tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41625196325322135762024-02-21T05:18:33.713-07:00Careless WhispersA collection of ramblings, mutterings, fever dreams and the occasional tantrumBunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.comBlogger185125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-29204794887329875562014-02-14T09:03:00.000-07:002014-02-14T09:04:14.699-07:00Five Days in FebruaryThe call came through last Thursday evening, through the rabbit rescue. Someone called up and said they found a "baby rabbit" in their back yard. I asked some questions to try to determine if it was domestic or one of the native cottontails. They said it had small ears and a long tail. I was like, really? Bunnies don't really have long tails. The person said her neighbor told her it was a baby rabbit, and she had no idea what to do with it. I told her to bring the little one to me and I will have a look. This is what they brought:<br />
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Turns out they found a baby pack rat. The little one was so tiny, I was taken aback. He really needs to be with his momma. I've had baby cottontails brought to me about that same size, and it's always been a terrible ordeal keeping them alive. They just don't do well, because nothing can really take the place of their mother's care and milk. But I knew I really had no choice. Turning this little creature away would doom it to a certain death. But I had no experience with anything other than a cottontail. One thing was certain to me: I must try.<br />
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So I researched the care and feeding of baby pack rats, and found a surprising amount of information. Rats, as a general species, have nutritional requirements that are similar to humans, so their babies do best on soy-based infant formula. Baby rabbits do better on kitten milk replacement formula or goat's milk. So I set up a glass tank on the kitchen table, on a heating pad to keep the baby warm. I put pieces of flannel on the bottom, along with some rabbit fur I had saved from trimming an angora rabbit a while ago, and constructed a warm and soft nest for the little guy. I fed him with an eyedropper, a process he didn't care for but he put up with anyway, and left him alone for the night.<br />
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The next morning he was still with me, and he quickly became familiar with my fingers rubbing him and picking him up. I took photos and sent them to my friend Julia, and she immediately named him Ratatouille, or Bebbeh R for short. I had to wrap him in Kleenex when I fed him because it seemed more formula would come out of the sides of his mouth than he would swallow. When he decided he had had enough formula, he would push the eyedropper away with his tiny hands, and firmly close his mouth to make it hard for me to insert the end of the dropper. I did get some formula down him, but it was very difficult to make sure he did not breathe some of the formula into his nose. That was my biggest fear, that he would aspirate the formula into his lungs. He would do some very sweet, adorable things like grab onto my thumb with his arms and legs and cling to me. This is what I would see every day:<br />
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I would feed the little one three times a day. He seemed to be doing okay, and every morning I would apprehensively come into the kitchen to check his tank, and every morning he would be curled up in the warm, soft fur and would immediately jump up and move around when I touched him. He seemed to have a good day, followed by a not-so-good day when he would not eat as much as he did the day before. But he did seem to be putting on a little bit of weight, so I began to be cautiously optimistic that he was doing well. He would stand up on his long, thin, wobbly legs and move around as best he could. It was such a joy to watch him.<br />
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I had to give him a little bit of a bath after every feeding, because of the formula getting all over him, but that was okay. I actually became really excited about the third day because he was passing a little bit of solid waste. This was actually a really good sign, because it meant he was taking in nutrition and processing it. Of course the Holy Grail for me would be if I could get him to stay alive long enough for his eyes to open up. Once his eyes were open, then he would be able to forage around for his own food and eat more on his own. So it became a race to get him to the finish line, which is his eyes opening.<br />
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I would check up on Bebbeh R dozens of times a day. I thought about him constantly. It's hard to understand, unless you've been through something like this, how this incredibly tiny, frail droplet of life can take over your existence, and so much of your time and energy. He had captured my heart the very first night that I had him, and each passing day made me a little more optimistic for him survival. I actually allowed myself to think about what he would be like when he grew up and became much more aware of me and where he was. Would his wild instincts kick in and turn him into something difficult to handle? Most likely, but I was fully prepared to release him back into the wild when appropriate, or keep him with me if he wanted to. After a couple of his not-so-good days, I would always be apprehensive when I checked him in the morning, but he always seem to hold on and make it through another night.<br />
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Time would run out on Bebbeh R on Tuesday night, five days after I first got him, when I noticed he did not look well and I could hear little clicking noises when he breathed. My worst fear had come to realization, as it was a sign that he had developed pneumonia. He was not interested in eating, and there was precious little I could do other than hold him in my hand, stroke his tiny head, and let him know I was here. I said goodbye to him and went to bed.<br />
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The next morning, Wednesday morning, I woke up and found him dead under a blanket of soft rabbit fur. I was not particularly surprised, but I was extremely disappointed and hurt. I put my entire heart and soul into keeping this little one alive. Realistically the odds were stacked against him from the very start, being just a couple of days old and extremely tiny. But I did allow myself hope that he, through some miracle, would make it and survive. That was not to be, and once again I learned that the bitterest pill to swallow is dashed hopes, and seeing your very best efforts come to naught.<br />
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I miss you, Bebbeh R, and I am sorry you had such a very short life on this earth. I would do anything to have you back for one more try. You really did take a bit of my heart with you when you left. You were unforgettable, and so delicate and sweet that I just can't find words to adequately describe it. I am absolutely certain that you knew I was there, even though you never saw me, and I take a lot of comfort in the knowledge that, for these five days in February, you knew you were valued, loved and cared for.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-56741778638916339942013-12-29T20:56:00.000-07:002014-01-04T08:36:41.184-07:002013: The Year In Review (Part 3)Here we are in the strange, surreal, no-man's-land between Christmas and the start of the New Year, and 2013 is on death row. There will be no last-minute reprieve from our 400-year-old, hatchet-faced governor, nor a last-minute phone call from Amnesty International. 2013 sits in its dank little prison cell, marinating in melancholy, and dejectedly gnawing on its bitter last meal of broken dreams and unfulfilled promises. So, when the prison chaplain shows up at the door with his Big Black Book of Contradictory Nonsense to make one last-ditch effort to redeem the soul of this year before it gets marched off to the electric chair and be plugged into eternity, 2013 will spit in his face with cheerful defiance and blurt out, "Stuff it, Padre! I apologize for NOTHING!" There were some good things in this year, some bright spots of greenery in a desert of bland mediocrity, and we're going to remember some of them:<br />
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The WELL, BUTTER MY BISCUITS AND CALL ME SCREWED Award goes to the redoutable Paula Deen. Paula was the nation's Buddha of Bad Eating, the Princess of Pork Belly, the First Lady of Fricasseed Funk, and a Southern-Fried Cracker Queen whose toothy, perfect smile graced dozens of magazines every time I stood in a grocery store checkout line. She was like a lowbrow Martha Stewart, but without all the murderous psychopathic qualities and barely-concealed hatred for the people who buy into her house-of-mirrors media empire. In Paula Deen's world, there was no problem that could not be fixed with a couple of pounds of butter and a big ole mess of possum skracklings, or a hundred other things I would never consider putting in my mouth. Well, maybe except for the problems that will arise from injudiciously dropping the N-word at a court deposition, seemingly tolerating an atmosphere of sexual harrassment at the restaurant she co-owns with her brother Earl "Bubba" Hiers, or letting plans slip out about a "plantation-style" wedding with black waiters in white jackets. Fancy white jackets are apparently one of the many wonderful perks slaves enjoyed during their working vacation, I mean, servitude to white people, if that old Duck Dynasty scumbag is to be believed. For the national media, it was Thanksgiving Day and Paula was the biggest, fattest turkey they had ever layed eyes on, and they went after her with a vengeance usually reserved for mass murderers or child molesters. Paula immediately went on an I-so-sorry tour of morning talk shows and seemed genuinely repenitent for her gaffes. But Our Lady of Perfect Gravy is nothing but resilient, and as recently as this month was spotted<b> <a href="http://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/year-end-poor-paula/Content?oid=2322049" target="_blank">cheerfully visiting a bunch of backyard chickens in Savannah</a></b>. Hang in there, Paula! Redemption is yours for the asking, just don't say the N-word out loud anymore. And yes, I don't mind if I have another one of your delicious crescent dinner rolls.<br />
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The CRAP HIT THE FAN, THEN HIT IT AGAIN 90 MINUTES LATER award goes to the movie "Gravity." According to <b><a href="http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2013&p=.htm" target="_blank">BoxOfficeMojo.com</a></b> - the Careless Whispers preferred resource for movie statistics - the highest grossing film of 2013 was "Iron Man 3," which earned over $400 million in its US release. Pretty impressive, when you consider that the third installment of a film franchise featuring a second-tier Marvel Comics character can pull down nearly a half-billion dollars worth of scratch. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm thinking it has something to do with the appeal of its star, Robert Downey Jr., who seems to be very talented and a good person, and not as grubby and unkempt as Johnny Depp. But this item truly moves into <b>WTF?</b> territory when you consider that "Iron Man 3" made TWICE as much in foreign release, bringing its total worldwide gross to nearly $1.25 BILLION! Well played, Buena Vista Pictures, for a $200 million investment. It's been a very nice Christmas for you, indeed. I haven't seen 95% of the major movies of 2013, but one I did see and enjoyed very much was "Gravity." This movie had EVERYTHING! Sandra Bullock in her underwear! Authentic looking space hardware! Mind-twisting special effects! George Clooney's GHOST! A cloud of hypersonic satellite debris ripping the crap out of a space station, and then doing it AGAIN ninety minutes later as it circled the earth! Oh, my inner science nerd was having a field day with this movie! A number of other people agreed, because "Gravity" made $254,592,000<b> </b>domestically and $653,292,000 worldwide, on a production budget of $100 million. Not as much as Robert Downey Jr. in an aluminum jump suit, but still nothing to sneeze at. Contrast, if you will, the number 54 movie of the year, "Ender's Game," based on the novel by homophobic garden gnome Orson Scott Card. That resounding flop of a movie had a worldwide gross of $88 million on a production budget of $110 million, costing Lionsgate Pictures over $20 million, more if you factor in the advertising and promotion money the studio had to spend publicizing that stinker.<br />
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The IT'S COMING! IT'S COMING! IT'S... NOT COMING! award for 2013 goes to Comet ISON. We astronomers are a prickly lot. Some might even consider us dour; spending endless nights when normal people are sleeping, freezing to death while peering morosely into tiny glass eyepieces attached to big metal tubes, hoping to spot a dim smear of gray light from an object impossibly far away. People just don't grasp the awe and excitement we feel when we do see that tiny bit of fuzzy light, knowing that it took 50 million years or more to travel to our earthbound retinas and register in our tiny mammalian brains, and that it, in fact, represents an entire galaxy composed of hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of stars, with many billions of planets circling them, and many millions of intelligent civilizations with sentient beings very different from humans, who may be looking right back at us with the exact same sense of astonishment. We get really excited about stuff that happens up in the sky, and a whole lot of stuff does happen. But, ironically, we are bound by our gravitational attachment to Earth, and being able to see many astronomical events depends on exactly where we are on Earth and what time zone we're in.<br />
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For instance, by all accounts the most amazing, mind-blowing astro-event you can witness is a total eclipse of the sun, but the path of totality - which is the only place to be, really - is a tiny little strip of land often 50 miles in width or less, and almost always in the most remote, desolate, god-forsaken location possible, such as the Antarctica, sub-Saharan Africa or the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Even if, through the greatest of luck or the most expensive of efforts, you find yourself in the VIP seating section for a solar eclipse, you are still at the mercy of a passing weather front, which can most surely obscure your much-sought-after vantage point and basically ruin your life. I lucked out majorly in May 2012 when I was able to see a very rare annular eclipse of the sun, and I only had to drive 5 hours to northern Arizona, which was totally worth it.<br />
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Other celestial events are more widely observable, such as the aurora borealis (or the southern hemisphere counterpart, the aurora australis), but they are best viewed in high latitudes, above 50-60 degrees. Here in Phoenix, at 32 degrees north latitude, we never see the northern lights, and if we did, it would probably mean big trouble, since the earth would have to be blasted with an epic, historic radiation storm to see them down here. Other astronomical sights are very widely viewable, such as meteor storms, or total lunar eclipses, which are visible over entire hemispheres with clear skies. Another such event is a comet. The appearance by Comet Hale-Bopp, a number of years ago, was a world-wide event which sparked huge excitement and interest in these dirty snowballs which cross our path every so often.<br />
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When Comet ISON was discovered, immediately the hype started. Portrayed as the incipient "Comet of the Century," lots of people painted vivid word pictures about the "Christmas Comet," which would grace the skies in December, make a close encounter with our sun, and (remember these words ==>) <b>if it survived</b>, would continue on a path which would take it even closer to our planet. It would then put on a spectacular show in January, with some people saying (be still, my heart) that it could be as bright as the full moon. Many astronomers (myself included) dreamed many, many dreams of a brilliant comet hanging suspended in a clear winter twilight sky, gossamer tail extending almost to the horizon, and being there for weeks if not months on end.<br />
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Astronomers tracked ISON with pain-staking precision, and the expectations grew faster than the comet did in telescopic photographs. Things started to unravel a bit in September when some Debbie-Downer-type astronomers said ISON wasn't brightening quite fast enough as it plunged through the outer solar system toward the sun. But we didn't care because comets are notorious non-conformists and will do whatever they please, light-curve predictions be damned. We watched in breathless anticipation as satellite-based solar observatories saw ISON cruise in past Mercury, getting bigger and brighter as it approached our central star, finally disappearing in the harsh glare of the sun, an Icarus with white wings soaring into the light and heat.<br />
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Now, those three words I asked you earlier to remember: "if it survived"? This is where they come in. ISON swung around our Sun, barely a million miles above its searing surface and then.... broke into a bunch of pieces. Scientists the world over expected to see a big, brilliant cometary body with a long, bright tail sweeping in front of it, but instead saw a small, indistrict bright patch with a tiny tail, which eventually got smaller and smaller until there was nothing but small pieces left. It was officially declared dead a couple of weeks later. Thus, Comet ISON, the "Comet of the Century" became Comet ISON - the DUD of the century, leaving us astronomers severely disappointed and demoralized. But we went right back to scanning the skies in hopes of being the first person to spot the next incoming Great Comet Hope, which would again be granted the mantle of Comet of the Century, and this time maybe will actually fulfill that promise, instead of breaking all our astronomical hearts.<br />
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The ALL THINGS MUST END... SOMETIMES BADLY award goes to the series finale of Dexter. The Showtime series finished up its eight-season run earlier this year, not in a blaze of glory, but a resounding THUD, reminiscent of the sound your head makes when it hits the side of the toilet as you rush to puke into it. When it was firing on all cylinders, Dexter was a stylish, intelligent, and well-written tour de force through the labyrinthine mind of a serial killer. His "dark passenger," as he called his murderous alter-ego, alternately surfaced and retreated in the ever-changing facade that Dexter presented to his family, friends and the outside world. But things really derailed for the last season, and in the climatic episode, Dex was shown carrying the dead body of his sister Deborah Morgan out of the hospital in the midst of massive hurricane evacuation through crowds of police and public-safety officers onto his boat, and NO ONE STOPPED HIM. After dumping Deb into the ocean, the last we saw of Dexter was him driving his power boat directly into the swirling maelstrom of the approaching storm. Well, "the last" until he surfaced inexplicably somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, where he labored as the Unhappiest Lumberjack Ever (or stunt double for a post-apocalyptic Bounty paper towel commercial), living in numbing isolation in a dreary, decrepit boarding house, with only his memories of his previous life in Miami. I can't remember another series finale that was so thoroughly and universally condemned and reviled by fans and critics alike, with levels of hateful derision and virulent contempt normally reserved for Republican presidential debates. Sorry things ended so badly for you, Dex, but it could have been worse. You could have been one of your fans. <br />
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QUICK TAKES:<br />
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TV Shows I Like: Boardwalk Empire,
Homeland, True Blood, Breaking Bad, Live From Daryl's House, Later with
Jools Holland, Real Time with Bill Maher, Sons of Anarchy, The Rachel
Maddow Show, Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Nurse Jackie, House of
Cards (on Netflix).<br />
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Things I Love: Rabbits, animals in general, my dear friends (both local and Facebook), Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue, hiking, secret crushes, sunsets and sunrises, astronomy, sushi, my friend Meme's homemade Chinese Seafood soup, chocolate, writing, photography, artwork, dinners with friends.<br />
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Here's hoping 2014 is a turning point for our country, and we can get back to being the great nation we truly are. Sometimes it's very hard to see that potential. I wish there were no unwanted and unloved children and animals, everyone had a decent standard of living and health care, and a decent place to live. I wish people in power weren't so evil and hypocritical and dishonest and deliberately ignorant. I wish people would mind their own damn business and stay out of the lives of others with whom they have no reason to meddle. I hope people continue to turn away from religion and other stifling, suffocating poisons of the human spirit. Most of all, I wish for peace, love and continued health for my friends. I hope I never lose the sense of child-like wonder I feel when I look up into the night sky, or into the eyes of a beloved rabbit. I also hope I never lose my belief in angels and miracles. If I die tomorrow, it will be with the knowledge and satisfaction that I have lived my life exactly as I wanted to live it, and I have no regrets.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-68525512165885473872013-12-27T09:05:00.002-07:002013-12-29T20:58:27.410-07:002013: The Year in Review (Part 2)Hey, we're on a roll here. Not really, but cut me a giant slackburger with cheese, okay? It's Christmas. Here are some more highly desirable and coveted awards for the Year That Almost Was - 2013!<br />
