So many things to read...

There are over four hundred items in my newsfire thing, with more being added every few minutes. There are some amazingly intelligent people out there blogging about politics. (There are some mind blowingly stupid ones too, of course. Bell curve, and all that.) During the 9/11 media blitz bullshit, one of the things I heard was on the Diane Rehm show, asking people how their lives had changed since the attack. I was thinking about it - I've become more political, more politically active. Hardly a week goes by that I'm not emailing somebody about something. (I have my congressman's number in my phone memory, how's that.) I've always been a registered independent, but I'm actually thinking of changing that now. While I still think the two party system is flawed and crappy, it's what we've got right now, and if I stand on the outside saying "hey, it would be better to do it THIS WAY" but don't actually get in and work with the current system to make a difference... that's less than helpful. (And besides, I'm tired of not being able to vote in the primaries, dammit. Unless I move to Wisconsin or something, I'm pretty much out of luck there.)

I have to say, tho, Bush's administration has made it easier to become more politically active. I've never become so incensed so frequently. If I didn't spew about it here, my head would have exploded by now. So the links I put here the other day are just a tiny example of the stuff I skim on a pretty much daily basis. If anybody's interested in the list of what I read, don't hesitate to ask. There's some great stuff out there. At some point I'll finally have my website back up with all the

OH MY GOD IS THAT ACTUALLY THE HUNGARIAN AMBASSADOR?

Linkfest continued

I wonder if I can get this in a poster?

I bet this has a whole lot less inaacuracies than the ABC crapu-drama that just aired. Wonder if anybody in town wants to set up a viewing.

I need to keep this link available the next time I bother trying to talk to MB about the idiocy of this war. (I've been tempted to email him and ask if he's heard more from his "friends on the inside; those guys who are still in the business"... but I can't keep myself from making snarky comments, and besides, if in the last conversation all he could respond with is that I didn't know enough to converse with him about the topic, then fuck him. That still makes me angry.)

Hey, those of you who own a TiVO or DVR or whatnot? Please consider this as a great way to give feedback to ABC if you're as cranky as I am. This list is a little more complicated, but still has some things that the uber-busy mensch can fit into their day of trying not to fall under the wheels.

Saw this quote today from an older article:

... the national-security choice for ordinary Americans in the post-September 11th era is... "Who's going to keep me from getting blown up by terrorists?" And that's the question Dubya makes sure to answer clearly (... "defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home").

Yes, it's bullshit, but at least he's answering the core question in a way that phrases like "liberal internationalism" never will.

So, my advice to my fellow Democrats is this: Stop trying to articulate a progressive foreign policy vision. Instead, tell Americans why Dubya's foreign policy is going to get them blown up, and what we need to do to prevent that.

That still does seem to be the issue. Trying to explain nuances of international policy and the psychology of human beings to some people seems to be a lot like teaching a pig to sing.

Linkfest

I wish I'd learned better how to knit before Megan moved north. I'm going to have to save these instructions for later.

Wasn't there a website like this that let you do church signs? If not, we should make one.

This makes my month. It's things like this that change the world a few people at a time. The guys are now reading rather than comparing dick lengths - progress!

This is disturbing in an amusing way. Think we're heading here?

I'm not sure why, but this made me think of my bro-in-law Monster...

I'd love to see a brain scan of President Bush to see if it's similar to what's talked about in this article.

I treasure articles like these that still make me laugh - even if it's a sick, tired kind of laugh - about the insanity going on in our government.

This just amazed me.

More to come, I have about a hundred tabs open in firefox. (That might be why my poor iBook is running slowly...)

Note to self: Books to read when I'm not drowning in life and have brain cells to spare:

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency by Ahmed Hashim
Conservatives Without Conscience by John Dean
The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind
The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh
The Politics of Truth: A Diplomat's Memoir by Joseph Wilson
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Scheuer
Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & The Future of America by Michael Scheuer
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News by Eric Alterman
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz
Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago by Michael Ledeen
Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War and Walked Away by Michael Ledeen
The Bush-Haters Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years by Jack Huberman
Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush by The Center for Constitutional Rights
Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Dangerous Presidency by Senator Robert Byrd
Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore
Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Hijacked the Conservative Movement by Philip Gold
After the Neocons by Francis Fukuyama
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet by Jim & James Mann

And for my kids: Is There Really a Human Race? by Jamie Lee Curtis


there are many more. Maybe I'll add them as I think of them. (that "people who bought this book also looked at this one" link at amazon is dangerous)

Things I wanted to share that I've found lately...

From Crooks & Liars:

Let’s play a game of "Name That Representative"

In August of 1966, a young Republican Congressman from Illinois gave a lengthy speech about the need for Congressional oversight over Vietnam war related contracts.

This congressman insisted that only "an investigating committee to be controlled by the minority, can assure vigorous investigation . . ."

By the way, the company that had obtained the contracts that this congressman railed against was Brown and Root - which later became Kellogg, Brown and Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton that is now the largest contractor in Iraq.

Facing South :

As a Republican congressman from Illinois in 1966, [he] raised questions about the 30-year association between Halliburton’s chairman and then-president Lyndon Johnson. "Why this huge contract has not been and is not now being adequately audited is beyond me," [he] said. "The potential for waste and profiteering under such a contract is substantial."

The name of that Congressman questioning long term relationships with war profiteers and demanding minority party oversight?

DONALD RUMSFELD

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From A Tiny Revolution:

Two Disney Movies, Two Titles Containing "9/11," Two Strangely Different Outcomes

Why is the U.S. media such an eternal catastrophe? My standard explanation is that 99% of the disaster can be explained by the fact the media is (mostly) giant corporations, required by law to make as much money as possible. No conspiracy is required.

But...maybe I need to revise the 99% estimate downward:

ABC, after exploring all advertising avenues, has decided to show its upcoming two-part U.S. film, "The Path to 9/11," commercial-free when it airs next week...

In yet another surprise move, ABC has revealed it will also offer both parts of the film as a free online download at Apple's iTunes Music Store and stream the miniseries on its own Web site, ABC.com.

So..."The Path to 9/11" cost $30 million and was written and directed by conservative ideologues. Factually speaking, it's predictably craptastic. And yet Disney is glad to lose at least $30 million on it.

By contrast, this was Disney's treatment of another political movie—one that eventually grossed over $200 million:

The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday...

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

''It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,'' this executive said.

So, right wing movie: Disney happily loses $30 million by running directly into a "highly charged partisan political battle."

Left-wing movie: Disney refuses to make gigantic amounts of money because they're so very scared they'll "alienate many."

Hmm. This would almost make me believe the media is conservative rather than liberal. Thank god we got the dispensation on this one that allows us to ignore all evidence forever.

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From The Agonist:
The Reconstruction of New Orleans vs. the Reconstruction of Lebanon

Immediately after the war in Lebanon ended, I predicted that Hezbollah would do a better job rebuilding southern Lebanon than the US government (federal, state and municipal) had done with New Orleans. Joyce Chediak has done a comparison:

In New Orleans, the people who could not self-evacuate the city, including the sick and people too poor to afford cars, were left to their own devices when the waters rose. Many of the most vulnerable drowned in their homes.

The tens of thousands of old, sick and infirm people who the city encouraged to gather in the Superdome until the storm passed were left there for five days. They had no medical attention, no sanitation, little water and food. Many died. Thousands of other flood survivors stranded at the Convention Center suffered the same fate.

