US War Deaths

US Civil War: 655,000
WWII: 405,000
WWI: 116,000
Vietnam: 58,000
Korea: 36,000
Revolutionary War: 25,000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

What I Was Taught As a Kid

(1) That Abraham Lincoln was a "great" president and "saved" our country.
(2) That John F. Kennedy was a good president.

In the Civil War, over 620,000 men died thanks to Lincoln. All utterly avoidable. By "avoidable" I mean that the slave trade was pretty much abolished by European countries over the next 20 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom

Though it took African nations longer to enact such bans. In short, the slave trade would have come to a halt by the end of the century anyway, sans the wholesale slaughter of American men. (Note also that there would have been no slave trade to European countries had warring African tribes not sold their own people into slavery. Historical fact.)

RE Lincoln: When you're responsible for the deaths of 620,000 men in your own country, you're not by any means a "great" president. Rather, you're utterly inept---which is a kind word for your stupidity. Think about it: What other leader of a country in the history of this planet was responsible for the deaths of 620,000 of his own men---not in defense of their nation, but rather turned against other countrymen? And over half of the dead were on your own side, and didn't even want to fight to begin with but were forced into it. See NYC Draft Riots.

And this idiot is considered a "hero" and "great"? The only other names that come to mind in this ignorant anti-pantheon: Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao---and these guys had actual intellectual, political aims and killed for a political purpose. Lincoln, on the other hand, was just a dummy.

RE JFK: Kennedy was responsible for the US involvement in Vietnam and for the Berlin Wall being built and for the Cuban Missile Crisis and for the Bay of Pigs crisis. Despite how cute he was, he was an awful, ill-equipped, utterly light-weight president. We had to deal with the Berlin Wall trauma for decades because he was too weak to challenge the Soviets in his few days in office. (The Soviets would never have dreamed of challenging former WWII General and President Eisenhower by building the Berlin Wall.)

History was presented to me one way while growing up. But I'm just now starting to learn the actual facts about what happened.

Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

A song about one's life-line vs. one's "thigh line."

Godard is often annoying, as is his wife/leading-lady Anna Karina. In this particular case, the original novel upon which the movie was based had a bourgeois guy running off with his teenaged baby-sitter. A bit too young and controversial, even for Godot, so he made the woman "of age" but then had her behave like a child the whole time. One other dumbly memorable scene is Karina loudly moaning up and down the beach about being bored, while Belmondo "tries to write." Sacre bleu! 

 

Godard can't maintain a narrative about an actual relationship, so the film, by the end, devolves into terrorists and shooting, etc., as do most of his films. (Today, Tarantino--who obviously owes much to Godard, style-wise--has also incorporated most of Godard's dumbly gun-filled endings; you're supposed to learn from and build on the past, not simply repeat it!)

My favorite scene from Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (1965)

"Like my own private case of mass hysteria..."

Klaus Nomi: Dido's Lament

Dido and Aeneas

George Jones: If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me

I'm not even drinking right now---was just craving hearing George Jones. And I love looking at his face! p.s. A couple of his male musician contemporaries have commented on how "dumb" and "blank" his "possum" eyes were---I disagree. As a woman, I find his eyes very intense and soulful, regardless of the state he's in, or the year the photo was taken. I also relate to his post-divorce out-of-control obsession with lost-love Tammy Wynette, which echoes my own unhealthy past obsessions that drove me temporarily mad. (I'm much better now, thanks.)

I wasn't ready to move this year...

 ... but I'll be ready to move next year. I'm on my way to planning: Tonight, went through my closet and got rid of shirts and pants and jackets and shoes that I haven't worn in over 5 years. Boxes now ready to be hauled to Goodwill. (Out of all, only 3 shirts worthy of even being sold on eBay.)

Next up are books and CDs to be whittled out. The majority of these are a pretty tight collection already, but... probably 10% can be deleted.