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The ONE-TRACK MIND/NO-TRACK BRAIN Award goes to the Republican Scandal Industry: "Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. OH LOOK! A SQUIRREL! Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi. Benghazi."<br />
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The WINTER OLYMPICS AWARD FOR SPECTACULAR WASTE TIME AND MONEY goes to the government shutdown last October. This was when the Republican party completely lost their minds and got hijacked by a bunch of noisy, obnoxious douchebags in their own caucus and brought the entire US government to a complete halt. The Tea Baggers, ostensibly led by pasty-faced bed-wetter with questionable citizenship Ted Cruz (aided by his completely demented, Alzheimers-ridden father), threw a hissy fit and turned what should have been a routine budgetary procedure - raising the federal debt ceiling, something that Republican false idol Ronald Reagan did 18 times during his reign of error in the 80s - and tried to use it to cripple the Affordable Care Act which also debuted in October. Because that's the way one of the oldest representative democracies in the world changes legitimately-passed laws that run afoul of a bunch of dimwitted loose cannons in the House of Representatives - by shutting down the government. Millions of federal employees furloughed, national parks closed, airport security compromised, for what reason? Less than three weeks later the Tea Baggers capitulated in a hugely embarrassing loss, gaining ABSOLUTELY NOTHING other than a monstrous amount of bad publicity, the Republican party rightfully buried under the condemnation and derision of the public, and the Office of Budget and Management estimating that over $64 BILLION dollars of taxpayers money were completely squandered by this useless exercise in constipated government. And the target of their misplaced ire, the Affordable Care Act, was completely and utterly unscathed by all this (although it definitely had problems of its own making, more about that later). Hope you enjoyed your little 64-billion-dollar tantrum, Tea Baggers, because the result was that most people in this country had their pre-existing opinion reaffirmed - that you are a bunch of selfish, useless, idiotic dicks.<br />
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The WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE? Award goes to Miley Cyrus and her delightful twerking episode on her appearance at the MTV Video Awards (or something, I can't tell any of those award shows apart anymore). Stretching the definition of "entertainer" to nearly the breaking point, Ms. Cyrus and her grotesquely large tongue made their entrance from the inside of a gigantic teddy bear complete with Battlestar-Galactica-Cylon scanning red eye. And things went downhill from there. Floundering and gyrating around on stage like a zombie scarecrow with a severe neurological disorder, she made her way through a bunch of confused dancers dressed up like plush animals. Then singer Robin Thicke sashayed out of nowhere, decked out in the latest football referee formal wear and warbled out his current song "Blurred Lines" (which, I'm embarrassed to say, I find irresistibly catchy and have on my MP3 player).<br />
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But, cultural critical mass and nuclear detonation was achieved when Cyrus bent over, backed into Thicke's crotch and did some half-hearted spasmodic twitching which the kids nowadays call "twerking." 500 years ago folks would have called it "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Vitus%27_Dance" target="_blank">St. Vitus' Dance</a>" and burned her at the stake. Well, the next day the American public went completely batshit crazy, just like they did when Janet Jackson had her infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake, and kiddies all over the world were treated to the unexpected sight of her boobie and nipple shield (and I'll bet THAT made for some interesting post-Superbowl parent-child conversations). Every single pundit went into overdrive and were unanimous in their conclusion that this is America, not some godless wicked society which would allow such a wanton display of abysmal taste and moral dissolution. Ironically, this really IS America, and the only bad publicity is no publicity. Instead of being banished to the outer reaches of cultural Siberia, Cyrus received an unprecedented avalanche of publicity which she funneled right into the release of her latest music album, resulting in spectacular sales and well over 35 MILLION likes on Facebook. Jesus Christ's Facebook page, by comparison, has fewer than 6 million likes.<br />
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So what are we to make of this, when a very marginally-talented, utterly forgettable celebrity behaves in an overwhelmingly crass and tasteless fashion, and immediately reaps an enormous, priceless bonanza of attention and publicity? In our culture, sensationalism trumps quality any day of the week, and people delight in watching others degrade themselves, the more publicly, the better. What we can expect in the future is more of the same, because nothing succeeds like success, and Ms. Cyrus has very clearly shown us that the reward for bad behavior is infinitely more lucrative than the reward for good behavior.<br />
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The "PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE'S SOME OTHER WAY WE CAN SCREW UP" Award. The name of this award comes from a scene in the classic movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." After a particularly awkward and uncomfortable dinner with a delegation of Klingons, Capt. Kirk says, "I'm going to bed now. Please let me know if there's some other way we can screw up tonight!" This award is given to the most monumental screw-up of the year, something that was so horrifically misconceived and so dismallly executed that the inevitable carnage was spread far and wide, from sea to shining sea.<br />
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Everyone knows that the staff here at the Careless Whispers blog (me and 17 rabbits) is nothing but even-handed and impartial (I would have said "fair and balanced" but those dirtbags at Fox News have ruined that phrase for the rest of eternity), and we assign blame wherever appropriate, regardless of political affiliation. Thus, this award goes to the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act.<br />
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The ACA had been in the works for a long time, and is the signature legislative achievement of the Obama administration. Central to the idea of health care reform is a national website which would allow people to shop for health insurance and sign up online. The website is widely reported to have cost over $400 million dollars when it went live on October 1st. For nearly HALF A BILLION dollars you'd think you'd get the Lamborghini of websites, a platinum-standard of efficiency and user-friendliness. What we got instead was a clunky, poorly-designed mess which was well nigh impossible to navigate. I got on the site about two weeks after launch and it was incredibly slow and tediously frustrating. There were many things wrong with it, too many to list here, but suffice to say it was a big pain in the ass to use. I stopped using it whenever it took 20 minutes to get some information back after you hit ENTER, and the questionnaire part that gathered personal information was a complete mess, asking ridiculous questions and taking an unacceptably long time to do anything. I went and did something else for a month and came back to the site, and it had improved considerably. I found a health care plan which I liked and the rest of the process was really pretty easy.<br />
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But the damage was done and the entire country went crazy. The Republicans jumped on it like a pack of ravenous hyenas on a geriatric antelope and took every single opportunity to inflame and misinform the public regarding the entire concept of health care reform. At this writing, the Obama administration has just barely begun to drag itself out of the mammoth crater it dug for itself and hopefully by this time next year, the extreme screw-up that greeted the launch of the ACA will be a distant, unpleasant memory. But not before the Republicans squeeze every single drop of political advantage out of it.<br />
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Next up: Part 3, in which we tie up the loose ends and send 2013 to the Promised Land. <br />
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<br />Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-36988010742220023372013-12-25T12:29:00.000-07:002013-12-31T10:47:23.999-07:002013: The Year In Review (Part 1)Like the rheumy old geezer you're forced to sit next to in a theater or on a three-hour plane flight, 2013 is coughing, hacking and wheezing its way into the outhouse of history. While not as bizarrely awful as 2012 (and that was due in large part to the presidential election), this year will go down as having more than its share of weird, unsettling and just plain annoying happenings. So, let's take a look back at the crazy quilt of human folly that was 2013 and present some well-deserved awards for galaxy-class stupidity, starting with our premiere award:<br />
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The MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Award: We thought we were going to get through this year without millions of right-wing dimwits getting all whipped up into a frenzied lather over some faux-controversy, like they did with the Chick-Fil-A idiocy last year. You might remember that the COO of C-F-A made some ill-advised comments to religious publications that he was proud of financially supporting some groups that advocated a "traditional definition of marriage" (a.k.a. homophobia and bigotry disguised as piety). When some people suggested we may want to direct our discretionary spending to a restaurant chain that wasn't quite as intolerant and hateful, the conservative sheeple were summoned into action by the right-wing garbage-mongers on Fox News and other pseudo-journalistic bastions of stupidity. What better way to show your innate homophobia than by running down to your local Chick-Fil-A outlet and ordering up a big mess of their nasty fried chicken? Yeah, that'll show those queer-loving liberals - go out and buy a shitload of artery-clogging, greasy animal parts. A lot of people really had no intention of eating what they bought; many of them threw the food away immediately. But gol darn it, they were going to make a STATEMENT and stand up for the First Amendment rights of some idiot who insists on sticking his nose into the lives and business of fellow Americans.<br />
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Back to 2013: Fox News tried to get the ball rolling by kicking off their annual "War Against Christmas" pseudo-controversy. When it appeared it wasn't getting enough traction with their easily-distracted-by-shiny-objects viewers, they decided to let slutty Botox abuser Megyn Kelly spew some incomprehensible drivel about Santa Claus only being white or... something? I don't even know. But the shitstorm really spooled up to high gear when the patriarch of a clutch of barnyard animal-human hybrids that appear in some ridiculous reality show called "Duck Dynasty" cut loose with a rambling diatribe in GQ magazine that was pretty stunning and extreme in its stupidity, racism and homophobia. Now I've never seen "Duck Dynasty," nor would I ever consider soiling my brain with whatever genetic-cesspool nonsense those hairy snake-oil salesmen are perpetrating on a dimwitted, gullible American public. I spend my entire life avoiding those kind of people and trying hard to convince myself they don't really exist. But you would really have to be living on some other planet these past couple of weeks to not have heard about this crapfest on nearly every news outlet. The A&E network almost immediately tried to distance itself from the one program on their schedule that was an absolute cash cow, and "suspended" the noxious old fart from his own show. Always eager to show its clout, the right-wing stupidity machine went into overdrive and cast this suspension as a heinous, unwarranted violation of someone's First Amendment Free Speech rights. There's that pesky First Amendment again. It's almost as misused, misquoted and misinterpreted as the Second Amendment.<br />
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The right wing loves to shriek like a stuck pig whenever they imagine someone violating their own rights, but gleefully and willingly will try to curtail the rights of any group of people they don't agree with, such as gay people seeking marriage equality or adults seeking to maintain access to a legal birth control procedure. Then you get irrelevant, obsolescent gasbags like the scrawny, brittle, trailer-trash queen Sarah Palin dragging herself out from under some rock and shoving her pinched, ravaged face in front of any camera she can find, forcefully broadcasting her opinions like anyone gives a screaming shit about what she thinks. The ignorant conservative hordes jumped up at their leaders' command and goose-stepped their way down to their local Walmart or Cracker Barrel restaurant and willingly blew their (irony alert) welfare checks on useless crap they really didn't need, just because some media hack told them they were defending some pseudo-celebrity's right to free speech, and snapped up every bit of Duck Dynasty schlocky merchandise they could get their fat, stubby fingers on. It's astonishing to me that those idiots will do whatever their right-wing puppet-masters tell them to do, without a smidgen of critical thought. As long as they see other people like them doing the same thing, they think they are on the right side of things. Adolf Hitler would be so proud.<br />
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It's really difficult to understand how this country has changed so much that some repulsive, grubby old scumbag can spout a load of vile, disgusting hatespeech to a national magazine and then have millions of idiots defend his right to call gay people "terrorists" and make astonishingly ignorant statements about how black people were better off under slavery. Twenty years ago someone saying that would be roundly criticized and condemned from every part of the political spectrum. Nowadays, you could come out in favor of child molesters and as long as you managed to sneak in some Bible quotes, you will get people defending you and your right to be an asshole in public.<br />
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How did that happen? I think it's the result of a number of things; one of them being the death of civil political discourse and intellectual thinking in this country. The internet and social media have given everyone a global, anonymous platform to expel any and all kinds of hateful, disoriented thinking, with little or no consequence or accountability. The gun lobby has set an example of scorched-earth policy by vehemently opposing even the smallest, most innocuous and toothless tightening of gun laws in this country. Even the slaughter of 20 innocent children in December 2012 meant nothing to them. The only thing they cared about is the fictional "slippery slope" which would surely lead to the government forcibly confiscating everyone's firearms if they banned one assault rifle or extra-capacity ammo clip. Throw in an ignorant, uneducated population that accepts claptrap like that as gospel, and the spineless, cowardly stooges in Congress who are firmly in the back pocket of the gun manufacturers, and you have a great example of neo-fascism knocking at your door disguised as "patriotism."<br />
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But I digress. Thankfully, Christmas is providing a welcome (albeit short) relief and distraction from all this small-minded stupidity, but I fear the argument will only be resurrected next month as the new season of that Duck Dynasty trashfest starts up. It seems the conservative parts of the population will put up with absolutely any kind of horrible stupidity and intolerance as long as it's painted with the varnish of "religious expression," which has become the dog whistle to automatically incite the vast unwashed hordes to jump up and do whatever they are told. After all, Jesus is on their side. Or so they think.<br />
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Therefore, I give the Much Ado About Nothing Award to Duck Dynasty and their mindless followers for all their spectacular bigotry and ignorance. They have taken the entire country one giant step closer to hell.</div>
Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-52267738993383094962013-10-11T23:42:00.000-07:002013-12-25T11:45:06.309-07:00End of the ExperimentOnce again the greatest representative democracy the world has ever known finds itself in a maelstrom of confusion and insanity. Thanks to the shamefully stupid Tea Buggers and their lethal demagoguery, the whole entire US government is shut down, brought to its knees, spinning its wheels while nearly a million federal workers are idle, national parks and recreation areas are closed, and numerous programs that provide real help to real people are shut down. Welcome to the end of an experiment.<br />
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Our system of government has always been a social experiment on the grandest of scales. Imagine a form of government born of the ideas of freedom, liberty and equality for all. Something quite like that had never really been seen on this planet prior to the 18th century. Thousands of years ago when primitive humans were first starting to gather together and form settlements, one of the first governments to evolve was a monarchy, a "king" to rule the others. This ran through a couple of permutations, such as an oligarchy (rule by a small, chosen group of people) or plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) or theocracy (rule by religious leaders) but by and far it proved a fairly workable way to keep a bunch of farmers and shepherds kind of toeing some sort of line.<br />
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For a long time monarchies worked well, and still do in a number of countries in the present day, but as large number of people became more educated through technological advances such as the printing press, they soon outgrew the confines of royalty and royal lineage. As the world expanded, wealth (and resultant power) became more distributed, government likewise expanded and adapted. People were demanding more of a say in how their lives were run, and various forms of representation were created. General assemblies, or bodies of citizens representing other citizens, began to take root in Europe, one of the earliest being Iceland's Althing, created in the year 976. Eventually hybrid systems of government were created, merging kings with prime ministers and parliaments and a new form of representational government took hold.<br />
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The US government was born at the confluence of a number of serendipitous forces. Initially formed by those fleeing religious persecution, it was a brand new world, full beyond measure of immense natural riches, free from the limited land mass and resources of Europe and the stifling weight of history and their stodgy traditions. America was a clean slate, a chance to start anew, to get it right, to create the most perfect form of government that humans could possibly dream up. And dream they did.<br />
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The Constitution that came out of the late 1700s has become the gold standard of good government. Not perfect, but better than anything else that has been around. Even though it has been amended 27 times (with a 28th amendment proposed - one that would make all laws applicable to everyone), these adjustments have allowed the government to change in response to a rapidly changing world. Some of them have been foolhardy (No. 18 - Prohibition) but others have been true to the finest expressions of the best of humanity (No. 13 - Abolition of Slavery and No. 19 - Women's Suffrage). The great social experiment that is the United States of America was in full bloom, and doing very well indeed.<br />
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Scientists will tell you that the best experiments are those which are conducted in a closed system; that is, an environment where everything is carefully controlled and random outside forces kept to a minimum. Even under the best of circumstances, a running experiment will start to degrade as entropy creeps in and wear and tear causes deterioration. Our government has been beset with destabilizing forces from inside and out, from those which occur in nature to those created by our own shadow natures.<br />
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It seems the worst forces that befall our nation and disrupt our constitutional government are those created by ourselves. In the past century, two devastating world wars, a number of smaller but still very significant skirmishes (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq) have caused great stress. The threat of nuclear annihilation or environmental catastrophe has been shaping policy through most of this century. But most insidious, it seems, are the forces of greed and religion. They form a double-headed serpent, and it is at the nexus of those two where the most damage is done.<br />
