An irrelevant matter regarding a mouse

Since this is the final posting for the year 2011 on my blog, I thought I would reminisce about this past year, and then choose the most exciting thing that has happened in our family and write about that.  I got this idea from all of the TV pundits who have spent this past week talking about all of the important things in the nation and world that have happened this past year, but my subject is a particularly irrelevant matter if one lives in a city.  Remember the title of this blog is also about irrelevant matters

I need to state that I live in a rural area on the California coast along with some rather unpleasant neighbors – black widow spiders and rattlesnakes.  These spider neighbors are not much of a problem because we were taught and we teach those who have come after us that one never puts one’s hands or feet where one cannot see clearly that there are no obnoxious inhabitants there, and we also recognize the rather peculiar random pattern of their webs.

Although the hands and feet rule works for rattlesnakes as well, there is an additional help to keep them away from us, and that is a cat.  Now the cat does not go after the snakes personally, but they do go after the rodents that the snakes feed on, so, ipso facto, no rodents – no snakes.

Our mouser cat had gotten much too old, she is now 20 years old, to go out and hunt, so we acquired a kitten who has turned out to be a prolific hunter, which is what we really wanted, and for which we are really happy.  Sounds great?  Well, Big Mo likes to bring his catches into our bathroom with its shower that has a slightly sunken floor.  He figured out that the mice can’t make it out of the shower if he can manage to get them in there.  They sometimes get away from him before that.

One day the mouse got away from him, and my husband was in the bathroom trying to catch the mouse, which ran behind the toilet.  In the ensuing chase, that appliance that used to be in every bathroom, the toilet plunger, had been left out of the cupboard, and the plunger sort of fell over.  It didn’t go all the way down, but was tilted with the opening at the bottom touching the floor.

Voila!  The mouse ran into that wonderful escape hole!  My husband grabbed the plunger, flipped it up, took it outside and launched the mouse into a marvelous arc away from the house.  And there was born – the mouse-o-matic.  For further details on the shape of a mouse-o-matic, ask for them in the comments section.

I am writing this to benefit any reader who lives in the country and who has a problem with mice in the house, for whatever reason.  When chasing the mouse, tilt the plunger in front of the mouse, it runs in, flip it up, and outside send the mouse on the ride of its life away from the house.  It works about 80% of the time.  We do have a mouse trap for the other 20%, but the mouse-o-matic is much faster and more humane.  If you don’t live in the country and don’t have a mouse problem, we hope you have enjoyed this story.

With that, we in our house wish all of you a peace filled and very Happy New Year.

The Cold Within

The Cold Within

(Reprinted from Dear Abbey, The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, CA)

Six humans trapped in happenstance

In dark and bitter cold,

Each one possessed a stick of wood,

Or so the story’s told.

Their dying fire in need of logs

The first woman held hers back,

For of the faces ‘round the fire,

She noticed one was black.

The next man looking across the way

Saw not one from his church,

And couldn’t bring himself to give

The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes

He gave his coat a hitch,

Why should his log be put to use,

To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought

Of the wealth he had in store,

And how to keep what he had earned,

From the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man’s face bespoke revenge

As the fire passed from sight,

For all he saw in his stick of wood

Was a chance to spite the white.

The last man of this forlorn group

Did naught except for gain,

Giving only to those who gave,

Was how he played the game.

The logs held tight in death’s still hands

Was proof of human sin.

They didn’t die from the cold without,

They died from the cold within.

My prayer for this Holiday Season is that all people who follow a faith tradition that emphasizes love and compassion for our neighbor, regardless of who they may be, will be filled with the warmth of that love and compassion for the next year.  Our poor weary world can certainly use a bonfire of love and compassion right about now. 

The Iraq War

The Iraq War

The night of 9/11 we were watching television, and heard Wolf Blitzer of CNN declare definitively that it was the Arabs who had attacked the World Trade Centers.  And I knew we would eventually go to war.  We changed channels to ABC News, and Peter Jennings kept stating that it was unknown who had perpetrated the attacks.  And I knew we would eventually invade somewhere.

