“DONE, FINISHED, OUT’A HERE …”

When one lives among sharks and barracuda, one acquires a healthy respect for … shall we say … diversity.  To eat or be eaten is not a lifestyle to be taken lightly.  It is the way of the reef. Nothing personal.  In contrast, (O)CT(O)PUS thinks of human beings as rapacious without purpose and fractious beyond reason.  Not unlike cannibals, humans predate their own kind.

The title of this post does not signal my intent to quit The Swash Zone or retreat from Cyberspace.  These are my last words in a comment thread posted yesterday at Conservative Convictions, or as Captain Fogg likes to jest, Conservative Convicts.

It started with this post, “The Call to Dunkirk” Launches Mass Exodus From Public Schools. According to a video, it equates public education and “liberals” with fascism and Nazis. I responded to this post with the following comment:

(O)CT(O)PUS:  Gayle, if you don’t want to send your offspring to public school, that is your business; but to imply that those of us whose support of public education is akin to National Socialism, your attitude is disrespectful of other religious denominations and persons of conscience who hold different views.

A reasonable reply, I thought, but not according to Robert. Having known him for some time, he has … shall we say … a head for illogic thicker than a stone crab.  He obfuscates, perambulates, or simply ignores any point deemed inconvenient.  Here are examples:

ROBERT:  First, the suggestion that the First Amendment bars religion from public schools is absurd and I think it sad [Note Appeal to Emotion fallacy] that people consider this worthy of debate …

The framers had no problems with simply stating that troops quartered in private homes was forbidden, but the left suggests that they "meant" that religion was to be only a private matter [Note Analogical Argument fallacy] …

This intenet [sic] is supposed to have come from delegates to the Constitutional Convention where many were required to be a member of a church to be a delegate [Note Non Causa Pro Causa fallacy] …

I did not find this offensive at all [Note Subjective Argument fallacy].

Public education, as a general rule, has deteriorated to the point of spending an entire year teaching to pass a single test [Note Projective Identification fallacy that blames liberals for a program authored by conservatives] …

I knew more about history, geography, science, and humanities by the 5th grade than my children who are in high school have been taught [Note Questionable Authority fallacy] ….

There is tight local involvement, and because we are a red state and red county, our system is mostly rid of the liberal infestation of Al Gore movies and absurd anti-religious views [Note Appeal to Ridicule fallacy] …

Nowhere does it say that we are to humble ourselves before other religions, nor to place them on a level field with Christianity [Note Special Pleading fallacy].

Robert, however, is not the subject of this post.  This is:

GAYLE:  Wow! I didn't realize liberals were so against people deciding how they want their own children to be educated … I'm an American, and we still have freedom of choice in this country whether liberals like it or not. Public school, private school or homeschool [sic]. It's up to the parents, period.

Fine, fine, fine, except that is NOT what I said. If you are reading this, Gayle, please write on the blackboard 100 times:  This is not what 8pus said.  In fact, your faithful 8pus is himself a graduate of the Sargasso Academy, a posh and exclusive preparatory school for snooty cephalopods.

If you are re-reading my first comment, Gayle, I objected to your use of Godwin’s Reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy that equates liberals with Nazis:

(O)CT(O)PUS:  Do you mean to imply that Jewish Americans, whose ancestors were killed in the Holocaust, are now consorting with Nazis just because they send their kids to public school?

There is more to Gayle’s post that I found objectionable. I referenced the website, ExodusMandate.org, and found this:

"Christians have already become numb to the moral relativism that is taught in all public schools today. Now children will be told that their sexual orientation and gender are relative, too. No longer will children raised in these schools understand that God made us male and female with different, but complementary roles. Instead, children will be taught that sexual orientation and gender are merely a matter of personal choice … The likely consequences of this for children, the institution of the family, our churches, and our culture are horrendous."

In other words, The Exodus Mandate is not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, or about a better education, or even about a religious education. The hidden message is all too obvious (my paraphrase):  “Since those fascist liberals will not allow discrimination against homosexuals in public, we choose to separate ourselves and practice discrimination in private.” Thus, the covert mission of the Exodus Mandate is DISCRIMINATION and HOMOPHOBIA.  I am just shocked to discover Christians engaging in stealth and guile; I thought this was Satan’s work.

I cannot, will not countenance discrimination in any form whatsoever based on ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation.  And I refuse to be associated with any forum that does.  With a heavy heart, I have decided to remove Conservative Convictions from our link list and shall return there no more.

Any objections?

God is great

The explosions look like fireworks but with the bright white stars headed downwards rather than up. Oh Jesus, it's white phosphorus, I said to myself when I realized what I was seeing. I've raged about such weapons when the US used them and it makes me sick to see Israel using them too. Burning phosphorus does horrible things to people.