All day the television networks showed footage of people stranded on roofs waving hand-made “help me” signs and others in the Superdome begging for water and medicine for dying seniors. Yet FEMA head Michael Brown said he didn’t realize the extent of the crisis until four days after the levees collapsed. Then he took another four days to rescue the survivors.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the force fighting and defending the villages, at the same time started helping the population as soon as the Israeli bombing began. The Lebanese resistance provided the ambulances and scores of searchers who pulled people from the rubble. They helped organize getting tens of thousands of refugees to schools, public parks and private homes (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 16).

In Beirut alone, Hezbollah organized 10 mobile medical teams that cared for 14 schools each, in two-day rotations, helping 48,000 people. Another 70,000 were treated in houses by other professionals.

In a Hezbollah kitchen near downtown Beirut, volunteers prepared 8,000 hot meals a day — part of a daily total of 50,000 they distributed across Beirut, reported the Monitor.

So. They handled things better during the disaster. How about after?

On Aug. 14, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said he would give money for “decent and suitable furniture” and a year’s rent to any Lebanese who lost their home in the war. Beginning in the very poorest community of Dehiya south of Beirut, the resistance is distributing $12,000 per family, a huge sum in Lebanon where monthly rents average $300 (New York Times, Aug 16).

A year later after the New Orleans flood, “Thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end. ... All you see is debris, debris, debris. ... The reminders of death are everywhere” (New York Times, June 21).

Little to nothing has been done to rebuild the 9th Ward. This majority African-American community is filled with rubble, coated with mud and mold. Advocates point out that much damage, such as advancing mold, could have been stopped if the area had been cleaned early on. Many residents would have gladly organized their own cleaning brigade, but they were banned entry for the first four months after the flood.

In Lebanon, on Aug. 14, the very day of the cease-fire, while Israel was withdrawing its troops from Southern Lebanon, there were reports that hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying the damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings were, just a day after a cease-fire began, fully passable....

...In September, the home insurance giant Allstate refused to reimburse New Orleans homeowners who had flood insurance policies. The company claimed the homes were destroyed by the wind, not by flood (MarketWatch, Sept. 20, 2005).

In October, the Bush administration reneged on its promised to provide thousands of mobile homes as temporary housing for returning refugees (New York Times, Oct. 31, 2005).

After promising New Orleans federal housing loans to repair and rebuild, it became apparent that no special loan provisions had been made for victims of the flood and that the White House was pushing for hurricane disaster-recovery loans at a higher rate than any other administration in the last 15 years (USA Today, March 15)....

...Meanwhile in Lebanon, a Hezbollah spokesperson announced, “We have full information on all the buildings that have been destroyed or damaged. … “We will either pay for new flats or rebuild the buildings that were destroyed”
(Aljazeera.net, Aug. 19)....

...“There are people from Hezbollah coming regularly to check on us and give us bread and other basic items,” said Mohammad Bazih, 30, from the village of Baakline. Residents of Zabqine, where tobacco is cultivated, told the press that Hezbollah was providing them with basic services (Beirut Daily Star, Aug. 22).

Bottom line. Hezbollah is more competent than the US government, the State of Louisiana and the municipality of New Orleans. It is also better at fighting wars than the US (who is 0/2 where Hezbollah is 2/0) and, based on actions, not words, it cares more about the people it rules.

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From AMERICAblog:

GOP Congress blocked Clinton push for anti-terror legislation
by John in DC - 9/04/2006 11:10:00 AM

CNN, July 30, 1996

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, emerged from the meeting and said, "These are very controversial provisions that the [Clinton] White House wants. Some they're not going to get." ....[Hatch] also said he had some problems with the president's proposals to expand wiretapping.

So Bill Clinton, rather than just breaking the law as Bush did (then again, perhaps this is why Bush broke the law - he knew from history that the Republicans controlling the congress would oppose his efforts to expand wiretapping), decided to go to the Republican congress in 1996 and ask them for increased authority to do more eavesdropping in order to stop the terrorists - stop September 11. Senior Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, one of the GOP's top picks for the Supreme Court and a GOP committee chair, objected.

The Republicans stopped President Clinton from getting all the tools he needed to stop the next September 11 - well, no, actually they opposed giving President Clinton all the tools he needed to stop the actual September 11. Could September 11 have been stopped if the GOP had given President Clinton the tools he requested to stop Osama and Mohammad Atta from killing 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington?

Maybe we need to ask the Republicans up for re-election why they wanted to appease the terrorists?

President Clinton urged Congress Tuesday to act swiftly in developing anti-terrorism legislation before its August recess.

"We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue," Clinton said during a White House news conference.

But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures.

There's even an audio clip of President Clinton practically begging the Republicans to give him the tools he needed to stop Osama and the terrorists. Trent Lott said no. Orrin Hatch said no. Do these men really deserve to run the Congress during a time of war?

Who the fuck put up Bob Casey against Santorum?

For the love of god, I'm watching Meet the Press and based on this interview, I wouldn't vote for either of these schmucks! Why, when they asked Santorum about Iraq and terrorism, and he responded with IranIranIran didn't Casey come back with "What you've just heard is Senator Santorum following the talking point memo he got that says IranIranIran 24/7 - and doesn't address any of the issues of the current war in Iraq that we got into (that has nothing to do with the war on terrorism), nor does it address the war on terrorism! Iran is another upcoming problem that this administration is rapidly exacerbating on the horizon, and based on how they've handled Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war for the hearts and minds of people across the globe, including right here in the US, I wouldn't trust them with grooming my DOG, let alone trying to finesse a delicate situation in Iran!"

Have I mentioned this yet?

I'm sort of half-assedly looking for a job. I've been out of the rat race for four years now, and it's a little disconcerting. I've not yet been able to find the old resumé that has dates of employment and whatnot, so I have only vague recollections about when I worked where. ("Lessee... I was working there right after high school but before I got married, so that must have been in 1994...")

I've been having pretty severe memory problems - my psych nurse points out that during times of high stress and not enough sleep that you're not likely to have a decently functioning memory. Looking back on the last 15 years, I realize that I've been under a lot of stress (99% of which was self inflicted, but the source doesn't matter) and rarely get enough sleep, so it's no wonder that large portions of my past are blanks. Disconcerting, yes. Surprising? No. My memory works by association, so if it's jogged, sometimes I can dredge something out of the darkness - but some periods of time are just gone.

How did I get off on that tangent? Anyway, I'm finding myself dealing with my old habits of self-destructiveness in the workplace. I'm talking myself out of applying for jobs. Amazingly enough, I've only been fired twice. One of those was a "we're not working out" at the 6 month period at a state job, so it was only a semi-firing. (At least that's what I tell myself, ha ha.) The other one was being let go from a consulting firm after sending the president of the company an email that informed him that the raging bitch that I think was my boss at the time was a detriment to his company, as she caused personnel problems (horrible turnover, lack of motivation, etc.) She was a backstabbing, incompetent woman who was sleeping with one of the employees that she supervised, and it was not pretty. Interestingly enough, the CIO caught my email before it was delivered and called me into his office and asked me if I REALLY wanted that email sent. I think I decided not to bother sending it, and I was let go not too long afterwards. I'm not sure if that email played a role; the project I was working on was done, so it might have been pure coincidence.

Here we come to my basic trouble - I have a Quixote complex. I think it was awful that in the consulting firm I worked for we were doing a project for the counties that basically plugged data into last year's form and didn't really do any analysis for them. I think it's awful that corporate thieves get away with stealing millions, and people that steal hundreds go to jail. I think it'sasininee that CEOs are making 500% more than their employees. I think politicians who capitalize on the deaths of 3000 people to control the electorate should go to hell and be tormented by the 25000 people a day who die of starvation elsewhere, just to give them some perspective. I have a desire to go to theology classes just so I can walk up to those morons on the street corner holding signs that say "The wages of sin is death" and expose to them (in Jed Bartlet style) their own stupidity and hypocrisy. I wish I could beat through Creationists' skulls that science doesn't address spirituality and that there is no conflict (unless they're those literal 6 day people, oy vey).

