Author Archives: philosophocle

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About philosophocle

Free-thinking centrist Libertarian, straight, married, white Southern male. I'm UNreligious to the point of being virtually anti-religious, and I don't vote simply because Libertarians can't win & I won't support another party I don't believe in. I also prefer to use my own brain & form my own opinions. But I sleep good at night knowing I'm not sheep nor living a lie.

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

Jimmy Kimmel: smartass, funny, stupid — all at once

Jimmy Kimmel is a comedian I’ve always liked, although in a way that I have a devilish greed for chocolate — knowing it’s no good for me, but the weaker side of me fails in the face of temptation.

Kimmel promoted a video prank where parents told their kids they ate all their Halloween candy & then filmed the kids’ response, which was usually crying.

Obviously this is a bad thing to do for a kid’s psyche as they will probably carry that with them for the rest of their lives depending on their age, and/or they will grow up thinking it’s perfectly normal to do cruel pranks for your own enjoyment at the expense of others.

It’s this sort of parenting that breeds bullies.

Now the real shocker here is that Kimmel’s Facebook page had this prank posted, and the “likes” outnumbered the “dislikes” 20 to 1.  Appx 95% of people in a “survey” covering appx 50,000 people think this is funny & normal behavior/parenting.

That’s what we have to overcome.  Bullying in all its forms has got to stop, as well as acceptance of it, applauding it, or turning a blind eye to it.

This isn’t Kimmel’s only problem — he’s upset a lot of Chinese people with another recent skit he did with kids in which one kid suggested we kill everyone in China to get rid of the debt we owe them.

Adding all this to his misogynistic Man Show resume (I know it was a parody show — it was funny most of time to me also) doesn’t help him at all.

But is this the entertainment & values that America wants?  We are progressing in many ways, yet digressing in many others.

“Are you sure Hank done it this way”?

I read a “reader’s response” editorial in a newspaper recently where a respondent was mad about a comment an earlier respondent had made.  The earlier comment was that Alabama shouldn’t have any problem naming a stretch of highway after anybody, since they’ve already done the same for Hank Williams (1923-1953 — this is the guy they usually refer to as Hank Sr, except that he isn’t a Sr. & Hank Jr isn’t a Jr. — that was a marketing ploy by Jr, which was the smartest thing he ever did), as if you couldn’t get much lower than naming a highway after “Ol’ Hank”, and proceeded to call him a drunken country singer.

Like the 2nd respondent, I also took exception to this, but only because he left out his heavy drug use — he should have called him a “drunken addict”, and a dumb & ignorant one at that; you see, I’ve always been a stickler for the truth, no matter how unpleasant or unpopular it may be.  Anyone who’s a drug addict or alcoholic is stupid — education & intelligence otherwise notwithstanding.  

The 2nd writer simply said that the previous writer was dragging Hank’s name in the mud. 

I counter that 2nd respondent’s opinion that Hank “Sr.”, with his own shortcomings (such as drinking to excess & being fired by the Grand Old Opry for it & his drug use), had already dragged his own name & reputation into the mud, so he shouldn’t have a problem with being dragged there again, and don’t forget that he was a heavy drug user also, and that combination is what was alleged to have killed him in his sleep in the back of a car on the way to a gig on New Years Day, 1953 by a number of writers on the subject.  For the record, the official autopsy said he died of heart failure, but 29-yr-old men typically don’t just die from heart failure in the back of a cab unless they’re abusing their body or have a disease.  he actually had a disease — his back pain was very bad and caused by spina bifida, a birth-related dysfunction of the vertebrae that people typically live with forever nowadays if they get past their childhood & their life expectancy is as normal as that of sedentary people being that they typically don’t get the exercise needed for true longevity, but in those days, adults did die early in their 20’s & 40’s as a result of it.  I agree that he might have died early anyway due to spina bifida, but that’s not what killed him, just like Marfan’s Syndrome didn’t kill Abraham Lincoln — though he may have had it & it might have killed him soon, Booth’s bullet did it, not Marfan’s.

Now that’s getting deep in the mud, and that’s the way ol’ Hank woulda done it; I’m just surprised his ignorant, loudmouth, jackass son didn’t die in the same way at the same age, but maybe he’ll follow him in his senior years if he mixes some drugs & booze, as that’s the way Hank woulda done it and that’s the way he actually did it if you believe some who’ve researched it.

