Are Men Perverts?

Some guy out there in the world, used chat rooms to talk to women and then offered a woman $750 for her to have sex with him while her children were there, too. It says nothing in the articles about him actually touching the kids or wanting to do anything of the sort. He apparently wanted them to watch.

The woman called the police and the man was arrested before – please note that word – anything happened. He admitted that he wanted to have sex with this woman, for money, in front of her children. No where does it state the ages of the children.

"By the grace of God these children were not exposed to a traumatic experience that could've lasted a lifetime," Lennington, the judge in the case, said.

"It could've been anybody's kids," the mother said.

Let’s look at the mother’s statement first. It could have been anybody? What? The man did not break into her house. He did not force her to do anything with threat of violence. He invited her to earn some money. SHE said okay. SHE acquiesced to bringing along HER kids. It could never have been MY kids because I wouldn’t have brought them into such a situation. This could only happen to children who had a mother willing to “sacrifice” them for money.

Now, for the judge’s statement. “Traumatic experience” I suppose means watching sex because the man was punished – by losing his job, having to register as a sex offender for 10 years, and doing 100 hours of community service. He is allowed to keep his own three children.

I would think it would be much more traumatic to watch your mother “sacrifice” you for money or else to prostitute herself. But neither of these traumas were addressed.

How many children of hookers watch their mommies bring home johns and work in front of them? Is this the johns’ fault or is it the mother’s fault – I’m betting it is society’s fault because everything is. Are any of these women registering as sex offenders? Do they, who actually have repeated sex in front of their kids, get their children taken away?

What about these people who believe in a “family” bed? What happens if in the darkness of night, Mommy and Daddy do stuff that awakens junior or juniorette and they are traumatized and see stuff? Do both parents have to register as sex offenders? Do they put the kids in foster care?

Let’s look at history for a minute. When did each person get their own bedroom? How many one-room cabins are even scattered throughout the USA, a relatively new country. Across the globe, how important is privacy to this “private” act? How many children, even today, actually see their parents having sex because they inadvertently open a closed door?

The guy didn’t even DO anything. He planned. He was arrested. His life is completely changed. Advocates of “the children” are up in arms because he wasn’t sent to prison. He is “evil” and his children should be taken from him because foster care is so much better. It might be, now that the guy is jobless and branded.

How many times have any of you out there in the world been propositioned with something you find distasteful? I can’t even count the number of “offers” I’ve had, but I never had anyone arrested for being gross. I simply said, “No.” What is so difficult about that? I wonder if Tom Cruise is gearing up to arrest people before they commit any crimes so that the world will be a safer place.

Are We Doomed?

Is the planet in the worst shape it has ever been in during all of recorded or even pre-recorded history? Are we in a handbasket on our way to a self-induced hell? Is there anything going right in today’s world?

I’ve been reading non-fiction lately, which is always a chancy proposition. Every writer, regardless of how much they try, writes from a biased viewpoint. It is impossible not to do so. But some people take bias to an extreme.

But the problems seem to be insurmountable. There is no doubt in my mind that there are problems in the world and in our country. I can see the difficulty with porous borders without anyone telling me the dangers implicit in that stance. I can see a war being waged. So no one needs to point that out to me. I can see children “graduating” high school and they can’t read, write, or cipher.

Is it getting worse? I don’t know if there was ever a time when someone somewhere in the world wasn’t at war with someone else. Nationally speaking. I think I read somewhere about a miraculous year that was war-free, but that may be wishful thinking or some novel.

A few hundred years ago, when the printing press was first invented, no one printed much other than a few books because the general population was illiterate. It took a couple hundred years to get a population that could read enough as well as to get paper and ink cheap enough to make printing a daily newssheet worthwhile.

What scares me today is that we seem hell-bent on giving up any freedom in the name of appeasement and “doing the right thing” to any and all. Illegal aliens need protection under the law. Why? They aren’t even supposed to be here. Protect their butts right back to wherever they came from. I need to be bilingual because people who illegally enter this country can’t apply for my tax dollars easily if I don’t help them by my learning their language rather than their learning mine.