But it's now 1am a day or two after I started this post, and I'm going to finish it and work on other things, dangit. Or maybe sleep.

Finally!

J's been bugging me for forever now to watch Sideways with him. He finally got the movie from a friend, and we watched it tonight, whilst drinking wine and eating cheese crackers.

It was wonderful.

As a depressive, it was amazing to watch Giamatti's character. He nails it in so many infinitesimal ways.

Khang came over this afternoon and I baked him a peach cobbler for a get together tomorrow - it was fun, talking to an intelligent adult! :) Small world - guy he met online thru his car club thing turned out to be from the same town in Vietnam that Khang's parents are from. So they're all coming over to visit. They live in Houston, and have never had peach cobbler. (That's a sin, y'all.) So I told him to bring a recipe and the ingredients, and I'd be glad to play baker. (Hey, I get to bake it, but not eat it - better for my waistline, dontcha think?) I actually tried a recipe that basically called for pie crust. We'll see how it turns out - I've not made pie crust since I was nine. With the leftover peaches, I'm going to make us a small one that uses the biscuit-on-top method. (Much less effort that way.)

Speaking of baking without eating, if you've not watched Ace of Cakes on the Food Network, I highly recommend it. It never fails that I'm watching it and shouting to J "OMG, you have to see this!! This is EXACTLY how I would do it! And they made everything edible! And the bastards have all the tools, too, dammit..." I'm seriously thinking of writing him a letter offering to work for him for free for a week or two. *swoon*

Quote of the night from J: "When the Vatican looks Left of our Right, things are bad." (They just announced xtian zionism promotes something something and perpetual war. Heh.)

And now I'm going to go peruse the news whilst tipsy. Half a bottle of shiraz will do that to you. (When you're a lightweight like me)

AGAIN, I STATE MY BET: We will be in Iran by the end of 2007. I saw on one of the news shows as I flipped past it a nice little graphic that said "The Case For War" - and rumours from Washington include people saying "We've already lost the American people, so we might as well do the right thing."

Anybody want in on the betting pool?

I know this makes me really weird

but then, didn't you all know that already?

I was reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back the other day, and it struck me... how big were those cats by the time you got to the end of the alphabet?

So I'm sitting here with a calculator and a notepad figuring it out.

I've also noticed that I've started typing things in scrambled and dyslexically. I'm wondering what brain changes that heralds.

Had my first mammogram today. As I told J - not nearly as bad as I've heard. But then, maybe when your breasts are as floppy as mine, it's not an issue. (He groaned at that.)


EDIT
Okay, so I finished my calculations. I used algebra again! Which I didn't have to, actually, after really getting my brain engaged, I realized it was just multiplication of fractions. Yay for spreadsheets.

If you've read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, you know that at some point he needs help, and lifts the hat off his head, and VOILA, there is little cat A there to help him. Each cat successively lifts off its hat and there is another cat all the way to Z (who has VOOM under his hat, don't ask me.) I judged that the Cat in the Hat is about 6ft tall, and his hat 2ft tall (look at the drawings, don't you think so?) so of the sum total of cat + hat, the cat is 3/4 of the total and the hat 1/4. With a handy dandy spreadsheet (not a notebook, no) I come up with this:

Cat in the Hat: 96 inches (both cat and hat)
Cat A: 24 inches
Cat B: 6 inches
Cat C:1.5 inches
Cat D:0.375 inches
Cat E:0.09375 inches
Cat F:0.0234375 inches
Cat G:0.005859375 inches
Cat H:0.001464844 inches
Cat I:0.000366211 inches
Cat J:9.15527E-05 inches
Cat K:2.28882E-05 inches
Cat L:5.72205E-06 inches
Cat M:1.43051E-06 inches
Cat N:3.57628E-07 inches
Cat O:8.9407E-08 inches
Cat P:2.23517E-08 inches
Cat Q:5.58794E-09 inches
Cat R:1.39698E-09 inches
Cat S:3.49246E-10 inches
Cat T:8.73115E-11 inches
Cat U:2.18279E-11 inches
Cat V:5.45697E-12 inches
Cat W:1.36424E-12 inches
Cat X:3.41061E-13 inches
Cat Y:8.52651E-14 inches
Cat Z:2.13163E-14 inches

Okay, so the cats would be fricking invisible to the human eye LONG before Cat Z ("Z is too small to see")... J decided to fuck with my mind by suggesting the cats were crouching in the hats, rather than standing. *sigh* okay, I'll let my obsessive compulsive nature take over here...

If you're crouching, I'd say

oh, fuck it. It's midnight, and I'm going to bed. Carry on where I left off, readers.

Since the post is no longer available for interaction

but I just found it now, and had written down a few quick ideas:



You know, this is a great conversation and I'm being exposed to things outside my general bubble (which is wonderful - being a stay-at-home-mome I don't have many conversations like this at the moment) but I have to take issue with your answer to #4, Michael. My mother is a teacher in a private religious school, so the pay scale isn't the same as public schools in our area. (She has been teaching 20 years there, and I think she makes about as much as a starting teacher in the county, I'm not sure.) But the pay isn't what I'm arguing about - although I have to say, I DO think teachers are underpaid; to have the money for school systems coming from property taxes insures an unequal system that is dysfunctional in many ways)

Wait, I'm getting off what I wanted to say. You said "relatively low hours" - in my experience, good teachers work significantly more than 40 hours a week, and spend their summers taking continuing education classes, going to conferences to learn better ways to get the kids engaged, and tutoring kids to pay the bills in the summer.

For what it's worth, I've long been curious about the voucher system - I don't believe the public school system has any monopoly on an ability to educate; having been to both a parochial school and a public one I have a little experience in both areas.

I have to agree with Shimpei - parents are morons. (not that it was said quite THAT bluntly) Look around at the parents we have today. I'm not sure if they are unaware of the "incentives" you mention for them to care about their children's education, or just don't care, but the end result is the same. Perhaps it is a self-feeding cycle - the public school system sucks, so education end results decrease, so the parents of the next generation and the next generation and the next generation are unable to see a way to make a difference (or indeed unable to even see that a difference is needed)...

You have parents that don't know what grade their children are in. They don't know the teacher's name, they are happy if their kid doesn't end up in jail; doing homework is waaaay down the totem pole of worries. And not to throw the absolute lowest in there as a red herring, perfectly normal lower middle class people seem to have gotten the idea that education is the school's job, and they don't have to worry about it. They don't remember much from their middle & high school years, and they turned out just fine - that attitude is not lost on the kids, trust me. And even upper class, educated people can be stupid - take this example from my mother's school. This parent is an upper class, college grad (at least Masters level, possibly higher), running for the school board mother. One of the exercises my mother did with her students was to send home something that the student had to 'teach' to the parents, have a family discussion over dinner (you understand it better when you have to try to explain it to somebody else, right?), have the parent sign & bring back. After the first one, this student said her mother said she didn't have time. My mom thought there might have been a wire crossed in communication, after all, this parent was on the school board, obviously she had time for her child's education, right? Nope, when she asked the woman, she was told "yeah, the first couple were okay, but I just don't have time for that."

Don't even get me started on parents who believe that the bible is absolute literal truth; they're the reason we have a book at the Grand Canyon claiming it was made by Noah's flood; why we have a president in the White House who said that God told him to invade Iraq and believes he was called to lead the nation at this time...