What was lost in most of the rhetoric that came after was the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, that had stated that the Project would not be able to be implemented unless the United States suffered another attack such as Pearl Harbor.  I suggest that one might want to Google this Project, and wade through its vast rhetoric.  One thing I am not saying is that George Bush was involved in planning the attacks of 9/11, but his basic incompetence certainly didn’t help in preventing such an attack.

Further, probably because of both my long years as a mother, and my 16 years in politics, I have a seventh sense in detecting when someone is lying.  My husband probably got pretty tired of me yelling at the TV that I could tell when Bush II was lying about weapons of mass destruction, or yellow cake in Niger, or denying the outing of Valerie Plame (covert CIA agent), among other lies.  He gets a really peculiar look when lying, and in the long term, I was correct.

Also, the absolute lies about Saddam Hussein throwing the nuclear weapons investigators out of the country were obvious.  They were pulled out because El Baradei was not finding any weapons of mass destruction, and since this was to be one of the reasons the Bush administration was creating to justify invading Iraq inspectors could not be left there.  Once the inspectors were out, the rhetoric was ratcheted up about Saddam lying about not having any weapons.  In the long term it was proven that there were never any, so how could Saddam prove that there were none when the plan was to accuse him of having them?  It was truly a Catch 22 for Saddam.  The US would not allow independent inspectors in to prove that there were none, and thus Saddam could not prove verbally that there were none since the US needed to prove that there were.  Saddam Hussein was a truly wicked man.  But try him for what he had actually done, not for what he hadn’t. 

So our war is over.  It should never have begun.  It was so horrible for the Iraqi civilians, to say nothing of our own service people who were sent over there to fight and for some to die.  Our service personnel and their families suffered through what they honestly believed was the right thing to do, and for that they truly need to be honored.

Plan B

Plan B

Both sides of the hoopla over whether to allow girls 17 or younger to purchase what is basically a morning after contraception pill, which must be used within 72 hours to be effective, have some good points.  But first we must concede that this pill is safe to use, and apparently the science indicates that it is.

Let me point out first that we have four daughters.  Although now they are certainly beyond the age of beginning to make such decision for themselves, I have a certain bias toward parents.  After all, parents are responsible for their children through to the age of their 18^th birthday, which certainly indicates a great amount of parental anxiety, and in my mind, rightly so.  If the parents have a really great relationship with their daughters, the girls probably will not need a Plan B, but if for some ugly reason, like rape happens to them, their parents will be right there with them and probably buying Plan B for the girl.

On the other hand I have enough experience in this world to know that not all young girls have parents, or other caregivers, whom they can trust with such intimate knowledge of their behaviors.  In this case, a girl ought to be able to fend for herself, which just might include the purchase of Plan B.  Since Plan B is so expensive, it is doubtful if most girls under the age of 17 can indiscriminately pop on down to the drugstore and purchase a whole lot of boxes of these pills if the pills became available to girls under the age of 18.

And yet these are the girls who will need access to Plan B the most.  We hear constantly about the evils of abortion, and I am certainly not one who believes in indiscriminate abortion, either.  However, if a young girl gets pregnant, the only alternatives are carrying a baby to term and putting the child up for adoption, or having an abortion.  Forcing a young girl to carry a baby to term is, in my mind, not a good proposition.  She is not mature enough to know how to care for a baby, or to recognize that a baby is a 24/7 proposition for 18 years!  And beyond, if need be.  If she opts to carry the baby to term, and if her parents are at all responsible, then they have the potential responsibility of raising another family.  They may or may not be emotionally or physically fit to take this on.

This is one of those times where one tends to decide an issue based on personal experience or religious conviction which may not be the same personal experience or conviction of many other young girls.  We all need to take into account the reality of the life experiences of others, and not judge an issue based on our own biases.  These biases may be perfectly valid for our own experience, but not perhaps for others.  Decisions must be based on what is best for all concerned at the emotionally charged time.

This is such an emotionally charged issue that I, for one, am glad I am not making the policy decisions.

