trying

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around recent commentary made by certain Republicans running for re-election. The furor raised among members of the Republican Party is fascinating. What I find disturbing is the fact that we’ll forget our outrage in a few days and go back to ignoring the far right conservatives that want to force people’s lives in one particular direction. What I find appalling is that it takes something outrageously ridiculous and ignorant, such as an elected official saying that it takes “legitimate rape” for a woman to not get pregnant. This implies that most of the time when a woman claims she was raped and then got pregnant, she on some level enjoyed being raped…and if she enjoyed it, it wasn’t really rape. That’s the elephant in the room, which is that he is implying that if you got pregnant after being sexually assaulted, you must have enjoyed it, or at the very least it was partly consensual. 

I’m going to cite a wiki article, about rape in the Bosnian War. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_Bosnian_War

“Perpetrators told the female victims that they would bear children of the perpetrator’s ethnicity. That they would become pregnant and then be held in custody until it was too late to get an abortion.”

I would like to see a movement begin, on youtube or somewhere else, of women who became pregnant after being raped, coming forward to talk about it, to show the truth to those who are so ignorant that they would believe that it can’t happen. We can’t allow ignorance like this to fester and continue to exist.

Pro-Life

I often find it curious that people that are “pro-life” are also very often pro-war. It seems to suggest that the only thing they care about is that people are alive, without regard to the actual quality of life that people have. It’s horrifying, really. 

It’s not even that they’re pro-life. I get that. To be honest, I myself am pro-life, that is, anti-abortion. 

There’s a difference though, between myself and social conservatives, as they’re called. The difference is that I do not try to force my idea of a perfect world onto other people. You can’t do that, because there ain’t such a thing. Sure, I’m oversimplifying their thinking for purposes if expediency, but I don’t care. 

The thing I find really fascinating is the people who insist on focusing on things like sex and abortion, because of their religious views, yet they ignore other things that are equally sinful according to their religion…Where’s the outrage over slothfulness and vanity and adultery and murder and greed?

Green Skinned Monkey Love

Bring on the greened skinned love wenches!

But..But..I thought it was my turn to be the sex caboose.

Love is all you need

George Lucas Must Die.

You have paid the price for your lack of vision.

The Economic Red Line: Why we had a recession

Times are kind of crappy. That’s stating the obvious, right? Of course it is. The frustrating and annoying part is that nobody is stating the obvious reasons for WHY things are crappy.

Here’s the deal: The cost of gas went up. Shot up and tripled over the 8 years Bush was in office. Personally, I blame Cheney; those backdoor energy sessions he had with people working in the Energy industry…the ones he refused to provide the transcripts for…yeah, those…I swear he was up to something.

But I digress. So, the cost of gas shot up, and then they started laying all those taxes on cigarettes, and so cigarettes shot up. So you had a large number of people who weren’t getting raises suddenly having to pay more for gas, which is a basic necessity for getting to work in the majority of the country, not to mention a necessity for transporting goods, and then cigarettes go up at the same time, so people are paying roughly 5 to six dollars for a pack of cigarettes. Sure, not everybody smokes, but if you want to establish cause for the recession, there you go. All of a sudden two things that a lot of people buy every day went up exponentially.

Here’s the fun part: Nobody’s pay rate went up…Well, not anybody at the Economic Red Line. I’m talking about the line of people making between, say, 1000 to 1500 a month.That’s a lot of people, when you think about it. Not only that, but the cost of living doesn’t stop going up either. While goods and services have gone up more slowly to avoid stickershock for people wanting something as simple as a 20 oz bottle of soda, the fact remains that the last thing to go up is people’s wages. The economy is kind of like an ecosystem. Ecosystems have what you’d call habitable zones. Generally life thrives within these zones, unless something happens to the ecosystem. Now, stay with me here, ok?

What happens in an ecosystem when something catastrophic happens? There’s inevitably less to go around, which is exactly what is happening right now. There’s more money being taken out of the economy by companies, and less being returned to employees in the form of income. I’m not being a socialist or any other -ist. I’m stating a fact. Companies are charging more for goods but not raising the pay of the most base employees, which are the majority of people in the country, and what happens when they make less money? Everybody makes less money.

I don’t have a solution other than the obvious, which is that either the Federal Government needs to put a law into effect establishing some kind of fair pay system that companies have to follow, with a maximum and minimum pay rate, or they need to put a cap on the cost of living somehow. Establish a national rent control, to keep rent from going up arbitrarily everytime you renew a lease (which, you have to admit, is an unfair practice for rental properties to engage in), maybe repeal the national gas tax temporarily…

The point is that we don’t just need jobs, we need to make more money, or pay less for goods and services, because we folks at the red ilne are having to choose between eating and buying gas, or paying bills, and it’s not getting any better unless we get some kind of relief. And let’s be honest, companies aren’t going to do it for us unless the federal government does something to compel them to do so. Sure, this may all sound a little naive, saying that the government needs to get companies to do something about paying people more money…I’m pretty sure those companies I’m thinking of make plenty to spare.

mmmm…..pudding…..

Date Night

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Smiles, everyone