Okay, this made me laugh

This chick has an intriguing idea: http://porphyre.livejournal.com/515857.html

Here's what she said:

Focus on the Family, the horrid anti-gay evangelical church based in Colorado Springs that wields too much power for anyone's good, has a store on their website that will give you books, CDs, and DVDs absolutely free of charge. Usually people pay for their items by donation, raising millions of dollars to help Focus on the Family produce more hate-propaganda featuring "experts" on homosexuality who claim it's a curable "sickness". (They're practically defined by their book A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Course, there's no mention of having less kids, which is the only proven method. No, no, you shouldn't use birth control, that would be wrong. They need more worshippers, how dare you prevent god's will.)

It's a little bit time-consuming, but not enough to deter me. (Nor should it you). The chance to take money out of their pockets is too useful, not to mention satisfying.

1. Go to www.family.org and look for the "Resources" link in the blue bar on the left-hand side, right above the "Search" box, and click it.

2. Under the "Resource Category" menu on the left-hand side, you'll notice categories such as "Homosexuality" under "Resource Category." Me, I went straight to the CD's and DVD's under "Resource Format."

3. Go through, find something you like, such as the recently released movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Chronicles of Narnia Radio Theatre Complete Set, suggested donation US $79.00, or the three disc Les Misérables soundtrack. It's not a very wide range of products, but there's bound to be something either you like or you could use as a sweet gift for someone else. Click the "Add to Cart" button.

They won't send more than $100 worth of materials for free in any given shopping trip, so be sure to go through a few times, until you're sure you've dinged them.

4. Select "Add New Shipping Address," decide to send it yourself or someone else, and once you're done picking up to $100, click "Proceed to Checkout." Some people have been sending items to themselves to sell later on eBay, some have been ordering the more controversial items as conversation pieces or educational props, (as anti-anti-propaganda), but I plan on using mine as gifts, mostly. I've found no reports on receiving Focus on the Family junk mail after inputting an address, so I figure it's fairly safe.

5. The next screen asks you to sign-up for an account and give your information. Fill it out with fictitious information, enter whatever name and address you like. You might want to make up a phone number too and an e-mail account too. After filling out all the required fields, click "Proceed to Checkout" one more time.

6. This will take you to the "Here is Your Cart" page. You may have to re-enter your data again after this part to actually confirm your account. Eventually, you'll get to the "How Much Would You Like to Donate?" page.

7. Select "Enter other total amount" and enter 0.00 as the amount you would like to pay. (Don't put in a dollar sign or it will ask you for credit-card information.) Don't be fooled by the field in the lower-right-hand corner that shows you the suggested donation amounts, simply Proceed to Checkout.

8. The next screen is a guilt screen, to make you feel bad about how little you donated. ignore it. Ignore it utterly. Think of how many people they're persecuted and had in their "gay kids can be cured" camps. Just proceed to checkout again.

9. Click "Checkout Now."

So, I'm curious - what do you think? I'm going to head over to the website to see if they've changed things yet...

I learned something new yesterday

The kids and I went to the Junior Museum. (Or the Florida Museum of Science & Natural History, or whatever the hell they changed the name to that I can never remember.) It was the best time to go - drizzly, so it was cooler - no people, and almost all the animals were out.

We were coming down the walkway to the Florida Panther enclosure and I heard the most god-awful howling and hissing and growling, I thought "holy shit, are they fighting?" Came around the corner and - um, oops. Those two panthers are a male and a female, yup. From those noises it was hard to tell if she was enjoying it or suffering it. I asked one of the workers later if their panthers were able to have babies - she said no, he'd been vasectomized. (It didn't occur to me until later when mom asked - why on earth would you want an endangered species animal vasectomized? Wouldn't you want them to have as many babies as possible? Maybe they're siblings.)

Well, I got to ask the question...

but I never get to ask the followups I want to, dammit.
Amazingly enough, Diane asked some decent followup questions during the entire conversation; I was impressed.

So, according to the experts (whatever their qualifications; I should look that up) of course the US couldn't manage a ground force invasion of Iran, we're too busy in Iraq. Air strikes, sure. Supporting internal dissent, yes. (We're probably already doing this.) They would HOPE that Bush would ask the Congress for some sort of resolution. There is no military answer for Iran. We'd have to have 100% perfect intelligence because if we missed some, like the insurgents in Iraq, they'd just recreate elsewhere.

Well no shit, sherlock - there was no military answer for Iraq, either. That's why Bush's dad didn't follow Hussein in after freeing Kuwait - it's not that Saddam Hussein was that hard to take down; it's because of the ball of crap that Iraq becomes afterwards that Bush Sr. didn't want to step in.



Okay, and now on a totally shallow topic, I heard yesterday that Tom Cruise got fired. J & I talked about it, and agreed that he wasn't being fired because of his religion, but because his recent statements and behaviour have made it difficult for the studio to sell tickets. (Which is all Paramount cares about anyway; if you can't make them money, you're out.) Wonder if there will be a lawsuit anyway.

After his oh-so-educated comments about post-partum depression, I personally think he should be committed. I think the reason scientology says psychiatrists and psychologists are so bad and to stay away is because then some of the nutjobs that join the religion would get treatment and realize how fricking insane the whole set-up is.

Then again, (and I've said this before) when you compare the semi-socialist son of a Jewish carpenter being raised from the dead with thetans infesting your body to a god who talks out of a pillar of fire and likes you to cut up and burn choice parts of animals - who's craziest?

Here's why I don't watch CBS, NBC or ABC (let alone FOX)

How to give a realtor proper motivation to sell your house

Tell him you've just received a letter from the mortgage company informing you that if the account is not brought current in 30 days that foreclosure proceedings will be started.

I shudder to think of what language he used when he got off the phone (in his position, I certainly would have cussed up a storm) but he's now in as much of a hurry as I am. Which makes me feel better. Kind of.

So, if anybody's in town and feels like coming and sitting and keeping me company, some adult conversation would be welcome. If Logan didn't have a newborn I'd ask her, but I know how much of a pain it is to function at somebody else's house, and if I went to her house, then I wouldn't be getting any work done HERE.

Garage sale went well; sold some stuff (which is more stuff I don't have to move) and I'll be calling the lighthouse children's home to come get the rest.

Appointment tomorrow to pick up and be instructed on how to use the pulse oximetry machine (or whatever you call it) to find out if I really do have sleep apnea. Whee!

Little girl requested pancakes this morning; she wanted ketchup and mustard to dip them in. I made the pancakes, but I must admit by the time I was done I'd forgotten the mustard. She ate them anyway, amazingly. I'm beginning to develop a complex about the kids not eating what I make them.

I am a soldier!

A Soldier in the War Against Stupidity!

I probably have sleep apnea. Expect to see a whole heck of a lot more energy in these pages if the diagnosis is correct and I get a c-pap machine.

I'm recruiting for my Army of the Savvy & Judicious. (I really wanted to use Bluestockings, but as that implied female only, it was sadly too limiting.)

Off to prepare for garage sale. One man's trash is another man's treasure - hope some people see it this way, so I can get rid of some of this stuff.

Have I created a list of "things I never want to see again" yet?

If I haven't, this is the start of it, and number one on the list of things I never want to see again is this: my husband being taken out of the house on a gurney to a waiting ambulance.

I'm not sure if anything will beat that to make number 1. Hopefully neither of my children, you know?