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The past two decades have seen the ascendency of greed and religion in our government at a level that can scarcely be comprehended. Like some kind of virulent zombie virus, it has taken over vast segments of the population and most of Congress, turning them into blathering idiots, and malignant ne'er-do-wells. Complicated by a Supreme Court that has some of the most backward-thinking, regressive conservatives around, the complete corruption of our government by money has been aided and abetted by heinous, abominable rulings such as Citizens' United, which virtually assured the democratic system will be irretrievably choked and debased by an enormous influx of special-interest monies and corporate meddling.<br />
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Religion, and in particular Christian fundamentalism, has also insinuated itself into our legislative system at all levels. Like a many-headed Hydra, it manifests itself in an appallingly large number of ways, from advocating to pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control because it violates their "freedom of religious expression", to taking over school boards and forcing changes to their curricula to include bogus, intellectually untenable pseudo-sciences such as "intelligent design", to doing everything they can to prevent certain segments of the population from exercising their right to vote. Using their religious beliefs like a shield, they cowardly pass preposterous laws designed solely to prevent women from exerting control over their reproductive destinies by forcing them to undergo unnecessary medical procedures such as ultrasounds, and enacting biased, draconian regulations that make it nearly impossible for planned-parenting agencies to legitimately and lawfully provide needed and wanted services.<br />
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We have seen the wealth of this nation being concentrated into the top 1% of the population, while everyone else considers themselves lucky if they just tread economic water. This has caused this wealthy segment to tighten and consolidate their control over the Republican party, which is essentially working for the Koch brothers and the Dick Cheneys of the world. Wars are started under the flimsiest of pretenses, bolstered by blatant lying and disinformation, and private corporations rake in the profits.<br />
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Sure, there are many evil people in this country who will gladly take this nation down a pathway to complete destruction if it meant getting their political agenda in place. All this is ultimately made possible by an uneducated, disinterested electorate, for whom critical thinking and skepticism are unknown concepts. Too many people are more than willing to let Fox News or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or dozens of other conservative blowhards tell them exactly what to think and do. They find it much easier to hate people who are different from them, and they make these "other people" convenient, easy scapegoats for the awful things their legislators - who they themselves had voted into office - do to the quality of their life and the complete ruination of the future of their children. They just don't give a crap, and are too stupid to care.<br />
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The drama going on in this country now - the government being held hostage by a gang of 30 or 40 zealots, blinded by their own radical ideology to the damage they're doing - and the upcoming threat of a debt ceiling crises - which nearly all knowledgeable economists in this country agree would be a complete and unmitigated disaster on a global scale - is unprecedented, certainly in my lifetime. I have never seen the country so thoroughly polarized, even back in the worst days of the Vietnam war, when our society was nearly ripped apart by a costly, tragic war which we eventually lost. These Tea Baggers don't care how much damage and hardship they inflict on millions of people, or the millions and millions of dollars that will be shamefully squandered by a completely unnecessary government shutdown. The only thing they care about is getting their own way, and they don't care how many lives are wrecked in the process.<br />
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Sadly, I'm beginning to think the great social experiment in representative democracy that is the United States of America is starting to wind down, to sag and break apart under the weight of its own misdoings and corruption. Our system of government is being poisoned by right-wing ideologues and religious zealots, who are pulling everyone down into their toxic cesspool of psychotic paranoia and dissolution. I don't see a way out for America to save itself. We may come out the other end of this somewhat intact, but we will be so changed that we will no longer be the America we once were.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-26579605944069417742013-09-10T08:48:00.000-07:002013-09-10T08:48:41.524-07:00The Syrian MinefieldThe dire situation in Syria has exploded on the world stage and the global reaction to it has quickly become the geopolitical version of an M. C. Escher painting. You know what those are - mind-bending drawings of staircases that go around and around but end up nowhere, or buildings with unending twists and turns which also lead nowhere. Likewise, the political twists and contortions that are still going on also seem to expend a lot of time, energy and media bandwidth but fail to go nowhere.<br />
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It all started several weeks ago as the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria, feeling threatened by a rebel insurgency that wants to see it gone, turned chemical weapons on its own people. We all cringed at the photos and videos of the dead and dying Syrian civilians suffering the ravages of what has to be some of the most horrific and awful weapons ever created, next to nuclear. President Obama, being the highly moral person he is, was thoroughly appalled and horrified over what had happened and rightfully condemned the government in Syria for violating a U.N. proscription against the use of chemical weaponry. Saying the Assad regime crossed a "red line," Obama left it quite clear that he felt a military response against such an atrocity should not only be appropriate, but almost mandatory. Obama expected the American people and the rest of the world to be properly and instantly outraged, and to fall in line in support behind him in moving forward with a military strike which would cripple or eliminate Syria's capability to gas their own helpless, innocent people.<br />
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What he got instead of support was ... virtual silence. Obama was all set to go ahead with the attack using his powers as head of the executive branch without consulting Congress. There was a clear precedent to this when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq about a decade ago, on a wildly dubious and ultimately untrue basis of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be something between astonishing incompetent intelligence information or just plain old-fashioned lying through your teeth. But conspicuous in its absence in the wake of a terrible atrocity was a groundswell of incensed clamoring for immediate military action. Where were all our allies in the West - Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, even Poland? Surprisingly, the prickly French, who seem to delight in taking a contrary position to whatever the U.S. is taking, were the most agreeable to a forceful response to Assad. The American people, while recoiling in disgust to the human tragedy, were also recoiling from the prospect of dipping our toes in another Middle East quagmire, with Iraq and Afghanistan being prominently featured in their reasoning. Baffled and caught off-balance by the blatant non-response to a humanitarian catastrophe, Obama still went ahead and tasked the Pentagon with coming up with a plan of action and risk-assessment for what was being portrayed as a "surgical" strike.<br />
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This whole Syria issue has taken on a life of its own. It has split into two different news stories: the first being the gas attack itself, and the second being the political reaction to the gas attack. The second story has grown so rapidly that it has overtaken the original event, relegating it to the status of an afterthought or a mere detail in a bigger picture. It has produced some very unusual and novel things, like Republicans calling for calm and restraint in the face of an opportunity to attack another country, which is like a starving dog turning down a big piece of filet mignon, or Democrats screaming to let the bombs fly sooner rather than later.<br />
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Syrian president Bashar al-Assad looked like a character out of a John Waters movie on an interview today. He denied that chemical weapons were ever used by his forces. In fact, he made some vague, unsupported assertions that HIS military forces were the ones who got gassed. Assad is quite a creep, and looks like he would be most comfortable in the back row of an X-rated movie theater. When asked about the deaths of the people he is supposed to serve, he acted like he just got caught by his wife, making out with a trashy waitress he met at the downtown Damascus Hooters restaurant - deny, deny and deny some more.<br />
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The situation is very fluid and things change every day. Now the Russians have come up with a proposal to put all of Syria's chemical weapons under international control, to be eventually destroyed. This may be an out for all concerned that avoids a military conflict. The American people are staunchly against any military involvement, and many make the "slippery slope" argument that a "limited surgical strike" will lead to American boots on the ground, and another Afghanistan in the making.<br />
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There are so many variables, so many possible ways this can play out. If Congress does give the go-ahead and the U.S. goes through with the attack, how will the Assad regime react? How will his neighbors feel about another country lobbing rockets at someone right in their back yard? Will Syria pop a couple of missiles over the fence on Israel? Would a surgical air strike against Assad's chemical weapons capability actually do any good? It would be virtually impossible to cripple his entire chemical weapon stockpile, and would he then be much more willing to use whatever remains?<br />
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If Congress says no to the whole thing, would that encourage other dictators to use chemical weapons because obviously they could do that and get away with it? What will a "no" vote do to American prestige and influence all over the world, but especially in a region where fear and intimidation are the main glues that hold together a fragile peace? What will that do to the Obama administration as its second term plays out? Will it cripple an already lame-duck president and compromise his ability to push through all the other things he wants to accomplish? Will it be more difficult for him to get his way on other issues, like the upcoming debt crisis and immigration reform? Will Obama himself be seen as weak and dithering on important issues?<br />
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Obama's move to drag Congress, kicking and screaming, into the fray may be either a good idea or the worst idea ever. Now Congress will be on record as either opposing or approving an air strike, so they will share either the credit or the blame. But bringing this incredibly dysfunctional body into center stage may be really dumb, since Congress seems incapable of doing anything constructive or useful.<br />
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We will probably get the first vote on the Syria matter in a couple of days, when the Senate votes to invoke closure on the topic, and deny any use of the filibuster (the Republicans' weapon of choice when they can't get their way by, you know, actually coming up with good alternative solutions to a problem) to gum up the works. The House of Representatives looks like to won't vote for a couple of weeks on the matter, conceivably giving the Assad regime time to move its chemical stockpiles around and conceal them, or "harden" them by making it tougher to find and destroy them. This will also involve moving them into civilian neighborhoods so if the chemical weapons do manage to get blown up, the gas will be released and cause horrific collateral damage and deaths of innocent people.<br />
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This is a quagmire of the first order, and one which definitely changes daily and often seems to evolve by the hour. It would be completely fascinating to watch if it wasn't for the fact that so much is riding on what will happen when the U.S. and the world finally decide to take some sort of action against a heartless dictator who sees no wrong in subjecting his fellow citizens to die in a gas attack.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-16375732476340274402013-09-05T20:08:00.000-07:002013-12-30T10:47:44.419-07:00Running Down The ClockSummer in the desert is starting to wind down, on this, the first week of September. You wouldn't know it just from the temperature, because it was 110 degrees today. It sure felt hot outside and the next couple of days are predicted to be moderately cooler, maybe all the way down to 108 degrees. Summertime kind of quietly weasels its way into your life during the month of May, but it always needs to be dragged out - kicking, screaming and clawing the ground - all through September and half of October.<br />
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But there are subtle indications that the wheel of the seasons is beginning to turn. It is becoming noticeably darker earlier these days. When I left the gym yesterday at 6:55 pm the sun had already set, the first time that has happened since last April. I read something where the sun's position in the sky doesn't change much from the summer solstice on June 21st through Midsummer Day (this year on August 6th). After that date, the sun begins to move more swiftly in its southerly journey to the autumn equinox and then the winter solstice.<br />
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In the nighttime sky, when it's not full of monsoon clouds, the stars are starting to belie the passing months. Scorpio the Scorpion is beginning to slink away toward the southwest horizon. For just a couple of weeks, you can spot two beautiful crowns in the sky - Corona Australis, the Southern Crown, a little below the scorpion's glittering stinger, and Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, low in the western sky not far from the sparkling orange Arcturus, one of the brightest stars in the sky.<br />
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The Great Square of Pegasus is starting to vault its way up the eastern sky. A large, nearly perfect square, it's easy to spot and is a sure sign of autumn. A little less obvious is the constellation of Andromeda, hanging on to one of the corners of the Great Square for dear life and trailing it as it rises in the sky. With binoculars, it's not hard to spot a smudge of dim gray light in the boundaries of Andromeda, and the multi-million-year-old light which finally has made its way to your retinas after crossing a gulf of 12 quintillion empty, frigid miles. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, an island universe of billions and billions of stars, similar in shape to our own home galaxy, the Milky Way, but even larger.<br />
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The two galaxies are part of what's known as the Local Group, a collection of dozens of galaxies bound together gravitationally in our own little neighborhood in space. Astronomers are pretty sure Andromeda and the Milky Way are speeding toward each other, and will most likely collide in a couple of billion years. Surprisingly, they also think the two galaxies will just pass through each other, the distance between individual stars being vast enough so that the probability of a star running into another star is extremely low. But the collective gravitational tidal forces will be more than enough to bend and warp the two galaxies into very distorted shapes, and invariably millions of stars will be cast off into intergalactic space, to wander the deadly cold vacuum as rogue stars, in desolate solitude. Over even more billions of years the two galaxies will dance and loop around each other, colliding over and over again. Eventually, in the far distant future, the galaxies will merge into a super-galaxy and probably even the supermassive black holes in the two galactic centers will merge into one ultramassive black hole.<br />
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In fact, astronomers have spotted a couple of galaxies, 30 times farther away than Andromeda, which are in the process of colliding. This ultra-slow train wreck of galactic proportions has been going on for hundreds of millions of years and will continue on for many more millions, leaving a huge mess of stars, gas, and dust strewn over an impossibly vast area of space:<br />
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So, sometimes I think about our home galaxy being on an unavoidable collision course with an even larger galaxy, and I dream about what that might look like, assuming Planet Earth is still in one piece and there will be humans living on it in a couple of billion years. No matter who or what is around at that time, it will be the greatest show in the entire universe. For now though, I have to be content with dreaming about the cool, crisp autumn mornings which are also slowly, inexorably inching their way to us, and the dramatic cranberry-colored sunsets which give way to dark, deep and chilly nights. And the 110-degree summer days will be a distant memory.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-57210340541316464992013-07-31T11:14:00.000-07:002013-07-31T20:52:49.558-07:0020 Years in ArizonaToday marks the day 20 years ago in 1993 when I officially moved to Phoenix. I've written about my "Arizona-versary" several times in this blog so I won't go over things that I've already talked about, but it is somewhat of a milestone. Just short of one-third of my whole life I have lived here, and in spite of being born in Pennsylvania, I consider Arizona my home.<br />
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I have always loved the desert, even as a little kid when the only desert I saw was on our black-and-white TV. Something about the dramatic starkness and the beautiful barrenness of the land spoke to me, and I was always mesmerized by the craggy, windswept mountains and vast expanse of sun-baked earth. Where a lot of my peers saw nothing but brutal desolation and debilitating emptiness, I saw life, history, color, art and intricate, ageless patterns and rhythms. This is a land that holds more ghosts than people, and the footfalls and songs of countless previous generations echo down the canyons of time right to the present day. The desert might appear to be a lonely place, but you are never alone here. Wherever you go, spirits walk with you. Monument Valley, in far northeastern Arizona, is one of those places where the veil between the temporal world and the spirit world is especially thin.<br />
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Arizona is a place where cultures collide, intersect, conflict, separate and come together again, over and over. Cultures such as the Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo have mixed uneasily at times but have still melded together to form a uniquely colorful and vibrant pastiche. A fine example of this is the church at San Xavier del Bac, in southern Arizona. Known as the White Dove of the Desert, it rises in hallucinatory splendor from the shimmering, heat-blasted expanse of ochre- and olive-colored desert near Tucson.<br />
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It seems, though, as time goes on the various cultures who make up this land are increasingly at odds with each other. Discrimination and bigotry are rampant in Arizona, particularly against Native Americans and Mexicans who have lived in this area for a very long time. A lot of those doing the discrimination are people who have moved here from somewhere else, and really have no claim on the land or any of its residents. I guess Anglos have a way of doing that, moving into a land and then taking it over and appropriating its culture as their own, making aboriginal residents feel like outsiders and trespassers. They did that with rock and roll music of the 50s, when black gospel and rhythm-and-blues music were co-opted and taken over by white artists like Elvis Presley and thus made palatable to the presiding (white) culture, who milked it for as much money as they could get out of it. They took everything, and gave nothing back in return.<br />
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The Anglo culture has been dominant here for a long time, but that is coming to an end. The increasing Hispanic population fairly guarantees that the white population of Arizona will become a minority, as early as 2025. What that will do to this state, its culture and its population cannot be reliably foreseen, but it will be amazing and fascinating, and it will blaze a trail to a new reality and a new state. Maybe Arizona, as it rushes into the future, will find that it more closely resembles the Arizona of 100 years ago than anything else.<br />