It’s not all black and white

I’ve referred to this before, but not only are the answers to our society’s problems in shades of grey rather than black or white, so are our races & the way we view them.

Our society doesn’t have a clue as to how bigoted we really are until we actually stop & think about the people who we call “Black”. For the record, I prefer the terms Black & White for those races because I don’t use euphemisms, except that I’ve somehow gotten trapped into using the word “issue” at times when I mean “problem”, at least when I trying to sell a “problem” on somebody as an “issue”, but I prefer to call the so-called African-Americans “Black” & the Caucasian European-Americans “White”. So sue me or call me archaic in that respect; I can live with that, but let’s call it what it is.  After all, aren’t Egyptians & the various Muslim-based Saharan tribes of North Africa & the whites in South Africa actually African-American if they come here to live, even though these people don’t have black or dark brown skin?  Calling someone who’s Black an African-American isn’t being completely truthful, and to step away from the word “Black” by Blacks means that they’ve accepted that the word “Black” is a negative connotation that they don’t want to be a part of, and that’s truly lamentable, as we White people are the root cause of that.

We call Maya Rudolph & President Obama “Black”, but they are neither — they are mixed-race, being 50/50 White & Black, and since the term “mixed race” implies “impurity” as to race & because they have an ounce of Black blood (the ancient “one-drop” rule), our society automatically calls them Black, which is a negative in the eyes of White society if they have any color other than White in their ethnicity.

But the fact is, they’re as White as they are Black if they’re 50/50 White & Black. So think about this — if they aren’t called “White” because they aren’t 100% White, why should they be called “Black” if they’re not 100% Black?

As far as changing society’s ills & our preoccupation for what color you are, it won’t change socially until there is a desire for change in the masses, and it probably won’t change in our lifetimes and probably not in our grandkids’ lifetimes either. Blacks have been free for appx 150 years and it’s been a slow climb to get where they are now (which isn’t nearly where they should be by now & not entirely their fault by any means), and a lot of their brothers & sisters haven’t made the climb very well, if at all. They have freedom, but they don’t have true acceptance or universal social equality here or abroad, and they have a lot of problems within their own society that might not be cured anytime in the next 50 years — it took the White Italian immigrants about 100 years to rise out of the slums and be accepted as mainstream Americans & move to the suburbs, and there are still times that they have trouble gaining acceptance among the more pearly-white Americans of Northern European backgrounds.

What to do if your pension is claiming overpayments made to you . . . how about only a 3% payback?

I’m not a lawyer, but if your pension or any other monthly payments have been partially or wholly confiscated due to alleged overpayments, whether accidental or otherwise (assuming they aren’t fraudulent overpayments), you may have at least 2 fairly cheap & quick legal options to possibly reduce that to PENNIES on the dollar . . .

1) File suit against the pension payer in your state/county Small Claims Court.  You don’t need a lawyer, usually costs about $200 or less to file using their standard “EZ” form & you usually get heard quickly, like within a few months.  Complain that you don’t owe anything beyond the Statute of Limitations for debts in your state & cite the State code/statute number that says that.  You can find your state’s statutes online.  In my state, it’s 3 years.  Don’t let them argue that it’s a Breach of Contract, which is an old excuse creditors use to try & get around the debt statutes, as that’s 6 years in my state.

The caveats to this are that in some States’ Small Claims Courts or District Courts, you can’t bring an “equitable action” against an entity.  An equitable action is one where you are asking for something to be done that isn’t monetary-related, per se, e.g., asking for a reduction of debt, or a reversal/recission of a particular condition that isn’t monetary in nature.  You may also be hemmed in by the monetary limits of the court.  In my state, it’s a $10,000 limit.  You may have to file in the next level of court, which in my state is Circuit Court, but even if you can’t do so on your own there (which you typically can do, it’s just that the standards are higher for your complaint as are the rules of evidence & civil procedures — I’ve represented myself more than once in Circuit Court & won), you can typically hire a hungry lawyer for around $1,000 upfront plus whatever he can collect in lawyer’s fees from the defendant when you win, which is all but assured under the debt statutes, but make sure he includes the awarding of legal fees to him in your lawsuit.

