A Crisis of Confederates...

I am a Southerner and an American. I am white and a male. My home is near the geographic heart of the U.S.’ continental pudenda. A collection of sandbars connecting an archipelago of high spots now inundated with what passes for civilization. I say that without intending irony.

Florida, like so many places where the water meets the sea seems always in crisis. A crisis in the economy, a crisis in education, a water crisis, crisis ad infinitum and still a crisis over Confederates?  The war between the states may have ended in 1865 but not the strife.  Florida’s role in the conflict was negligible though decisive.  The Confederates held and many ancestral Floridians still take pride in that.

However, our governor and vampire-in-chief, Nosferatu, demurs siding instead with the righteous indignation of the NAACP in barring inclusion of a few distinguished members of the Confederacy precisely because they were NOT United States military.  Honorable service and post-war achievements aside, they were wrong, so nyah!  Serves you right you slavers!

But isn’t this place named the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame?  Weren’t they Floridians?  Or is this a Federally funded installation or another usurpation of state’s rights?  Or just the misgivings of a plutocrat ill equipped to see clear what is dear to many of his constituents? 

Who am I kidding?  By constituents, I meant the people of Florida.  Governor Scott’s constituents are predominantly transcontinental oligarchs sensitive only to a shortage of Beluga and Cristal.  So who can blame him?  He doesn’t know any poor or working class people.  Those characterized by the English author Lord Lytton as the great unwashed.  Those considered mere chattel to be corralled and ruled or at least made into cannon fodder to fight wars whereby some future stone edifice might bear the names of those sacrificed on the altar of a bad cause.  Sound familiar?

The governor should be ashamed for not finding a way to illuminate both sides of gallantry in this latest monument to a sanitized past.  Shame on Nosferatu. Bad vampire, bad!

It was either him or her...

    Are you freaking kidding me? A two year-old found his mom’s pistol and instead of blowing his own brains out, turned the electronics display at an Idaho Walmart into a bio-hazard with hers. And then we read that she was a scientist working for an obscure agency charged with design and development research for our government. 

    More proof that even brilliant minds can’t stand up to stupid in an unfair fight. A son has lost his mother in a way that surely will affect his care and keeping in the years to follow this wholly preventable occurrence. Further details are pending and warranted.

In the meantime, I don’t believe there is any malice in a two year-old, so I have to ask as a gun owner and parent, what style of weapon did she carry and why did she keep a round in the chamber? 

If it was an automatic, then she paid the ultimate price for her negligence. I do not care if I’m certified King of the World Champion Over All Others with that exact weapon, I would be guilty of reckless endangerment for carrying it with “one in the pipe,” in public.

If however, the weapon in question was a revolver, then it had a very slick action. One that could be squeezed by a two year-old. If that is the case, there is a reason that the old-timers kept only five rounds in their six shooters. To prevent this very thing from happening. 

With either design, this tragedy could have been averted with the “specific” knowledge required for the weapon in question. All the advanced academic degrees in the world cannot replace acute experience and self-awareness. 

I will pray for the shattered family she has left behind. I will also pray for a renewed sense of responsibility on the part of owners of firearms. Let us not let this happen again.

When there's blood in the water...

My local newspaper ran an article describing a child suffering the supposed ineptitude of the entire industrial-medical complex.  Even the institutions are included in the list of defendants.  Being good Catholics, they abstained from dragging the Creator into it deferring to His mysterious ways.  [cough]

Of course the loss of a child is a hole that nothing can fill but only be compromised with.   The vacancy sign will always flash in the night.  What remains of the child will have to be attended to and it will be expensive.  Anyone who has ever uttered the phrase, life is cheap, has never seen a hospital bill for life support services.

The plaintiff’s council believes there is a vein of malpractice gold to be mined and are merely waiting on the assay.  Their strategy is to indict everyone.  To sling blame in all directions and see what sticks.  Justice they will howl though there is none to be found, only the amount of remuneration to be haggled over and their 40% off the top.