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I feel that I have carved myself out a really good life here in Arizona. I have a home which I dearly love. Buying this house was one of the best things I've ever done, and it is a place where I feel perfectly safe, secure and satisfied, and where I can enjoy my beloved rabbits in peace. I have made many wonderful, faithful friends who I value very highly, and a new chosen family in Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue. I've been a volunteer with BHRR for going on 13 years and it has made a huge, incalculable difference in my life. BHRR is also one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and I feel that I have gained much, much more than I have given.<br />
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The yearly parade of what passes for seasons here in the Phoenix area never ceases to fascinate me, and a beautiful desert sunrise can still imbue me with an awe and an appreciation every bit as strong as the first time I witnessed one. The cranberry-colored clouds of a December sunset can fill my mind with a beauty and serenity unsurpassed by any other. The summer monsoon can set the sky ablaze and turn the evening twilight into a living painting of the most amazing and intricate textures and colors. And most certainly, a clear nighttime sky far away from the lights of the city is absolutely one of the most mind-blowing and awe-inspiring things I have ever witnessed in my life. The sheer number of stars you can see defies comprehension and is a treasure beyond any valuation, and far beyond my ability to adequately describe.<br />
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The vast diversity of the land and the eternally-changing tapestry of the sky turns this state into an artist's-canvas of the soul, a multifaceted prism which shows you many, many different, new sides and angles of something you have seen dozens of time. The desert renews and reinvents itself constantly, but in very subtle ways and if you don't tune your mind to these changes, you will most likely miss them.<br />
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But, all things have a beginning and an end, and I am starting to get a bit restless. I find the right-wing, ultra-conservative politics of this state to be destructive, suffocating and toxic. Too often these days conservatism is just a convenient cover for racism, homophobia, religious intolerance and bigotry. American politics is fracturing along many different fault lines, not only by political orientation but also racial, economic, gender and class lines, to name a few. People are much less inclined to open their eyes and their minds to new outlooks and opinions, and many of them opt to shut out any voices which are different from their own. They choose to not make an effort to understand what their neighbor is saying to them, and prefer instead to surround themselves only with others who share their narrow views. Understanding different points of view takes a little effort and so many people in this state are very disinclined to do to make that effort.<br />
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So, I am starting to look elsewhere to live, most probably out of Arizona. I'm looking toward New Mexico or Oregon/Washington state. I have no concrete plans as of yet, but this is how things happen in my life. There will be a slow, almost imperceptible change in me and eventually, when the time is right, I will leave Arizona and move on to the next adventure in my life.<br />
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There will come a time when I will have no more Arizona-versaries, but I will always have memories of the great times and unrelenting beauty of my desert home.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-32523902377752840422013-07-19T10:59:00.002-07:002013-07-19T10:59:36.767-07:00American Justice: An Oxymoron (Part 2)One of the tenets of the American criminal justice system is the idea of trial by jury. Having its roots way back in the British Magna Carta, the idea that a "jury of your peers" could provide the purest, most unadulterated dispensation of justice possible has been a central pillar of the house of cards which passes for our justice system.<br />
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But just how good is this "jury of your peers" idea, and how does the court system maximize the ability of a jury to provide this invaluable service?<br />
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I have a little bit of direct experience with the jury system, having served on a jury in the city of Phoenix court several years ago. I was seated on a case involving drunk driving, which make up like 95% of all court cases in this town. I was chosen as jury foreman, which I wanted because I thought it was my best chance to hurry things along and get the hell out of there. I had to almost immediately jerk one of the other jurors back in line, because he loudly announced that a long time ago some cop gave him a traffic ticket which he considered unfair, and because of that he was going to vote for acquittal no matter what. I explained to this dickwad in no uncertain terms that nobody gives a crap whether he was fairly ticketed or not, and he wasn't there to exact some kind of vague revenge against the system which he felt unfairly persecuted him. His job was to examine the evidence of this particular case and render a verdict, and not launch a vendetta against some perceived injustice he suffered years ago at the hands of a traffic cop. Admittedly I was tired, in a really REALLY lousy mood and I would have slapped the shit out of any fellow juror who pissed me off in a hot second.<br />
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Fun fact: I was called for jury service a couple of years later and yet another drunk driving case (I know, boring as hell) but since I think people who drink and drive are absolute scum of the earth, I made those feelings abundantly clear during the courtroom interview. When asked about the law providing a "legal limit," or a level of alcohol intoxication under which it is permissible to drive, I loudly announced that "I don't care what the law says," (exact words) and I would vote to convict anyone who has a B.A.C. other than 0. Needless to say I was hustled out of the court room and actually dismissed from serving on a jury that day. I was home by 9:30 that morning and was incredibly happy and delighted with myself. I will definitely do that again the next time I'm called for jury duty. <br />
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Jurors bring with them all manner of batshit-crazy experiences and biases which have nothing to do at all with the case at hand, but which can affect any decisions they make, and in the privacy of the jury room the judge knows nothing about these biases unless someone tells them. When jurors are selected, the judge and lawyers are looking for people who don't know a lot about the case being tried, and supposedly their ignorance about the facts of the case would be a "tabula rasa" (empty tablet) on which the relevant facts would be written and their conclusions drawn, outside of the refractive lens of pre-existing knowledge. The case of George Zimmerman was such an immediate national sensation that it's very difficult to understand how anyone in the Sanford, Florida, area could have missed hearing about it. Call me an elitist, but I think the more intelligent you are, the more you know about news events happening around you. Smart people tend to follow current events and watch news shows on television; less intelligent people watch "The Bachelorette" and other such drek. Therefore the lawyers favor people of limited intelligence to serve on juries.<br />
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Because it seems that jurors are kept in the dark about a lot of stuff happening during the trial, and the more poorly-informed you are about everything the more desirable you are as a juror, that is the best incentive I can think of to live a crime-free life. I consider going on murderous rampages at least two or three times a week, but it's the prospect of having my fate decided by a bunch of clueless, detached "peers" in a <strike>circus</strike> court of law that keeps me from acting on these feelings. I may have regular homicidal urges, but I'm not stupid enough to get caught for them.<br />
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So, I really was not surprised by the torrent of outrageous idiocy when one of the jurors on the Zimmerman case decided to speak out to the media about her experience. "Juror B37," as she was cryptically called, spoke to Anderson Cooper about her jury service and you can read her bewildering thought processes <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/justice/zimmerman-juror-book" target="_blank">here</a>. Some highlights:<br />
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<i><b>"I think George Zimmerman
is a man whose heart was in the right place, but just got displaced by
the vandalism in the neighborhoods, and wanting to catch these people so
badly that he went above and beyond what he really should have done."</b></i><br />
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Since when does "above and beyond what he really should have done" include shooting a 17-year-old to death? That's a little bit more serious than having a minor lapse of judgment. Poor judgment is when you post something stupid on Facebook or say something horrible about your boss when they are standing right behind you. A lapse in judgment usually does not result in a teenager being shot and killed. Also:<br />
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<i><b>"...I think his heart was in the right place. It just went terribly wrong."</b></i><br />
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Well yeah, occasionally things do go "terribly wrong." But I thought in our justice system there are legal consequences when things go "terribly wrong." This shooting was no accident; Zimmerman knew what he was doing from the moment he racially-profiled Martin in his hoodie. He took deliberate, intentional actions despite being warned, and precipitated this confrontation. He could not be more guilty, and yet he walks. Because the state of Florida has decided that under a wide range of circumstances, you have a right to act as judge, jury and executioner of someone whom you<i> think</i> is acting in a threatening manner. Another quote from Juror B37:<br />
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<i><b>"Anybody would think anybody walking down the road, stopping and turning
and looking -- if that's exactly what happened -- is suspicious."</b></i><br />
and<br />
<i><b>"I think all of us thought race did not play a role. We never had that discussion."</b></i><br />
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That is one of the most transparently stupid and simple-minded things ever spoken. Anyone who thinks race is not a major factor in what went down that night is either a complete idiot or being deliberately disingenuous. Zimmerman was clearing gunning (pun not intended) for a black youth because he felt they were responsible, as a subset of citizens, for all the vandalism and crime occurring in that neighborhood. The fact that Martin was wearing a hoodie branded him as a "thug" in Zimmerman's mind. Juror B37 even went so far to say that the fact that it was raining also contributed to Martin acting "suspiciously." How many people do you see on a daily basis who look, act and walk "suspiciously?" If I took a shot at every dirtbag in Phoenix who I thought was looking or walking in a suspicious manner, the police wouldn't be able to keep up with the bodies piling up.<br />
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Reading through a transcript of everything Juror B37 said in her interview illustrates every single thing that is wrong with the criminal justice system in America. The fact that someone as blatantly stupid and ignorant as she would get anywhere near a courthouse is an abomination. Sadly, the whole vast spectrum of things that have made up the regrettable jigsaw-puzzle that is the Trayvon Martin case show how spectacularly dysfunctional, unfair, and racist the American justice system is.<br />
<br />Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-79751763225184049342013-07-15T13:57:00.003-07:002013-07-18T09:43:26.630-07:00American Justice: An Oxymoron (Part 1)This past weekend on a hot and sultry Saturday evening a bombshell was dropped on this country which is still reverberating three days later. The Florida trial of 29-year-old George Zimmerman, killer of 17-year-old Skittles-carrier and chronic iced-tea abuser Trayvon Martin, came to an end with Zimmerman's acquittal. The moonpie-faced defendant sauntered out of the courtroom a free <strike>asshole</strike> man (not really totally free, more on that later) while Trayvon Martin, well, remains buried in his grave.<br />
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The largely arcane, inscrutable wheels of the American judicial system churned and wheezed and rattled one more time, and once more left huge numbers of people extremely upset and disappointed in a very obvious miscarriage of justice. Our court system has a way of doing that, ignoring the big-picture for the niggling little details and minutiae of process. Remember O.J. Simpson? There wasn't a shadow of a doubt that he committed the murders, yet he got let off by a jury who was talked into having reasonable doubts. Now, almost two decades later, it is an indisputable fact of public knowledge that he murdered two people in cold blood. Casey Anthony, who murdered her daughter and failed to notify authorities of her disappearance for a month because she was too busy partying and participating in wet t-shirt contests, also skated out the front door, thanks to the jury. On what planet is it considered justice when obviously guilty criminals can get away with their heinous actions scot free? Also, how is it possible to have a shred of respect for such a system that allows such glaring, atrocious failures to happen?<br />
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Prosecutors in the Zimmerman trial certainly had their work cut out for them, because the investigation of the case was horrifically botched up from the start. Evidence was contaminated or not collected at all. Martin's body was physically moved from the sidewalk to a grassy area, disturbing and tainting the evidence. The now-famous hoodie he was wearing was placed in an airtight plastic bag after being moistened by rain, further destroying and corrupting evidence. At first it seemed like a slam-dunk for the state. The initial statement by the prosecutor was riveting and emotional, and the opening statement by dickwad defense attorney Don West started off with a supremely ill-advised and staggeringly unfunny knock-knock joke, which seemed to imply the jurors were idiots. Laying the biggest egg since the brontosaurus walked the earth, the silence in the courtroom that followed that incredibly stupid attempt at comedy was deafening, leaving West chortling and grinning at himself like the biggest jerk in the world, which he is.<br />
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Slowly but surely it changed from George Zimmerman being on trial to Trayvon Martin being on trial, for having the audacity of <i>dressing</i> like a thug and <i>walking</i> through a neighborhood. Zimmerman, a wanna-be cop with apparently a lot more free time than common sense, decided that Martin was surely up to no good being in that part of town looking the way he did and took it upon himself - despite clear admonishment from a 911 dispatcher to mind his own business and stay put - to confront Martin for ... what? A cell-phone recording of someone calling for help became a bone of contention as families on both sides claimed it was their relative screaming for his life.<br />
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Central to this case is the concept of self-defense and when it is appropriate to use deadly force to save your own hide. Florida's recent "stand your ground" law makes deadly force a much more viable option because it says if you <i>perceive</i> yourself to be in imminent danger of death or severe bodily harm, you are justified in the use of deadly force to defend yourself. If you <b>PERCEIVE</b> yourself to be in danger! You don't have to actually BE in danger, only THINK that you are. Think about the ramifications of that for a second. Someone you don't like because of the way they dress or the color of their skin is walking in a part of town where you don't think they belong, and they turn to look at you as you approach them from behind to confront them, and you think THEY are being threatening?? How many dimwitted, gun-happy douchebags would find that a "threatening" situation when in fact they are the ones doing the threatening? Just think of all the batshit-crazy, mentally-unstable nut cases there are in Florida and then imagine them given carte-blanche by the authorities to shoot anyone who happens to look at them the wrong way. That's what "stand your ground" does.<br />
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Some people think this trial was only about race, and others think it's about self-defense. Personally I think it's about both, with the added complication of guns and gun use in America. Again the problem of mentally-deficient faux-vigilantes carrying firearms and being all too eager to use them has resulted in a pointless loss of life. But how can we expect anything different if twenty young children in Newtown, Connecticut can be blasted to smithereens by a deranged gunman and months later Congress is too cowardly and spineless to pass even the most innocuous, toothless law about background checks? Because of such selfish, narrow-minded cowardice, these types of ridiculous, tragic murders will continue until every street in America is stained with blood. And still the NRA, their ape-like, knuckle-dragging supporters and their bottom-bitches in Congress will bleat and complain about how their precious, god-given Second Amendment rights are being trampled and violated. Well, BOO-FUCKING-HOO. You want a nice Camembert to go with that whine? At least your damned kid is still alive.<br />
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The trial may be over, but Zimmerman's life will be forever changed. He will need to be on the alert every minute of every day, because he must be painfully aware of the millions of people who are outraged at this travesty of justice. Some people will not be content to move on; still others will seek some sort of vigilante justice (which, in a weirdly ironic way, is not at all different from what Zimmerman was instigating on that cool, damp, February evening in Sanford, Florida). It will be next to impossible for Zimmerman to function in the general public, being instantly recognizable (read: targetable). No one will want to hire him with the toxic baggage he will carry for the rest of his life. He is the one who will be in a kind of solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Meanwhile a seventeen-year-old person lies in a grave and a family, along with millions of American citizens, grieve at how spectacularly broken our justice system is when an obvious murderer can be set free and walk among us.<br />
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<br />Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-88910877947544643592013-07-01T21:25:00.000-07:002013-07-02T09:13:25.077-07:00Hell On Earth Weekend 2013Oh my my my I have been such a bad person, ignoring my blog like this. I really love writing my blog but I go through phases where I just don't have the motivation to write. It's been three months since my last post, and I said I wouldn't let months go by without posting. Oh well enough with the recrimination. I'm here now and I'm ready to WRITE!<br />
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Just got through Hell on Earth Weekend, which is what I call the weekend right before July 4th. And it really lived up to its name. Friday and Saturday the temps rocketed up to 118 degree territory. The very air seemed to be burning, and you can tell when it gets above, say, 115 because you notice how hot the air is when you breathe. I don't know what's going on or why there's any reason why it has to be so hot. But even at 10pm it was still 100 degrees outside. This is such a strange place where I live.<br />
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I keep thinking more and more that I have to get out of Phoenix and get away from these horrible, awful, miserable summers. I was sick and tired of the heat three weeks ago, and there's still at least three, and more likely three and a half more months of this crap to get through. It seems the air conditioner runs all the time, valiantly waging a war against the blistering heat outside, doing its best to maintain as much of a difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures as possible. It wouldn't be so bad if it cooled off during the night, but summer low temps are almost never under 80 degrees, and more often in the upper 80s or low 90s. That makes for a nasty climate where the heat is unrelenting and constant. And debilitating of mind and spirit.<br />
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When I first moved here 20 years ago I loved the heat; I thrived on it. Maybe it was moving from the San Francisco Bay Area where the marine fog layer was often an enemy, a spoiler. Many times I would awake on a clear morning anticipating a day at the beach, and I would begin the drive out there and it was beautiful and sunny but one mile away from the coast the gray clouds started spreading out in front of me. When I got to the beach itself it was gray and overcast and windy and cool. Some of my fondest memories of the Bay Area were the days I spent at the beach. The days when there was an offshore breeze and all the fog got pushed way out over the ocean, the beaches were spectacularly beautiful. The sky was a crystalline blue and the air felt so very fresh and clean. I would get to the beach at 10am and stay till 6pm, broiling constantly in the sun. I know now that was not a smart thing to do, skin-cancer-wise, but I would not trade that experience for anything in the world. I felt so perfectly happy and content, surrounded by a world of unbelievable beauty at the beach on those crystal-clear, perfect days. I didn't want to be anywhere else and never wanted it to end. It truly was a paradise on earth.<br />
