Convergence

September 2, 2011 Leave a comment

Apartment life. Life ala compressed multiculturalism and noise.  People upstairs. People downstairs. People next door. Surround sound, surround smell, surround people 24/7. No man is an apartment unto himself.

Latin oompah music pumps my eardrums at all hours.  Asian Techno music throbs somewhere in the water pipes.  An unbalanced washing machine in the basement bangs against the wall or is it the churning dance music beat of the sixteen year old listening to Pit Bull in the next apartment? Fights, arguments, door slamming and door knocking. Sounds of silence  – No Vacancy here.

 The Filipino couple across the hall is fighting again.  The guy’s stuff is scattered all over the second floor hallway and in front of my door. He knocking, calling and crying. No one answers – for about four hours.

 The black girl in apartment C has just came home from work. She’s carrying her one year old son up the stairs. The boy’s father will be over on the weekend. He wishes she lived on the first floor. In a recently and easily overheard argument I heard him say to her “You never see the things I don’t do.” I knew at that point that things would not get better. I turn up Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem.

 On the weekends, the Brit school teacher in apartment B gets in his car to pick up his two-year old son. Otherwise, he has satellite TV and the nearby sports bar.

 The drunk in apartment C routinely stumbles through the hallway to get his social security check out of the mailbox. He will soon walk over to the same sports bar.

 A young Asian couple moved upstairs last weekend. For some reason they roam their bedroom all night long.  Their footsteps run across my ceiling putting out my dreams.

 Again tonight the hippie couple who live downstairs and two doors over sit outside by their clay chiminea. The smell of pot is becoming heavy in the air. No way to Teach Your Children.

I close my patio door to that dreamland wafting up and to the choking smoke coming from grilling Tecate chicken below me. I had wanted to sit outside on my small porch and enjoy the summer night but there is also a guy fixing his SUV in the parking lot.  The SUV rear-end is jacked up and so is Lil Wayne’s She Will. Stille nacht not.

 Tik Tok. In case you are wondering, I get up at 3:30 am in the morning and get ready for work. I catch the 5:04 train to the city. So, I go to bed at 8:15 pm. But tonight, like every other night, the Hispanic family downstairs decides to use their bathroom.  This is a problem because for the past year the fan, which toggles “On” with the light, makes a “grrrr” sound like its being forced to run against its electrical will. The “grrrr” sound continues through my neighbor’s shower and then some into my angst. Why don’t they get it fixed? No entiendo.  Maybe, there is so much other noise they can’t tell there is a problem.

 And, oh yeah, I had to stop using the building’s washer and dryer. I think someone uses Sackrete to wash their clothes. I now use a local laundry mat and that is a whole other reality series experience. I tell myself I get to meet new and interesting people.

 It’s Friday night and this is all I know:   Estoy muy cansado and I am rocking myself to sleep in the free world.

© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved

Filed under Life As I See It, non-fiction, Short Piece, short piece, Writing Tagged with , ,

Bureaucracy Speaks

September 1, 2011 Leave a comment

Paradise News Release (PNR):

On Thursday, Sept. 8th, 2011, Bureaucracy To Speak Before a Joint Session of Bureaucrats:

Using the core principles of Newspeak Barrack Hussein Obama or The Bureaucrat of the ruling class inner party, is expected to deliver a moving speech (hopefully avoiding teleprompter whiplash), before a joint session of bureaucrats. Directors of the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Plenty, The Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love will all be in attendance.

Before his fellow bureaucrats Obama will present the reasons for the economic problems at hand: you, me and a dog named Boo.  Tilting at windmills, he will verbally attack the America-loving Tea-Party. He will blame them for making his bureaucracy so difficult to maintain. He will remind us just how hard he has worked for our benefit. And, with Big Brother love he will tell us that he only wants the best for us, that only he knows what is best for us. He is a community organizer after all, born and bred by the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and a host of Radical Progressive myopians. He wants us to understand that he is just one of us born to rule.

Our Dear Leader will remind us that we the people even managed to interrupt his vacation with our concerns about Hurricane Irene.

In his ineffable non-partisan way Obama will pronounce that Republicans and Tea-Party Proles are to blame for the economic mess we are in. He will also invoke the force majeure clause in his contract with America. (BTW: for atheistic and agnostic Americans, it’s still God’s fault.) And, he will remind us that the bureaucratic buck should never stop long enough to stick to him. He’s from Chicago.