My current apartment, which I've lived in since 2017, is fine for the moment. Much better than when I got here in 2017. When I first arrived, there were drug-addled hillbillies (and I say that as a white person with poor hillbilly roots---although my own parents were quite a few steps above that, which is why I'm so embarrassed right now) running around setting off fireworks at all hours, and numerous poor whites who couldn't control their kids---some of whom actually ran around on my roof and jumped over my backyard fence and literally entered my apartment. After the first 2 years or so, the rents went up enough (or else the management became more particular?), so that things have calmed down quite a bit. It's quiet now almost all of the time. And the pool is only a few steps from my apartment, as is the laundry room... And, as always, there is 1200 sq-ft, which is still a better value for what I'm paying than most of Austin offers.

That said: I'm over 50. I'm not a kid who still needs to be "grateful" for a non-shitty place. I don't need a fancy place, but I would like a place where sun comes in, and where I'm not surrounded by the threat of loud and/or drug-addled 20-somethings and their shitty single-mom kids. Where I have a small yard (not on view from neighbors) where maybe my cats could go out or where I could sit. A place that has its own washer/dryer so I could do my wash in private, when I want. I don't think that's an impossible wish one year from now.

Pulp Fiction (1994): Dance scene

With Uma Thurman and John Travolta

Bande à part (1964): Dance scene

"Band of Outsiders" (1964) directed by Jean-Luc Godard

With Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur

1980: Rickie Lee Jones: Chuck E's In Love

The one I think was the love of my life (dead as of 1988) loved Rickie Lee Jones (whom Ginny could imitate hilariously) and Prince and Heart. I either ignored or found something to criticize about the former and latter, though I was shallowly "in to" Prince during his "Purple Rain" years and the years shortly after. (From 1983 to 1988, when I knew her: I was mainly into the Beatles, and John Lennon solo albums, and Pink Floyd's "The Wall." When she and I went to a showing of the latter, she ran out of the theater in horror. I did not chase after her.)

Last night, I had a dream that I was standing at Ginny's grave and trying to leave a message via writing a poem and leaving it on the gravestone. The Azle girl who had replaced me in her affections was also standing there, and asking me questions. Truly, this is probably the stupid story of my afterlife!

Sad to say, whenever I think of Ginny, I also simultaneously think of Cindy, the girl she left me for. Cindy is now, according to the Internet, hunkered down with a heavy-set black woman, while I am alone---Ha! Does that make me in any way more devoted to Ginny's memory? Nah. Probably Ginny's actual soul-mate is Cindy,  the one who followed her out of "The Wall" showing because it disturbed her so much. Whereas I continued to sit there and think: "Wow! This film is so great." I had to see the movie through to the end. To this day, though, I don't think that I would/could do any differently.

RE Rickie Lee Jones: I think Ginny was a lot more soulful than me---I didn't get Rickie Lee Jones when I was 18! OR early Prince! Today, I wish we were 50 and listening to both George Jones and Rickie Lee Jones. (Or could those two have ever meshed? I think so; both are soulful, at least...)

All said, I do wish that Cindy would get the fuck out of my dreams about Ginny! (Make a life with your big black woman that you're posing with on Facebook and leave me and Ginny alone!)

From "The Badlands" by Ted Hughes

In 1959, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took a road trip across the United States prior to their return to England. Before I ever read this poem, I'd traveled from Texas to California in 1993 on my way to grad school, and had a similar horrified reaction to the utter desolation of the desert landscape that I was traveling across.

From Ted Hughes's "Badlands," published in 1998:

...The canyons cooled. Indigo darkened.
Oozing out of the earth like ectoplasm.
A huge snake heaping out. "This is evil,"
You said. "This is real evil."
Whatever it was, the whole landscape wore it
Like a plated mask. "What is it?"
I kept saying. "What is it?"
As if that might force the whatever
To materialize, maybe standing by our car,
Maybe some old Indian.

"Maybe it's the earth,"
You said. "Or maybe it's ourselves.
This emptiness is sucking something out of us.
Here where there's only death, maybe our life
Is terrifying. Maybe it's the life
In us
Frightening the earth, and frightening us."

Another Melancholy Cat Story: Big Sandy

In August of 1994 (the Summer of OJ Simpson's Low-Speed Chase), I moved from Austin to San Francisco to go to grad school. For the 6 months or so prior to my leaving, I'd been feeding a big male sandy-colored stray cat that I'd named "Big Sandy." I'd occasionally let him in my duplex to sleep inside with me (for some reason, he usually liked sleeping right on top of me---and he was heavy!), but he was 90% an outside cat. 

