Carlin on more than a few matters, and that is one of them; don’t like the broadcast, use one of the two knobs. And otherwise STFU.