Obama will once again play the Bush card by telling us that he inherited his problems from W.  He will say this while asking to pile on more debt via more stimulus money in a move reminiscent of his own first two years in office.

Obama won’t mention that his aunt and uncle are in the US illegally. He doesn’t want to inherit any of that.

In a nod to the Outer Party (those who have been under liberal university tutelage) Obama will tell them to continue to Lean Forward.  A sign that he wants them to embrace the Rainbow Peacock just as he has done.

His speech will include class warfare indictments against those rich people with teleprompters of their own (not state-owned) and against those who use corporate jets to take vacations (this type of luxury is reserved only for bureaucrats of his stature and for those up and coming bureaucrats in the Outer Party).

On that night, our Beloved Leader, Barrack Hussein ‘Moses’ Obama will speak to us about the Progressive Land of milk and honey based on his dream of wealth re-distribution rationing.

In order to spur the damaged economy, he will offer higher taxation on taxes – if you pay taxes you must pay more taxes. He will clean up government waste by hiring only union sympathizing bureaucrats for any bureaucratic position. He will bring in a new economist to his financial team who will tell him he was right all along.

He will offer ‘Green’ jobs (actually, ‘greenbacks’ or patronage ) as a means to get our country (actually, those close to him) out of the economic mire it is in.

In typical grandiose fashion Obama will offer his own alternative energy jobs plan:  build wind towers. (a project that he and Jeffrey Immelt of GE fully approve of)

Obama, confident in his appeal, will remind us that we need to create jobs to get people back to work. And, that we each need to do our part.

Finally, Obama is expected to talk down to the Prole class.  After all, they are too stupid to know better than that Someone who has no experience but lots of campaign money and connections

Let the bureaucratic babble begin! After the speech, celebrate with some Victory-gin!

Your faithful and obedient reporter, Winston Smith.

*******

“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me—“

 from 1984 by George Orwell

Filed under 2012 election, Current Events 2011, Economics, Life As I See It, Political Commentary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Straighten Up & Fly Right

September 1, 2011 Leave a comment

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It’s A Nuclear Family Affair

August 27, 2011 Leave a comment

The Big Bang or the time of the Great Annihilation, when Matter and Antimatter clashed and cosmic sparks went flying, the progeny of majorons provided the universe with an asymmetric mix of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, more quarks than anti-quarks. And, that’s what Mattered the most.

It was in That Beginning that Time and his twin-brother Space were born. Since that day, they sprawl the universe with their feet up and their hands behind their head.  Under a contractual agreement, though, they will have to return – from whence they came.

 Time, the patient caregiver, the healer of all wounds, or, as has been seen, the brutal tormentor of the long-sufferer, always takes his time. He’s been known to say, “A day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”

 Space, a distance runner, hopes to place in the next inter-galactic marathon.

 Space and Time or Space-Time as they are often called spend most of their time-space wrestling in gelatin with friends and neighbors. They tell me that this adds dimension to their lives. They listen to string-theory music while wrestling.

 Miss Universe, a stellar beauty, is curvy. The brothers also spend their time following her around.

 Speed-of-Light, the brothers’ close friend, always beats them to the remote whenever something special is broadcast.

 My family, the Atoms family, spends its time playing king-of-the-hill and marbles. We do like knock-knock jokes. Little Hydrogen gets pushed around a lot, though.

 The Nebulae Family members, known for their starry eyes, are nomadic. They spend their time gazing at Space-Time from a point of departure somewhere in the galaxy.

 The favorite saying of the Planet households is “What goes around comes around.” Their favorite hangout is the Milky Way.  They own several tanning salons.

 I guess that if Time were to be no more and if Space was pigeonholed and if Speed-of-light was somehow surpassed and if Family Nebulae no longer roamed and if the Planet households split up then, God knows, you and I are no longer relative.

© Jennifer A. Johnson, 2011, All Rights Reserved

H/T to italo calvino

 

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
   Tell me, if you understand.
 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
   Who stretched a measuring line across it?
 On what were its footings set,
   or who laid its cornerstone—
 while the morning stars sang together
   and all the angels shouted for joy? Job 38:4-7

 

*****

“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar.