2) If you’re in dire straits & your credit rating & the status of your other debts/contracts or home rental/lease is not an issue, consider filing Chapter 13 bankruptcy.  You can not only ask for an injunction against the pension being withheld (it might get paid to the BK trustee temporarily, but your lawyer might can get it released to you as an undue hardship), you can also typically finance the legal fees as part of the deal, as you’ll have to have a lawyer in BK Court, and if your income is low, they will reduce your debts to a level you can afford to pay, which means they may make the creditors accept as little as 5% of what you owe as payment in full.  So if you owe $60,000 in overpayments for 12 years, you might succeed in getting that reduced to $15,000 in Small Claims Court or Circuit Court (the last 3 years, assuming your state’s debt statute is 3 years, less whatever they can’t collect beyond that date as time marches on until your court date comes, assuming they haven’t file a suit against you to “toll” the statute from the date they file & serve you), then you could go bankrupt against that & maybe get it reduced to $750 (5%) with payback over 5 years if your income is very low, which is like $30/mo payback with the legal fees of appx $1,000 added to the balance.

How does a 3% pension overpayment payback suit you?

The Anti-Hero is the new hero

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Look at the characters that are the stars of some of the most popular TV shows over the last dozen years.  The heroes aren’t the good guys anymore — they’re the bad guys.

  • Dexter (“Dexter”) – Serial killer
  • Vic Mackey (“The Shield”) – A really bad cop & murderer
  • Tony Soprano (“The Sopranos”) – Mob capo, murderer, serial philanderer, you name it
  • Tommy Gavin (“Rescue Me”) – Alcoholic, schizophrenic, serial philanderer, constantly assaulting people, homophobic, sexist, racist
  • Walter White (“Breaking Bad”) – Drug dealer
  • Nancy Botwin (“Weeds”) – Drug dealer

If you look within the motivation of each of these “bad guys”, you see that each one of them doesn’t necessarily want to be a bad guy, but that it was an easy road to take to get them out of their problems & deliver themselves to the place they want to be.

If you look even deeper within each show, virtually every one was created by or starred an actor who was a child of a Baby Boomer, or otherwise born in the 1st half of “Generation X”, i.e., 1963 to 1973.  You can probably blame sanctimonious Baby Boomers for creating these kids and endowing them with their own self-indulging personalities & entitlement disorders.

Look at how the same demographic & their kids eat up this type of character.  They see these characters & their situations in themselves, and they feel that it’s OK to skirt the law, hurt others and generally dispose of people like yesterday’s trash SO LONG AS it helps them get what they want.  Scruples & integrity are not found in Generation X’s dictionary, and they’ve passed that mentality down to the latest generation of adults, Millennials, who grew up having all the latest gadgets & the instant gratification of microwaves, cell/smartphones, the internet, etc.

Even the so-called good guys have massive flaws in their character.  Look at Dr. House & a host of shows with (mostly) good guys who have a lot of “issues”.  People are so soft nowadays that they can’t even say the word “problem”, much less deal with them.

Don’t forget that Boomers started this fringe behavior by worshiping their own anti-heroes long before these shows came about, like James Dean, Marlon Brando, the TV show “Dallas”, the Godless music called Disco, the Me Decade of the 70’s, protesting, drug use, etc.

Yes, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, assuming it ever falls & instead decides to stay attached to the limbs — more adult kids are living at home with their parents than ever.

The 3 Commandments

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Forget the 10 Commandments — George Carlin has already downsized those to 2 anyway.  Here’s the 3 Commandments we Americans should adhere to — all Americans should have:

#1) Access to adequate & free medical care, regardless of income level.  Sure, those with money will have access to faster & better care, but that’s capitalism.

#2) Adequate & safe minimum free housing, if they can’t afford it.  Not slums, but decent accommodations.

#3) Free adequate & nutritious food, should they not be able to afford it.  Nobody in America should be starving or malnourished, but it’s happening.

I’m not saying they should live like kings, but they should have safe & adequate medical care, housing & food free of charge to some degree.