Prior to Big Sandy's arrival, I'd been feeding a little one-eyed stray cat for a couple of months. She was pitiful-looking and skittish and I wanted to make her my own, but... Big Sandy scared her off. I didn't get to know her enough to name her. And she stopped showing up at my back door once Big Sandy arrived.

Once I was accepted to grad school, I'd known Big Sandy for a while. He still wasn't "mine" since he was mainly outdoors, but he was enough "mine" that when, during this time period, I unexpectedly went out of town for 3 days, I asked a friend to come over and feed him. So he was kinda mine.

When it was time for me to leave for grad school in August, Big Sandy was enough mine to ask my younger brother to take him in (I sent him $20 a month for a big bag of cheap food). I'd been feeding Sandy long enough to feel guilty about just abandoning him. (Though still not enough mine to crate him up to go to San Francisco with me.)

I left in August, and when I came home to visit Austin at Christmas of that year and stayed for 2 days with my brother and his soon-to-be wife... Big Sandy was still there with them (as an outdoor cat, only infrequently let inside); he was let inside for my visit, and when I was there, he came and laid down on my stomach, as he used to...

One creepy thing while at my brother's place: While Big Sandy was inside their place with me, my future sister-in-law threw a pillow as hard as she could right at him. It wasn't a la-di-dah "toss" of a pillow, it was aggressive and hard, full of dislike. She clearly didn't want him around her.

A month or so later, once I'd returned to San Francisco, I got a letter from my brother saying that Big Sandy had disappeared for a while, and returned bedraggled and sickly, so they had him put to sleep.

To this day, I don't think that Big Sandy just "disappeared" and then came back sick and had to be put down. I think that my future sister-in-law didn't want him around and had my brother put him down to get the cat---however unobtrusive and outdoors he was---out of her home. Not particularly because of the cat himself, but because she felt it was HER home and she didn't like the intrusion.

No decent person hits a cat, or any animal, in the face for no reason. So why wouldn't she, via her weak boyfriend, make a disliked cat (from a disliked future sister-in-law) disappear?

This was all in the late '90s, and I didn't say anything for 2 decades. Today, however: I know what you did. You're an utter creep, Erica, despite the friendly persona that you present to the public as a teacher. (Though your "teaching" is based on "social/emotional learning"---part of the current bullshit that's corroded our school system.)

The UK Guardian's False Journalism

While searching online for the text of Ted Hughes's "Epiphany" poem for my previous post, I found it on the UK Guardian site. The Guardian has, in the past, been a leftist paper, but the below Statement of Purpose was purely Marxist:

...And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular American media bubble.

There are so very many falsehoods in the above statement by The Guardian:

(1) RE we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality.
95% of the US media is, today, Marxist, as is The Guardian. CBS, NBC, ABC, and mainstream cable channels CNN and MSNBC, all tout open borders and re-distribution of wealth, prime tenets of Marxism. Just as you do.
(2) RE we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. 
"The fight against racism" is one thing: No one should be discriminated against because of their race. But, unfortunately, the stats show that, at least in the US, blacks are 13% of the population yet commit 50% of the crimes. Stating the facts isn't "racism." And the police should be allowed to get all criminals, regardless of race, off the streets. And the US District Attorneys should be law-and-order DAs, and should also want to get the criminals, regardless of race, off the streets. (Unfortunately, however, many city DAs and mayors are Marxists and don't believe in punishing criminals, especially if they're black.)
As for immigration: Every country should have the power to control its immigrants. What's so "racist" about that? You're a UK paper, but in the Northern Hemisphere: Mexico, for instance, has a wall on its southern border to deny Guatemalans from entering.
RE "reproductive justice":
The phrase "reproductive justice" is utterly invented by academia and is utterly un-scientific. How do you define "justice" here, Guardian? There's no "justice" in killing a baby in the womb. As you like to say, follow the science: What other species kill their own?
RE "the climate crisis" (oh, and not being "afraid to name who is responsible"):
The geological history of the world shows that the climate changes approximately every 15,000 years. Humans don't have anything to do with it; the same process has happened for the past 5 billion years, with or without humans on the planet. According to you, who exactly is "responsible"?