It's ten PM, and he's evidently fine, I'm waiting to hear more details. I know they're planning on doing a CT scan, that his EKG was okay, that his blood pressure and pulse rate is okay, and that he was cracking jokes in typical Justin fashion. His brother is up there with him, for which I am eternally grateful. They've not admitted him, and it doesn't look like they're going to.

So any well wishes wafted his way would be appreciated.

And I'm going to try not to stress about (and not to let him stress about) the hospital bills. Heh.

I'm sure this is normal

I mean, I know everybody has this kind of stuff happen to them. I mean, heck, poor Dan is running from the cops. But to have Justin have heatstroke from mowing the lawn at the old house; for us to slide into a ditch on Lipona that required a tow truck and some ingenuity (I was sure the side panels would be all dented, but no, it didn't actually come up that high) - the only reason we didn't flip over into the ditch was because Justin knew at the point of no return to actually steer INTO the ditch rather than fight it (which is what I would have done); and to have a phone call from Sharif (who evidently does like it) offering us cash for our old house. (!!) It's either a) a scam b) one of those "buy houses cheap foreclosure guys or c) some rich guy named Sharif d) who may want to not go through a bank and therefore avoid that level of scrutiny. (In that order of likelihood, too.)

This is on top of a normal weekend with two kids under four - tantrums, playing, not enough sleep, going down the escalator, potty training...

Sleeping for a week. I very rarely have had a time in my life when I've not been willing to take that offer.

Off to research...

One of the milestones of parenthood

Taking the doorknob off our bedroom door to let the cat out, as we didn't notice the kids had been playing with the lock, and when we shut the door, it was locked. Oops.

Dangit, am talking with mom and missed the Daily Show. Crap.

Bless my husband, who is putting the children to bed. I really appreciate getting that break; by the end of the day I've lost whatever patience I had with the kids during the day, as a general rule.

and, like a bolt from the blue...

am catching up on over 500 newsfire rss feeds, and saw an item - rumour from the UK is that war with Iran is guaranteed, already planned, and we'll be in it within the year. (This from the same people who were saying that the war with Iraq was planned when the Bush administration was still saying "no, no, it's a last resort.")

Talking with J - and it hits me (yeah, I'm slow)

We went to war in Iraq so we'd have a place to attack Iran from.

I'm sure most of you are going DUH!

We've got flyover rights from Turkey, Azerbaijan, & Turkmenistan; we now have bases & troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and some "staging" in Turkmenistan; Pakistan is our "ally" (altho I'm not sure how stable) - but we needed something close by on their west flank that wasn't just friendly, but was ours. With Iraq, that's it. Iran is surrounded.

Shall we start a betting pool? I'll guess we'll be at war with Iran by early 2007. Place your bet!

I am stunned

The patheticness is unimaginable.

I'm surfing the television. I come across "Cheaters" - a television show made up entirely of video shot of actual people committing infidelities. The intro stated - and I quote - "This program is both dedicated to the faithful and presented to the false-hearted to encourage their renewal of temperance and virtue. " God help me, they have a website.

Later I come across "Who wants to be a Millionaire" and the question is "who was president of the United States during World War I?" AND THE DUMB BITCH HAD TO CALL HER FRIEND.

Fuck Jefferson weeping. I'M weeping.

How I'm keeping myself busy these days, besides the usual housework (mended J's pocket this morning, I feel so domestic), birthday plans for C, unpacking...

heeheeheeheehee okay, this will probably make mostly democrats laugh.

but the good ideas aren't sexy, so it'll never happen, like so many other things that will never happen...

This makes the point that I've been making since day one: this war cannot be won by the military, because they're fighting an IDEA, and people living by an idea... I mean, think of it this way: what if you were trying to get rid of the christians in the US. Imagine a large number of them were fundamentalists that believed enough to bomb abortion clinics, believed enough to strap bombs to themselves and walk into gay bars, or the like. Now imagine trying to kill them all. Doesn't that sound stupid? For every one christian extremist you'd kill, you'd create an untold number more - that person's children, or observers that hadn't quite decided to be THAT much of an extremist, but now had a reason... *sigh*

So let this be a lesson to you...

I've told myself for years not to care what other people think. I've done a really shitty job of it. Most recent example:

My mom (who has said in the past that when I say things like "Argh, the kids are driving me CRAZY today, they make me want to shut them in closets!" she worries that I would actually do it) sees me spank my daughter once (she was doing the flagrantly disobedient, laugh while she's doing it in my face stuff) and now cannot sleep from concern and wants to talk to me about it.

My mother-in-law says I'm doing an awesome job as a mother, and tells my sister-in-law that my son is brilliant, but other than seeing her at school when we were dropping off & picking up M, she's not spent any time with us, so how would she know?

I remembered that my counselor said I should spend less time with my mother. Since he's said that, I've spent more time with her, sadly. J & I never thought my parents would be the ones to spend this much time with our kids. Between that, the money we owe her, and the health problems I help her with (currently it's post-operative wound care kinda stuff) I spend more time with her now than I have in years. And while generally I get along with her better, she also has the ability to press my buttons better than anybody in existence. (Probably because she created most of them, come to think of it.)

I realized just the other day that part of what drives me crazy about my mom is that she thinks I'm brilliant, gifted, awesome, a person she'd be glad to be friends with even if I weren't related - all that gushy stuff. And yet she cannot seem to not treat me like an incompetent moron. I'm guessing it's the result of her fucked up home life, which is why I keep wishing SHE'D go to therapy - but that'll happen when pigs fly. (And don't tell me they're working on that in the labs.)

Add to that, day after tomorrow is my son's birthday. I've sort of put off planning anything - one because I procrastinate almost everything; two because we were still moving up until a few days ago; three because my sister-in-law is going to pop any day now... that reminds me, I've not heard from her in a couple of days, wonder if she's in labour yet?

I'm going to go peruse consumer reports type things about vacuum cleaners, because we're going to need one at this house. The old red one that we inherited from a roommate sometime in the last 4 years is, well, old. I've replaced the belt on it several times. (It doesn't do so well with long hair. Oops. Between living with me & our exroommates, long hair was sort of a staple floor covering...)

Ah, PMS. How I love your mental instability inducing hormones. I've not noticed that the new mood-stabilizing drugs do much, but it's only been a little over a week - I know antidepressants rarely show an effect before two or three weeks; this is probably no different.

OOO! Possible trip coming up... going to do research now.

Notes from the front

I've been avoiding the news for the last week or so in an effort to maintain my mental health. J did, however, read to me the Honourable Gentleman from Alaska Ted Stevens's reason for voting against the net neutrality. If you've not read it, check it out.

Anyway, J was reading it to me because he thought it was funny - I said "don't read that kind of stuff to me! It's not funny, it just makes me want to kill people!"

What do you guys think about sponsoring a mailing to the people of Alaska that include some choice quotes of Mr. Stevens and asking them in large print IS THIS REALLY WHO YOU WANT REPRESENTING YOU IN WASHINGTON?

Lord, if Jefferson could see this, he'd weep.

WHAT THE F&$# IS IT EVER GOING TO BE EASIER?

Okay, so mom's in the hospital. She originally went in to have a seroma removed, as it was grapefruit or more sized and was making it difficult for her to bend over. Not a big deal; not expected to go beyond the fat layer.

Turns out it had grown into the mesh that had been placed over the weak spot of a previous hernia surgery; between that and another hernia that seemed to be developing to the left, the surgery was more complicated than expected. She's in the hospital on a morphine drip. She is, and I say this with much love (and she'd agree with me) a CRAPPY patient.