If they’re sheltered & working, whether in a rusty trailer, an old apartment, a suburban home or a mansion, they should have access to free basic medical care paid for by our government.  No, it might not performed by the greatest specialists in the world, but it’s adequate medical care & they should be able to get what they need, including any medicine or surgical procedure in a timely manner.

If they NEED shelter, whether working or not, they should have free (if unemployed) or low-cost access (if employed) to at least an apartment or trailer that provides the minimum adequate shelter for their family size, i.e., 2 people per bedroom & 3 people per bath.  I’m not talking about a high-rise condo or a home in your neighborhood (NIMBY, you know), but safe & adequate shelter somewhere, paid for by our government via our taxes, and also subsidized by deleting unnecessary government programs & other political “pork” projects that serve to help no one but the rich & privileged, who don’t need our help at all.  I’ve been a long-time advocate for a bipartisan government agency that is given a mandate to delete a certain portion of Federal spending each year.

If they don’t have food, they should have access to getting free meals when needed.  I’m not saying steak & or a premium vegan menu, just adequate nutritious hot meals 3 times a day.

Why?  Because we’re all in the same boat.  We’re all human, and we’re all Americans.  We all have compassion in our minds, but we seem to oppress it as much as possible.  “Hmmm”, as The Church Lady might have once said: What would Jesus do?

How do we pay for all this?  Simple — downsize the overblown military starting first with their ridiculous defense spending (we have more military spending than the next 10 kazillion countries combined) & their overblown worldwide presence (we don’t need air bases in many of these places we have them, including many in America); cut out all the “political pork” programs we subsidize annually (mostly hidden inside of bills that have nothing to do with them); heavily raise taxes on the wealthy & on corporations & remove their tax breaks that limit that tax; nail the large estates (I say that’s those over $2 million) with a hefty estate tax & disallow all the breaks they use to get out of it; levy a small flat minimum tax on all religions (I know — separation of church & state, but I can dream, can’t I?); eliminate the subsidies & expenditures we make for people & programs that obviously don’t need it (we have a National Helium Reserve that’s costed us billions that they’ve been trying to delete for appx 20 years now with no luck); and eliminate all those gov’t agencies that employ people with overblown salaries who do pretty much next to nothing but live off the gov’t teat, the same teat they don’t want the poor to partake upon.  And a final salvo the GOP-ers will like — pay the Earned Income Credit in 12 monthly checks instead of a big check they simply blow once a year — look at all the interest the gov’t will make floating it for a year.

After all, isn’t all of this what Jesus would do?  Funny how the right-wing chooses which of Jesus’ teachings to adhere to.  Of course, that assumes he really existed in the first place.  If he did, how come The Jerusalem Times (of that day) had all kinds of contemporary news reports & special editorials about all the other figures of history in that time, yet nothing about Jesus until 40 years after he allegedly died?  That’s a whole other blog entry.

The real beavers of the recent Congressional dam

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As the world knows know, the GOP-ers & the Dems are duking it out on Capitol Hill as we speak.  The GOP-ers don’t like it that in March, 2010, over 3 years ago, Congress passed the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act, and made it the law of the land just as many other laws have been passed, like Civil Rights laws.  Imagine the Republicans trying to hold up gov’t funding to stop that already-passed & signed law.

They’re currently trying to grind the government to a halt (which they’ve succeeded in doing for the most part already) and are willing to once again take a chance at not only causing a default of our nation’s debt (theoretically possible, but actually unlikely, as the president could step in & order payment of the debt by citing previous case law and/or legislation), but surely may cause its credit rating to soften once again, which happened the last time they put a stranglehold on government with their strong-arm tactics.  Turns out that the majority doesn’t rule — all it takes is a minority of a few motivated politicians to change the world.

Just in case you were wondering who to blame for the roadblock, here’s your smoking gun, straight out of a Texas babe’s mouth . . .

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the man who’s wanting to be the next George Bush, has recently said the following, and I quote:

Cruz: “We (read: Republicans in Congress & their idiotic supporters of this action) should look for 3 things — #1: We should look for some significant structural plan to reduce government spending.  #2: We should avoid new taxes.  And #3: We should look for ways to mitigate the harms from ‘Obamacare,’ ” He also said that the debt ceiling issue is the “best leverage the Congress has to rein in the executive.”