Given all of the above facts, you're neither "fresh" nor an "outsider perspective." Rather, you're exactly what the US media, and NGOs, are also falsely propagating. Why? For money? For a sense of righteousness? Whichever the case, you're utterly and scientifically wrong.

Epiphany

The first cat I ever knew:
Unannounced, my dad brought a cat home from his office, given to him by a co-worker. My mom freaked out, hated having it in the house. I was excited to have a cat and volunteered to have it shut in my bedroom during that first night, since my mom didn't want it roaming around the house.
I don't remember any problems the one night when the cat was with me in my bedroom.
The next day, we all had to go somewhere, and my mom refused to have the cat in the house. So we had to put it in the garage, with the garage door opened a few inches to allow some air.
When we got back, the cat was gone. It had squeezed out under those 2 or 3 inches to escape its misery.

Reminds me of the Ted Hughes poem about finding a fox cub and thinking about bringing it home to his wife, Sylvia Plath. His poem, from 1998's Birthday Letters, is called "Epiphany":

London. The grimy lilac softness
Of an April evening. Me
Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge
On my way to the tube station.
A new father – slightly light-headed
With the lack of sleep and the novelty.
Next, this young fellow coming towards me.

I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn't believe it)
What I'd been ignoring.

Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers used to wear their whippets –
But its actual face. Eyes reaching out
Trying to catch my eyes – so familiar!
The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression –
The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,

Between the jacket lapels.
    'It's a fox-cub!'
I heard my own surprise as I stopped.
He stopped. 'Where did you get it? What
Are you going to do with it?'
    A fox-cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!

'You can have him for a pound.' 'But
Where did you find it? What will you do with it?'
'Oh, somebody'll buy him. Cheap enough
At a pound.' And a grin.
    What I was thinking
Was – what would you think? How would we fit it
Into our crate of space? With the baby?
What would you make of its old smell
And its mannerless energy?
And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
The long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?

The little fox peered past me at other folks,
At this one and at that one, then at me.
Good luck was all it needed.
Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
   Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox –

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

Hershey: #HERFORSHE, International Women's Day

Fae Johnstone isn't a woman. It's a woman-hating trans person. Hershey was trying to virtue-signal but really screwed up.

"Women of Courage"

Jill Biden hands out "Women of Courage" award to a tranny. Sorry, but trans women aren't "women." They're men who take hormones and who might have had body parts chopped off. (Oh wait---many of them haven't chopped off their nether-regions, but yet still claim to be women...)

There's nothing "trans-phobic" about ridiculing this. You don't get to be a "woman" just because you "feel like" one. Just because the Internet allows you to have whatever avatar or identity. (Which is EXACTLY where the current idiotic trend stems from.)

Sorry. Follow the science.

Working From Home

One good thing is that there's no office politics.

But the main bad thing: I'm alone ALL of the time! Which, in general, is nice 75% of the time, but then the other 25% of the time is kinda rough. There's only so much that TV and movies and music can give you. I miss talking to real people!

I don't at all miss the idiotic "office politics," but in the old days, it was nice to go out to lunch with people, to chat with people, to go out to drink with people after work.

It would be nice if I had a work group that would like to go out for a drink and chat every now and then. I don't have that at all. But then I didn't have it either at my previous in-house job from 2014 thru 2019....

Come to think of it: Back when I was an undergrad at UT-Austin, I would go out every week to drink and talk poetry with fellow students. And that's what I wished for when I went to grad school in San Francisco---that didn't happen at all. No one went out after class to talk and drink. I'd always thought San Francisco was supposed to be so cool for artists...

Zip A Dee Doo Dah (Academy Award for Best Song, 1947)

Watch it now, folks, before it's banned from view forever.

Today's Marxists make me sick with their race ideology:
If you show blacks as criminals, you're racist. If you show blacks as being nice and integrated into society, you're racist. Completely sick---there's no way around the Marxist thought process.

Klaus Nomi 1982 interview (French TV)

Nomi died of AIDS on August 6, 1983.

My 2019 Job Decision

In October 2019, I found out that a newly hired 30-year-old guy with zero editing experience (only past marketing experience) was making only $1700 less per year than I was for doing the same editing job. (I'd been editing since 1998, and had been at this job since 2014.)