–Joke circulating on the internet

Filed under Astronomy, Life As I See It, Science, science fiction, short piece, Writing Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Outsourcing

August 23, 2011 Leave a comment

 The radio message came at 22:01:44.9 Martian time:  “The Community-Organizer-in-Chief has left the Washington DC Bureau of Breadlines and has fled to his Martha’s Vineyard compound.”

 It was to be expected. The People’s Economy had turned on him. Unfed jobless (and tattooed) masses were walking the streets looting, robbing and killing for food. Washington, the center for The People’s Economy was no longer safe.  But, we felt safe in our star-ship Gorforit. That is, Friedrich and I felt safe.  My name is Milton.

 You should know that there were many Capitalists in The People’s America when the Hope and Change Desolation began ten years ago. But, since that time, there is now only a small remnant left.

 Back then we were called the “Free-Market-eers.”  As such, we were constantly booed and jeered by The People’s Media.  Flash mobs of union workers, guided by The People’s Media, attacked us. And though we were peace-keeping people, many of us were battered and some lost their lives.  At one point it became so bad that corporate jet owners were being hung openly on the Mall, right in front of Lincoln Memorial.

 How did this all begin? A Progressive candidate (The Candidate) won the presidential election in 2008. This newly elected president began to stir up class warfare among the people.  He incited people to turn against each other, neighbor against neighbor, because of money. The People’s Media joined in.

 In 2011 a “Lean Forward” campaign was launched by the People’s Media.  Soon, the slothful, the dimwitted and the envious began to call themselves “The Forward Thinkers” or the “Lean-Forward Thinkers” – commonly known as the “LFT”. Their numbers, mostly union workers and unemployed college graduates with useless degrees, grew rapidly.

 The People’s Media which had once campaigned for The Candidate in 2008, now campaigned for the Lean-Forward group.  The campaign encouraged these marauders to take from the rich (those who had a job and some income) and to give to the “under-privileged” – those who saw what others had and wanted the same things.

From the Oval office the president, via regular People’s Media broadcasts, told the citizens that government was the best mechanism to handle society’s problems.  So, with the help ‘elected’ representatives he began to take away the people’s money through taxation. People were no longer able to donate to charities or to directly help their neighbor.  Every dollar was excised from the people for the people in The People’s Economy.

 The People’s Media, rousing the animal passions of the LFT members, encouraged demonstrations to take place against Free-Marketeer businesses.  Soon, though, the demonstrations were replaced with random looting and pillaging of stores.  Strife increased between merchant and customer, neighbors and friends.

 Our nations’ economy, once strong and vibrant because of free-market exchange, was now subject to the whims of recalcitrant, angry mobs and inept tyrannical leadership.  It quickly deteriorated until our present time.

 So, a plan was decided at our last Capitalist conclave held in a secret hiding place near Mount Rushmore.  Two of us would go to Mars and begin a free market economy on a new planet. Both Friedrich and I volunteered to go.  We were the oldest in the group.  If something happened we were both prepared to die.

 We had the star-ship Goforit but not the fuel.  The People’s Economy rationed both fuel and food. So, we had to put our heads together to find a solution. Now, we had done similar things like this before so we were not overly concerned but time was running out.

There was no IPO for this venture, no influx of cash.  The US dollar had folded.  Instead, we had to learn to create fuel out of gold bullion.  And, as it turned out, a small amount of this fuel would take us all the way to Mars. Once there we could also use it to barter with the Martians.  They have no gold on Mars but they do have good underground living quarters for the two of us. We could set up shop very quickly. In fact, it was the Martians who had offered to help us.  They would benefit from us. It would be a mutually beneficial relationship, something no longer found in The People’s America.

 We all believed, the Free-Market-eers, that is, that there would be defectors from the People’s Economy but we didn’t know when. Things were getting nasty in The People’s America.  So we decided to plan ahead and get ready for the influx of homeless and hungry. We had to start somewhere new.  Somewhere that wouldn’t be affected by The People’s Media. 

It seemed to us that Mars was the best option since there was a significant time delay for any radio signal to reach that planet. And better yet, The People’s Media Broadcasts would easily get lost within the noise of space radiation and our own Sun’s solar flares. “Bingo,” I said when I heard this.