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There are great days here in Arizona, mostly in the fall, winter and early spring. I find I function much better in the cooler weather. I feel more energized and excited to do things. When it's so hot that you end up sweltering in your own home, even minor chores like cleaning are a real pain in the butt. I hate the fact that the hot weather is so horrible outside that you spend way too much time indoors. It's just the reverse of when I was a child. The wintertime was when you hibernated, stayed indoors because it was so nasty and cold outside. Here, you hibernate during the summer, when it's disgustingly hot outside.<br />
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I used to love living here, but the political climate in this state is so vile and hateful I can't stand it anymore. There are so many hate-filled conservatives here, and they are some of the most ignorant and uneducated people I have ever encountered. The state legislature has some of the the most repugnant excuses for human beings that ever befouled a voting booth. There are also more burned-out meth heads and white-trash dirtbags than I'd ever believed possible. Racism is absolutely rampant in this state and runs wide and deep - racism against Mexicans, native Americans, gay people. There are dimwitted, bigoted, fundamentalist Christians who are totally delusional in their Bronze-Age beliefs and superstitions, and robotic, insular Mormons who try so very hard to conceal their virulent bigotry and prejudices with their thin, studied smiles and carefully chosen words.<br />
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The question is, where would I go if I moved? I like Payson, about an hour and a half northeast of Phoenix. There, up on the Mogollon Rim, they actually have seasons and the occasional covering of snow. But it's still Arizona, and everything that goes along with it. I don't want to move back to California, since my love-hate relationship with that state still hasn't resolved itself. You need a lot of money to live there, and I'm not sure it's worth it.<br />
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That leaves moving out of state, and possible places are northern New Mexico, north of Albuquerque and south of Taos. I would consider Oregon or Washington State, too. Colorado would be nice but the winters can be very harsh, and I don't want to get into a reverse-situation like I have now.<br />
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So, with the twentieth anniversary of my move to Phoenix (July 31, 1993) coming soon, I am looking to move again. I am forming a five-year plan to be out of here, and on to my next adventure in life.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-87774849069511125822013-03-20T10:36:00.000-07:002013-04-14T20:00:19.769-07:00Same Old GrindSpring has just sprung, today is the day of the Vernal Equinox. The sun is noticeably rising earlier and setting later. We've already had a blast of unseasonably hot weather, and just a couple of days ago we were basking in record heat for the date (94 degrees).<br />
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While it is WAY too early for such temperatures, and the trend over the next couple of days is moderation closer to normal (80 degrees), time does march on. Springtime inevitably brings the Easter holiday, and with it the equally-inevitable problem of live rabbits as Easter gifts.<br />
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Last year I created a meme for Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue to be used on Facebook. Much to my delight, it was wildly successful and got a great deal of sharing and "likes." You can see it below:<br />
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We re-released that meme a couple of days ago and it is again getting widespread attention and sharing. <i>Update:</i> According to Facebook insights, as of April 14 this meme has been seen by 962,571 people worldwide. Inevitably, along with the sharing comes the barrage of hateful, idiotic comments from real scum-of-the-earth types. Just this morning I had to wade through a bunch of stupid comments and delete-and-ban at least 15 people.<br />
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These comments, sadly, are pretty much the same. A simple-minded, juvenile comment about how rabbits are so good to eat. The vast majority are from males, which makes me very ashamed of my gender (athough women aren't entirely immune from such assholery). I don't call them "men" because they are not men. They are small-minded, psychopathic little boys who spend their worthless, pointless, and hopeless lives parked in front of a computer, trolling the internet for ways to inflict their mental illnesses on the world.<br />
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Much like a really annoying 12-year-old boy starving for any kind of attention, no matter how negative, they make it a point to pipe up and insert their bile into any discussion. I just don't understand the mindset of people who think their opinions are either needed or wanted. If you don't have anything nice to contribute to a group of people who are working for the welfare of innocent animals, then go back to your internet porn or something. But no, so many of them choose to write a hateful comment which serves no useful purpose other than to make them feel like men, which could not be further from reality.<br />
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There has never been anything like Facebook in the entire history of humankind on earth. Even back in 2000, when the internet was still pretty much in its infancy, something like Facebook could barely be imagined. A global platform, easy to use, available to all free of charge (except for advertisements, but I have an ad-blocker on my browser and I see ZERO Facebook ads), which provides instantaneous communication to users in all corners of the world. The egalitarian nature of Facebook means your comments can appear right next to celebrities and national figures. The very democratic, populist nature of Facebook is its greatest strength, and also its greatest weakness.<br />
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Because any idiot in the world can sign up for a Facebook user id, it more often resembles an overflowing toilet instead of a freewheeling digital repository of ideas. The isolation and protection Facebook offers means that really diseased, disturbed individuals can hole up in the moldy comfort of their mother's basement and spew their garbage-filled comments far and wide, free of responsibility or fear of retribution. They are the ultimate cowards, because if they were actually out in a group of people I highly doubt they would be spouting the offensive bullshit that they so often do. If they had to answer for their comments, and get called on the carpet for their festering, disgusting bile, you can be sure the vast majority of them would crawl back into the toilets they came from and continue their sad, stunted lives in mommy's cellar.<br />
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Far from being a new development, the very toxic minds of people were on full display right after the Newtown shootings last December. As the gun control debate raged anew, I was astonished to read some extremely vile and disturbing comments from people whose only priority is to keep their arsenals of guns and high-power weapons. Whatever happened to America that citizens feel so under-siege in their own communities that they need to stockpile such lethal weapons? So many of them are extremely paranoid, and feel that the world is going to come to an end very soon, with vast hordes of criminals sweeping into every town, village and hamlet in this country, raping, pillaging and waging war on the innocent. Where did this poisonous, malignant paranoia come from?<br />
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Facebook certainly has a role in all this, providing instantaneous, worldwide communication of any idea at all, without the responsibility of actually having to justify and explain your opinions. People make hateful, vicious comments about anything because it's easy, and there are no repercussions. They spew their loathsome, disgusting hatefulness, solely because they can.<br />
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If these disturbed individuals are looking for a platform for their psychoses, they won't find it on the BHRR Facebook page. I check our page constantly, and immediately delete-and-ban any fool who thinks their being cute or "edgy" with disgusting comments. <br />
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Leave it to human beings to screw up and corrupt something as miraculous and astonishing as Facebook. Count on some people who aspire to be nothing more than bottom-feeders, living in the muck and mire of the lower depths of the gigantic cesspool that the internet is becoming, and lashing out against anyone who is working to make the world a better place for animals, which are so often victimized and exploited in the most horrific ways imaginable. They will do it, just because they can.<br />
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And I will check our Facebook page throughout the day and through the end of the month, and I will swiftly delete-and-ban any dickwad who has absolutely nothing else going on in their miserable life other than being a hateful, bitter asshole.<br />
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I will do it, because I can.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-8262943013760870182013-03-08T09:57:00.000-07:002013-03-08T09:57:53.085-07:00Taking The HeatLast evening The Rachel Maddow Show had an absolutely brilliant piece detailing the extents to which two of the biggest death merchants in the history of this country will go to avoid answering for their actions.<br />
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For decades the tobacco industry produced a product specifically designed to create an addiction in their users for that product. Nicotine levels were purposefully manipulated to guarantee that the vast majority of their users would be unable to stop. The industry was less than subtle when it came to advertising their product to children, knowing full well that the younger you can get a smoker hooked, the more likely you will have a customer for life, even a life that will be significantly shortened by use of the product.<br />
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With the full cooperation of the popular media, especially Hollywood, the tobacco industry made sure their product was portrayed as an essential part of American life, a birth right to which everyone was entitled. It was turned into a symbol of class, glamour and sophistication.<br />
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But when medical and scientific evidence began to mount concerning the link between smoking and many of the most severe health issues affecting the population, Big Tobacco began to get nervous. Through the courageous actions of pioneers like former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop (recently deceased), the harsh spotlight of public attention was being shone on the cigarette makers, and not in a flattering way.<br />
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It was starting to get hot, so the tobacco industry decided they needed a "heat shield" to protect themselves from this increasingly aggressive scrutiny, so they created and funded a bogus organization which they called the National Smokers' Alliance.<br />
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Ostensibly cast as a spontaneous, "grass roots" organization of fine, upstanding Americans who were seeking nothing more than the freedom to exercise their god-given right to get cancer, the NSA received millions of tobacco dollars to act as national apologists for the tobacco industry. They came up with completely preposterous pronouncements such as "Accommodation and common courtesy would solve this problem," meaning that the answer to all the health concerns is for everyone to mind their own business and pretend nothing bad is happening.<br />
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But it was hard to ignore the huge costs of tobacco addiction, and a number of high-profile, big-dollar lawsuits against the tobacco makers were beginning to get a lot of attention. And some of that attention came from a Senate investigating committee, which at one famous session summoned a number of top tobacco executives to answer for many years of lying to the American public. The gig was up for the phony National Smokers' Alliance, and it quickly disappeared from the national scene.<br />
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This was an example of a "heat shield" that did not work. Now, an example of a heat shield that DOES work:<br />
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The corporations that make and sell guns found themselves in a similar situation to the tobacco industry. Their product is produced solely for the purpose of murdering people. Guns can't be used for anything else than that. Knives kill people too, but knives have other legitimate uses. You can kill someone with a baseball bat, but bats can be used for their intended purpose, in a baseball game. Guns have one and only one use.<br />
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The gun industry did not want to have to deal with the messy business of gun violence and the carnage it wreaks on American society. The daily slaughter of innocent people of all ages was something they did not want to rationalize. They needed something to take the heat for them and deflect the public anger away from them, to provide cover for the continued sale of their product and rake in many millions of dollars of profit. Enter the National Rifle Association.<br />
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The NRA would like you to believe they are comprised of four million stalwart American citizens who seek nothing but the ability to defend their family and property from vast legions of vicious, bloodthirsty criminals, undocumented immigrants and an increasingly Fascist government that wants to invalidate the Constitution. The NRA just wants to make sure the Second Amendment stays firmly in place and every obese, ignorant hillbilly who wants to have a half-dozen automatic rifles in their filthy double-wide should be afforded that opportunity.<br />
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The Second Amendment to the Constitution contains exactly 27 words and was written at a time when the newborn country was just getting on its feet. Those 27 words have been mangled and stretched beyond recognition, and I am certain the Founding Fathers could not dream that it would someday cover mass-produced, insanely powerful weapons like the AR-15 or the AK-47.<br />
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The truth is, the NRA receives an enormous amount of funding from their "corporate partners," a veritable who's-who of gun manufacturers. Their decrepit zombie of a CEO, Wayne LaPierre - purposefully as repellent and obnoxious as humanly possible - acts as a very effective lightning rod for the all the criticism coming at the gun makers. The NRA has one of the most powerful lobbying machines in Washington to make sure that cowardly members of Congress remain firmly in their back pocket and resist any sort of gun control legislation.<br />
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The NRA also relies on the ignorance of their own members, who have been duped into thinking that the NRA is really interested in defending their Second Amendment rights from all the socialist Muslims who want to do heinous, vile and un-American things like ban high-capacity magazine clips or close ridiculous loopholes in gun sales. In reality, the NRA could not care less about gun rights, beyond the extent that gun rights can be used to maintain and increase their sales margins, and it exists only to make sure there will be an insatiable market for more and more guns in this country.<br />
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But, NRA members seem to be perfectly happy and content with being stooges, dupes and idiots, blatantly manipulated by gun industry proxies and being played like cheap violins. No doubt they are laughing insanely in the NRA board room at how easy it is to make really stupid people do exactly what you want them to.<br />
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No doubt the National Rifle Association has learned well from the example of the National Smokers' Alliance on how to be an effective heat shield. Whether or not it is going to save them from the same fate as the Smokers' Alliance remains to be seen. We are starting to see little cracks in the NRA heat shield today. We can only hope that these cracks will grow and eventually, the NRA will be seen as the cruel, cynical scam that it has always been.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-27845867658287900322013-02-25T21:56:00.000-07:002013-02-26T09:19:21.795-07:00Financial FrankensteinHere we go again: We find ourselves on the brink of an economic catastrophe and once again, it's of our own making. How is this even remotely possible?<br />
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The clock is ticking on the Sequestration Bomb, a breathtaking little bit of insanity that was created not by some vengeful, pissed-off god, nor by some diabolical cabal of fundamentalist Islamists, nor by a gaggle of Chinese cyber-terrorists, but by our very own Congress. Back in 2011 when Congress was bickering over the debt-ceiling crisis, our very rational, courageous and forward-thinking representatives decided it would be a good idea to force themselves into taking some action on deficit reduction by coming up with a poison pill so onerous that enacting it would be unthinkable.<br />
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Congress has become so good at deferring action on critical issues. Their philosophy seems to be, let's kick the can down the road and worry about it some other day. Out of sight - out of mind, they think, but their short-sightedness cannot comprehend the fact that someday the piper will have to be paid and they will have to face the issue again, after it's had a chance to fester and grow and metastasize into something truly scary.<br />
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On Friday, March 1st, some $85 billion in budget cuts will be imposed across the board. Everything is going to be hit, even the sacred cow of defense spending. There are many dire, horrific, sky-is-falling predictions of all the teachers who will be laid off and the hours-long lines at airport security when TSA agents are sent packing. $85 billion is quite a chunk of change, but it's less than 3% of the national budget. How so much pain and disruption could happen at such a relatively small bump in the budget is hard to understand.<br />
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The Democrats and the Obama administration have been fanning the flames and doing whatever they can to put pressure on Republicans to get a grip and compromise on a debt reduction deal. Republicans are refusing to consider any increased tax revenues, thinking instead that the President has gotten all the new taxes he's going to get, and are holding out for big-time spending cuts. Both sides have dug in their heels and the rest of us have to sit on our hands and slide helplessly into Friday when the Frankenstein monster Congress created comes to life, goes on a rampage and eats the economy for lunch.<br />
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It's astonishing how myopic Congress can be, and how it can separate itself from the monster it created and disavow any responsibility for it. They're acting like they had nothing to do with the impending apocalypse, and throw up their hands as if they are completely powerless to do anything to solve the problem THEY created.<br />
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All this is eerily reminiscent of another faux-crisis we all endured, the so-called "fiscal cliff" back on December 31st of last year. This also was a manufactured event, created not by economic forces but by design, by intention. I suppose we could glean some comfort in the fact that we survived the fiscal cliff, and we will survive the upcoming sequestration. Leading economists, such as the always erudite Robert Reich, say that most people probably won't directly feel the results of sequestration for weeks or months or maybe never.<br />
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But the economy always seems to be teetering on the brink of "another recession." The recovery from the financial collapse of 2009-2010 has been anemic at best, and even though the stock market has been flirting with record high levels, there's the very real feeling that it's all a house of cards that can come crashing down any minute. It wasn't that long ago that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in the 6,000 range, instead of occasionally peeking over the 14,000 mark as it does these days.<br />
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Congress seems to have effectively isolated itself from the effects of these cliffs and crises, and somehow deflects the blame away from itself. More ominiously, there's the chance that this has become the new "normal" - already the next two "crises" are being teed up: another possible government shutdown coming on March 27th and more debt-ceiling churn in April. Instead of governing for the long term, it appears Congress has chosen to merely jump from crisis to manufactured crisis, like a flat rock skipping over the surface of the water, accomplishing very little, and pushing as much as they can down the road, over and over again.<br />