Okay, so I'm in the hospital with a 3 1/2 yr old and a 2 yr old. That was a blast. Realized that they both desperately needed naps, and mom told me to go ahead and go home (I was originally going to make a pallet for them on the floor with blankets) - so now I'm at the old house; C is asleep and M, of course, never went down after I took her (asleep!) out of the car. Did I mention we're potty training M? She did very well today - she waited until we were in the hospital dining room, far away from my bag of clean clothes etc., to have an accident. Oy.

The power is getting cut off at this house day after tomorrow. We can't get the pressure washer we borrowed from my dad to start. (I fricking HATE small engine things. Lawnmowers, you name it.) I have to be at the hospital at 7am tomorrow so I can talk to the doctor. Our friend Sue (bless her soul) is going to come to our house at 8:30 to watch the kids, because J can't get off work until about noon.

I started mood stabilizer medication last wednesday or so - hard to tell if there's been any difference; I sure noticed the difference when I remembered to start taking my flax seed oil capsules. Regardless, the stress is beginning to get to me. Between my mother, the house, our finances, and my (#*&@(#$*@# feet (heel spurs, and I think I've pulled both calf muscles) and the fact that I have a two year old who's enjoying being 2, and a 3 1/2 yr old who is going through potty training - I'm about to cry for no discernible reason. Oh, and my laptop isn't working as well with Ubuntu as we hoped, so I'm going back to Mac OsX, assuming we can find a #(*#@$@#&( copy, as I've managed to find Justin's original laptop cds, but not mine)

Disobedient children. I'm right on the edge of losing it. Would anybody like to take my kids for a few days? They're stressed out because they've spent so much time at my parents' house and have had no schedule and haven't seen a whole lot of J and I...

Okay, fuck it, am taking the kids and picking up J. Never got M to sleep and she's getting into stuff. Hope all is well with all of you. I'll concentrate on remembering the half-full part of the glass. (Mom came out of surgery fine, the kids are healthy, J's got a steady well paying job, we're living in a nice house, we have a nice car...)

I made the jump!

Okay, it's almost 1:30 am - so much for getting to bed early.

Blew away Mac OSX and installed Ubuntu on my iBook today. Have been putting all my files back on, installing packages, tweaking kernel... so far the only letdown has been Flash problems. (Macromedia doesn't support me, wah!)

Exhausted. Have been for days. So much to do. I hate moving. Lots of news. J not celiac disease, yay! Heard Brandie was pregnant, congrats to her, I know she was trying. I wonder if she still finds being compared to Coulter amusing.

Hope all is well with y'all.

I love weather like this - it means I can get 94.5 FM. New address, phone #, etc. - want them?

A dinner I was proud of

Yesterday was John's birthday (hope he got my voicemail; I still have to take his present to him... hope he doesn't already have it!) and today is Erin's birthday... and last night I made a wonderful dinner and neither one of them got any; that doesn't seem right, somehow.

J had the idea to make stuffed bell peppers and as a treat for M, chocolate fondue for dessert. I made ground pork, rice made with ham stock, onions, fresh garlic, chopped up bell pepper bits (the tops of the red, yellow, & orange peppers we stuffed), pecorino romano cheese, and seasoned nicely.... mmmmmm.

And the fondue was a big hit. I should have gotten a picture of C; he wore quite a bit. He liked the strawberries, M liked the cheesecake (yes, she's my daughter) and J introduced me to Lorna Doone cookies. (bad bad bad bad bad - how have I not eaten these before?) I think J liked the bananas best.

Earlier in the day, I did some voice recording for P's office IVR system. I've discovered a new talent, and it pays... maybe if I get enough of these side hobbies I can actually make some money! Decorative cakes, face painting, voice recordings (I've always wanted to read books on tape...) Afterwards, giddy at having no children, P let me drive his car. WHEEEEEEEEEE! Man, I miss having a sports car. And I've NEVER had a sports car with that much power. *drool* And no, I didn't get pulled over, I didn't wreck his car, I DID momentarily give both him & J a heart attack, but that's just 'cause they're wusses and didn't realize that yes, I had plenty of room going around that car, thank you.

Ran into my old friend/ex-lover/whatever Jake at the comic book store. He looked great; this town is too small not to run into your past everywhere. (That's why I think longingly of moving elsewhere sometimes.) He's one of those people that I have equal numbers of fond memories and awful memories. *sigh*

I'm sitting here at the dining room table stressing out and trying not to. It's making me nauseated. I have to come up with $1235 by 6:30 tonight. It's probably going to mean me borrowing money from my mother again. God, I hate that. I can't wait until the house is sold and we can pay her back for good.

Okay, taking up way too much space on the blog...

I put together the entire conversation here and there have been a few additions since the original post.

Again, comments, opinions, etc. welcome.

And again I say, places to get information would be considered an early birthday present! If my friend here and I can't have a conversation that gets into detail on the Bush administration and what exactly has transpired and our opinions on it, I'm still wanting to have the conversation.

Stef, I respect your "I don't talk politics" rule - I'm sure it's saved you a lot of stress and quite a few friendships. ;) What do you read, then, when it comes to politics? I mean, the left has its Americablog et al, what blogs & news sources do you read that are more right oriented?

I need your opinion...

The following is an email exchange between me and a man I've known for years now.


{moved to webpage because it's taking up waaaaay too much space on this blog page}

He's not responded to that last one yet. The more I read it, the more disappointed I am, really. Prior to this email exchange I'd run into him in Home Depot and discovered that he supported Bush et al, and expressing disbelief I said we'd have to sit down & talk about it. He told me then that there were things I didn't know; that I had to remember he still had friends 'in the business' and that I shouldn't believe the media. When I spoke with him on IM at some point after that, I mentioned that I'd just returned from my first march (I joined FSU, TCC & FAMU students marching on the Capitol demanding justice for Martin Lee Anderson, the kid who died in the Florida boot camp due to "complications from sickle cell trait.") His (very condescending) response started out with "have you completely strangled your common sense?" and progressed to basically saying that this kid got what he deserved, and that he supported the death penalty, etc. I got pretty upset and called him a barbarian, so to be fair perhaps in this email exchange he's still feeling offended by how emotionally I reacted to the IM conversation. (Part of his logic about the death penalty was this: I didn't have a problem killing somebody to keep them from hurting myself, my family, my close friends, or a bystander - so why should the passage of time matter? To this day, I still cannot understand how he could not see the difference between me shooting a man to keep him from killing my husband, or electrocuting a man after he's already killed my husband. To me, the first is defense/preemption - the second revenge. Am I nuts here?)

I used to respect this man, and I made allowances for his overbearing behaviour, his condescention, his faint sexism and misogynism in his speech - I said he was older, he was military, he was a lawyer... but I don't know what to say to this.

After J read this email exchange (I BCC'd him copies) he called me from his office and told me that he was so angry that he was actually sick to his stomach. He said that he couldn't believe anybody that would profess to be a friend who cared about me would speak to me that way.

While that had occurred to me, I frankly have had that happen so often with 'friends' that it's not usually the first thing that comes to mind in situations like this. What I still keep coming back to is this: HE DIDN'T ANSWER ANY OF MY QUESTIONS. I don't understand that. He had no response, no explanation, no reasoning for why anything I mentioned or asked about was wrong, was reasonable, was sucky but unavoidable, etc. - his entire response consisted of patting me on the head and saying that I wasn't capable of having a conversation about it. (Is that what you get out of it, too? Am I reading too much into what he said?)

So I'm asking the general public. Pass it on. To those of you that don't know either of us, what do you think? And do any of you know of any places where the questions I raised ARE addressed? Because I honestly would like answers.

That's it, I'm done.