*****

 “Milton”, Friedrich spoke glancing out Goforit’s small window at the silent Martian orb, “soon you and I will be able to start our booming life again, but this time, on the Red Planet!”

Milton replied, “A laissez-faire world at last. To Mars or bust, my friend, to Mars or bust.”

© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved

Filed under 2012 election, capitalism, Conservatism, conservative, Culture, Current Events 2011, Economics, Political Commentary, science fiction, short piece, social commentary Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Well, what did you think?”

August 22, 2011 Leave a comment

“Well, what did you think?”

 

“Well, what did you think?”

I’ve heard people ask,

As if a snide comeback,

Was up to love’s task.

 

“Reasons, all reasons.”

“We’re not by your side.”

“Our life has its reasons,”

They’d chortle and chide.

 

“With friends like these friends

I’ve learned to just say,

“I’ll continue along,

Get out of their way.”

 

“Well, what did you think?”

They won’t hear me ask,

I’m so far behind them,

I walk in their past.

 

© Sally Paradise, 2011, All Rights Reserved

Filed under poetry Tagged with , , ,

Atheism in Retreat

August 20, 2011 Leave a comment

  
William Lane Craig wants to debate atheists ( Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc) in the UK but there are NO takers:
 
*****
God Is Not Dead Yet
How current philosophers argue for his existence.
by William Lane Craig
 

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

That generation’s cultural high point came on April 8, 1966, when Time magazine carried a lead story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright red letters: “Is God Dead?” The story described the “death of God” movement, then current in American theology.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of God’s demise was premature. For at the same time theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was rediscovering his vitality.

The complete article here:http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/july/13.22.html?paging=off

For more information: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer

Filed under Atheism, Christian character, Christianity, Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

CTRL-ALT-DELETE

August 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Have you ever been in a relationship with a controlling person?  If you have you will better understand what I am writing about below.

 A controlling person is often a perfectionist.  For whatever unsettling condition/s that occurred in their young lives their need for perfectionism is absolute.  These people must have everything perfectly in order and under control.  And, in doing so, these people will find fault with everything. It doesn’t matter how good things are.  They will find fault with it. Their common reproach:  This is good, and yet…”  

You have just broached the liberal/progressive mindset and the maniacal motivations behind Hope and Change and MSNBC’s Lean Forward campaign

 *****

Control is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party.  This party seeks to control the conversation, to control your words with its ersatz religion of political correctness, to control the amount of your take-home pay, to control the social milieu, to control your food intake, to control the air, the water, the earth, control the science of air, water and earth, to control energy, to control finances, to control the pretense of international involvement via undeclared military action, to control education through teachers unions and text-books, to control jobs through unions, to control guns – to control your life ad infinitum.  The Dems have myriads of tyrannies of control governed by their politicians in charge of their ‘kingdoms’.  These Dems inherently seek more power to control and more time in office doing more of the same – controlling you at your expense. And, they keep Black-Americans in ‘their’ place with social welfare programs.

Let’s look at some of this tightening of the noose around our necks:

Control the conversation:  Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller are just two examples of those who would constrain the first amendment to only leftist thinkers. Remember Stalin and the Gulags? Remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn being imprisoned for his writing against the government? Students today only read the myopic screed The People’s History of the United States written by the communist Howard Zinn.  These students have no idea about real world and American history. Student neo-socialists will seek to repeat Stalin’s Russia, I have no doubt.

Control the social milieu:  homosexuality, the donkey’s behind of the Democratic Party symbol, demands that the homosexual life-style addiction be accepted and endorsed by everyone at every level, much like pot-heads who want pot legalized.  Homosexuality demands that our children be taught about this lifestyle.  It demands that our children’s text books be filled with homosexual lore and history. And, if you don’t agree with homosexuality it will shout out “Homophobe!” Americans have every reason to fear the degeneration of America because of homosexuality.

Control your food intake:  Think Michelle Obama; think Democratic thin lizzies wanting to stop McDonalds and other fast food restaurants from serving their product to you. They want to control your weight.

