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LULU

She's  a spritely little ball of fur. Sort of black, brindled with brown when in the sun. Down the left side of her nose is a white strip, shaped something like a fat b. A thin line of white extends across her jaw down to her collar-bone across her thin chest and down to her sternum, like streak lighting. This is a kitten that will be a beautiful adult cat. She is settling in to her new home and to me. Part of the settlement involves her bolting out of my room when I return from my many bathroom breaks overnight. She loves to run around the kitchen, hiding behind the electric range. She also makes a bee-line to the bathroom. Catching her is not easy for an old man with stiff joints.  She sleeps comfortably with me, though not where I would like, in the crook of my arm where I know where she is when i turn over. We will be working on that. So far in her short time as my Lulu, I have taken her with me when I venture into the public. I don't want her to have separation anxiety. A...
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I'M FINE.

k Decisions become more difficult as we age. Will buying a newer used car be worthwhile, the closer I age until I must let others drive? When do I finally listen to that desperate phone sales-person trying to sell me burial insurance? Should I cut back on ice-cream, or chocolate. But things could be worse and it pleases me that it isn't.  My doctor wants me to have a colonoscopy, my third. I got scheduled for an appointment a week ago. It's in Feb. My follow-up email was that I needed to pay $446. Up front. My previous two appointments were covered. I rescheduled until March so i could afford my twice-yearly car insurance. The out of pocket cost fell to $296 in my march appointment. Does that mean i get a cheaper physician? I hope the meds are as pleasant as before. I got some new pants for Christmas. My waist size is a couple sizes smaller. I'm happy with that. My new blue jeans are made for mature men. They are called Ballroom jeans. My visits to ballrooms, rare earlier, ...
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BEAN COUNTERS

Back when Henry Ford was figuring out the assembly-line process, and spreading fascist propaganda, there was a work theory called Taylorism. It's proponent was Frederick Winslow Taylor. It taught management how to break up factory jobs into small, easy-to-manage, units. Workers preferred to think of it as monotony. Later, as I took my place in the work-a-day world, they were known as efficiency experts, or "bean-counters". The corporate world is like that. I make a distinction between the corporate world and capitalists. Capitalism is your local pizza parlor. Corporatism is the international food conglomerate targeting the local pizz parlor to cut part of their business away so that Dominoes can make their P&L look good.  I suppose there is something remarkable about capitalists hiring an extra employee who is not producing product. But underlying this workplace annoyance is the reality that the excess profits earned by the bean counter makes the P&L look good, wh...
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AN INQUIRY INTO THE MAGA MIND.

There's something wrong with Republicans. A mind-worm maybe, or a dimming of intellect. I can't begin to guess the cause, but such behavior is well-represented in the realm of Maga, and undetected by the non-maga corpse of the Republican party. How, for Instance can a preening woman who shot her dog for not being sufficiently obedient, and then shot her goat for the period on the point of the exclamation mark, be appointed to any public position, let alone an office where such fraught language as Homeland Security is used. In what alternate universe can a woman be appointed Director of National Security, when she had been investigated and not cleared, by the FBI as a national security threat. That woman is Tulsi Gabbard, washed in the cleansing waters of maga-dom. And how do you explain Steven Miller, Trump's Reichsmarshall. He is a ripe  pustule of fascism, ready for Dr Pimple-popper. There are more, there's not enough time.  Indulging in speculation, which I am often ...
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BEING RELATABLE

Too many years ago I was transitioning from a 9th-grader in middle school, to a Sophomore in high school. It is a cruel turn-about, from the status of the oldest class in middle school to the youngest of the high school rankings, all while acne and hormones are raging. Across Highway 214 from high school, however  Was Burkes Big Wheel, for soft  ice cream, a block from there was Smith's Corner Grocery. The convenience store of today, 7-Eleven and Plaid Pantry, did not arrive until the late 1970s. To call it a corner grocery was an exaggeration. It did sell cigarettes and candy. The Smiths had a son in his mid-20's. He was male because that was the only option he had. Some of us called him a 'morphadite', a mis-application of hermahrodite, which people 1000's of years before our time, new more about than Republicans today. As time progressed gays and lesbians were finally allowed legal humanity. Transgenders have not yet achieved that status. In June of 2024, I becam...
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Some thoughts I didn't get to make at a Peace Forum.

Here's my problem with the Republican party as it exists today. I watched you people trap Gary Hart in a honey trap and ruin his political career, for something you people do all the time. I watched you people impeach Bill Clinton for an act that Newt Gingerich and other prominent Republicans could have been tried for. I watched Reagan do away with the Fairness Doctrine, and how the political spectrum has been cheapened since then. We still tried to work with you. We saw you halt the 2000 recount in Miami-Dade County for 600 votes. Three of the people who stopped the recount that sent Bush v Gore to the Supreme Court went on to become Justices on the Supreme Court. You told us, "it's over, get over it". I haven't. We watched you people claim erroneously, that John Kerry shot himself in the butt to get a purple heart. We watched the Republican TV channel get their panties in a bunch over Howard Dean's perfectly normal scream. All of these were designed to weake...
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THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE

My mother used to tell us, "if you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all." Same with my father. Neither of them said anything bad about the other. It is how you raise small children to be tolerable adults. It hasn't worked for a number of reasons. None of them are because I have a hard time being silent.  Back in the 1930s, a philosopher named Karl Popper contributed to the long history of humanist essays, "The Parodox of Tolerance". At the time he wrote this, Fascism was stretching its muscles, in Italy, Germany, Spain-where it was actively taking the country, and Turkey. Concurrently Germany had been bribing US legislators to spread fascist propaganda through Congressional Franking Priveledges, free mail. Henry Ford was handing out free copies, with each car he sold, of The Learned Elders of Zion. The purpose of this influx of German influence peddling was to keep America out of the war Hitler was preparing for. Think about ...
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