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<br />Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-76901649698590072292013-02-12T10:50:00.000-07:002013-02-13T10:25:49.987-07:00Digital Melting-PotDigital technology has sped up the reaction time of everyone, and nowadays it's very common for something to happen in the world and almost instantaneously, reactions and comments pop up on Facebook.<br />
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Twenty years ago, none of this was even imagined, let alone remotely possible. And back in the day, when I was young, news came from either the newspaper, the radio or national televised news shows. We got our news basically twice a day, when the newspaper was thrown on the front porch, or when the evening news programs came on.<br />
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Today, we are immersed in news from the second we awake to when the nights go out at night. Instead of a couple of places to get news, we have many dozens. The internet has brought an astonishing, incomprehensible amount of information to our fingertips, pretty much for free, day and night. But so much of this information comes not from independent, credible news sources, but from thinly-disguised echo chambers of political entities for whom journalistic truth is the enemy, not an ideal to which to aspire.<br />
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In the vast, global, digital melting-pot that is Facebook, there is always something cooking. The media stew it serves up can be a smorgasbord of interesting, funny and enlightening photos and comments from my Facebook friends - whom I genuinely appreciate and enjoy reading - to a witches' brew of insanity, paranoia and batshit-craziness from the darkest gutters and cesspools of the American psyche.<br />
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Politically-inclined FB pages are public pages, and that opens up the floodgates for all the virulent strains of craziness that seem to be running rampant in this country. In particular, conservative trolls are ever-ready to inflict their narrow-minded, pointless slander and undisguised racism into any and all discussions, even if they are not even slightly political. No insult is too cheap, no snide remark too juvenile to make when it comes to denigrating our President.<br />
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Disclaimer: I have certainly put in my time as a liberal troll, and I spent a fun-filled two weeks after the elections last November carpet-bombing political pages and websites with all the eat-shit-and-die liberal gloating I could muster. I gleefully and mercilessly rubbed as many conservatives noses as I could into the messy bowel movement that was the Romney campaign, with completely predictable results. Heads exploded everywhere, and the bile and hatred I elicited was quite impressive. I felt that if I could raise conservative blood pressures to stroke-inducing levels and ruin as many of their days as possible, I was doing my job and life indeed was wonderful. It was almost too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, but eventually it ran its course and I don't do it anymore. At least not as much.<br />
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The Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in mid-December brought a whole new array of crazy conservatives to the forefront, and these were the extra-paranoid, gun-nut variety. It really is something when you find out how many of our fellow citizens spend their lives gripped by an intense, irrational fear that someday, vast armies of criminals, armed to the tits with AK-47s, are going to march down every street in every town and city in this country and storm the doorway of their home in a enormous Armageddon-type apocalypse, and the only way they can hope to survive is to make sure everyone in their family, from little two-year-old Nutley to ninety-year old Grandma, has a couple of automatic rifles at their disposal to dispatch all these bloodthirsty felons to the lower depths of hell where they belong.<br />
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I was surprised to find out that a lot of people take seriously the notion that their individual liberty and freedom are in constant, grave peril, either from armed, highly-organized criminals or from our own government. Paranoia and conspiracy theories go hand-in-hand, and these people can see heinous, nefarious plots in every single thing that happens. Evil socialist Muslim Kenyans are behind everything, and they are well on their way to converting every Starbucks in this nation into Islamic indoctrination centers, and Walmart will start selling burkas any minute. Actually, it would really be a good idea if some of Walmart's customers wore burkas.<br />
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These pathetic, disturbed individuals have a doomsday scenario playing in an endless loop in their heads, that they will someday have to engage in mortal combat with a mysterious Fascist movement which will suddenly rise to power and all the U.S. military forces will fight blindly for the prophet Mohammed, despite nearly 250 years of Judeo-Christian culture and government influence. How little faith these people have in their fellow citizens, and in the form of government which has produced the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen, and has gotten us through a bloody Civil War and two World Wars as well as numerous other skirmishes. To these hopeless paranoids, it's just a tiny step to go from an established, representative democracy to Sharia law.<br />
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The Republican party, along with their mangy, yappy little attack dog the NRA, is expert at cultivating and empowering such mindless paranoid fantasies, and there seems to be no limit to the number of gullible dupes and stooges out there who are ever-so-eager to swallow this claptrap. Personally I feel it's indicative of the extreme intellectual laziness that has taken hold in his country. Why make the effort to learn about the world and the things that are happening in our culture, when you can sit comfortably on your couch with your TV and a giant bag of Doritos, and let blowhards like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or the dimwitted hacks of Fox News fill your head with whatever garbage they choose, because somehow it sounds like they might be right, or at the very least their drivel seems to fit into your personal delusions and biases? They are the professionals when it comes to providing very simple-minded, ineffective, populist solutions to complex problems. Why bother thinking about stuff on your own when you can let someone else do the thinking for you?<br />
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There is a herd-mentality aspect in people that makes them want to be a part of something bigger, which seems counter to the famed American "independence of spirit." People want to align themselves with other like-minded people, because there is safety in numbers and comfort in shared attitudes. Going out on a limb and actually deconstructing problems in order to understand them is scary and way too much work, and many people just do not have the mental capacity, experience or inclination for critical analysis, thanks to our failing educational system. They instead opt for the demagogues who speak in terms that sound familiar, or at least non-threatening, and engender an us-and-them separation that puts their followers clearly on the "us" side, and anyone who doesn't agree with them or maybe challenges their long-established biases and prejudices are the "them" that they have to be afraid of.<br />
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What people don't understand they fear, and that's been true throughout history. Overcoming fear requires courage, fortitude and persistence. Sadly, sometimes it seems all too clear that people are not being enlightened by reason and understanding, but instead are turning their backs and marching into the darkness.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-75714882361852375292013-02-11T09:15:00.001-07:002013-02-12T09:07:56.427-07:00My Excellent Lobbying AdventureLast Wednesday I went to the AZ state capitol here in Phoenix to participate in the AZ Humane Lobby Day, sponsored by the ASPCA and the Humane Society of the US.<br />
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Despite living in Phoenix for nearly 20 years, it was my first trip to the state capitol, actually located only about 10 miles from where I live. It was an interesting, eye-opening experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it.<br />
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<i>The Arizona State Capitol building</i></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Click on the pictures to view them full size)</span> </i></div>
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There were about 120 people attending, representing 23 of the 30 state legislative districts. We met in the Old Senate chambers and discussed the three bills we were there to lobby. They are:<br />
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1) Animal Fighting as Racketeering - would classify any kind of animal fighting as a racketeering activity, opening the door to easier prosecution and stiffer penalties.<br />
2) Prohibiting the Roadside Sale of animals - Already banned in Maricopa and Pinal counties, this law would prohibit animals being sold on the side of the road statewide<br />
3) Prohibiting Live Animals being given away as prizes - this law would prohibit statewide the heinous, loathsome activity of giving away live baby bunnies and other animals as prizes at carnivals, events, etc. to idiots who have no clue or desire to care for them properly.<br />
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All 3 bills are working their way through committees, and we are hopeful they all will be passed through. Then of course they have to be voted on by both legislative bodies and signed by the Governor, and there are many ways the measures can be derailed and killed, but we are hopeful they will become law.<br />
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<i>Arizona House of Representatives, meeting in session</i></div>
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All us lobbyists were scheduled to meet with our three legislators, 2 representatives and 1 senator. Our two representatives were busy running all over the place doing other things, but we did meet with our state senator, Ms. Katie Hobbs, and she was extremely nice and supportive of our efforts and the causes we were advocating.<br />
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Needless to say, I took each and every opportunity to mention the plight of rabbits in the context of all three bills, especially the carnival prize one, because it's so easy just to focus on dogs and cats. While that is indeed worthy and necessary, I was not about to let bunnies get pushed into the background and given the short shrift.<br />
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There was a lot of legwork, running between the state House and Senate buildings, and a little bit of chaos as we tried valiantly to meet with our representatives, but in the end we met with one rep's staffer, and for the other one we only dropped off materials for them to review, but I believe we got our message to them.<br />
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While lobbying, I got a chance to visit the Arizona Capitol Museum in the Capitol building, with its graceful, colorful dome:<br />
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Also, there was a<i> </i>model of a very interesting design by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a new capitol area, created in the 1950's but never built:<br />
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I had a really good time at my first try at political lobbying, and I think I may have somewhat of a knack for it. I would love to do more and I'm sure I'll be participating in the next Humane Lobby Day. I will use each and every opportunity to bring awareness and raise consciousness of the treatment of rabbits in this state. I consider it an honor to raise my voice for those who can't speak.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-39650263755361728552013-01-24T10:06:00.000-07:002013-01-29T10:14:48.575-07:00Peaches at the BridgeLast Monday I had to say goodbye to my beautiful Flemish Giant girl Peaches. She didn't want to go, and I didn't want her to leave me, but her body said it was time. Reluctantly, she crossed over to the Rainbow Bridge. I was holding her in my arms and am confident she knew I was there, helping her make the transition to the next world.<br />
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Peaches came into my life in 2005, after a hoarding situation in the Show Low area of Arizona sent a number of Flemish Giant rabbits to our shelter. She got her name from the bright orange-tan color of her fur. Flemish Giants, or "Flemmies" as they are affectionately called, are one of the largest breeds of rabbits. The purebred males can sometimes get to be 20 or 22 pounds in size, and can measure nearly three feet in length when stretched out. Peaches wasn't a purebred, but in her prime she tipped the scales at 15 pounds, a very respectable weight for a bunny. By the way, the internet stories you sometimes come across where someone claims to have a 50-lb. rabbit are most likely bogus. A rabbit's skeleton and physiology could not support that kind of weight, and the rabbit would be unable to move around.<br />
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<i>Peaches in 2005</i></div>
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I didn't adopt Peaches right away. For a while she was up for adoption, along with the other Flemmies she came with. Flemish Giants are very popular rabbits, due to their large size and sweet, loving, gentle personalities. We don't get them very often at the shelter and when we do, they usually get adopted quickly. I was fostering Peaches for a while and took notice of her sweet disposition and excellent litterbox habits, a winning combination in the eyes of any prospective bunny adopter.<br />
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It wasn't long before a woman came forward to adopt Peaches, and Peaches went to live in her new home. Not long thereafter, the woman contacted me and reported that Peaches is acting very strangely - urinating all over the place except her litter box, hiding behind a stairwell whenever she was let out of her pen for playtime, and generally behaving badly. The woman had a male roommate and Peaches loved him, but she would have nothing to do with the woman who adopted her. I tried to give her advice on how to counteract Peaches' recalcitrant behavior, and even went over to the woman's house to work with them, but Peaches just dug in her bunny heels and would not change her antisocial behavior for anything. Eventually the woman could not deal with the constant urination and reluctantly returned Peaches to the rescue. I went to her home, picked up Peaches and brought her back to foster care in my house. The minute Peaches got to my house, the bad behavior vanished, her perfect litter box habits returned, and I realized that Peaches was finally back to where she really wanted to be. I officially adopted her soon after, and she had not left my care since.<br />
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<i>Peaches snuggling with mini-Rex Marty in 2011</i></div>
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Peaches loved to go out in the back yard for playtime when the weather permitted. I have memories of her joyfully bounding across the back yard, kicking up her heels and leaping into the air in what bunny people call the Rabbit Dance of Joy, otherwise known as a "binky." She would launch her 15-pound bulk straight up and catch some really good air, kicking up a cloud of dust as she did. Once she was outside, she never wanted to go back inside the house, and not even the darkening skies of evening would change her mind. She quickly learned that if she hid under some shrubbery in the yard, it was hard for me to force her back inside. In particular, a large bougainvillea bush next to the cement block wall was her favorite hangout, because she could observe the whole yard without being seen, and the hundreds of sharp thorns would make it a difficult and painful proposition for me to drag her out of her very comfortable spot to go back indoors.<br />
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In the 8 years I had her, Peaches was never anything other than extremely sweet, docile and affectionate. Her health was really good throughout her life, although once she had a case of urine sludge that was very severe. Her urine got really thick with excess calcium and minerals in her diet, and came out of her body with the consistency of toothpaste. She was very sick and at times her body was completely limp, but luckily I pulled her through that and made changes to her diet, and she was fine from then on. About 6 months ago she had trouble walking around, and was losing the use of her back legs. Eventually her back legs did go out on her and I had to move her from the exercise pen where she had lived her whole life to a cage lined with soft, fleece padding.<br />
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I could tell she got really depressed when this happened, because she had always been so active and vital. She was sad that she couldn't move on her own, and I helped as much as I could by keeping her clean, holding her over her water dish so she could drink and changing her position several times a day. She still loved to eat her vegetables and treats, and she would yank a treat out of your hand with as much gusto as she always did (ask my friend Julia). Last weekend things started to get really bad for her, and she began losing her appetite, a sure sign of her decline. By Monday morning, she was virtually paralyzed, her food left untouched. I knew the end was near for my dear girl.<br />
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I was able to spend a lot of time with her on Monday - holding her, brushing her beautiful fur, and letting her know I was nearby. Monday evening she started crying and moaning, and I knew the end was imminent. She did not want to go, and fought very hard to stay with me, even though I told her over and over it was okay if she needed to move on. Tears started to form in her eyes, and in mine, too. Eventually she realized it was time and when she surrendered her spirit, a palpable wave of relief crossed over her face. She relaxed a final time, and she was gone.<br />
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I am still dealing with the loss of my dear girl, and I don't think it's fully hit me yet. I keep walking by the bunny room expecting to see her there, her big, dark eyes sparkling under her long, long eyelashes and her huge ears pointed directly at me in anticipation of a treat I might have for her. I will think of her every time I'm sitting on the back patio, gazing out into the back yard at her favorite bougainvillea bush on the side, expecting to see her stretched out underneath it like Cleopatra on her barge.<br />
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When an animal touches your life and your heart as much as she had, she never really leaves you. One of the amazing things about having animals in your life is that they change you. They bring such goodness of spirit into your life, that you can't help but be a different (read: better) person from the experience. I've always maintained that animals make us better human beings, and show us by example how to live our lives. Animals can teach us so much, if we only open our hearts and minds to them, and I know my life was made immeasurably richer by the presence of a big, beautiful tan-colored Flemmie named Peaches.<br />
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The day after Peaches passed, I got a call from the local humane society. They had received a young, injured bunny and needed to know if our shelter could take it from them. Of course I immediately went down there to pick the bunny up.<br />
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I was not quite prepared to find a tiny, incredibly soft ball of the purest, whitest fur imaginable, barely weighing a pound and probably no more than 5 weeks of age, with an eye injury. The doctors there said the eye itself was intact, just the conjunctive tissues surrounding it were damaged. Her thin, fragile body was covered with numerous scabs, indicating that her life had been a difficult one so far. That was bad enough, but unfortunately I came to realize that the poor little soul had suffered some critical internal trauma, because she was passing blood out her anus. I gave her as much supportive care as I could, but knew that only time would tell if she was going to survive her injuries. I keep telling myself that having hope in situations like this is important for both me and the bunny being treated.<br />
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The next morning she was even more listless and lethargic, refusing food and water, and I became increasingly pessimistic about her chances. Sadly her injuries overwhelmed her and she passed away quietly in the afternoon, less than 24 hours after I brought her to my home.<br />