Tomorrow

Generally I post my views on Friday afternoon, in time for the weekend net surfers.  Today, however, we had a retirement party to go to which I thought was in the morning, but turned out to be in the afternoon.  So, will have something by tomorrow. 

Incipient Totalitarianism

On March 22, 2010, James Zogby posted on HuffPost (Huffington Post) Social News, Frightening GOP Behavior.

In this post Mr. Zogby wrote that time after time in the debate leading up to the final vote on the health care reform bill, “A Republican talking point repeated ad nauseam during yesterday’s debate pounded on the theme that they, and they alone, had the right to speak for “the will of the American people”.”  This theme was repeated over and over, using different words and phraseology, but, “All making the same point – that the GOP speaks for the American people.” 

This was written prior to the 11/10 elections remember. The final paragraph reads:

“Listening to the rhetorical excesses of last summer’s demonstrators, or those who mobilized to chant slurs at Democrats over the weekend, or to the radio and TV personalities who incite with hate and fear (“that we are losing our country”), or the GOP Congressional leadership who charge much the same and incite in similar ways – I hear echoes of last century’s history.  The behavior fits a frightening pattern and ought to be of concern.”

The shenanigans of the Republicans in Congress have kept the focus on Washington as they continue with the above behavior, but at the state level even worse behavior is taking place and except for Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow and Laurence O’Donnell on MSNBC, there has been little or nothing mentioned in the main stream media.

The Governor of the State of Michigan, through Public Act 4, can remove duly elected officials from office by declaring a financial state of emergency in the targeted jurisdiction.  I have scanned the act, and frankly, it doesn’t mean much in the way of protecting citizens of the four cities and one school district that have already been taken over, and have had an emergency city manager take over all of the administrative and financial functions for those cities and district.  There was a lot of rhetoric about the fact that these are cities, and I presume the school district, that are over 50% minority populations, and that this is basically a racist move.  These cities may have been targeted by the white GOPers in the mistaken belief that the minority citizens wouldn’t know how to fight back (a belief that is being proven wrong as I write), but I rather think that if the GOP can get away with these tactics in Michigan, the nose of totalitarianism is under the tent of our democracy. 

Go back to the beginning of this posting and read again Zogby’s final paragraph.  This is the type of behavior that dictators always use – some trumped up reason to seize control of governments everywhere.  What is being legally questioned, and rightly so, is how can the duly elected representatives of the people be summarily removed from office because one politician, in this case the governor of Michigan, decides the jurisdiction which these officials represent are in financial difficulties.  As a retired elected official, I find this action to be absolutely intolerable, disgusting, un-American, anti-democratic, and treasonable.  Other than that, I don’t have much of a problem with it!

Go out and join the closest Occupy demonstration you can find.  Now.

Addendum to Critical Thinking

Addendum to “Critical Thinking”

In yesterday’s blog I concluded with the following paragraph, inferring that there was a concerted effort by politicians to divert attention from the reasons for the OWS movement onto police brutality by having senior officers in departments, who have no business being involved in the actual policing, indulging in a less than professional manner, such as the “white shirt” in the NYPD and the Lieutenant at UC Davis.  Both of them sort of went bonkers with the pepper spray.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.

Of course today there was an article on Reader Supported News, titled The ‘Crackdown on Occupy’ Controversy, written by Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK, 12/3/11.  I will be mentioning a “Verheyden-Hilliard”.  This is Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the DC Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

This is a 10 page article, but well worth reading in its entirety.  Please do so.  Here I will quote three of four of Wolf’s final paragraphs in the article.

“But as far as my central argument goes, I stand my ground.  I have here presented additional evidence that NYPD and federal authorities coordinate efforts in the surveillance and arrest of OWS supporters.  I have presented what appears to be DHS’s own non-denial, as of this writing, of potential lower level staff involvement.  The oversight role of DHS by specific congressmen, as specified clearly on DHS’s own website is clear.  I argue still the congressmen and women have a confirmed financial interest in the status quo, which individual Occupy members’ first 100 answers to me about their agenda would directly threaten.”

“My analysis about the various forms of collaboration between DHS and local law enforcement is “on firm footing”, confirms Verheyden-Hilliard, “and the record will speak for itself as it comes out.  The whole last decade has been about the integration of law enforcement on a vertical level.”