This is but another reminder of the fragility of being born a human into a world beset with dangers large and small at every turn of every day.  Speaking for myself, if and when a doctor/hospital/et al fails at first to perceive and treat my child correctly, I will find another doctor/hospital/et al before sunset.  I love my children too much to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different outcomes.

In the meantime, the sharks will always circle waiting for one of us to make a mistake.

On your mark, get set...

Okay, we as in members of humankind, and more specifically, a bunch of Europeans just landed a man-made object of space travel on a frigging comet this week! If you’re a member of the same species and did not get a bit tingly at the news then stop right here and read no further. But, if you stopped for a second and realized what just happened, then you know we have born witness to science doing what it does best — pushing out on the envelope of ignorance.

“With so many going hungry in the world, I just don’t understand how we can afford to go to space.” This is the constant refrain from the same people who see this milestone as nothing more than (insert favorite deity here) allowing mankind a bit more slack in the umbilicus that is our inseparable link to our maker(s). These acolytes complain at trying to understand the universe. To them, if reference to such things does not exist within the pages of their sacred scribble, then it must not be of relevance nor importance. Things like germ theory, evolution and historical facts are considered suspect. 

Remember Galileo? He’s the guy that described the universe without the Earth at its center and was summarily placed on house arrest for the remainder of his life. Even after it became old news, the Church did not pardon him till 1992. He died in 1642! Talk about holding onto a grudge.

I grew up during the Space Race fomented by the constant beep of Sputnik and our President’s admonition shortly thereafter. Like a latter day Babe Ruth he stood up at the plate and pointed his bat at where the country needed to put the ball. Out yonder, that bright disk in the night sky. That’s where we are going and back by decade’s end. And we did. I wish he could have seen it.

Cooler still, we did it in my own backyard. I was living one hundred miles inland from Cape Canaveral and on the day the first Saturn V rocket lifted off, I could see it climb into the sky from the rooftop of our home. Better still, I could hear it. A deep crackling sound as the ball of light trailing white condensation rose ever faster until disappearing into the ethers. When it broke the sound barrier the windows rattled. It was glorious.

I shinnied down from the roof and joined my parents in front of the large black-n-white Philco with Walter Cronkite reporting the event. He looked shaken. My parents told me that when the Saturn V's Rocketdyne F-1 engines fired up, things in the newsroom started falling off the walls.  

CBS had underestimated the harmonic resonance that the rocket’s five engines created. Visibly shaken, Mr. Cronkite, always the professional, composed himself and carried on though at a slightly higher pitch. Those engines remain the most powerful ever produced by mankind.

With that the Space Race was on and no expense spared. That is the America I miss. The one with the cojones and the chutzpa to get what needs to be done, done. We all benefit from it in measurable ways by the products and technologies born of the time and inclination. We as a country need that again. Make no small plans. Everyone benefits and besides, I want my Space Race back.

and a side of psychometrics too, please...

    My local school district has just dumped north of $106,000 dollars in annual salary for one newly minted expert in psychometrics.   
    Now wait a minute, I know what you’re thinking and that’s a little presumptuous coming from the likes of us. We simply do not know what the going rate is nowadays for good help in the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.  Maybe we got her on the cheap.
    However, we do know what the going rate is for three newly minted teachers. And, that we could get two doctorate degree seeking teachers with a signing bonus of free parking, weekends off and all the bad coffee they can chug. And, we would know how to measure their performance. 
    The world would know them by the inspired and edified minds they’re able to turn out semester after semester year after year with dwindling support and little hope of advancement unless they join the likes of the new Senior Director of Assessment, Accountability and Evaluation.

How will we know how good the new Senior Director is at her job? How will the new Senior Director elevate the District’s credibility? Most important, how will the teachers and students of the district benefit from her expertise today and tomorrow?  Time will tell.

One thing for sure is the District has just added another layer of deniability in case the current direction of education in our fair county doesn’t markedly improve.  Even if the student's grades don't improve, I am sure that psychometrically they will track on an advancing plane adjusted for shift in the demographic mean.  Right?

Wait a minute, what am I talking about? This isn’t the REAL world where results are what matter most.  This the realm of school boards where our property taxes go to fatten the backsides of only those smart enough to ditch the “I do it for the kids” routine and latch onto the real money in education — administration — where no one ever gets fired, only laterally promoted with a bonus and a parking space upgrade. 