Was looking back through the calendar - the kids have been sick almost constantly since we moved in here. We're spending $400+ a month on gas, and it suddenly occurs to me that I didn't have such a horrendous snoring problem before moving here either...

Definitely selling the house.

I should be reading more Orwell

If you've not read "Not Counting Niggers" a 1939 essay by George Orwell, you should.

And then come tell me what you think about its resonance in today's news.

Dilemma

Praise Allah, my children are asleep.

So do I take a nap too, or finish what I'm working on?

I have a headache. Perhaps I'll see how much sleep I can get.

Am I thirty already?

Yes, you dope, and you're going to be thirty-one this year.

I was checking my email just a second ago and, getting nothing, (not even spam, amazingly) remembered when I was working for the Department of Labor... I was practically running a mailing list out of my cubicle. It had started off as a Gaelic language list, and a few of us had gotten too chatty, so we created a side list for off-topic conversations. I had a lot of what I would call friends on that list... one of them sent me a stained glass shamrock that I gave to Uncle Patrick this year. What sort of scares me is that I don't remember any of their names. In fact, were I to read my emails back and forth to them, not only would I not remember them, I wouldn't remember saying the things I'd typed.

I know this, not because I have any of those old emails, but because when I Google myself, I find myself popping up on messageboards and having conversations that I have no recollection of. NONE. Usually I'll remember having been active on that board, and having conversations/arguments - but none of the topics will ring any bells.

My brain works almost entirely on association. Take the trip home from swimming at Maclay today - we stopped at the grocery store; J & M went in - C was asleep in the back seat, so he & I just hung out in the car. I was entering data on the really nifty gift J had gotten as a handmedown technology gift and given to me (he knew I'd love it - it's an iPaq) and was entering John's info, having been thinking of him earlier (because he's a sweetie and is watching my kids for me while I go to a psych appt.) I actually had his birthday and his & Robin's anniversary in my phone calendar, and so then started entering Robin's info next. When J got back in the car, out of the blue (to him) I asked if Robin had gotten the Dean of Students job yet. Actually, I'm not even sure if I said "Dean of Students", I might just have said "job" - I forget that people I'm talking to haven't been privy to my train of thought. Needless to say, it took him a few moments of WTF? to catch up to where I was. The point of this little vignette was to show that for outsiders, even if it SOUNDS like I just made a comment out of left field on Mars, I actually DID have a path that got me there.

And the point of mentioning that was to say that even when I read these old arguments, 9 times out of 10 they don't trigger that kind of memory reflex. I'm thinking it might be scorched earth - times of extreme emotional stress blank out parts of my brain. I'm wondering if I'll ever get those memories back, or if they're gone for good...

Did I have a point? I'm not sure. I was a basket case last night and again this afternoon/early evening - I'm guessing it's PMS, as it's getting towards the end of the month. Last night I'd asked Patrick for a humongous favor - to let me practice face painting on him. (J having a beard, that kinda made using him more difficult.) I'd talked to Moira's teacher Nancy and since I used to draw things on the kids' hands every day at the end of school, but hadn't done it in weeks, I wanted to do something kinda special before they left - she said it would be great if I came Thursday and I could do painting then. So I've been perusing face painting sites; getting ideas and tips and looking at step-by-step instructions, and was getting kind of excited about it... which might explain why when Patrick basically laughed incredulously and said hell no, I was more upset than one would assume. (That and I had run out of patience earlier with children, and was getting somewhat emotional - not a good mix, that.) I forget if it were he or J that said that it just didn't sound like something that would be any fun for them. I said well, then the next time either of you asks me for a favor, if it doesn't sound like something that I might remotely enjoy, then you can both fuck off.

Emotional much? Yeah. I put the kids to bed and then stayed in the back by myself. J later told me that he was proud of me for telling him that I just couldn't be around people right now, and taking myself off the bench, so to speak - several years ago I wouldn't have been able to do that. He's right - not that it made me feel enormously better at the time, mind you. J said that game night with P went well and that they had a lot of fun, which I was glad to hear, because god knows I wasn't in the mood. [Stef, btw, I'm talking about Dungeons and Dragons gaming, I forgot I'd never clarified that for you. Yes, we are übergeeks.]

For those of you interested in face painting, there are some adorable and fricking amazing ones here.

It's now 2:07am, and I can't believe I'm still futzing around with my webpage and half watching old West Wings with J. I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Blech

Got a phone call from school; had to go pick up Moira because there was some kind of electrical problem - no power.

I'm watching the video of the White House Correspondents' Banquet. I must say, the conspiracy theorist that lives in my brain says "hrm, interesting that Bush has offered to redo the press area, which means they'll have to move out this summer for some period of time... wonder if Bush et al is looking forward to the press not being as close?"

In reading more about the new book "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism" by Michelle Goldberg, I've become truly alarmed. Truly.

An excerpt:

A few days before Bush's second inauguration, The New York Times carried a story headlined "Warning from a Student of Democracy's Collapse" about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor emeritus of history at Columbia, and scholar of fascism. It quoted a speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and the American religious right. "Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he was quoted saying of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured [Hitler's] success, notably in Protestant areas."

It's not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his forty-five-year-old book "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology," I shivered at its contemporary resonance. "The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith," he wrote in the introduction. "They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness."

Fascism isn't imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History professor Roger Griffin described the "mobilizing vision" of fascist movements as "the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it" (his italics). The Ten Commandments has become a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American right.

True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense, the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group says it exists to "neutralize the destructiveness" of America's "domestic enemies," which include "biased liberal, socialist news media," "the ACLU," and "the conspiracy of an immoral film industry." To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. "AVIDD reminds all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, 'both foreign and domestic,'" its Web site says. "In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies."

According to Jim Cabaniss, the seventy-two-year-old Korean War veteran who founded AVIDD, the group now has thirty-three chapters across the country. It's entirely likely that some of these chapters just represent one or two men, and as of 2005, AVIDD didn't seem large enough to be much of a danger to anyone.

Still, it's worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD's cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America's Christian majority.

"People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of our people," Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin. "Christians represent a huge percent, and we don't believe that a small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage."

I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a red, white, and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was saying that American Jews have too much power. "It appears that way," he replied. "They're a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system. That's the part that makes us very upset."

Ed Hamilton, who'd come to the rally from San Antonio, interjected, "There are very wealthy Jews in high places, and they have significant control over a lot of financial matters and some political matters. They have disproportionate amount of influence in our financial structure."

And more:

Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a fundamentalist Presbyterian, and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.

Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John (R. J.) Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer, churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical law. White-bearded and wizardly, Rushdoony had the look of an Old Testament patriarch and the harsh vision to match -- he called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers, and unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy and "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers believe Jesus won't return until after Christians establish a thousand year reign on earth. While other Christians wait for the messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves. Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists. They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ's return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to a certain apathy -- why worry if the world is about to end and you'll be safe from the carnage?

Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an American who founded L'Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying, "These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results -- including sociological and government results, and specifically including law."

Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas of America as an originally Christian nation. In "A Christian Manifesto," he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American flag, but added, "None of this, however, changes the fact that the United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to government." Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. "It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's Law it abrogates its authority," he wrote.

Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book "The Battle for the Mind." That book married Schaeffer's theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, "Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country -- and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.

"We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders," LaHaye wrote.

As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists together to form the Coalition on Revival (COR) in order to lay a blueprint for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of COR's steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.

Between 1984 and 1986, COR developed seventeen "worldview" documents, which elucidate the "Christian" position on most aspects of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The documents outline a complete political program, with a "biblically correct" position on issues like taxes (God favors a flat rate), public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts ("We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as art or 'free speech'").

