California
Sacramento has a member of its city council who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance or salute our flag. Her name is Mai Vang. Her supporters know that her objection to our flag comes from her "Communist" politics. Since her family immigrated as refugees from so-called Communist abuses in Vietnam, most of her Hmong community find her politics disturbing.
Worth clicking to enlarge. Anyway, apparently someone told Mai Vang to get out of Sacramento, and she interpreted that to mean she should go to Washington--as a member of Congress!
I think she should adopt some children and be a full-time mother. Run the family economy like a socialist dictatorship. The more children, in her case, the better. They will all grow up either Republicans or Libertarians.
Ethics
Catherine Salgado is confusing fetuses with babies again, while James Talarico is misrepresenting what the Bible actually says about fetuses. They have no "rights." They are parts of their mothers, who themselves are too often seen as parts of tribes. (The Old Testament writers didn't spend much time trying to unpick or correct tribalistic ethics. "All the men" in an entire tribe--clearly meaning all the fighting men, but still--were slaughtered in cases of rape; when rape was recognized as having occurred, it was clearly seen as a sin against God, against Life, more than merely a sin against the victim or her tribe. Dependent wives' and children's "vows," usually meaning sacrificial offerings, could be nullified by the head of the clan. Children had to marry or leave home, or not, at their parents' command. And so on.) Fetuses have value if they have two parents who affirm that the fetus has value for them: they are property. Even some Jewish groups now feel free to update the law as given by Moses...so there is no need to deny what it actually says. A fetus is not a living person; if you can see it, it's a dead or dying blob of glup. But it has some value to people who may have wanted a baby very much, who may spend hours grieving and trying to bring the disgusting little object to life. The feelings of those people have some objective value to society. Much as dogs and cats get their value from people who claim them as pets, much as bits of paper get their value from people who recognize them as money, fetuses get their value from people who hope (or hoped) to claim them as children.
Is God non-binary? Yes, in the sense that God is not bound to a body that has any physical sex. Was Jesus a radical feminist? Yes, in the sense that "in Christ there is neither...male nor female"; the spiritual life is not shaped by sex in the way the physical life is, and Jesus came to guide people into the spiritual life. Did Talarico realize that both of those claims would be heard in the wrong sense and taken to say things quite different from what they meant? Probably; he doesn't look all that stupid. He knows God is not a mixed-up depressive fourteen-year-old dweeb imagining that his life would be less miserable if he could be a girl. He knows Jesus never told full-time mothers they were doing something worse than welfare-cheating, or even than waiting tables. He was yanking the chains of people like Salgado, who unfortunately fell for his game, in public.
Music
Wu Fei.
R.E.M.
Trace Adkins. Warning: grief trigger.
Toby Keith.
Elijah Bossenbroek.
Travel
Nostalgia time...How many have stayed in a motel like this one? How many would rather stay in a motel like this one than in a Yuppie Suites Chain hotel that costs ten times as much? How many w ould still take road trips if we could still count on finding a shabby but clean, locally owned, cheap motel?
Cheap because low overhead. Cheap because people still thought air conditioning and an unheated, unshaded, open-air swimming pool were luxuries, and did not expect 1500 Internet-streaming digital coor TV channels, fancy electronic door keys that work about half the time, room service, and a full spa. Cheap because they were for people who just wanted to stretch out on a bed or couch for six hours, take a shower, and hit the road again. Cheap because, if their guests planned to watch television at all, they wanted to know about road conditions, so the local channel in black-and-white was plenty. Cheap because they really cleaned up when some desperate family, as it might be the family of a teacher who would be paid at the end of September and it was still July, rented a suite with a double bed for the three children by the week. "Housing" for people who intended to rent, and probably would rent, a decent home if they stayed a few weeks. Because the world was less crowded; because nobody seriously thought that anybody would need to be, or choose to be, or tolerate being, stacked-and-packed in a "tower" building for life.
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