It’s an attempt to turn back a law agreed upon by a majority of both houses of Congress & signed by the President into law just a little over 3 years ago, a law which mainly helps Americans who have no insurance & can’t get it (“uninsurable” is what they call sick people) or who can’t afford it, and hurts those who have to provide the insurance (i.e., it greatly affects the bottom line of these rich & greedy insurance companies).

What’s amazing is that GOP-ers (both the politicians & their fanatics) actually believe (or at least act like) it’s going to affect them, but it really doesn’t affect much of anyone who has employer-based or gov’t-based insurance, and at last count, that was 80% of Americans.  If it does affect you, it’s simply because you have crummy insurance or your employer and/or your insurance company is using this as a (pardon the pun) lame excuse to raise your premiums, which they all did.

It’s really nothing more than a wedge the “White People of America Who Are Asses” are using to continually divide us socially & politically.

Losing my religion

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Most Gen-Xers know the song “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., and many thought it actually had something to do with religion & an individual parting from it.  However, it’s merely an old Southern term for a person about to get really angry, but in this case, I’d like to use it literally . . .

To believe in things like ghosts, angels & divine miracles, you’d have to believe in an afterlife in which we flourish, or at least exist on some level other than as worm food or ashes, and I (and many other intelligent people) don’t believe this as it’s a totally ridiculous premise not backed by the facts as we know them, and to believe in something (to “have faith”) against known facts is foolish.

There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that an afterlife exists, which is why you have to have “faith” that it does contrary to all the known evidence & facts we have. If there were a God who was all-knowing and all-powerful, surely he (or she — I doubt it’s a woman as I’m not the first to point out that a woman all-mighty deity wouldn’t screw things up this badly) would not leave us guessing as to whether he (or she) exists and would let us know in no uncertain terms.

Of course, other than the fact that He hasn’t shown his cards to us ( or not yet as the faithful will say), you could argue we don’t know if there’s an afterlife or not, which would fall into the realm of Agnostics, who you might say are those that are too scared to admit that there is no afterlife and prefer to sit on the fence for various reasons (fear, doubt & theory all come to mind) rather than take a position and be Atheists.

Most people want to find a reason to blame things and not take responsibility for their own fate and pawn it off to some unknown deity who controls it, like if He (or She) exists, our alleged supreme being has time to deal with every picayune issue on this planet considering that we have many billions of galaxies full of many billions of planets out there, all of which he allegedly created, and keep in mind that some people don’t even believe the Earth is more than 6,000 years old!  

Religion is for the weak, the ignorant, and those who make money from it.

Odds & ends, and Jenny McCarthy is a dumb blonde

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A collection of thoughts that I didn’t feel like writing an essay about, but they needed to be said . . .

> How many kids have died & will die because Jenny McCarthy and her ilk are telling people not to get vaccines?  The basis for this highly-inaccurate stance was from a single discredited 1998 article by a nutbag, in my opinion.

> I used to lament how stupid the average American is, and I’m not surprised when TV crews take their video cameras to ask the “man on the street” what they think about something, or ask them questions that any reasonably-intelligent person should know, yet their answers are constantly wrong & their ideas are ridiculous.  I used to get very upset at this widespread ignorance, then I realized that if everybody were smart, it would be very difficult to make money in this economy.  Our economy depends upon people being stupid enough to not shop for prices, not vet out things before trying them, not reading the information that’s there for all to see, not handling their money or businesses properly, and there are a host of other reasons why stupid & ignorant people are necessary for the economy to flourish.

> It’s not necessary nor wise for a writer to rape a thesaurus when they write; in fact, it usually makes them worse.  Besides the fact that they’re simply showing off either their alleged wider-than-average vocabulary (or their ingenious use of a thesaurus), considering that the average person doesn’t understand those words simply prevents them from getting their point across, and it’s highly pretentious (virtually everyone knows that word — just because it’s long doesn’t mean it’s bad; I mean, “mayonnaise” is both long & a foreign word, but we all know it, right?).  I’m not ask them to dumb it down necessarily, I’m simply saying that it’s not important to use words that are not normally used in colloquial (everyday) speech.  See, I provide explanations when I dip into my thesaurus, but why not just say “everyday” like I would have, had I not been wanting to make a point?