Somewhere freedom of religion got turned into freedom from religion and the Ten Commandments, supported by Jews, Christians, and Muslims must be removed from buildings because the ACLU finds them distasteful, unlike NAMBLA which is just freedom of speech. The KKK can put up a cross, my tax dollars can pay for plastic poop and pictures of vaginas to be plastered on the Virgin Mary, but I better not even think about wanting “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” being played in a mall while they are praying in the accounting offices that the Christmas rush will make up for the empty coffers from the rest of the year.

My parents handed off a world that saw civil rights granted and then my generation made up quotas, stigmatizing people of color as being somehow inherently less able and needing a hand up forever more.

My parents gave me a world free of Hitler and the death camps emptied and my generation has turned a blind eye to wholesale slaughter in Africa and the Middle East, not wanting to get involved.

My parents handed me a world where literacy and scientific knowledge was stridently endorsed and my generation has made curriculum so dumbed down that anyone should be able to pass any test, and yet the scores keep falling.

Somewhere along the line, self of steam became the only possible worthwhile enterprise. Self-actualization and self-satisfaction became more important than self responsibility. Everyone is a victim of a society that mistreats them. No one is responsible for their choices.

I hope the grandchildren have a world to grow up in. I hope my generation doesn’t make it impossible for them to learn, grow, and become responsible adults.

Is Stupid a Choice?

I’m at a loss here. I know how to look stuff up on the Internet. I know how to do cogent searches. I can find lots of tidbits. I learned to do this for The Mad Professor back in 1999. He gave out some of the most esoteric searches. The next class he would say, “Oh, but wait, you have to do this to find that sort of information.” He did that to me two or maybe even three times, and then I learned to never really do the search until the second class – when I had sufficient information.

In the intervening years, searching online has gotten both easier and harder. There are more things out there and so you have a better chance of getting a hit – if you know how to enter the right words to search against. But there are more things out there and some sources are not exactly “kosher.”

But I do know how to look up stuff. I know the difference between a fact and an opinion. I know that quotes from a book are quotes, whereas opinions about those quotes are not fact. Hence, the world “opinion.”

Twice this past week someone has mentioned something, I’ve searched for the answer, entered the data, and passed it on. The response that was hoped for and my facts didn’t gel with a preconceived notion. I am at fault. I’m not wrong, its only a matter of me getting blasted because my fact-finding mission didn’t lead to the appropriate or desired result.

I’m going to stop going on these missions. I can’t find the facts that will enable mushy thinking to solidify. I’m not happy with being castigated for searching for the facts, presenting them, one without comment, one time with editorial comments that were labeled as opinion, and then getting smacked upside the head because the facts are facts and not what was apparently the “correct” answer.

If someone wishes to be stupid, I can’t help it. Pointing out facts seems to get in the way of far too many opinions and I’m not in the mood to take the heat from dopes who wish to stay that way. I will continue to do my research for my own projects. But any request for information will be met with no response from me. If you want to be stupid, ignore facts, let opinions based on unsubstantiated thought processes, I will no longer fight to educate. I am not a teacher. And I am not in charge of the stupid people.

That’s my reasons, anyway.

Dear Abby Ticked Me Off

Bright and early this morning, sipping my first cup of freshly brewed coffee, I came unglued.

Some grandmother was feeling that her daughter was being slighted by the daughter’s own son. The grandson apparently doesn’t appreciate all his mother does for him and Granny wanted to know just how much a stay-at-home-mom [SAHM] is worth in dollars and cents.

Bowing to the stupidity of statisticians, Abby came up with the figure of $134,121 for a yearly salary. Because SAHMs do so much. They apparently work 91.6 hours per week without ever taking a vacation. They are “housekeeper, laundry machine operator and janitor. Higher paying categories include computer operator, facilities manager, psychologist and CEO.”

Now, I think that SAHMs are wonderful people and that they do their families a great deal of good. However, this list of jobs and the hours worked are a little iffy. I’ve seen cook and chauffer added to the list and then the salary of a 5-star chef in incorporated into the mix and the chauffeur’s salary is added. But – that means that the SAHMs should be cooking gourmet meals and a separate meal for each diner. If there are no eggs Benedict for breakfast, crab Louis salad for lunch, and a five-course meal for supper – give back the salary. Every time you serve hotdogs, take off some bucks. And when you buy some takeout you have to pay money back into the pot.

