Rooms In My Head

    Sometimes I write in this blog just to clear my own mind about stuff going on in my life.  Lately, I've been copying and pasting a lot of stuff just because the author reflects my point of view and puts it a cleverer way than I could.  And then there are the Foxworld posts with their mini observations.  It seems rare anymore that I write just to let my readers know what's going on with me.  This is just such a post.

    I've been working at the hotel now for eight years.  Before this one, I worked at another hotel for four.  Both were on the overnight shift.  For personal reasons, I had committed to stay at my current job until the end of next summer.  By that time, I will have been nocturnal for thirteen years.  As much as I love my job and the place I work, I'm tired. I want to do something else.
    So, for the next eleven months, I'm going to be exploring my options.  There's some things I have to consider: my age and my health insurance being two of them, and what type of job.  I really like working with the public and meeting new people all the time.  I got offered two jobs just from giving the tour of the hotel.  One gentleman suggested that with my knowledge of OKC's architectural history, I should work for him as a water taxi driver in Bricktown.  Another, for the same reason, said I should become a public relations guy for the City of Tulsa.  Both offers just came along at the wrong time.  And now, with Gaby's job being more important than mine, moving to another city is not really an option.
    One of the things I'd like to do is to talk to people who are actually doing the things I'm interested in.  I have friends on Facebook that are just such people, and I'd really like to sit down with them and talk about what they do, and see if they can offer any advice.  (This would also be part of a larger plan to get to know some of my Facebook friends who are only acquaintances in real life.)

    If my world were different, I'd really like to spend my days concentrating on my art.  I used to do just that, but real life interfered, and I just don't know how to restart.  I've let things fall apart so much that I think I'd have to take a few months off just to do the prep work.
    That being said, I have started a new adventure in my artwork.  A friend of mine convinced me that the photos that I take, manipulate on the computer, and then set aside for the purpose of eventually maybe possibly in the future getting around to drawing or painting, are, in fact, works of art in themselves, and that I need to just find a good printer and mat, frame and sell what I've got.
    Framemasters, here in Edmond, has a giclée machine.

 

I'm so pleased and excited about the way these look I could just bust.  But I've got to make a big investment this year in framing and printing.  I intend to have at least a dozen of them to show at the Edmond show next spring.

As many of you know, Gaby and I went through immigration last year, and last summer he got his green card.  That gives him the ability to travel, and our intention is to go see his family in Chihuahua ASAP.  The biggest obstacle has been that he has to have a Mexican passport, and that has to be gotten through the Mexican Embassy.  There is a traveling consulate that one can go to when it comes to town, but they aren't very good at keeping their online schedule up to date.  Fortunately, the agency where Gaby works keep track of this stuff, and finally, a year after he got his green card, he's got an appointment this week to get his passport.  That means we'll be able to start making plans within a few weeks.
     Just one hitch:  Chihuahua is one of the cities noted for violence, killings, kidnappings.  And my sisters-in-law live in Ciudad Juarez, which is even worse.  I want to go, but I have to admit I'm more than a bit nervous.  I'm going to be relying on advice from my in-laws about safety on this trip.  But I really want to go.  There are photos that need to be taken.

We went to see a new doctor last week.  We really like him; he listens, and he really seems to know his stuff.  Also, he's not afraid to talk about money and how we can save some on healthcare.  We've both been given referrals to specialists, a sleep specialist for Gaby, and one that that can take movies of my innards.  I could talk more about the state of our health, but I haven't gotten my lab results back yet (because of my schedule, not because they aren't ready.) 
    Gaby was told he needs to lose 35 pounds.  (He's actually 70 pounds overweight, according to the insurance charts, but, you know, baby steps.)  I need to lose about 30 myself.  That will require a plan, and we haven't sat down to make one yet. But as I sit here typing, I'm feeling the achiness that comes with being too sedentary.

They say a man's mind is like a house with a lot of rooms.  These are the rooms in my mind where the lights are on.  I've got a three day weekend this week.  Maybe I'll get something done in one of these rooms.

The Guns of Foxworld

In Foxworld, some people blame the guns themselves whenever there is a shooting death.
 

In Foxworld, there are people who believe that guns are independent operators.

 

In Foxworld, there are politicians who actually want to ban guns.

The Study of History in Foxworld

In Foxworld, there are obvious historical parallels between

Adolf Hitler, 9-11, and the presidency of Barak Obama.

Reading List for August 21, 2015

5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012 in which the GOP forgets why they lost the last election.
Trump thinks that being born in the U.S. shouldn’t make you a citizen. Changing that would be very hard.  in which the Constitutional problems with Trump's immigration plan are examined.
Carly Fiorina did a 4-minute riff on climate change. Everything she said was wrong. in which Ms Fiorina is praised by the right wing press for passing along bad information.
Carter, Reagan, and Machiavelli in which Paul Krugman comments on Rex Nutting's article about Jimmy Carter.