"They shelled everyone in Gaza ... they shelled children and hospitals and mosques and in doing so, they gave us legitimacy to strike them in the same way,"

said Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar. Of course the hospitals and schools and even the mosques are ammunition dumps and launching pads for the thousands and thousands of missilesHamas has launched and is launching indiscriminately into Southern Israel for the very purpose of provoking an attack which, seeing as they are hiding in schools and hospitals and apartment houses would generate the kind ofinadvertent martyrdom Hamas , in its self-righteous cowardice, likes to assign to innocent people. They're still firing them into towns and villages and still refusing to stop even if itallows a cease fire and the end of the killing.

Of course it's hard to cite something as a provocation when it follows your prior provocation, but the chain of provocation and response is so long, any party can pick a beginning that suits their arguments -- and of course they do.

Is the Israeli response disproportionate? Of course, but if someone fires a bullet at you would you limit yourself to firing only one in return -- and of the same caliber? I think not. Would we have given Germany back to the Germans or Japan back to the Japanese had they persisted in firing hundreds of rockets at us every day of the week? HaveHamas's rocket attacks and suicide bombing attacks been entirely against civilians? Of course. Have Israeli embargoes and draconian restrictions followed massacres? Yes, and around and around we go.

Is this kind of insanity the ineluctable result of two religious cultures claiming the same ground for religious reasons? In any event, I'm not a believer in any peaceful solution that will allow all concerned to lead decent, secure lives. If Israel were to turn over all territory taken after neighboring states tried to annihilate them, I have no doubt that every square inch would be used as a base of operations to once again attempt to kill every Israeli and every shot would come from behind a screen of women and children. So far, that's just what has happened.

There has been a tense and angry peace between Israel and other neighboring countries, but I see no hope for a Palestinian state in addition to Jordan, unless it's willing to accept Israel's existence -- and Hamas is not about the acceptance of Israel.

Hamas' strategy is to provoke Israel into vicious insanity - and it works. As they haven't the manpower or the weapons for anything but barbaric terrorism against innocent civilians, they depend on getting sympathy through the sacrifice of their own innocent citizens - and it works and as long as it works, they're not going to fix it.

CNN Talks Too Much

It happened again - minutes ago. CNN talked about a news a story rather than reported a news story. There is a difference between TALKING about the news & REPORTING the news - a distinction increasingly lost on the powers that be at CNN. I swear they could bail out wall street with the money CNN pays out to one so-called expert after another. Increasingly, CNN seems incapable of highlighting a news story without analyzing it with TALK - TOO much bloody TALK!

Minutes ago - an anchor was given approx. 30 seconds to cue the audience into a story. Then she spent just as much - if not more - time introducing her two experts. She asked a few questions - not much more probing than "so what do you think?" As a result the answers were not on point with the heart of the story. AND the heart of the story, btw, was never addressed in the 30 second lead-in. Then - that was it - onto the next story.

I was appalled. Every time I clicked on my browser today this story lit up google headlines. I knew more about the story from google headlines than I did from the CNN "piece." No joke. There was a MAJOR wrinkle in the story that was NEVER fully addressed, only passingly alluded to in this "piece." If the anchor had just simply REPORTED the facts of the story then we - the audience - would be up to speed & informed. BUT since, as per usual, CNN felt the need to pay experts to talk AROUND the story - the audience was left uninformed.

It's not the experts' fault. They aren't news people. And it's not the anchor's fault - she's actually a good reporter when out in the world reporting away from a talking desk. It is the producers and those that think that the way to better ratings is to soften, mystify & cutsify the news.

Fortune 21 - who's the dumbest of us all?

What were the "dumbest moments in business" during the newly departed annus horribilis, asks Fortune Magazine, which lists their choice for the top 21 feats of stupidity in 2008. Was it the beggars from Detroit arriving in Washington in private Jets or the Man from Chrysler arriving the second time around in a bloated SUV hybrid scheduled to be cancelled? Can any of that compete with investing money with BernieMadoff , ( number 17) or be more laughable than John McCain telling us the "the fundamentals of this economy are strong."only hours before the Dow fell 500 points on news of the Lehman bankruptcy? (number 13) Maybe number 21; PhilGramm's calling non-optimists a "nation of whiners" and his condescending dismissal of a troubled economy as a "mental recession" deserved to be on top.

It's hard to rank blunders so gross on any kind of scale. It's hard even to count them when the road to Black Monday was so long and so well paved with politics and patriotism and of course, funny as such pratfalls usually are, nobody can afford to laugh.

January may be a rough month "There's going to be a massive sea change in the retail landscape," said Nina Kampler, executive vice president of Hilco Real Estate, which advises retailers on their property management. and the likelihood is severe enough that even the mixed metaphor won't draw many giggles. All in all, this is not a good time to ask the mirror who's the dumbest of them all. It reflects us all equally.

