Monday, June 30, 2014

SCOTUS and Birth Control.

The Supreme court came down in a 5-4 decision for Hobby Lobby not having to cover birth control they (erroneously) think causes abortions. Hobby Lobby needs to get educated on vaginas and birth control.

The thing that has been interesting to watch is the reaction on social media. On Facebook someone I know is an Ayn Randian type of conservative. You pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy. Even if you don't have boots you lazy fuck. He was saying a corporation shouldn't have to fund birth control if they are against it.

Firstly, it's a corporation. An entity for business. It ain't a person. I don't see Walmart or Hobby Lobby trying to fit in the pews at the local Catholic church. Because it can't it's a business. Corporations make filing taxes easier by considering them a person. And Citizens United says this corporate entity has the right to free speech like a real person. And floodgates of money opened and woe to the voting public...

Now I wonder if you were hired by a Christian Scientist, would you get any insurance coverage at all? They don't believe in MEDICINE. None of it. You get better by praying to god. Don't pray strong enough and you die. Example of a Christian Scientist? Jim Henson of the Muppets fame. Died of pneumonia because he didn't believe in penicillin. But penicillin believed in him and could have saved his creative ass. Are Christian Scientist owners going to bring a suit to the supreme court? Could happen.

How about Muslims? A Muslim owner of a business could be following Sharia law ans force women to wear burkas. Or deny insurance for women. If a Muslim had gone to the Supreme Court with this same lawsuit, would they have decided in the same way? The 5 justices are Catholic. Would they rule the same way for Islam? Or would they vote against it because they aren't Christian? I really would like to know.

A female friend of mine thinks they would have voted the same way in either case because it is anti-vagina. They are keeping women as second class citizens.

When are the old fuckers on the Supreme Court going to die? It needs to get packed with people who don't think corporations are people and women should be protected equally under the law.

The really hypocritical thing about the decision... Viagra and condoms and vasectomies are cover by Hobby Lobby's insurance. What a double standard.

Last of...

I was in a grocery store today. Usually I breeze in and out quickly. I know what I want and where to find it. I rarely just wander the aisles. As I was walking I saw and old man talking to a woman with a shopping cart. They were strangers, I could tell from the conversation. I don't know how it started but I eavesdropped as I walked by.

Old man: I'm the last one standing. No one in my family is left. I'm last of the Mohicans. I'm 96. I don't have much time left.

He didn't say it with any bitterness. Maybe just resignation. He was waiting. He seemed in a good mood. Very talkative.

The woman tried to say something comforting to him. I had walked out of earshot by the time she tried to answer. I got my groceries and headed back to where he had been. I don't know why. I wanted to say something. Meet him. I don't know. Something in my heart hurt for him. His aloneness or something like that resonated with me.

When I got to where he had been, he was gone.I looked around the rest of the store, but I guess he had left. At the check stand I engaged the cashier in world cup talk. But my mind was elsewhere hoping that man was not really as alone as he said.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Monogamy

I find monogamy to be a little odd. How in the world are two people supposed to find one another captivating for the rest of their lives? Love is one thing, Lust is another. Both can work simultaneously in the form of a person. But they can also work separately.

Love grows over time. Lust can walk thru the lobby of  a hotel, and you would like to sleep with that woman.

I don't know. My folks have been married for over 45 years. How many years I really don't know the exact number. I have some friends who have been married for less than 20. A few years back they opened up the marriage to other sex partners. Why? It was not going well, they were not happy as it was, and divorce wasn't really an option they would consider. So rather than throwing the whole relationship in the dustbin, or staying in a bad marriage, they expanded. It appears to have worked well. I don't judge. It's not the first swingers I've known. Or Poly arrangements I have known.

Let's face it, sex is fun. And though the super religious say god frowns on anything but man and woman marriage, I think it was a way for the church to control people. Because if you look in the bible for marriage definitions, you end up with guys that have multiple wives and concubines. There's verses that say if a soldier rapes a woman from another country, they are now married. ?!?! Fucking really? That's gonna be a great loving marriage. Not! Of if a brother dies, he has to marry the wife of the brother. Again, really? That doesn't make sense.

But so much of the bible doesn't make sense. People would tell you that is the old testament and is not used in Christianity. You say Potato/ I say Studebaker. Picking and choosing what you use out of a religious tome to suit your argument has always struck me as dishonest.

Controlling sex was a way to control people. And the ones who wanted to control sex say god doesn't like ________________. Fill in the blank. Whether it's straight, gay , bisexual, there's going to be someone somewhere trying to control what people do in the privacy of their own homes.

For most of the natural world, mating happens only when females are in heat. Primates can fuck at the drop of a hat. For most of human sex doesn't produce offspring. Why do we do it? It's fun. Sex is fun. New partners are a rush. You have no idea how they are going to react, what they look like sound like, feel like, smell like. It's exciting to be with someone new. There's a flood of endorphines and oxytocin. The brain releases a soup of chemicals.

