Freedom from Reality

I was talking business... I actually do work a little...with an associate who also happens to be a friend. We were talking about having to sit in meetings with people who were there to win the meeting as opposed to interacting cooperating and figuring things out...you know the type and a certain number of you are that type. It's about winning, not doing what is right. It's a tendency we all have and must learn ourselves out of.

Speaking of those who are terminally concept deaf, I made the offhand remark,

"You have to work with the thoughtful folks, and take the others out of the gene pool."

Well that was the gist of what I said, anyway. I actually used the words, "Save the ones you can, take the others out of the gene pool." Neither sounds very kind. What brings me to tell you this is that my friend laughed and said, "Exactly! You need to write these things down and save them." So I am.

Now I didn't mean anything other than a business concept here, so don't try and take it any other way. This type of thing is what Conservatives try to do every minute of every day in reverse. They don't want anybody doing any thinking...just follow orders and speak in the official talking points...or die!

I don't advocate actual killing, much, just a figurative kind of termination. Not even the killing of other life forms, except for fleas and ticks and those big carpenter bees that are eating my house. We have a population explosion of those things now that we have a couple of million acres of dead pine trees lying around East Tennessee. They eat spiders and I happen to like spiders. I don't kill spiders. Folks sometimes think I'm a little off when I pick one up in the house and take it outside. Most insects are fairly benign and nowhere near as harmful as the stuff humans regularly spray around their house and lawn to kill insects. Accounted for properly, most insects do virtually no harm.

Humans don't take a long view on problem solving and they tend to use nuclear weapons when a flyswatter will work just fine.

My mom used to complain about the lack of butterflies in the world. "There were so many butterflies everywhere when I was a child, and now there are so few," she would say while she was spraying something out of a can that had "Keeps on Killing!" boldy printed on the label.

Mom and her family were white sharecroppers, meaning "dirt poor", just around the time DDT was invented. They traded all their butterflies for cotton so a few men in Memphis could get really rich and get football stadiums named after themselves.

Mom often said things like this with a cigarette held fashionably in one hand, just like Betty Davis used to do the movies she saw as a teenager. She died from a cascade of things related to high blood pressure at 63.

This wandering rant started about a cute phrase I rattled off that essentially means you can't help everyone, concentrate on those you can. I don't really advocate taking people out of the gene pool except in a metaphorical sense, but sometimes...

There are two items that I want to share with you that are vaguely related to this. First, there is a bill before the Tennessee Senate that would punish a teacher for saying anything controversial or insulting a student's beliefs in class. It is Senate Bill 1117 and is a more complicated rehash of Scopes and his Monkey, except that this time it is no Chamber of Commerce P R stunt. This is going on in several states. Here it is from a group called "Students for Academic Freedom" which isn't a student's group and is definitely against academic freedom:

legal lunacy

I am not sure our local Senator can read and he danged sure can't cogitate beyond simple sentences, so he'll probably vote for this ideocy before he realizes that it will bring all of our colleges to a screeching halt. Well actually it will only affect the public universities...private schools can continue to insult anyone they want to. Morons!

The other item I have for you is another quip that sent me cackling:

"I think he’s just a shiver looking for a spine to run up."

It's about the man who wants to bring back DDT and Jeesus and it is the most recent send up of our main Lizard in the US House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, and hilarious to boot:

Juanita's



I bought a signed print of one of Mr. Fincher's Scribbles right off the internet. He draws a danged good dog, too!

scribble/