Donald Trump Is A PSA Against Conservative Politics

5 Reasons Donald Trump Is A Public Service Announcement Against Conservative Politics

...Here are five revelations about the GOP we should be grateful that he’s crystalizing for America to see.
1. It’s easy to act like a conservative on TV.
Want to be a conservative? Deny climate change. Promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that almost exactly resembles Obamacare. Say terrible things about Obama and Hillary. Deny the reality that the economy, health care and the deficit are all in far better shape than they were in 2008.
But most importantly, pick a scapegoat—a non-white scapegoat—to scare white America into believing you understand its fears.
2. The GOP’s decades of strategic racism make an actual racist look like a truth teller.
Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign with a states’ rights speech attacking “welfare queens” in Nesoba county, which was famous for its white supremacism and the deaths of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. The Reagan Revolution was so effective at turning the middle class against the government policies that girded the creation of the middle class that Democrats even adopted the rhetoric of “strategic racism.”
Using vaguely racial appeals is less about race than it is about power. Conservatives are on the verge of seeing decades of the Southern Strategy pay off with a chance to appoint four Supreme Court Justices who will shape America for the next half-century. They need a real ideologue to win. Trump just wants power and status. He isn’t appealing to conservatives, he’s appealing to the voters conservatives have been tricking into voting against their own interests for decades.
House Republicans have voted for mass deportations several times in the last few years. Every Republican candidate starts his or her immigration reform rap with, “Secure the border first,” knowing that after decades of scaring them about invaders, Republican voters will never feel secure enough to back any real reform.
When Trump skips all that and calls immigrants “rapists” and imagines a conspiracy where Mexico is sending its criminals into our country — because if there’s one thing Mexico knows how to do, it’s controlling criminals — he seems like the only honest clown in the circus.
3. Campaign finance is a complete joke.
Trump is a living argument for campaign finance reform. First, he’s a shining example of the sort of guy who is able to buy an election — arrogant, oblivious and comically absorbed in his own agenda.
But more important, as a large donor, he literally makes a mockery of the logic behind the Citizens United decision.
Conservatives on the Supreme Court justified unlimited corporate donations to campaign groups by arguing that doing so would “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Trump essentially says, “I give these fools money and they do what I say.” And none of the Republican candidates standing onstage with him dare to disagree.
4. America is not a business.Conservatives argue that rich people create jobs and America should be run like a business.
Trump inherited huge wealth from his dad and games the system to make himself much, much richer. The fact that the .01 percent are sucking up nearly all the gains of our economy is the greatest threat to our nation’s future. And when Trump stands there, we realize that what makes that possible isn’t his genius or the genius of the free market, it’s a political decision to aid the rich at all costs over the needs of the other 99.9 percent.
Recent Democratic presidents have kicked their Republican competitors’ butts on job creation because their policies treat workers as profit creators. When America is run for the sake of business, we get the crash of 2008 and Donald Trump — who was born on home plate and thinks he hit a home run — mocking those who leg out an infield hit as “losers.”
5. The “best Republican field in decades” is incredibly uninspiring.The GOP continually vaunts its huge field of candidates as the best in a generation. If that were true, why is Trump soaking them up like so much au jus?
Republicans may be inspired by governors whose specialty is creating wealth inequality and denying women health care — including one who shares DNA with the living personification of the failure of conservative policies. They may love first-term senators whose primary accomplishment is grandstanding. And they may be thrilled by candidates who have never won an election but are strategically aligned to attack President Obama and Hillary Clinton with a shield against charges of racism or sexism. But their party is truly swooning over a guy who learned how to be a conservative by watching Fox & Friends.

The right thinks it finally has Donald Trump on the run, and soon he’ll go the way of Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann.
But Trump has been a household name longer than the Clintons, is richer than the Romney and Bush families combined, and is crazier than Cain. He has nothing to lose and no TV show to go back to (which is a great reminder that the GOP frontrunner began his campaign by being fired by several corporations because they couldn’t stand by the racist rhetoric GOP voters loved).
What’s more likely is that Trump is on to performing his next public service, which is proving that saying horrible things about women doesn’t hurt you with conservative voters very much — if at all.

The Military Weapons of Foxworld

 

In Foxworld, President Obama is trusting Iran with nuclear weapons

and is also responsible for a 23 year old Department of Defense directive.

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

Paul Krugman, August 7, 2015

This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.

 

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor.

Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure whether the president is a Christian?

Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt against Planned Parenthood.

And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)

The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.

 

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

 

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.

Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.

Post Debate Reading List

Reading list:
It is now time to remember Donald Trump’s worst prediction ever, in which the Donald predicts Obamacare will cause massive unemployment.
Donald Trump Won't Win a War Against Fox News  in which the RNC has many tricks up its sleeve to prevent a Trump nomination.
Live Coverage of the First Republican Debate in which the gang at FiveThirtyEight discusses the debate as it happens.
Democrats jubilant after chaotic Republican debate in which Democrats celebrate the "extremism that is the Republican party of today."
FactChecking the GOP Debate, Late Edition  In which the gang at FactCheck.org examine some of the claims of the debaters.
17 candidates, 2 debates, 1 Donald Trump and plenty to fact-check in which the gang at Politifact.com does the same.
G.O.P. Candidates and Obama’s Failure to Fail in which the shared premise among Republicans is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front, yet they almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

The Fast Food Workers of Foxworld

In Foxworld, people who work in fast food do not deserve to be able to afford to feed their family...

