Probably there’s no other conclusion to reach: Middle Easterners don’t like other people as much as we do.
You’ve got all those wossname, Kurds having whatever is happening to them, or doing something to someone else.
You’ve got Israel doing a slick ethnic cleansing and land-grabbing against their cousins in neighboring Palestine.
You’ve got Sufis killing someone somewhere, Sunnis killing other people somewhere else, and you’ve got Shiites squeezing into the act killing someone else, possibly Sufis or Sunnis.
And now you’ve got women in Syria being stoned [with rocks, not marijuana] for adultery.
You’ve got the lot of them sneaking around killing, discriminating, not liking Christians when they aren’t killing someone else.
But of course those people don’t believe in the Bible. They never learned to stay home and peacefully mind their own business, relax about human diversity, and forgive others for being different from themselves. They never learned not to get too worked up about having a lot of extra possessions, big houses, gewgaws, cars and cosmetic surgery.
And guns. They have too many guns. Where the hell do they get all those guns? Those people in the Middle East have more guns and rockets than we have IPODs and SUVs. Especially the ones who are trying to be like us.
In countries over there where they’re not all Mexicans the white people try hard to be like us. Israel is a good example. But although they’re simple, God fearing folks, they aren’t Christians. They don’t believe in the Bible. So they can’t understand they need to quit slaughtering their neighbors and stealing their land. They’d like to be like real white people, but they can’t get it right. And that’s just Israel. A few miles in any direction the places are full of Mexicans who aren’t even trying to be like white people.
Hi readers. Hells bells. Hugh Hefner started the sexual revolution back in the 1950s because he thought we were holding back, stuffing things back down inside. Psychologically repressing ourselves and generally, because sex could make Hugh Hefner a pile of money.
Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism 2009 NR91 minutes This documentary maps the evolution of the “post-porn” movement, featuring interviews with pioneers like Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen and Lydia Lunch. More Info Starring: Norma Jean Almodovar, Maria Beatty Director: Virginie Despentes Flowing on Netflix.
But if Hefner had seen this stuff coming down the pike I believe he’d have been shocked, maybe he’d have to ask himself if what he began was an unmitigated blessing.
Also streaming on Netflix:
Fuck for Forest
(Fuck for Forest) 2012 NR 1hr This documentary lays bare an unusual Berlin-based NGO that uses proceeds from homemade adult films to fund the restoration of Amazonian rain forests.
I’m sure it’s just me, but saving the planet by screwing just doesn’t make a lot of sense as a motivation.
Also streaming on Netflix:
Danland 2012 NR 88 minutes This documentary examines the psychology of amateur porn-film creator Dan Lear and what prompted him to choose such an unorthodox profession. More Info Starring: Dan Lear Director: Alexandra Berger
Orgasm Inc. 2009 NR 79 minutes Orgasm Inc. is a funny and sobering look inside “big pharma” and the marketing campaigns associated with a pill for female sexual dysfunction. More Info Starring: Elizabeth Canner, Kim Airs Director: Elizabeth Canner
Then there’s what’s happening in the courtesan industry. Streaming on Netflix.
American Courtesans 2013NR 86 minutes Follow 11 sex workers through massage parlors, brothels, strip clubs and New York high-rises in this documentary about their choices and fears. More Info
Sheeze man. I don’t object to any of this, but I’d pay good money to avoid being a part of a fair amount of it. And not only because it would likely bring on the big one.
I was going to tell you and forgot. Graduation day at the cardiac physical therapy facility a little fat guy about my age who’s always pretended I don’t exist was standing nearby as I chugged water. He asked one of the other guys who the graduation banner was up for.
“It’s for Jack. He’s graduating today.”
“I wonder if he’ll celebrate by getting a shave and haircut.”
To which I couldn’t resist, “No, but I might try to gain 40 pounds, get six inches shorter and start picking my nose a lot.”
I’m thinking I might have run into the guy in an all-night truck stop when I was hitching through in 1965. 2 am drunken local good old boys noticed me in a back booth swilling coffee waiting for daybreak.