IN MEMORIAM

My last post of the year is an obituary, some belated, some current, for the lights that have gone out in our world during 2008:  William F. Buckley, George Carlin, Arthur C. Clarke, Heath Ledger, Paul Newman, Tim Russert, Alexander Solshenitsyn, and William Wharton, among others.   Here are some favorites of mine:

Cyd Charisse

1922-2008

Miriam Makeba

1932-2008

Isaac Hayes

1942-2008

Odetta

1930-2008

Harold Pinter

1930-2008

Eartha Kitt

1927-2008

Leonardo

(aka Mr. Underfoot)

1994-2008

My beloved cat is gone. For the past four years, Leonardo has suffered from diabetes stabilized with twice daily insulin injections, but time and declining health finally caught up to my dear cat. Today, an angel came and took him away.

According to legend, the Eskimo have as many as a hundred words to describe what we simply call “snow.” These so-called “focal vocabularies” supply specialized terms and distinctions that are important to certain cultures. Other cultures make do with more limited vocabularies and rely on descriptors or hyphenations to form manifold meanings.

Making do with a limited vocabulary is especially true of cats. A few simple words can represent many concepts, and the difference between “meow” versus “meow” depends upon context. For instance, the first meow in the morning means, “Hungry, fill my bowl.” At other times, meow may mean, “Hello” or “Play with me.” In full ally-cat mode, yowls of meows may represent an autistic fantasy or erotic rapture.

To an intruder into the yard, hiss means, “scram!”  In the vet’s office, hiss means, “Fahgettaboudit!” Purr is reserved for emotions such as contentment and love, and make no mistake: Cats DO give and receive love. Learning cat talk comes with bonding.  Learning French is another matter.

An interviewer once asked Jacques Derrida, “What is love?” In typical, obscure fashion, he replied that the subject is too complex for an adequate discussion but suggested that one might embark upon an examination of the subject by distinguishing between “who” as a singularity of the one who is loved versus “what” as an attribute of the one who is loved.

What is meant by the phrase, “who as a singularity?” Does “who” imply some immutable aspect of the one in abstract, something so individual and unique that there can only be one example from the beginning to the end of time? Does “what” imply only an ephemeral attribute that is mortal and perishable (perhaps even causing one to fall out of love in pursuit of a “younger’ attribute)?  Does love for the “who” connote something more enduring and noble than love for the “what?”  Is Derrida being Socratic or Sophist?

When I recall my fondest memories of Leonardo, I am a shameless sentimentalist.  If Leonardo were some immutable manifestation, any abstract concept of a cat could represent Leonardo and stand in his place.  Impossible!  So I prefer to think of Leonardo, not in terms of “who” but in terms of “what:” One salt-and-pepper tabby, one furtive shadow ruffling the curtains, one furry hunchback rubbing against corners and furniture legs, one pair of triangular ears up-periscope across an expanse of table.

So what is love?  For me, the distinction between “who” versus “what” strikes me as a false dichotomy.   I have come to understand love within the context of giving and receiving … as simple, unconditional acts that merge into one and become indistinguishable.

On this, the last day of 2008, may those whom we have loved and lost find eternal peace!

Wise to the words

This being the last day of 2008, it's customary to bring out my consultant Dr. Syntax and air his views about how none of you speak English properly. Indeed there are a number of stupid neologisms, platitudes, clichés, malapropisms and other linguistic transgressions I'm sick of hearing and you should be too.

It seems however, that academia has scooped old Syntax and released a more official list of awful verbal offal yesterday. Michigan's Lake Superior State University has taken it upon itself, or at least the English Department has, to ban a number of recent common usages, and although my cranky friend is a bit offended at the lack of respect and recognition he feels he deserves, he's used to it and he quite agrees with most of their condemnations.

Carbon footprint has been spewed forth from journalistic smokestacks all year and it deserves to be at the top of the list for many reasons, not the least of which is the inherent misunderstanding of basic chemistry. It's the compounds of carbon fouling the air and carbon dioxide is no more carbon than water is hydrogen, nor does either substance lend itself to having footprints. Find a better term, says my friend Syntax, or you may find his footprint on your you know where.

What else has brought forth the wrath of Syntax this year? Green: yes it's easier to type than ecologically advantageous and easier to attach to every trivial thing, action or policy the creativity of Madison Avenue and other enthusiastic simpletons can dream up. A thermos bottle isn't particularly green, for instance, unless it's made by Stanley, and virtually all things advertised as such wouldn't make a bit of difference even if most of the world bought them -- unless being green in the face from disgust counts. Algae is green and we could do with less of it in our rivers and ponds. Organic? Crude oil and snake venom are organic. Don't look for them at Whole Foods.

