Weekly Tidbits #2
This needs to get better organized. Will work on it. Too many loose ends lying around here which I have lost track of.
1. When Sen. Lisa Murkowski arrived to work on Tuesday after the weekend's snowfall, she might have thought she arrived in a future bereft of glass ceilings. As Murkowski took stock of the Senate floor, the Republican senator from Alaska noticed that every single person who showed up to work was a woman.
"As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female," Murkowski said, addressing the floor. "All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female."
Wow. A bad snowstorm and only the women made it to work? Times have changed.
2. Trump: “I could shoot someone and not lose”
He is probably right and that’s the sad part of it. The mentality of his supporters is much like the mentality of the OJ jury. The jury hated the Los Angeles police (with good reason) and since the police wanted OJ convicted the jury refused to do so. Take that!
Trump supporters hate most groups not the mirror image of their own cabal. These ‘other’ groups of people need to be taught a lesson. Trump promises to do just that. If he just makes sure to shoot someone in any of these other groups, he will get his base support by a landslide. The ‘wild west’ and everyone for himself is back in vogue.
The fatal flaw in the Trump mentality is this: All groups today have the power to be effective terrorists. They don’t need to meet in certain places to plan; they don’t have to form a uniformed army; most Trumpites have little to lose. They are very angry, frustrated, anti social, and are controlled by feelings, not facts or principles, or any tolerance of diversity. Everybody is becoming increasingly armed with guns. The whole planet is becoming a mirror image of Baghdad— a powder keg just waiting to be set off. It will be a bloodbath, and just like when Hussein was finally caught, the carnage will have been completed, thugs will rule the street. There will be few, if any, places left to run to.
The major causative problem for all this is human overpopulation. Perhaps the overpopulation solution will be simply for everyone to start shooting others in some sort of insane chaotic ‘last man standing’ mentality.
How things will play out is beyond anything but guesses. That’s the thing when chaos reigns, predictability goes out the window. Those who die first may well be the luckier ones.
3. http://news.yahoo.com/video/mcdonalds-manager-shot-death-los-062542461.html
That this guy was killed is no longer noteworthy. Americans kill more Americans by far than ISIS kills Americans, or Afghanistans, or Muslims, or Commies, etc. But this 29 year old American lived in one of those nondescript American ghettoes for which our society takes little responsibility. They are pretty much gated off almost a separate country within a country. What is striking here is that he worked three jobs to support his family—a manager at McDonald’s, clerked in a liquor store, and worked at a Tax Assistance business. There was a time when machines made life easier for Americans—not today. Logic might dictate that with machines doing so much of the work humans used to do, we could get by with a 30 hr work week. And what is progressive about people having to work 3 jobs just to support a family when 60 years ago a person working in any of those three jobs made enough money to modestly support a family? If a low wage earner now has to work three jobs to minimally support a family, how can there ever be enough jobs for everyone? Of course there aren’t, and with work hard to find, slave wages become the norm. Seniors are protected by cost of living wages. Low end workers have no such cost of living increases. Had there been a minimum wage cost of living increase every year since 1955, the minimum wage today would be around $21/hr. How will we break this cycle? The majority of citizens have little empathy with low wage workers. It’s not malicious as much as ‘out of sight, out of mind’. And we all demand bargains. The best bargains, of course, come off of slave labor. All this is legal just at is legal for Donald Trump to declare bankruptcy four times, retain the wealth accrued by investors in his various real estate ventures, and just do it all over again to bilk more money out of others. And it is all legal. We are simply suffocating from all the serious global problems bearing down on us from all directions. Me worry? Hell no, I am 75, too near the finish line to be much affected by the track path to the finish being pulled out from under younger competitors. Still, I see it all clear enough and it is sad. Yup, sad—simply put.