“Hey, what have we got here? Are you one of the Beetles?”
Probably the Synthetic Crisis Manufacturing Center is going to have to find some new plague scare organism after the current Ebola crisis loses steam. The bug has just been around too long waving the bloody flag. I recall as early as 1992 Ebola was being talked about as potentially scary. Same year as hantavirus in northern New Mexico offered itself up to the scare bidness.
Problem is that humanity knows what a bullgoose badass honest to goodness epidemic looks like. 1918 influenza filled the bill and gave a burst of financial health to the cemetery plot bidness. Black plague walked across Europe enough times to burn itself firmly into the memory of everyone since.
Anthrax. HIV. Malaria, Yellow Fever, Cholera. Equine encephalitis. Rabies. Heartworms on dogs. We 21st Century types who own televisions know all about epidemics and epizootic. So naturally not just any yawn in the virus family can keep our attention and adrenalin levels up.
At first glance Ebola looked good. Fairly long incubation period, high kill rate, the victim probably throws off the virus a considerable while before showing symptions sometimes. In ’92 Ebola could stand on its own hind legs as a worthy source of wide-eyed shivering hugging ourselves look-under-the-bed fear.
And you have to admit it’s held up fairly well over the years without actually killing many people or spreading much. This time it’s fewer than 2000 people contracted it, less than half of them dead. Heck, I’m betting there were more people than that chopped to death with machetes last week in Africa. Certainly more killed in Gaza, Syria, plenty of other places as bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not to say Ebola won’t someday get loose and kill a respectable portion of humanity. It might. But as a means to fill in for something to be scared of between meteors striking the earth and all the ice on the planet melting it needs to do a bit of outreach. Work a bit harder and explore new locations.
Public relations and a good resume can only carry on so long before something has to be produced. And Ebola’s beginning to appear to be all hat and no cattle.
Hi readers. Monday after Physical Therapy they stood me in front of a Happy Graduation banner, gave me a diploma and card signed by all the nurse-ladies, put a mortarboard hat on me and took a picure. Then they played Graduation March and I went around the room shaking hands while all the old codgers on machines cheered and waved on their various machines.
So the VA paid-for session of my return to physical perfection is done.
I’ve paid for another month use of the Olathe Community Center machines because I’m not 17 years old again yet.
Some of the guys who’ve been using the medical center facility a long time who’d been through similar cardiac situations to mine said they kept improving a while after the first physical therapy, is the reason I’m still hopeful it’s going to improve more despite congestive heart failure. But they also said, every one I discussed it with, that there’s a plateau that comes somewhere afterward, and things don’t get better from then on. It becomes a matter of maintaining, holding what you’ve got.
So I’m hoping the plateau for me will involve an ejection factor a bit higher than the 10-15% the VA and private cardiologists measured before therapy. I need to be able to go out in the world and climb over fences, trespass onto forbidden places. I need to be able to walk down to the grocery store somewhere and back with a bag of groceries inside each arm.
Or at least I need to be able to walk around the streets somewhere pusing a shopping cart with my belongings in it without tiring myself out too terribly. Some things in life a person just hates to give up the prospects for.
But phase one is done. Sorry if you didn’t get your invitation but graduation was never a sure thing. Even during the final weeks, even the next-to-the-last session the fast six minute measured distance walk took the wind out of my sails.
I’m going to miss all those old guys. Especially the ones doing post-graduate work hanging around because they didn’t have a courthouse square to hang around in playing dominoes and spitting tobacco. They’re paying a dear price to go there and can’t even spit.
Most of you will have already seen the news that the VA Medical Centers have been given complete responsibility for preventing spread of the Ebola pandemic to the US. The White House issued the statement Tuesday that, “the facilities are in place all over the nation and are under utilized. Recent new attention to possibly funding the VA Medical Centers and providing physicians who have not had their licenses to practice medicine suspended yet provides a solution to two problems. And a possible solution to a lot of others.”
Workers in VA Medical Centers are numerous and if Ebola or some other contagion doesn’t prevent it, many will enjoy Federal retirement benefits within twenty years. Potential fiscal saving spinoffs for giving Ebola to the VA are enormous.
