Wayward Landlubber

Office of St Peter Celestial Realm Attn. Saint Peter.                                                                                         Office of hypocrisy                                                                                          Liberty University Sir:  I write to request your forgiveness of Jerry Falwell Jr. He feels awful about being caught watching the pool boy shtup his wife. While he feels sorry for Becky, having to find her liaisons in other ways, he has assured me that he will now whack-off watching porn DVDs, there ...

     Those of us of a peculiar persuasion have long espoused verbally, if not by our actions, this simple aphorism. It is an acknowledgement of our place in the world, and an affirmation that money spent in our local community benefits far more than the farm or business, or restaurant where they are spent. This is known by the coldly scientific term, synergy: to work together. The parable of the "loaves and fishes, from the New Testament, is a good example of synergism. The people were hungry, Jesus fed them, and they stayed to marvel at his sermon. But on this subject I am hardly qualified, so I will try some other examples which I may be more qualified to discuss. I will, first focus your attention to the backyard and gradually widen the focus.      There is no greater connection to the web of life than composting. When done right, composting starts with our non-meat kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and eggshells, combined with the dead leaves of autumn, pl...

     As a youth I never wanted to come home from school to smell bacon and onions cooking on the stove. Those smells were a portent to the dreaded liver dinner. Dredged in flour, fried, and served with mashed potatoes and canned peas and carrots. Each medallion of liver, topped with the aforementioned bacon and onions, was in my adolescent mind, the meal from hell. Mother, in a vain attempt to make dads paycheck stretch, would implore us to try a little bit, but my siblings and I would have none of it. To my unformed mind there was nothing to recommend the dish. It didn't taste like meat, it felt grainy against the tongue, and worst of all it was innards. INNARDS! The stuff from inside the beef.Hotdogs (made from pork by-products such as snout, tail, and the occasional meat cutters finger), or Spam sandwiches (made from even worse parts of the pig) did not repel me like liver. All of my mother's entreaties and no amount of ketchup could induce me to change my mind.  ...

     I'm not an educated man. I was able to eke out a couple years of higher education, before THC and LSD introduced me to an even higher education. But I am not stupid, nor am I poorly informed. A lifetime of reading of all kinds has helped to hone my thinking. Exposure to intelligent, funny, and thoughtful people, through what is now called "fake media", has also shaped my thinking. A conservative would dismissively call this a recipe for liberalism. And, in this way, they would be right! Though I am viscerally contemptious of Foxnews and its kind.      I do not know too many conservatives, and those I know well, seem to lack a grounding in this cultural exposure. Those I communicate with do not seem to be able, or maybe don't care, to have a capacity to exhibit  basic spelling and word usage. They have a long history of using, perhaps unconsciously, hyperbolic speech and threats. Our current president is the end result of that hyperbole. The concep...

For many months I felt that Trump must have thought that the novel Corona virus was a book written by Clive Cussler, or some other writer who Trump might read, if he could read.

      The 244th birthday of the United States of America passed recently. Since most of the traditional Independence Day celebrations could not be held we were forced to face probably the biggest existential threat to our existance in my lifetime. It is not a single threat, but comes from multiple directions: we have a pandemic that shows no sign of waning. This is further complicated by a president that refuses to wear a facemask, and insists on throwing his people into a petri dish of Corona virus by putting them in close places with no demand for masks. We face an economic crisis brought on by that pandemic, and the necessary closure of businesses. Additionally there is ample evidence that much of the financial relief passed by congress is going to the richest businesses. We face a climate which is warming and its concomitant ecological damage. Some 96% of climate scientists agree on this danger and that it is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Only businesses...

     Trump wants to declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization, even as he encourages the white backlash to the George Floyd killing at the hands police. ANTIFA, for those too dim to understand, stands for anti-fascist. If you are against anti-fascism you are by implication, FOR fascism or tolerant of it. Toleration is always desirable, but some things can never be tolerated. This group of deplorables, dare I say "basket of deplorables", includes racists, misogynists, homophobes, and fascists. Why pick on them, you might ask? The answer is that they are intolerant of the people they have targeted. Donald Trump deliberately encourages this open hatred because he is one of them. Tolerance allows expression even though it may not be practiced by the individual. Intolerance implies a complete denial of whatever activity is not tolerated. Intolerance eventually leads to abuses that can't be tolerated in civil society. This dilemma is confusing to us liberals, we are usually more ...