Control your take home pay:  Democrats want to tax, tax, tax, build a casino to lure your money away, tax, tax, build a casino, tax…

Control energy:  Cap and Trade (says it all)

Control your job through unions:  union leaders want to have command of your job.  Once someone joins a union they want you to donate, donate and donate to their ’cause’. They will then skim money from your collected donations.  Union bosses are greedier than the corporate industry they rail against. And, they know that you are eager to give over your rights to them in exchange for the pretense of collective bargaining. They play on people’s laziness, people’s lack of motivation and people’s lack of self-determination. They tell you that they have the leverage that you don’t have.  This is a lie, of course. You can work wherever you want whenever you want if your are determined to do so or you can create your own company/job. You are free but unions are control mongers.

Control finances: the Dodd-Frank Act equals control, control, control, blame, control, blame and control; the irony: co-author Barney Frank is the very one who brought upon us the financial crisis of 2008 with his oversight Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’ little or no money down mortgages for low-income people.

Control the pretense of international involvement via military action:  It is a well-known fact that presidents who have not had military experience go easily into war. And, when they go to war they strictly limit and control the military action which in turn never yields a resolution or a decision of surrender. Instead of decisive military action there is only the ‘controlled’ back and forth of military hokey-pokey wasting lives, money and time.

 Extreme control and droll sameness are necessary to create a manufactured utopia. Everyone has to be on the same page for the utopia to work. The elitist left, Progressive Democrats, think that they know what is best for you.  Their ivory tower professors lecture naive and un-historied students spewing out their idealist nonsense in hopes of producing more useful idiots for their cache of followers.  These same professors have no real life experience.  They are afraid to go out into the real world. (Except, of course,  for William Ayers, the domestic terrorist.  He has actual experience in domestic terror.)

  “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business,” President Calvin Coolidge told journalists in March 1929.

Filed under Political Commentary, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

Allen West, Black America & Plantation Politics

August 18, 2011 Leave a comment

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Pretense, Part 2: The World Has Become a Jerry Springer Show

August 17, 2011 Leave a comment

The following short article was written six years ago.  Read it and take a look around today. What do you see?

Theodore Dalrymple
Law Isn’t Enough

City Journal, Autumn 2005

Recently in London a correspondent of a left-liberal Dutch newspaper interviewed me, a decent, civilized sort—one of us, in short. I am sure that he brought up his children to say please and thank you, probably in several languages.

He asked me why I had chosen recently to move from England to France. I said that I thought France was a decade or two behind Britain in cultural decline. It had maintained certain standards a little better than Britain—though, I added, I could see that it was heading in the same direction.

He asked me what evidence I had for my claim. Well, I replied, crime in France was approaching British levels; in some places, it was even worse, at least for serious crimes of violence.

Another straw in the wind was the rising number of tattooed and pierced young people on view, as well as tattoo and piercing parlors. Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw a tattooed person in France: now they are everywhere. The small and ancient town, solidly bourgeois, near where I live has such a parlor, purveying savage kitsch to young fools. Le Monde published a little while back a profile of the acclaimed French writer Ann Scott, whose work makes Baudelaire’s seem a bit like that of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Scott has a large and prominent tattoo of a swallow on her neck. Critics claim that her latest book, describing heroin addiction and lesbian love, has a terrible beauty, as well as near-emetic properties.

The correspondent asked me: what was wrong with tattooing, if that was how people wanted to adorn themselves?

I asked him whether he would have himself tattooed—whether he would be happy if his teenaged children had themselves tattooed—and if not, why not? After all, if he would not like it, he must have some inner objection to tattooing.

True, he said, but tattooing was not illegal. And since even I, who deprecated it, did not think that it should be illegal, there was nothing further to say about it. If tattooing was legal, it was thus of no social, moral, or cultural significance.

I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

Even worse than the correspondent’s implicitly totalitarian assumption was his lack of awareness of how societies cohere, and how social existence becomes tolerable, let alone pleasant. After all, the law does not prohibit rudeness, boorishness, and an infinity of unpleasant habits. But it is clear that if, for example, the prevalence of boorishness increases, life in society becomes more filled with friction and danger.

What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way a civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

 (Emphasis mine)

 From this article:

 http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html

 THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a British writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist

Filed under Conservatism, conservative, Culture, Current Events 2011, Human Interest, LGBT, Liberalism, THEODORE DALRYMPLE Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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