We humans, we Americans are chock-full of opinions. Most we’ve had for ages, decades, and we can’t actually identify when we came to adopt them, can’t support them with anything deeper than gut feel. Mostly it doesn’t matter because nobody cares anyway.
But the opinions we choose reflect the health of our souls. In a real sense our opinions are who we are. Occasionally it’s worth distancing ourselves from them and the ego attachments we form to them. Just to find out whether our opinions have any connection to anything inside the real world.
Hi readers. She snuck out of the nursing home they put her in after they snagged her car and sold her house. When a movie begins with that there’s nothing much can be done to spoil the ending. I’d put it up beside Harry and Tonto, generally.
Redwood Highway, 2013PG-131hr 30m, You rated this movie: 5 , Itching to get out of her retirement community but estranged from her family, Marie uses her granddaughter’s wedding as an excuse to go on a walk.
Woman my age dons a backpack and hikes roughly 100 miles up the California coast dodging search and rescue, refusing rides and shooting molesters in the face with bear spray.
Seems more obvious every day that wossname, George Bush Sr. needed to stay the hell out of wars in the Middle East instead of waging them and giving himself a premature ejaculation. That Desert Storm I must have been the absolutely most senselessly waged war in US history even before he pulled out and splattered the proceeds across the belly of the whole region.
That would have been a good time to sigh and notice the cold war was over and bring the troops home from Korea, Europe, and all those pestholes across the world where they don’t speak English. George Bush was never any great shakes, but Desert Storm 1 followed by him not noticing the end of the cold war when the USSR ceased to exist defined him. He set the course as surely as it could be set to continue disastrous military spending and constant military adventures for the foreseeable future.
For this reason George Bush Senior qualifies as the worst president in US history until those who followed him.
There’s no need to go through the litany of tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees who came after GB Sr, identical to him in every respect aside from being lousier presidents. They all marched to his drum and carried the country into more endless wars and a bottomless pit of national debt directly resulting from military expenditures, wars, and foreign aid to bought-and-paid-for friends we only need for more wars and military adventures.
What else he didn’t do? He didn’t sit Israel down and insist they withdraw inside their International Boundaries as recognized by the UN and every other country in the world. On pain of losing what eventually became $130 billion in foreign aid from US taxpayers.
Because GB Sr., had he done what any responsible president should have done, could have ended the next generation of troubles we’re experiencing as a contributory factor, today.
The US, and the US Presidents are frequently accused of responsibility for not stopping what some Roosky strongman’s doing, or some Mexican from Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan does or doesn’t do. Or what some Chinaman from Japan, or Burma, or North Korea does or doesn’t do.
What a laugh! What a stupendous irony.
The only thing in the entire world a US President might control, might influence helpfully, is the slaughter between Palestinians and Israelis. The problem we helped create.
By insisting Israel return to inside its established boundaries and withdraw the settlements. Cease claiming lands assigned to others, cease claiming mineral rights offshore belonging to Palestinians.
The US Presidents love to toss around sanctions against, say, Russia, or Syria, or Iraq, anywhere. Except the one place they’d surely resolve the fundamental problem.
When people in Israel shout, “They don’t acknowledge we have the right to exist!” what they mean is, “They don’t acknowledged we have the right to take their lands designated for Palestine for our own!”
This series of duckwalking ducktalking clowns who’ve occupied the White House could probably have made two gestures to appear to be something other than the mediocre hopscotching puppets they were .
They could have brought the troops home and sliced the military budget to something approaching what other countries have.
They could have forced Israel back inside its borders and bribed Palestine to accept things as they are with foreign aid akin to what Israel receives.
But I suppose imagination is too much to hope for in a duckwalking ducktalking politician.
Old Jules
Who’s Profiting From Israel’s Offensive in Gaza
Israeli Military Torturing Palestinian Children ~viewer discretion~ http://youtu.be/z5AkFlAeCHE
How the Jews Treat Christians in Israel – It’s Serious!
Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 