I'd given this guy his editing test; he scored fifth out of six people. The first four people turned down the job.

In short: He was mediocre, he had no editing experience, he'd scored poorly on the editing test, but... We had to have someone, so we hired him.

And this guy was making only $1700 less per year than me.

I don't blame him, I blame my boss at the time, who handed out the salaries. She later retired during Covid.

An utterly shitty situation for me: It was a good job, and I liked it, and I saw myself retiring from it in 15 years, and I certainly didn't want to quit and throw myself out on the mercies of a job search. But this was so blatantly, disgustingly unfair that I felt I had no choice other than quitting.

What happened to me since then:  When I quit the above job in October 2019, I was being paid $52K per year. As of today, March 2023---3-1/2 years later---I'm making $68K per year. Had I stayed at the above job, I would not have been making $68K until my retirement, if then.

I'm not bragging about my pay or anything---I'm just extremely grateful for the results of my quitting the shitty job and throwing myself out there on the mercy of the universe. I gambled in quitting, I suffered for about 6 months, and then got very, very lucky.

No advice for anyone... Well, yes, I do have some advice: Don't put up with shit---unless the salary is big enough!

Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff Joins Passover Celebration

Everything about this man makes me nauseous.

First and foremost because everything he has to say here is a platitude. There is not ONE original thought that comes out of this man's mouth. 

And he was recently on record coming out against "toxic masculinity"! (Sorry, but there's no danger of Doug Emhoff ever being mistaken for "masculine"---and thus I don't think he's an appropriate spokesPERSON for the issue!)

I'm honestly horrified by how creepy and phony this guy is. Watching this, I can see where Kamala gets her inspiration for public pronouncements on "You can see the moon with your own eyes!" They're both simultaneously dumbed down yet Woke-ist. Perfect for each other!

Randi Weingarten: Leader of American Federation of Teachers

Shrieking in front of the Supreme Court in favor of student college debt being abolished. (Weingarten is the one who brought "social/emotional learning" to our grade schools and who's against any competency standards for either teachers or students.)

This out-of-control, hysterical person is the leader of our nation's teachers? As a lesbian myself (as is Weingarten), I'd prefer a stoic straight male in charge. Just anyone who doesn't act out like this. How Weingarten presents herself is indicative of how ridiculously our country's school system is being run. THIS person is your leader, teachers? Time, I think, to get a better representative.

RE the college debt issue that Weingarten shrieks about: After paying off about $30,000 of my own college debt, my mother paid off the rest. I was grateful. That was a family matter. I think you should either pay for your own college, or your own family should pay for it. 

 

Why, however, should the American taxpayers in general pay for other people's college loans? It would be one thing if the banks themselves were agreeing to dismiss the debt---but that's not at all the case. What Biden is now suggesting is that all of Americans and their taxes should pay for those who took out loans to go to college. Completely ridiculous and unfair AND, most importantly, illegal. Again: Why should the 75% of young people and their families who never took out such loans be forced to pay for those who did and who are now whining about having college debt? What is this decrepit idiot of a President thinking? What is this shrieking, stereotypical harridan thinking? Why isn't society as a whole completely tossing these degenerate bottom-of-the-barrel "leaders" out in favor of more-competent, more-intelligent, more-logical people?

A vote for Sanity/Merit/Competency: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot concedes race.

Congratulations, Chicago, for getting rid of this utterly incompetent idiot. 

"Good Government" has nothing to do with the color of your skin or your gender or your sexual preference. Lightfoot checked all of the Woke boxes, but she proved to be completely unqualified for the job. (Same for Kamala Harris, same for Pete Buttigieg, same for Ketanji Brown Jackson, et al.)
 

I'm gay and female (and a '70s/'80s-type feminist), and I refuse to accept any idiots as my role models.

 

As a side-note: I feel rather badly for Democrat Amy Klobuchar--- During the 2020 election, I thought she was well-spoken and sensible...until I saw that she'd listed her "pronouns" on Twitter (as had Buttigieg).
 

I will NEVER vote for anyone who has EVER listed their "pronouns." It's a minor thing, but it proves their willingness to cave in to the leftist academic trends of the moment, sans any common sense. I would never trust any such middle-aged person with a shallow, teenaged mentality to be my President.