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She was not going to die alone and unnamed, an anonymous victim of the ignorance and cruelty for which the human race is so infamous. Droplet was a tiny, sweet angel who deserved so much better than the extremely short, brutal, pain-filled life she had to endure. I like to think that for the last day of her life, Droplet knew she was safe and maybe for the first time, experienced the caring touch of a human who held her close and whispered into her ear that she was loved, she was valued, and her life indeed meant something.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-22413123413795919602013-01-11T10:51:00.001-07:002013-01-11T10:51:17.448-07:00I Am OZ, the Great and PowerfulThere are some movies which are called "classic" and really deserve that title; one of them is the 1939 film, "The Wizard of Oz." Starring Judy Garland in her timeless role as Dorothy Gale, the flick is an absolute feast for the eyes and the imagination of people of every age.<br />
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There is amazing stuff from start to finish. Initially the film is in black and white, and it shows the quintessentially American life of Dorothy and her Auntie Em and a couple of hangers-on living on an idyllic farm in Kansas. Then wealthy, elitist Bitch-From-Hell Ann Romney, I mean Elvira Gulch, shows up with an order from the sheriff to confiscate vicious hell-hound Toto. Dorothy finds herself having the Worst Day Ever, and just when she thinks things can't get any worse, a tornado blows in and really screws everything up. This is the part that used to completely terrify me as a child; I remember being unable to breathe, paralyzed in fear, watching the thrashing, writhing tornado funnel bearing down on the Kansas farm like some huge dinosaur marching across the flat Kansas plains under a black sky.<br />
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Dorothy is not amused when she finds herself locked out of the storm cellar and runs inside the house for shelter. She gets knocked on her butt by a flying window frame and hallucinates this extremely intricate dream about the whole farmhouse getting sucked up into the tornado vortex and transported to a place called Oz. Still in black-and-white, there is a neat cinematic trick after she crash-lands La Maison Gale on top of an innocent pedestrian who turns out to the Wicked Witch of the East: when Dorothy opens the door onto Oz the screen explodes into mind-blowing Technicolor, an effect which is considerably muted when you only have a black-and-white television.<br />
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After being flash-mobbed by weirdly-dressed midgets called the Munchkins and getting her marching orders - not to mention a fabulous pair of red-sequined Espadrilles - from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy starts out for the fabled Emerald City to find the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who reportedly has an awesome GPS system and can get her back to her bland, boring, black-and-white life as a hopeless farm slave in Kansas. She picks up some friends along the way, all with their own issues, including another wicked witch with anger-management problems and a whole squadron of flying monkeys. If you think pigeons are messy, you should try to clean up after a bunch of airborne chimpanzees.<br />
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Eventually they do find themselves in the stunning art-deco audience hall of the Wizard of Oz, who proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of them with a lot of hollering and bellowing, and special-effects like blasts of flame and clouds of acrid smoke. Dorothy and her crew completely buy into the all-powerful-wizard scam, but not Toto, who pulls a back curtain open to show a dumpy old man working all the bells and whistles that make the Wizard so gawd-awful scary and Wizard-y. It turns out the Wizard relies a lot on reputation and overblown bluster and is not nearly as powerful as he would like you to believe.<br />
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What's the point of all this, you probably asked yourself three paragraphs ago? Anyone who reads Careless Whispers knows that "making a valid point" in any blog post is entirely optional and when it does happen, should be considered unexpected good fortune, like finding a $20 bill on the street. But oddly enough this post does have a point, which is we are seeing a variation of this Wizard story playing out in the raging gun control debate following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.<br />
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Playing the role of Dorothy we have the American public, thoroughly traumatized by gun violence, and seeking a way back to a world where 20 grade-school kids are not mowed down by a psycho with an assault weapon. Obama is the Good Witch of the North, pointing the way to a sensible, middle-road solution like banning those weapons and high-capacity ammo clips. Congress is there too, playing the role of the Munchkins, a role they play so very well - a bunch of annoying, helium-voiced douchebags that you just want to slap the crap out of.<br />
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The choice role of Wizard is played by the National Rifle Association, which for many years has relied on its reputation as the most powerful lobbying machine ever, and who uses gross intimidation, threats and blatant coercion to maintain its iron-clad stranglehold on members of Congress. The NRA would have us believe they are all-powerful and anyone who dares to speak up to them and challenge their authority will surely get slapped down and ground into dust like some disgusting bothersome insect. You mess with the Great and Powerful at your own risk, and punishment will be sure and swift: you will find yourself thrown out of office faster than you can say, "There's no place like home."<br />
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All the cross-dressing midgets in Congress tremble and cower in fear of the Wizard/NRA and consider it a privilege to grovel in the Wizard's presence and do whatever they're told. But the Wizard just might have finally met his match in the shock, anger and disgust that have swept the nation as it awakens to the horrific, awful things that gun violence causes in the life of this country. People are beginning to feel that this problem is getting progressively worse, and that the answer is not what the Wizard wants - which is more guns everywhere in the United States, especially in the schools themselves. The answer, which will by no means eliminate all gun violence, seems to be to take these automated weapons of mass killing and huge ammo clips and make them much more difficult to fall into the hands of the mentally deranged, while leaving responsible gun owners access to the firearms which make sense for level-headed people to own.<br />
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Bottom line is, what we have been doing up to this point when it comes to guns in this, the most heavily-armed nation in the world, is not working. The answer, in spite of the horrendous screaming and yelling of the Wizard, is not more guns for everyone. The public seems to be figuring out that the Wizard is all bluster and bombast, and there has never been a better opportunity to pull the curtain away from the Wizard, and see that his power is just an overblown illusion.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-82204481406659794832013-01-11T08:44:00.000-07:002013-01-11T08:44:02.645-07:00The Power of NineAs far back as I can remember, my favorite number has always been the number 9. There's something about it that is so complete, self-contained and satisfying. The number nine always looks like it's smiling - you can't be in a bad mood when you're looking at a number nine.<br />
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1's were always so plain and uninteresting. 2's resembled a question mark and looked confused. 3's looked like they were running away from something. 4's seemed dour and humorless. 5's were always smiling, but more like the crazy people on the bus who talk to themselves and laugh at their own jokes. 6's looked apprehensive and fearful. 7's looked stern and unforgiving. 8's appeared smug and self-satisfied. But with 9's, the best was saved for last, and it was always a great way to end a counting lesson.<br />
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But wait, there's a lot more to nines. Nine is ten minus one-tenth of ten:<br />
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9 = 10 - (0.1 x 10) = 10 - 1 = 9<br />
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This little numeric twist gives nine all sorts of mathematical powers. For instance,<br />
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One ninth = 1 / 9 = 0.111111....<br />
Two ninths = 2 / 9 = 0.222222...<br />
Three ninths = 3 / 9 = 1 / 3 = 0.3333333....<br />
Four ninths = 4 / 9 = 0.4444444.... <br />
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and so on. Also, if you add the digits of multiples of 9, they will add up to nine. As in:<br />
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9 x 1 = 09 ... 0 + 9 = 9<br />
9 x 2 = 18 ... 1 + 8 = 9<br />
9 x 3 = 27 ... 2 + 7 = 9<br />
9 x 4 = 36 ... 3 + 6 = 9<br />
9 x 5 = 45 ... 4 + 5 = 9<br />
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From this point, the digits in the product reverse themselves:<br />
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9 x 6 = 54 ... 5 + 4 = 9<br />
9 x 7 = 63 ... 6 + 3 = 9<br />
9 x 8 = 72 ... 7 + 2 = 9<br />
9 x 9 = 81 ... 8 + 1 = 9<br />
9 x 10 = 90 ... 9 + 0 = 9<br />
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The cautious reader will note that the left digits count up from 0 to 9, while the right digits count down from 9 to 0. <br />
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Things even go further, if you skip the strange anomaly of eleven:<br />
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9 x 11 = 99 ... 9 + 9 = 18 (wtf?)<br />
9 x 12 = 108 ... 1 + 0 + 8 = 9<br />
9 x 13 = 117 ... 1 + 1 + 7 = 9<br />
9 x 14 = 126 ... 1 + 2 + 6 = 9 .... <br />
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Eleven is kind of a mirror-image, bizarro-world version of nine. It's like the antimatter version of nine. All manner of ungodliness ensues when you divide by 11:<br />
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1 / 11 = 0.09090909...<br />
2 / 11 = 0.18181818...<br />
3 / 11 = 0.27272727...<br />
4 / 11 = 0.36363636...<br />
All the way up to:<br />
10 / 11 = 0.90909090...<br />
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If that stuff doesn't give you a headache, nothing will.<br />
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Right after the start of the new year, another indication of how awesome nine is came to the rabbit rescue in a litter of NINE baby bunnies! Just feast your eyes on these pictures, and tell me nine is not an amazing, awesome number!<br />
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<span id="goog_1347706683"></span><span id="goog_1347706684"></span><br />Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-63860939804753945172012-12-26T09:42:00.000-07:002012-12-30T09:36:58.375-07:002012 Year End Review: Part 2Oh I'm not finished yet. 2012 offered an embarrassment of riches when it came to batshit-craziness. To wit:<br />
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<b>Most Baffling Cultural Phenomenon:</b> Gangnam Style. Not that I follow popular culture all that closely (yes I do), this "Gangnam Style" thing completley blindsided me. Apparently some South Korean rapper (and I can't quite wrap my head around THAT concept) named Psy came out with this song and accompanying spazzy dance moves which has swept the nation and the world too. I just read where the YouTube video of this has just passed one billion views. That by itself is astonishing and worthy of some kind of recognition, but everything boils down to the question of "Why this?" and not something else? The music is not that remarkable, and the pretend-pony-riding dance step doesn't seem all that inspired, either. In fact, "Gangnam Style" makes the Macarena look like the Bolshoi Ballet. So I'm left scratching my head wondering what the hell is going on. I'm sure this Psy person has had a field day being the center of the world's attention for more than his alloted 15 minutes, but now he's facing the unenviable, Herculean task of coming up with something new and better to surpass this big splash he just made (not likely), or getting thrown on the next bus to oblivion and never being heard from again. We will see if anyone remembers what Gangnam Style is in a month or two.<br />
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<b>Most Hysterical Meltdown of 2012:</b> Has to be Karl Rove's total schizophrenic breakdown on Faux News' election night coverage. Things started going south early on for the Mittster, as state after state went into the Obama column. But when the race in Ohio was called and thus the election, Karl Rove crapped his Depends undergarments right on camera and had some sort of grand-mal seizure that made him get all flustered and bug-eyed like a walrus getting a prostate exam. He looked like he was going to pop a sphincter blathering about two or three Republican votes not being counted in some hinterland Ohio county, even though several HUNDRED THOUSAND votes in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga county were still outstanding. But the <i>piece de resistance</i> was when some siliconed Fox newsskank toddled off backstage on her stripper heels and confronted the numbers geeks at the "decision desk" where the Ohio call was made. The math nerds were NOT HAVING any of this "Are you reeeeally sure?" whining, and bitch-slapped that newstrollop (and Karl Rove, by proxy) back to whatever passes for reality on Fox. In the end, Obama won, Karl Rove got banished (for a while) from spewing lies on Faux News, and I had a big ol' glass of chocolate wine. Now THAT was a good night!<br />
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<b>The "You Want To Do WHAT?!" Award for 2012:</b> Okay so, there's this dude, right? And he has this balloon thing with a space capsule attached to it and rides it up to over 120,000 feet, which is like 700 miles or something, I don't know. And he opens up the capsule and he's like, right on the edge of outer space! No kidding, it's like the Starship Enterprise could run his ass over if he's not careful. And it's like 500 degress below zero, too. So he starts to crawl out of his space capsule like he totally wants to jump out or something! I KNOW! This other camera shows him looking downward probably thinking either, "Yeah, I can do this, no sweat!" or "This is one of the most f**ked-up things I've ever tried." So he says <a href="http://bunnyman09.blogspot.com/2012/12/words-of-our-lives.html" target="_blank">YOLO</a> and jumps out! On the way down there's no air resistance and he hits over 800 miles an hour, and my cousin told me that's like four times the speed of light. Dude starts to spin and twirl around until he finally remembers to press the SAVE MY ASS button and his parachute opens. Believe it or not he lands safely, but I don't care how many dry cleaners he goes to, he will never get the puke and nasty B.M.s out of that space suit.<br />
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<b>Biggest Buzzkill of 2012:</b> Climate change. People keep screwing up the climate and most are completely oblivious to what they are doing. This summer saw the biggest ever melting of Arctic ice, and that by itself has world-wide consequences, mainly in the disruption of long-established weather patterns and warmer-than-normal sea temperatures, which generate bigger, meaner and more destructive storms and hurricanes (hello, Hurricane Sandy). The shape of things to come? Yeah, most likely. Is anything going to be done about it? Not until it's too late.<br />
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<b>Best Things of 2012:</b> "The Walking Dead," chocolate wine, Greek yogurt, board game parties with friends, sushi, "Sons of Anarchy," vegetarianism, desert sunsets, more states approving same-sex marriage, clear dark moonless nights, and of course RABBITS!<br />
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<b>Worst Things of 2012:</b> Republicans, conservative trolls on Facebook, Fox News, the NRA, religion, terrorism, bigotry, hillbillies with guns, animal abuse, murdered children.<br />
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<b>Proof That Some People Still Live in the Dark Ages in 2012:</b> The astonishing, unrepentant and deliberate ignorance of some Republican legislators regarding rape. The very idea of "legitimate" rape, and the belief that a woman's body can "shut down" the pregnancy process after a rape clearly shows that they are beyond any kind of help or redemption. The fact that they are anywhere near a public office shows that their supporters are equally pathetic and worthless, and they deserve nothing but the highest contempt and most strident condemnation.<br />
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<b>Extra Credit for Scientific Achievement in 2012:</b> The landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover. Sheer joy, and an absolute, unmitigated triumph. The fact that they were receiving photographs from the surface of Mars within SECONDS of landing is completely mind-blowing.<br />
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<b>Mr. "No I Can't Keep It In My Pants and Thank You for Noticing" for 2012:</b> Gen. David Petraeus. Really? Are you that desperate? You just threw away your marriage, your career, your reputation and your legacy. I hope it was worth it, but I'm sure it wasn't.<br />
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<b>Loathsome Disgusting Toilet Scum of 2012:</b> Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, Orrin Hatch, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Allen West, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, that token Negro in the Republican primary debates, Sean Hannity or anyone on Fox News. Sadly, this looks like last year's list. Nothing changes.<br />
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<b>Ultimate Obnoxious Blowhard of 2012:</b> Donald Trump. Once again, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a huge amount of money can't buy even the tiniest iota of class. He truly is a national embarrassment and a disgrace.<br />
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<b>Best Reason To Remain Hopeful in 2013:</b> Rachel Maddow said it best in a short promo-segment on MSNBC. She said that in the last election, we had an opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood, institutionalize bigotry by outlawing same-sex marriage, continue giving outlandish, obscene tax breaks to people who already have so much, privatize Social Security and Medicare, pack the Supreme Court with right-wing creeps for decades into the future, and listed a number of other horrible legal consequences of electing Romney president. She said we had the opportunity to do all that... AND WE SAID NO! That fact, that the American electorate finally said enough of the extremist conservative bullshit and decisively kicked the Republican party square in the crotch, means that there is still hope for our democratic form of government.<br />
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I'd like to think that 2013 will be better than 2012, but I'm starting to realize that these days, the best you can hope for is that 2013 won't be quite as awful.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-34810566170391416142012-12-26T09:27:00.000-07:002012-12-31T10:30:10.232-07:002012 Year End Review: Part 12012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end. The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond. 2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:<br />
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<b>Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):</b> The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse. It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable. Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention. Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds. It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment. Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone. The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair. Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like <i>High Plains Drifter</i> or <i>The Outlaw Josie Wales</i>) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country. It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something. At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.<br />
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<b>2012 Douchebag of the Year:</b> Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared. Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year. Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land. Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on. At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years. Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann. Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist. I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades. You just know she used the N-word a lot.<br />
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<b>Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends:</b> Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle. Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire. But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays. Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems. Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem. Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year. Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation. According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns. It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.<br />
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<b>Death We Regret The Most:</b> Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things. Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do? Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation. It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.<br />