Silly me.

So money!

Everyone who has seen the movie, Swingers, knows that line. They know it as the favorite utterance from Vince Vaughn’s character signifying something unusually good. After the vote tallies of last night the line has obviously made its way into the lexicon of political operatives that I believe the likes of which America has not seen since Tammany Hall or the Teapot Dome Scandal. 

The moneyed interests in pachyderms have conquered Congress, the Supreme Court and as of today, the Senate is in their pockets too. I fear that the next election cycle will stack the deck with another one in the White House.  God forbid.  

Historically whenever all three tips of the trident are sharpened on the same bias, Americans suffer.  We’ve heard that we have no one to blame for this but ourselves. But is that true? If we chafe under the weight of knowing then it shouldn’t be a stretch for us to understand that it just might NOT be all our fault. 

If not, then shouldn't we be handing out pitchforks and torches? Where is the reasoned response? The outrage? The righteous indignation? Where in Hell are the Democrats? We know where the Republicans are. They’ve expanded through gerrymandering, misinformation, fear mongering and Fox News. Wait a minute, that’s just being redundant. Sorry.

The Democrats resemblance to Nero stroking his lyre while the poorer parts of Rome go up in flames is not much of a stretch. THINK: Urban blight solved.  And if all you know about the sack of Rome was that it was done by the Visigoths in AD 410 then you miss the more important aspect as to why. Simple math is the answer. 

By the time Alaric plundered the Eternal City, the population was two thirds enslaved. That’s two out of three people on the street being already screwed and tattooed by the empire. So it's easy to imagine them holding the gates open with, “Come on in. Make yourself at home. The treasury is that way and the bordello this way. Would you be so kind and kill my boss?  Can I get you something to drink?”

Another truth is that the fiction of rugged individualism is a lie. No one raises a barn on his own. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had help and some of it via virtual slavery. 

When a nation’s powerful and elite take liberties with us, it is our duty to the country to reassert our own liberty and call them out. Historically that has been the only way real change has taken place in our system. It has never been a top down game. Only of late, and done to us while we were sleeping. In other words, those are not hemorrhoids we are suffering from. 

When so much of the country’s wealth is concentrated among a handful of corporations, banks and oligarchs, we’ve got a stew simmering. One that smells faintly familiar and one particularly appetizing to Visigoths.

“I don’t believe.”

The statement means different things to different cultures, for sure, but it holds a special place in Christendom.  To utter such a phrase would have lost you your basic right to life in earlier times.  THINK: a barbecue for one.  Some still favor such a notion. 

Nowadays any psychopath armed with a smart-phone, an Instagram account, an AK47 and some twisted scripture can be expected to press their agenda on a world stage in real time.  Beheadings are just the beginning.

So how do we come to terms with the notion of God and those who consistently misread Holy verbiage in order to press their neuroses like a red hot branding iron onto the forehead of everyone else.

For shiite sake, are you kidding me? 

That’s the usual response you get from most thinking people in the West.  In history class, we were taught about the Reformation with a capital R.  There’s a reason for that.  It was a pretty big deal back then.  It set the tone for the modern world we enjoy today.   Without the Reformation there would not have been a Renaissance nor an Age of Enlightenment.  Science would have been left to the trifling of alchemists and hairstylists. 

So why do they hate us?   

That’s the essential question in dire need of a definitive answer.  If I am to hazard a guess, I’m thinking it has something to do with primacy and place.  Mankind is a species of greedy bastards.  It’s in our DNA.  We shouldn’t apologize for it as it is the same stuff that puts us at the top of the food chain.  However, it has to be marshaled and managed.  Think: space exploration. 

For Westerners, codified laws do that for most of us.  It is the thing that civilizes and socializes and contextualizes our very existence.  That said, it’s easy to see how some people get carried away with their beliefs--but day-emn!

It is another cruel irony that the thing that civilizes some of us can also serve as source material of still others to take up arms and commit atrocities on their neighbors in fealty to that belief system. 

God help us, indeed.