I understand idea of monogamy but I always seem to think there's swinging going on that we don't know about. So having an unrealistic expectation for monogamy seems foolish. If a married couple of 20 years has sex 3 times a year, say birthdays and anniversary, well, what good is the marriage? It probably exists in a state of quiet discordance. I have looked in cars as I've been driving and I can usually tell the couples that have been together a long time. They aren't talking or engaged with each other. That I find sad. I'd rather be alone than in a relationship that is quiet and tense. 

So what brought this around? Fuck, I don't know. Just thinking out loud. Kind of wish I was swinging thru the trees of swinging.

Monday, June 16, 2014

War

On the possible verge of another war in Iraq, it made me think.

America hasn't WON a war since World War II. That war had a definitive end. There were treaty signings and parades and We Fucking Won! posters all over the place. But since then America hasn't won a war even though we have been in a state of combat almost the whole time since then.

Korea. That war has technically not ended. There is no truce or signing of a treaty. If there were a treaty then why do we still have troops at the DMZ? I had a friend in the Army who was stationed there. He told me that almost every week the North Koreans try to get some kind of incursion across the DMZ. Just no one hears about it. It's not news.

Vietnam. We lost thousands of troops and spent lots of money, but in the end we packed up and left. Let Vietnam "fall to the communists." But the funny thing is, there is capitalism in Vietnam and tourists go there often. If the war had stopped earlier, maybe that transition would have happened sooner.

Then there are little skirmishes all over the globe. Grenada. We were fighting for... Sheep? Somolia. We were fighting... I don't know who, but we left without any resolution. The Middle East. Beirut. We had a bunch of peace keeping marines blown up there in the 80's. Reagan said "Fuck this", and withdrew everyone.

Gulf War #1. Iraq did a dick move and invades Kuwait. We go over there and blow the shit out of everything. The news said we were not in Iraq. That's wrong. I had a friend on an LAV who said they were 60 miles from Baghdad and were ordered to turn around. All the oil fields that were on fire when the war was over? Yeah, US troops blew those up, not retreating Iraqis. Yup. We are the dick who crashes a party and clogs up the toilet, then sneaks out without trying to fix the plumbing.

The 80's and 90's were skirmishes usually in the Middle East. Libya, Lebanon, the PLO, nothing that could be defined as a war, but also without a real ending. We just kinda threw up our hands and said "Meh." And we left.

When 9/11 happened the neocons in the GW Bush White House, came in their collective pants. We could go blow the shit out of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but then attack Iraq. Just because.  So that is what we did. Blew up the Taliban. Then pointed to Saddam and said, "He's got WMDs! We must blow up more shit!" The war in Iraq leads us to where we are now. We took a stable dictatorship and destabilized it.

Was Saddam Hussein a bad guy? Oh, hell yes. But he was the only thing keeping the thousand years of Sunni and Shia hatred from doing what it's doing now. Saddam had his secular country under control by being a brutal dictator. When he was out of power we couldn't set up a western style democracy because that's not the way they think. It's tribal. They are more likely to tell you they are Sunni or Shiite than Iraqi.

So the drumbeat of war is on again from the GOP. "This whole mess is Obama's fault for not keeping troops in Iraq for the next 100 years." That is the GOP mind set. Thing is, it's not our country. We only went in and destablized it for a reason that has proven false. Before the British decided the borders of Iraq around the turn of the century, there were 3 separate lands. One for the Sunni, one for the Shiite, and one for the Kurds in the north.

We shouldn't be in this civil war because we are bad at winning wars.

Friday, June 6, 2014

John Boehner Is Not...

There has been a lot of GOP senators and congressmen who have been lately saying a very simple cop out phrase to deny science. Whether that science is climate change or fracking or some other thing they don't want  to address.

"I'm not a scientist..." They think that simple phrase gets them off the hook for the tough questions. But it's a bullshit answer. Ok, you aren't a scientist. But the people who wrote whatever report you don't want to acknowledge ARE scientists. They have been working in their fields for many years and they can state with authority that something is a scientific truth.

When a scientist comes up with something they think is  truth they publish a paper on the subject. This makes others in the field do experiments to see if they can disprove your findings. When more scientists get the same answer you did, it gets closer to being an accepted scientific truth.

So back to politicians. If they say they are not qualified to weigh in on a subject, they won't have to legislate or try to keep something bad, like rising sea levels, from happening. But that's bullshit. They were sent there to do tough things. Though it's difficult to do tough things when you only work 108 days a year...

So John Boehner is not a scientist. Fine. I have come up with a list of things he also is not.

John Boehner is not a  fairy princess.
... a short order cook at a greasy truck stop on highway 95.
... a dog walker in Central Park.
... a flamenco dancer called Juan Boner.
... a trashy romance novelist.
... a transexual scuba diving instructor in the Maldives.
... one third of a Vegas act called "The Orange Man Group."
... a superhero who fights crime using cigarette breath and whisky.
... a zombie extra on The Walking Dead.
... a thinking legislator...