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More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-84940500041159748142012-12-21T21:07:00.000-07:002012-12-22T08:15:57.452-07:00Winter Solstice 2012It's the longest night of the year, the night of the winter solstice. Today was a pretty nice day, with the high temps in the upper 60s and lots of sunshine. In honor of the solstice I hiked up Squaw Peak this afternoon in my shorts and a tee-shirt, and I was keenly aware that I live in a a singularly fortunate part of the country. Most of the rest of the country was grappling with a strong winter storm wreaking havoc at airports in the midwest, and moving eastward just in time to screw up the most heavily-traveled weekend of the year. Me, I was hanging laundry in my backyard and enjoying the view from on top of a mountain.<br />
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This evening I'm sitting on my couch at home, all snuggly and warm, a houseful of happy, healthy bunnies, watching my fabulous new television. I have it very good, and my life is very comfortable and full of riches and blessings. The winter solstice lends it self to such self-reflection and contemplation. I think about how many people, in various cultures around the world, over the millenia since mankind first started noticing things like solstices and equinoxes, have taken note of this particular day of the year.<br />
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The winter solstice occurs in the dead of winter, when the world seemed the most lifeless, although you would never know it where I live. In European cultures everything was usually covered with a thick blanket of snow and locked in the icy vise-grip of winter. The fields were barren and desolate, and the trees devoid of any leaves, looking as if they were dead. But people also understood that this is the day when light and life would begin to return to the world, for buried deep in the dead of winter are the seeds of spring, and soon enough the world will be blooming and fertile again.<br />
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Yes, the days will start to get a little bit longer from now until next June, and six months from now I will be griping and moaning about the horrible, ghastly heat which threatens to kill us all. But right now, I am very happy to contemplate the cycle of the seasons, and enjoy the chilly weather outside. As I get older I become more sensitive to the passage of time, and the cold realization that I will not alive on this planet forever. We only get a limited time to live here, and I realize more and more each day that all of us have a responsibility to live a good a life as possible. I want to live my life kindly and intelligently, to leave the world in a better shape than when I entered it - a life marked by kindness, empathy, defending the rights of animals in a world where they are so often abused and devalued, and wisely using the resouces this planet provides to us.<br />
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That is what I'm thinking about on this night, the longest night of the year. When my time is over, I want to feel like I have accomplished something, and I have made a little bit of difference in the lives of the people and animals who have graced my life with their presence.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-71634337746516635542012-12-16T08:43:00.003-07:002012-12-21T21:08:29.135-07:00A Monstrous EvilA monstrous evil has again been visited on the country. And again, it comes from of the unholy, explosive nexus of guns and mental illness. And as always. the most innocent among us are the tragic victims.<br />
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I'm not going to detail the Sandy Hook school shootings of December 14th. That has been and still is being reported by the media. Rehashing the details in my head is far too debilitating and difficult.<br />
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In the supreme, ultimate act of cowardice, the shooter took his own life after gunning down 20 children. Someone told me that was good, he deserved to die. Obviously that's true but he needed to ANSWER for his horrific deed. He had to stand up in a court of law and tell the world why he did what he did. He needed to look into the shattered, hollow faces of the parents and be made to realize the incalculable damage he wreaked on totally innocent families. He had to understand that he not only took 20 lives who had not yet reached their eighth birthdays, he destroyed the lives of their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their grandparents and extended families, their friends and neighbors, and those of the community in which they lived. For many families, the holiday season will be forever stained by the memory of this act. The total damage will be incomprehensible and will be felt for decades, maybe even generations.<br />
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I can't help thinking that for everyone in that town, December 14th was just another day. Kids got dressed and hustled off to school, parents went to work or tended to their household chores. Maybe the kids were getting pre-occupied by the approaching holiday season, and were resolutely counting down every single day until Christmas Eve. I know I did when I was that age; December seemed to drag by achingly slow and it felt like Christmas would never get here. I would run to get the newspaper every evening and check down in the lower-left corner of the front page where they would have a little cartoon box that said, "11 Days until Christmas!" Then after what seemed like a whole year, the next evening's paper would declare, "10 Days until Christmas!" Thus it went until the little cartoon finally said, "1 Day until Christmas!" and I knew the excruciatingly long wait was <i>almost</i> over.<br />
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These 20 children will never have the joy of tearing into Christmas presents, of spending time with their families, of running in joyous abandon through a snowfall, feeling the entire world was a big Christmas card. They will never dance, laugh and sing again. They will never feel the love of their favorite pet, or feel their parents' embrace. They will never feel like they are so filled with love they are about to burst. They will never see a beautiful sunset, a dark night sky glittering with countless starts, the first blooms of spring, endless warm summer nights, swimming in the ocean, or watching the scarlet, gold and orange leaves of autumn fall and cascade and spin down from the trees and pile up on the sidewalks. All that was taken away, by one deranged, cowardly individual, and the gun culture which puts the "right" to own an assault rifle above any sort of common sense or interest of public safety.<br />
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There were also adults massacred in this horrendous tragedy, and one must take care to ensure their loss is noted. They were doing what they loved to do and many died while trying to protect as many children as possible from the rampaging evil. Their loss would have been terrible enough, but there's something awful, horribly, incredibly wrong when a child is murdered. People who know me know that I am not particularly fond of children, but this incident had me choking back tears. No one in their right mind would inflict such a soul-killing, life-destroying horror on anyone, but that's the whole point, isn't it? No one <i><b>in their right mind</b></i> would do that. But we're not talking about someone in their right mind.<br />
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I've read a lot of second-amendment gun fanatics, isolated from this tragedy by distance and just plain luck, sitting a home with their families around them saying that the problem is not with too many guns, but not enough mental illness treatment facilities. The bottom line is this: if the gunman's deceased mother had not had an excessive number of high-power weapons, readily available to her son whom she knew full well had mental-health issues, these 26 people would still be alive. I don't care what anyone says, citizens do not need high-powered automatic weapons or high-capacity ammo magazines, whose only purpose is to kill as much as possible. By attempting to deflect the blame for this outrage to the mentally ill, the gun lobby in this country is showing that they care absolutely nothing about the death of innocents, but only about their "rights" under the second amendment.<br />
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Everyone is calling for stronger measures to keep this from happening again. I have no hope that anything will be done. Over the next week or so, other news stories will push this awful, still-unfolding story off the front pages, and everyone will get swept up in the holiday hub-bub. Members of Congress are far too cowardly and beholden to the gun lobby to ever pass any kind of legislation which would make something like this even marginally less likely to occur. We will never be rid of the scourge of mental illness, and we will always have guns, because that is an immutable part of the American culture, but the very least we can do is try to make it much more difficult for the wrong kind of weapons to fall into the hands of the sick, the damaged and the psychopathic. But I really don't think anything like that will happen. That would be too sensible, and the gun nuts believe any measure to control their gun ownership is about as acceptable as widespread, government-sanctioned child molestation.<br />
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Much air-time and print will be used up trying to explain the inexplicable, comprehend the incomprehensible, and fathom the unfathomable. We've already started to see sad, painful stories of parents remembering their dead children. We will be seeing photos of impossibly gorgeous little girls, and handsome, bright little boys. So much promise, so much potential - utterly squandered.<br />
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Where an answer will be found, if at all, is impossible to know. Is the answer down one of the endless, dark corridors of the lethal labyrinth of mental disease? Or is it a peculiar twist of American culture that innocents are sacrificed so someone can exercise a "right?" Would our freedoms be so diminished by re-instating a ban on assault weapons? The world didn't end the first time, and it won't happen again. <br />
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It will be only a matter of time before some other slaughter of innocents will push the Sandy Hook incident further down the list of horrible, awful crimes, involving guns and mental illness. The critical question is, have we learned anything at all, and have we gained the courage to do something about it?Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-88625648879059014642012-12-12T11:42:00.003-07:002012-12-14T09:53:40.075-07:00Words Of Our LivesApparently words have expiration dates on their usefulness or popularity. An august journalistic body known as the Associated Press came out with some changes to their style guide, which a lot of other journalists and even normal people use as a reference for spelling, grammar, etc.<br />
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It seems they have decided to drop the words "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" from their roster of Mighty Fine Words. The reason that they gave was that the "-phobia" suffix was too close of a reference to a psychological disorder and they don't want people to think the words have anything to do with mental illness.<br />
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I've always felt homophobia is a mental illness anyway, so I don't understand what the issue is. It really irritates the life out of me that people discriminate against gay people only because of their choice of who they love.<br />
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Gay marriage is not a threat to any form of traditional "heterosexual" marriage. I'll tell you what are threats to traditional marriage:<br />
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Stupid people who have no business getting married and spend the rest of their time fighting each other are a threat to traditional marriage.<br />
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Idiots who get married and divorced multiple times like they are changing socks or something are a threat to traditional marriage.<br />
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Serial baby-makers with minimal or non-existent parenting skills who bring way too many innocent children into their crazy dysfunctional world to abuse, neglect and abandon, thus ensuring the next couple of generations will be equally as screwed-up, are a threat to traditional marriage.<br />
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Disgusting pigs who cheat on their spouses at the drop of a hat are a threat to traditional marriage. The 50% divorce rate bears this out. Compared to them, the lesbian couple down the street who have lived together for 30 years is not a threat. <br />
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Some people are against gay marriage because of their religious beliefs. To them, I say keep your religious beliefs to yourself. Anyone is entitled to believe in whatever god-delusion seems to complement their personal agenda, but what one is NOT entitled to do is inflict their beliefs on their fellow citizens. Believing in something doesn't make it true, and it doesn't give you the right to dictate to other people what they have to believe.<br />
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Fundamentalist Christians would scream like stuck pigs if someone tried to pass a law making them believe in Buddha or the Easter Bunny. Idiotic brain-dead Tea Baggers howl that Sharia law is being imposed in various parts of the United States. They would pronounce it an abomination if someone tried to force the teachings of the Qur'an on them, but think it's perfectly okay to force the teachings of the bible on their neighbors. So much for their "love thy neighbor" crap.<br />
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Fundies also like to assert that their bible is the literal word of their god and it contains specific prohibitions against homosexuality. The book of Leviticus is most frequently cited in this case. Leviticus also contains a lot of other preposterous nonsense about shellfish and wearing certain fabrics, but the fundies pay no attention to that. This cherry-picking of what you are (or are not) going to believe from the bible shows the worst kind of selfish intellectual cowardice there is. Either you believe in the bible completely, 100 percent, or you don't believe it at all. There is no middle ground with religious faith, especially when you're trying to ram it down other people's throats.<br />
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Since I'm just as qualified as anyone else, I'd like to throw out a couple of popular words and phrases which have outlived their usefulness and relevance, assuming they had any to begin with. So, these are things which shan't be said any longer, thank you very much:<br />
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"YOLO" - or "You Only Live Once," a cryptic tag line which is used to justify any manner of unacceptable or obnoxious behavior, under the premise that life is short and we should be allowed to try anything once. Basically a free pass for stupid behavior that doesn't involve death or widespread destruction, YOLO takes its place next to the execrable "It is what it is," a vile little <a href="http://mathforum.org/mathimages/index.php/Mobius_Strip" target="_blank">Mobius-strip</a> of circular anti-logic which is the linguistic equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air and passively surrendering to the idiot gods which rule this life.<br />
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"Double down" - or actually, lying again. This came into prominence during the last presidential election when a Republican made a completely absurd, blatantly untrue statement, and when called on it, merely repeated the same bullshit more emphatically. It is a consequence of Republican supporters who freely and willingly release themselves from the confines of logical argument - which has been used successfully for thousands of years since the ancient Greeks - and instead embrace the stupidest lies and fabrications imaginable because they sound good to them or at least, on the surface, appear to agree with their agenda. Repeated endlessly on faux-journalistic crapfests like Fox News or by repulsive mountains of sweaty flab like Rush Limbaugh, Republicans and Tea Baggers discard facts as if they were articles of clothing soiled in a septic tank explosion, and will gleefully endorse any kind of ridiculous claptrap as long as it seems to reinforce their personal prejudices. As someone once said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but not entitled to your own facts."<br />
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"Fiscal cliff" - Hopefully this is something we won't have to hear about after December 31st of this year. Completely fabricated, man-made and unencumbered by any form of reality, it is not really a "cliff" but rather a slope or slide. Come January 1st, 2013, the entire country is not going to plunged into a dark, fearsome recession. The banking system won't collapse and the internet won't go belly-up. With no action from our wonderful leaders, taxes will go up and everyone will start screaming poverty, especially the so-called "job creators" (who, by the way, have been really incompetent in creating jobs over the last two years), but the cliff is really a stepping-stone to the next Armageddon-du-jour in modern American life, the debt-ceiling negotiations upcoming in February. That will be another round of batshit-crazy political posturing and self-flagellation which serves no useful purpose other than to deceive the low-information majority of American citizens into believing that Congress is actually doing something valuable to justify their existence. Which is the biggest scam of all.<br />
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And no, I'm not getting rid of the term, "batshit-crazy." I still love using it and it's so very appropriate for almost any occasion.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4162519632532213576.post-67818532483118783112012-11-19T21:16:00.001-07:002012-11-20T12:08:50.078-07:00God Rest Ye Merry HuckstersAs the fair month of November slips quietly away, I look with a bit of dread on the rapidly-approaching holiday season. I know there will be lots of parties and dinners and gatherings to attend, and it will be very nice to spend time with all the wonderful people in my life, but a little bit of me is already starting to cringe at the orgy of greed and consumerism which is already rushing towards us.<br />
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Yesterday there was a story on the local news about some pathetic idiot who is camped out in front of a Best Buy store or something here, in anticipation of being the first one in the store when Black Friday hits. That would be four days later. Apparently this sad schmuck has nothing better to do than waste four days of his life on the opportunity to drop a bunch of money on some electronic gifts for his niece and nephew, which will probably be forgotten in a month or two. I'm not sure which is worse, this fool squatting on the doorstep of corporate America or the local news idiots publicizing him like he's some kind of retail warrior or something.<br />
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This year it seems more apparent than ever that Thanksgiving is becoming an afterthought, a secondary holiday whose main purpose is to mark the beginning of the REAL holiday - the start of the Xmas shopping season. This month I've heard more about Black Friday than about Thanksgiving itself, and that is really sad. Thanksgiving is the biggest secular holiday and the one with the most meaning. What could be more fitting and proper than to be thankful for all the good things in your life and to draw your friends and loved ones near to you and celebrate being together? Sharing a good meal, a glass or two of wine, and good conversation is to me a gift that no store-purchased bauble could match. And yet, people seem to be very willing to eschew the good things in life for the pursuit of the biggest bargain, or the lowest prices.<br />
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A lot of people will wage their assault on the local shopping mall with all the grim precision and painstaking detail of a major military operation. It is so unseemly and undignified to be such money-grubbing, shopping-crazed automatons - robots pre-programmed by a lifetime of carefully-honed and targeted commercials to go out and shop on command. The more money you spend, the more you love someone; that seems to be the take-away from all this. In the single-minded pursuit of this end, so much of what makes life worthwhile seems to drop away and get left behind in the glitter and the dust.<br />
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So this year, I'm going to do what I have been doing for the past 5 or 6 years - reject all the buy-or-die hysteria, push back on the annoying, intrusive and hyperactive sales pitches, and instead concentrate on the real reason we celebrate the season - the friendship of people we love and with whom we share more than just a parking space in a shopping center lot, the coming winter solstice, and soon afterward a new year and a new springtime, and another year full of promise and opportunity, sadness and joy, and more wonderful people and rabbits gracing my life and touching my heart.Bunnymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03967783337364820064noreply@blogger.com2