There is a house on fire, and it is ours.”

During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to only employ those who were in sympathy with the objectives of that administration.  This has been documented too many times for me to attempt to post them all here.  Since Wolf cites the fact that DHS would like to narrow the investigation to only senior staff at DHS, it would appear that lower staff were likely involved in this coordination effort.  All across the country the crackdown on OWS occurred all at once, so to speak, with subsequent incidents of police misbehavior.  This is what I meant by “throwing the police under the bus”.  The low-level officers apparently were acting mostly professionally.  But by upper-level personnel indulging in less than desirable behavior, it has smeared the reputation of all of our first responders.  And taken the emphasis off of the legitimate concerns of OWS, and onto manufactured police brutality.

This is not only really sad, but disgusting!

Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Years ago I had the pleasure of taking a class at a state college in beginning Greek logic.  I was not terrifically good at it, but it did open my mind toward doing some critical thinking of my own.  This is a really good thing to be able to do with all of the illogicalities one can either read or see every day.  There are three illogicalities that have really struck me lately.  A couple are serious – one is not, but is none the less instructive.

The first one is the Mike Huckabee commercial that airs almost nightly on MSNBC, and regards his petition to the Senate to urge the Senate to overturn what is unofficially known as “Obamacare”.  He urges viewers to sign the petition because to not do so will cause us all to be overrun by some socialist plot, or something on that order.  But the final clip states, and I quote, “Even if you have signed before, call and sign again”.  Really?  This is obviously not an official petition of any kind.  This sort of thing used to be known as stuffing the ballot box, or in this case, stuffing the petition.  Since this is not an official petition, this urging to sign more than once is probably not illegal, but it certainly strikes me as being unethical.  When these signatures reach the Senate it purportedly will infer that all of these people are opposed to Obamacare, when in actuality many of the signatures will be duplicate.  Rather than having a million people sign, it may be a lesser number signing a million times! 

The second illogical incident was actually an article I read for home beauty.  It was indicating that one needs to look one’s best when attending Christmas parties, but that having one’s hair “done” at a sylist could be as much as $45.00 a visit.  It suggested purchasing items that would allow one to style one’s own hair at home.  I totaled up the amount all of the hair products would have cost and they came to some $170.00.  Now since I have short hair and don’t really need more than a good cut every month, this was all sort of academic to me, but unless one had to go to the stylist more than four times, it was about the same as buying all of the various products.  It seemed to me the article was more interested in selling hair products than in saving the harried woman money.

The third illogicality was a discussion I had concerning the pepper-sprayed students at UCDavis.  If any reader has not seen that clip, it was of a group of students, about 12-15, sitting blocking a sidewalk, and they had their arms intertwined.  The students were ordered by the police officer in charge, a Lieutenant, to disperse.  They refused to comply, at which point they could legitimately have been arrested.  There were numerous officers there, sort of standing back, but there were enough that four officers could have separated two of the students each, probably having to drag them off since they undoubtedly would have gone limp, but doing so without harming the students.  Now comes the illogical part.  The students were wearing hooded sweatshirts or had bandanas covering their faces, and there were several standing by with video cameras.  The Lieutenant walked up to the students about 3 feet away, and began shooting streams of pepper spray at their faces.  His body language was that of someone spraying bugs on a hedge.  He went up and down the row of students, spraying away.  The discussion I was involved with indicated he had the right to use pepper spray because the students had not only disobeyed an order, but were wearing hooded sweatshirts and bandanas, which indicated, along with the other students with cameras that they expected to be pepper sprayed.  Well, as far as I know, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a bandana over one’s face is not illegal.  Nor is having someone there to video an incident, so long as one is not interfering with the action, which none of the camera people were.  Nor is expecting something unpleasant to happen illegal.  Therefore, using the sweatshirts, bandanas, cameras and expectations as an excuse to pepper spray non-violent protesters is illogical.  The majority of the officers, I must add, were acting in a totally appropriate and professional manner.  It was just one, apparently rogue, officer.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.