According to Prevention Magazine, 25% of Americans are dining out each night, but 66% of the remaining 75% or nearly half of Americans are eating some take out or supermarket ready meals. That means only about 25% of Americans are eating home cooked meals.

The chauffeur also does maintenance on the cars in his/her care. How many SAHMs are changing the oil themselves or rotating the tires?

I’ve been both a part-time and a full-time worker. When I worked part-time, I had two children at home. Each day that I worked at work, I worked harder than on the days I stayed home. Unless the SAHMs are washing the floors with toothbrushes, I can’t figure out how much of the time can be spent cleaning up the house, especially when the granny above was talking about a 16-year-old child. The kid was in school all day and driving himself.

I don’t know how much other computer operators make, but in my most recent job, I was paid less than what Senator Kennedy wanted for the new minimum wage. I’ve seen the result of the psychology that mothers impart and it leans toward abnormal psychology.

In order to get 91 hours per week, the SAHMs are working 13 hour days, every day. Every job I have ever had did not pay me to eat. So at three meals a day at 30 minutes per meal, that’s 1.5 hours to add to the daily grind, unless of course they get a one hour meal time. So these brave souls are working 14.5 – 16 hours daily without watching TV – can’t do that on the job – or reading a novel – no jobs let you do that – or going to the gym – you are at work – or recreationally shopping – you can’t be strolling the mall while you are working.

If these paragons of virtue and high wage earners are really working that hard, then all the cars must be sparkling inside and out; the lawn mowed, edged, and the weeds pulled; gourmet meals are presented with fine china and a crystal and a flower arrangement on the table; and the kids are the best behaved and most intellectually stimulated folks this planet has ever seen.

For a six figure salary, one should be really working. Otherwise, maybe SAHMs are worth their weight in gold to their families, but their salary or monetary compensation isn’t quite that high. I guess kissing up to the women is more important than making sense. As you can see, this really irritates me. I think that SAHMs are wonderful. I think that they are great for families. I think that they don’t work nearly as hard as working moms who do all the same stuff that the SAHMs so, but they do it in half the time, during the real second shift.

If you have the luxury of staying home, stop whining. And Granny, butt out.

What Am I Supposed To Do?

People keep sending me information concerning the trouble with American politics and the military-industrial complex. I don’t know why they do this. I’m on a couple mailing lists and belong to various mixed group discussion groups.

I don’t know what I am supposed to do with the information these people send me. I’m not even always sure why I am being given the opportunity to delete one person’s rants. He/she/it came uninvited and spams Yahoo group sites and picked one of the sites that was set up for discussion by a predefined group. But there is no kicking anyone out of a Yahoo group, they may come and go as they choose.

So I see C. Dipwad and I know that it is one of the rants he/she/it posts all over and I feel completely at ease with not reading it.

But when my friends mail me stuff – well then what? There are problems in the world. Yes. There have always been problems in the world. The reason I have never run for President is because I have not one whit of desire to make world-altering decisions. It’s not that I don’t like power, I just don’t need that much of it.

I tried answering and didn’t particularly care for the animosity. I tried not answering and then found that didn’t work the way I thought it would either. I don’t know what is expected of me and I can’t seem to get an answer about what is expected of me. I will agree that the US is not perfect. George Washington wasn’t and no President since has been. I prefer life in the US to any other country, which is why I still live here. Since I live in a free country, I could leave if I wished.

So what am I supposed to do? I cannot, nor do I wish to, alter international policy. I am not, nor do I wish to be, privy to inside double-secret-probation type information. I am not, nor should the world at large be, in on state secrets.

I am unsure why certain details are okay and other details, like crashing into the World Trade Center, are considered not so important. I just don’t understand the whole issue with what my opinion means. I read from the conservative side of the board. I don’t believe much of what is touted as “fact” or “truth” from such prestigious papers as that which employed Jayson Blair. I find their fact-checking too lax and their megalomania too great.

I am sure that all media is biased. Because there are untold millions of bits of information that could be printed and only enough room for a small portion of those bits, the news is inherently skewed.

I wish I could offer a bit-by-bit detailed analysis of world history and why the world is in the mess it is today. I can’t. So, what am I supposed to do?