...especially if they forget the straw.

Those Top 37 Things You’ll Regret When You’re Old

Those Top 37 Things You’ll Regret When You’re Old

January 13, 2014   

1. Not traveling when you had the chance.
Traveling becomes infinitely harder the older you get, especially if you have a family and need to pay the way for three-plus people instead of just yourself.
2. Not learning another language.
You’ll kick yourself when you realize you took three years of language in high school and remember none of it.
3. Staying in a bad relationship.
No one who ever gets out of a bad relationship looks back without wishing they made the move sooner.
4. Forgoing sunscreen.
Wrinkles, moles, and skin cancer can largely be avoided if you protect yourself.
5. Missing the chance to see your favorite musicians.
“Nah, dude, I’ll catch Nirvana next time they come through town.” Facepalm.
6. Being scared to do things.
Looking back you’ll think, What was I so afraid of?
7. Failing to make physical fitness a priority.
Too many of us spend the physical peak of our lives on the couch. When you hit 40, 50, 60, and beyond, you’ll dream of what you could have done.
8. Letting yourself be defined by gender roles.
Few things are as sad as an old person saying, “Well, it just wasn’t done back then.”
9. Not quitting a terrible job.
Look, you gotta pay the bills. But if you don’t make a plan to improve your situation, you might wake up one day having spent 40 years in hell.
10. Not trying harder in school.
It’s not just that your grades play a role in determining where you end up in life. Eventually you’ll realize how neat it was to get to spend all day learning, and wish you’d paid more attention.
11. Not realizing how beautiful you were.
Too many of us spend our youth unhappy with the way we look, but the reality is, that’s when we’re our most beautiful.
12. Being afraid to say “I love you.”
When you’re old, you won’t care if your love wasn’t returned — only that you made it known how you felt.
13. Not listening to your parents’ advice.
You don’t want to hear it when you’re young, but the infuriating truth is that most of what your parents say about life is true.
14. Spending your youth self-absorbed.
You’ll be embarrassed about it, frankly.
15. Caring too much about what other people think.
In 20 years you won’t give a darn about any of those people you once worried so much about.
16. Supporting others’ dreams over your own.
Supporting others is a beautiful thing, but not when it means you never get to shine.
17. Not moving on fast enough.
Old people look back at the long periods spent picking themselves off the ground as nothing but wasted time.
18. Holding grudges, especially with those you love.
What’s the point of re-living the anger over and over?
19. Not standing up for yourself.
Old people don’t take sh*t from anyone. Neither should you.
20. Not volunteering enough.
OK, so you probably won’t regret not volunteering Hunger Games style, but nearing the end of one’s life without having helped to make the world a better place is a great source of sadness for many.
21. Neglecting your teeth.
Neglecting your teeth.
Brush. Floss. Get regular checkups. It will all seem so maddeningly easy when you have dentures.
22. Missing the chance to ask your grandparents questions before they die.
Most of us realize too late what an awesome resource grandparents are. They can explain everything you’ll ever wonder about where you came from, but only if you ask them in time.
23. Working too much.
No one looks back from their deathbed and wishes they spent more time at the office, but they do wish they spent more time with family, friends, and hobbies.
24. Not learning how to cook one awesome meal.
Knowing one drool-worthy meal will make all those dinner parties and celebrations that much more special.
25. Not stopping enough to appreciate the moment.
Young people are constantly on the go, but stopping to take it all in now and again is a good thing.
26. Failing to finish what you start.
Failing to finish what you start.
“I had big dreams of becoming a nurse. I even signed up for the classes, but then…”
27. Never mastering one awesome party trick.
You will go to hundreds, if not thousands, of parties in your life. Wouldn’t it be cool to be the life of them all?
28. Letting yourself be defined by cultural expectations.
Letting yourself be defined by cultural expectations.
Don’t let them tell you, “We don’t do that.”
29. Refusing to let friendships run their course.
People grow apart. Clinging to what was, instead of acknowledging that things have changed, can be a source of ongoing agitation and sadness.
30. Not playing with your kids enough.
When you’re old, you’ll realize your kid went from wanting to play with you to wanting you out of their room in the blink of an eye.
31. Never taking a big risk (especially in love).
Knowing that you took a leap of faith at least once — even if you fell flat on your face — will be a great comfort when you’re old.
32. Not taking the time to develop contacts and network.
Networking may seem like a bunch of crap when you’re young, but later on it becomes clear that it’s how so many jobs are won.
33. Worrying too much.
As Tom Petty sang, “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”
34. Getting caught up in needless drama.
Who needs it?
35. Not spending enough time with loved ones.
Not spending enough time with loved ones.
Our time with our loved ones is finite. Make it count.
36. Never performing in front of others.
This isn’t a regret for everyone, but many elderly people wish they knew — just once — what it was like to stand in front of a crowd and show off their talents.
37. Not being grateful sooner.
It can be hard to see in the beginning, but eventually it becomes clear that every moment on this earth — from the mundane to the amazing — is a gift that we’re all so incredibly lucky to share.