In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of a high school curriculum "using the COR Worldview Documents as textbooks." Since then, there's been a proliferation of schools, books, and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian worldview in students and activists. Charles Colson accepts one hundred people annually into his yearlong "worldview training" courses, which include meetings in Washington, D.C., online seminars, "mentoring," and several hours of homework each week. "The program will be heavily weighted towards how to think," Colson's Web site says. It's intended for those who work in churches, media, law, government, and education, and who can thus teach others to think the same way.

Those who don't have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush's born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough's former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, "Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity."

Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they're simply responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. They say they're the victims in the culture wars. But Christian nationalist ideologues don't want equality, they want dominance. In his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."

Whatever happened to "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? or "Love thy neighbor as yourself?"

I'm in the middle of changing medication so my mental resilience is less than normal - and it's not very good normally anyway.

After an interesting exchange with my mother today, I've had enough. What do YOU think?

4:54:36 PM mom: can i have a couple of hours on sunday night?
4:55:10 PM mom: just 8th grade - shouldn't be too bad
4:55:27 PM cearashoffstall: I don't know if J has something planned for Sunday, you'll have to ask him
4:56:55 PM mom: don't have his im addr4ess
4:57:00 PM mom: what is it
4:57:38 PM cearashoffstall: he's not online at the moment, but you can call him at his office I would guess
4:59:38 PM mom: let me get this straight
5:00:40 PM mom: i need to ask your husband if it's okay for you to come over to help me with the proof reading, is that it?
5:01:26 PM cearashoffstall: it's Mother's Day and I heard him talking with the kids and making plans, so yes, you need to ask MY PARTNER if he has something planned so I don't plan something without asking him because THAT WOULD BE RUDE.

she dropped it at that point.

Moira is currently having a meltdown because she wants a diaper and I'm not giving her one. *sigh* I guess this is the equivalent of struggles other parents have with bottles or pacifiers, both of which we avoided.

Pathetic

I've lost track of how many times in the last week I've thought "Ooh, I should make a blog entry about that so as not to forget/see what people think/because it's nifty" and by the time I'm near my computer I am so tired that whatever it is has long since escaped my head....


J picked up Patrick on the way home yesterday - I took him home around 1am and promptly got caught in the high wind - hail - constant lightning - blinding rain trying to get home. I made it half a block before I said the hell with this and turned around to wait it out at his apartment. Considering I'd already been so tired I was falling asleep while driving, this wasn't helping. Fortunately I only had to wait half an hour. Not long enough to watch the Crossing Jordan P TiVoed for me, dangit.

J & I have both lost our keys, so let me know if you come across them.

C is entirely too awake. I'm going to try for more sleep.

Oh, I heard Mamaw & Papaw are coming down soon! That should be fun. Maybe we'll get in a skip-bo game. *grin*

Uber-geek

I Am A: Chaotic Good Elf Bard Ranger


Alignment:
Chaotic Good characters are independent types with a strong belief in the value of goodness. They have little use for governments and other forces of order, and will generally do their own things, without heed to such groups.


Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.


Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.


Secondary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.


Deity:
Hanali Cenanil is the Chaotic Good elven goddess of love, beauty, and art. She is also known as the Heart of Gold and Lady Goldheart. Her followers delight in creation and youth, and work to spread happiness, love, and beauty. Their preferred weapon is the dagger.


Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)




J was a Chaotic Good Elf Monk Druid. We're well matched. {grin} P was a Lawful Good Half-orc Ranger Fighter. (yes, he's interesting like that.)

I want cowboy leg!

I laughed so hard I cried and my stomach hurt - tell me what you think, y'all.

And the good news for the day: not a torn cornea. Massive weird allergic reaction.

I hate unresolved issues

It's one of the reasons I'm such a basket case, I think - I keep hoping for resolutions in everyday life. However, I figured with West Wing coming to a close, they'd tie up all the loose ends. Next Sunday is the last one. Last. *sniff* And there seems to be WAY too many loose ends to tie up all in one hour.

Anyway, today was a rollercoaster mood day.

And now I've torn my cornea. What a banner weekend.

random babbling

Well, J & P are going out of town tonight to a conference in Jax... I hope the boys have fun on the road trip. Thank goodness I'm feeling better; between the antibiotics and the inhaler I'm doing much better than I was a few days ago.

I've got my web page back up! The home page and my page are pretty well done (well, my page will be updated regularly, maybe) and now I've got M & C & the calendar & the family tree page to work on. Wheeee!

Study: US mothers deserve $134,121 in salary

May 3, 5:07 AM (ET)

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A full-time stay-at-home mother would earn $134,121 a year if paid for all her work, an amount similar to a top U.S. ad executive, a marketing director or a judge, according to a study released on Wednesday.

A mother who works outside the home would earn an extra $85,876 annually on top of her actual wages for the work she does at home, according to the study by Waltham, Massachusetts-based compensation experts Salary.com.

To reach the projected pay figures, the survey calculated the earning power of the 10 jobs respondents said most closely comprise a mother's role -- housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist.

"You can't put a dollar value on it. It's worth a lot more," said Kristen Krauss, 35, as she hurriedly packed her four children, all aged under 8, into a minivan in New York while searching frantically for her keys. "Just look at me."

Employed mothers reported spending on average 44 hours a week at their outside job and 49.8 hours at their home job, while the stay-at-home mother worked 91.6 hours a week, it showed.

An estimated 5.6 million women in the United States are stay-at-home mothers with children under age 15, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

NOT 'JUST A MOM'

"It's good to acknowledge the job that's being done, and that it's not that these women are settling for 'just a mom,"' said Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation at Salary.com. "They are actually doing an awful lot."

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 26 million women with children under age 18 work in the nation's paid labor force.

Both employed and stay-at-home mothers said the lowest-paying job of housekeeper was their most common role, with employed mothers working 7.2 hours a week as housekeeper and stay-at-home mothers working 22.1 hours in that role.

"Every husband I've ever spoken to said, 'I'm keeping my job. You keep yours.' It's a tough one," said Gillian Forrest, 39, a stay-at-home mother of 22-month-old Alex in New York. "I don't know if you could put a dollar amount on it but it would be nice to get something."

To compile its study, Salary.com surveyed about 400 mothers online over the last two months.

Salary.com offers a Web site (http://www.mom.salary.com) where mothers can calculate what they could be paid, based on how many children they have, where they live and other factors. The site will produce a printable document that looks like a paycheck, Coleman said.

"It's obviously not negotiable," he said.

On average, the mother who works outside the house earns a base pay of $62,798 for a 40-hour at-home work week and $23,078 in overtime; a stay-at-home mother earned a base pay of $45,697 and $88,424 in overtime, it said.

In a Salary.com study conducted last year, stay-at-home mothers earned $131,471. The potential earnings of mothers who work outside the home was not calculated in the previous study.

(LIFE-WORK, Editing by Eric Walsh; Reuters Messaging: ellen.wulfhorst.reuters.com@reuters.net)

hahahahahahahahahahaha

So it's 8:30am - kids are still asleep, thank god - I'm in the kitchen blowing my nose & coughing while I drink some orange juice. I hear something that sounds like Moira starting to cry/freak out, so I hightail it back to the bedroom only to look in and see her still totally asleep. I check Christian - nope, he's out too. So is Stravinsky. Okay, maybe one of the kids was whimpering in their sleep... I sit down on the bed to start sorting laundry and I sort-of yawn in the process -

the noise was me. My bronchial tubes made sort of a screaming high pitched sound when I breathed in.

TIRED OF BEING SICK! Going back to bed.