Syntax, you'll note I'm not calling him "the good doctor" because that's vapid cliché number 147 on his list, remains thoroughly opposed to a number of hackneyed metaphors, so overused that they have often obliterated more accurate and legitimate words. The now permanent fatwa on the carrion metaphor impact has been joined by ass kicking and references to suction to indicate incompetence or disapproval. These stopped being creative or even mildly humorous before you were born. Stop it.

Perhaps it will be another 4 years before we have to arrest anyone for using stumping and campaign trail, but please use the time to think of more direct replacements for these bits of verbal road-kill.

Syntax has nearly beaten efforting and texting to death, as he does with "verbed" nouns in general, but nearly isn't enough, is it?

Euphemisms such as right-sizing don't disguise the fact that your company is firing your department and it just makes your boss more of a jerk then you knew he was.

Changing the sign on your Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian or Japanese restaurant to say "Asian cuisine" makes you sound like a moron and it's an insult to the ethnicities you're attempting to cover with some gluey "Asian sauce." There's no such category as Asian, Asiatic or Oriental food - or sauce, and yes all three words mean exactly the same thing. And while we're on the subject of food, what the hell is comfort food and what would discomfort food be?

Graphic doesn't mean scary, and issue isn't synonymous with problem or concern. A bowel movement is an issue -- constipation s a problem.

There's been nothing new in rocket science since Newton and as a metaphor for technical difficulty, you'd be better off talking about rocket technology. All you'd lose thereby is the association with the lemmings of language.

Warfighter. Did we really need that one and doesn't it serve to dehumanize a soldier? As the military ( right after the business school) is often at the forefront of promulgating misleading and opaque usage, I'm suspicious, although I will admit with some degree of guilty feelings that I've always liked Overkill.

So anyway, the old man is getting a bit tired of you and the thoughtless way you talk and of having to remind you of it every year. We both know you'll be eating double bacon cheeseburgers in front of the TV by next week regardless of all your resolutions and you'll still be using "fell swoop" and "control freak" as though you knew what you were saying, you reprobate you.

THINGS I LEARNED IN A PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE

Some people already know this but, for the record, I work a VERY part time schedule at a jail. The medical department is small, tucked in the corner of one floor, consisting of an exam room, a pharmacy and several offices.

I usually bring my own dinner and rather than battle through three locked doors and an elevator ride to the dining room, I just find an empty office to sit in.

This weekend, I found myself in the psychiatrist’s office, spending a little quiet time before embarking on the chaotic journey known as evening med pass. There are two people who share this office; the (male) doc and his (female) assistant. Their walls are covered in various “art” and here are just a few things I learned in the psychiatrist’s office:

“Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.”

“This is a no whining zone.”

“I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.”

Not pictured; "Dr. S____ is in the office; no girls allowed!"

My favorite ( also not pictured), “You’d have to be crazy to see a psychiatrist!”

I know, it doesn’t seem like I learned much, but I only had ½ hour …

Light at heart

“Paul Shanklin is a long-time friend, and I think that RNC members have the good humor and good sense to recognize that his songs for the Rush Limbaugh show are light-hearted political parodies,”

said "Chip" Saltsman. I'm sure that many of them would see "Barak the Magic Negro" as hilarious, that many of them would see Rush Limbaugh as a funny man.

“Please enjoy the enclosed CD by my friend Paul Shanklin of the Rush Limbaugh Show”

read the note RNC candidate "Chip" attached to the CD containing 41 tracks of "light-hearted political parodies" and distributed as a message of Christmas cheer to Republican National Committee members. Republicans love Christmas and all it's religious meanings, you know. It's titled "We hate the USA." These light hearted bozos of course can't be accused of hating the USA, they just think most of the people in it are comical Poles, Jews, Liberals, homos, Mexican illegals, murderous Muslims, and of course Negros, any of whom can be stereotyped, ridiculed and condescended to over Scotch and sodas at the good old boy's club where loving America's most obnoxious traditions is as de regeur as a good old black-face minstrel show or lunch at the Coon Chicken Inn.

Rush Limbaugh, you know, the guy who avoided the draft because of an anal infection and who let his housekeeper take the fall for his drug addiction and who thinks it's "light-hearted" to compare a homely self conscious adolescent girl with a dog on national TV, predicted a while back that featuring the song on his radio program would foster accusations of racism. That wasn't hard to predict seeing that it is racism of the most arrogant sort. But no, Chip and Rush and the rest of the country club comedians haven't broken any laws. It's possible that they truly don't see anything wrong in being the douche bags they are and will go to their graves thinking they've been put-upon by moral censors and do-gooders and humorless liberals and there's little we can do about it other than to hope the event comes soon.

A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

Blogging Dino with a Brief Merry Christmas

Hello to all,

Sorry I haven't been contributing lately -- I have tried to keep up with the posts and will return to posting regularly early next year. But I want to wish everyone a fine Christmas and a Totally Jurassic 2009. (Coming from me, "Totally Jurassic" is a good thing. Dino valley-speak!)