Motley Moose – Archive

Happy Tuesday, Troopers!  Just another day in the neighborhood, with Alabama congresscritters proposing bills that would basically make government illegal, NRA jerks heckling the father of one of the Newtown victims, the Boy Scouts maybe allowing gays, immigration reform becoming a bit more possible… Oh, and I say Lincoln is better than Silver Linings Playbook, Les Miz, or Argo (of all the whatchamacallit nominees I’ve seen so far).

My nosiness remains boundless: What is your favorite music to clean house to? Nuts and chews or soft centers (candy, you fool)? Is cooked fruit OK? Are sweet ingredients (like fruit) OK in savory dishes? When you were little did you prefer to play indoors or outdoors? How about now?

Excerpts from the Twitter Stream of (un)Consciousness:

They must spray the elixir of stupid on the #MorningJoe set.

— TheRiverWanders (@TheRiverWanders) January 28, 2013

I feel a lot better now that I know Newtown shooter only used a “modern sporting rifle”

— Gen JC Christian (@JC_Christian) January 28, 2013

I’m only reading your shorter tweets.

— JerryThomas (@JerryThomas) January 28, 2013

Valentine’s Day Pro Tip: Make sure your girlfriend exists before getting a gift.

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 29, 2013

This still hasn’t been resolved as of my bedtime: What does Rep. Jack Kimble (Imaginary R, CA) want with Daily KOS?:

Drat, I don’t see any Daily KOS people online.They’re probably protesting against themselves or something.

— Jack Kimble (@RepJackKimble) January 29, 2013

Haven’t the Daily KOS people finished dinner yet?How long does it take to eat ramen noodles?

— Jack Kimble (@RepJackKimble) January 29, 2013

Republicans think it’s unconstitutional for someone to run against them.

— Chris Dashiell (@cdashiell) January 29, 2013

Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The Egg — laid by a bird that was not a Chicken

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 29, 2013

GOP: “We just need a better way to communicate our plans to kill Medicare, turn the clock back for gays and women, and destroy the planet”

— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) January 29, 2013

A burning local Los Angeles issue that I am completely on board with:

I would support this platform RT @ericspiegelman“Eric Garcetti, how do we get KROQ to stop playing Sublime?”#betterLAdebatequestions

— Sean Bonner (@seanbonner) January 29, 2013

  Make sure you let your peeps know where to find you!  

By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

The Democratic Party has always been the party of immigrants. Even as everything else about the party has changed, as it has turned from a party of Southern whites to the exact opposite, immigrants continue to vote Democratic. In the 1850s the immigrants were Irish-Americans. Today they are Mexican-Americans.

Of course, not all immigrants support the Democratic Party. Many immigrants, such as Cuban-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans, vote strongly Republican. There is a very simple explanation for why this is so, an explanation that requires merely one word:

Communism.

More below.

As some of you know, I am a photographer. As iriti found herself getting more and more fit through the winter of 2011-12, we decided we were going to do lots of hiking in 2012. As is my habit, I took my camera along for the ride sometimes. You will now be the benificiaries/victims of our wandering.

Cross posted at the Progressive Zionist (www.progressivezionist.com)

Hat Tip to Jed Lewiston and his Front Page Diary at Daily Kos: Remember when Paul Ryan blamed the attack in Benghazi on the sequester?

In reading Jed’s diary something struck me in one of Paul Ryans quotes:

We should always stand up for peace, for democracy, for individual rights.

Ok… on it’s own sounds fine.

Then Ryan goes on to say:

And we should not be imposing these devastating defense cuts, because what that does when we equivocate on our values, when we show that we’re cutting down on defense, it makes us more weak. It projects weakness. And when we look weak, our adversaries are much more willing to test us.

And this is where Ryan channels Big Brother. Allow me quote from George Orwell’s Masterpiece 1984:

WAR IS PEACE

So… what Ryan here is directly saying is… (In my words): “Let’s stand for PEACE and the way we stand for PEACE is to build up our WAR machine to a point where no one will be able to challenge us, because if they do, we will utterly destroy them.”

Now, aside from the facts that Guerilla movements in SouthEastern and Central Asia give lie to his commentary (after all, we outgunned the Viet Cong and Taliban 10,000 to one and we were able to wreck complete destruction upon their relative nations and yet that didn’t stop them). This is a dangerous fallacy that has infected the American Polity in a number of ways.

OH, and before we go on I want to make it clear that I am not an isolationist, I am not a Green, and I have no issue with the United States having a presence around the Globe (though I am certainly not a supporter of “Empire Building”). Further, I fully support the notion that the U.S. and our allies should have what I term a “Stout Defense”. But, that said, I also support an honest commentary on what that means and NOT use of Orwellian terminology to create a false meme.

But here… Here is a chart of our Defense Spending relative to the rest of the world

1. United States          711.0    

2. China                  143.0    

3. Russia                  71.9

4. United Kingdom          62.7

5. France                  62.5

6. Japan                   59.3

Now, notice… IF the U.S. Cut it’s military spending by over $ 400 BILLION per year. That’s right… you saw it $ 400 BILLION PER YEAR, we would STILL outspend the next five countries on the list added up together.

Let’s break that down even further. IF we cut our Defense budget by $ 500 Billion for one year we would still almost outspend our main rivals Russia and China together (they would have us by $ 3 billion).

NOW, does anyone in their right mind think that Al Qaeda for one second looks at our defense spending and says: “HOHOHO America cut it’s spending – well they must be weak” and further does anyone even further out really think that our main allies, Britain, France, Israel, Australia, etc… think that we are somehow “weak” even though we are outspending the next five nations (Nations 3 2-#6) collectively???

No.. What this is, is a blatant Orwellian Chant of “War is Peace”, “We destroyed that village to save the village”.

Paul Ryan’s words are hypocritical. His party stands firmly against Democracy (look at his party’s efforts to not count the popular vote), his party party stands firmly against individual rights (Marriage Equality, voting rights, civil rights). Ryan talks about Peace but in this, he is only talking about the Peace that comes from utter destruction left in the wake of War.

So, I am one of the recent moose to have migrated in the past few weeks from that other site.  (I peeked in today and man am I glad I am gone).  I have found this place to be wonderful change full of encouraging and inspirational people.  Great writing is always inspirational.  Well, I am no great writer but I would like to get more involved here.

I’m weird.

Not just in the ways many of us here are weird – liberal, progressive, etc.  No.  Not even just because I am an atheist. I was born on July 2, 1959, 7 weeks early, with no sucking reflex and no nails on fingers or toes.  Because I wasn’t that small, though, I was not given special attention in the hospital.  My parents have since told me they considered suing the hospital.  By the time I was 4 or so, it was clear that I was, in my father’s phrase “screwed up somehow, but not stupid”.  I was asked not to return to the same school after kindergarten.  A psychologist told my parents I would never graduate from college.  I did, by the way, graduate at age 20; my parents had a party for me.  I invited the psychologist.  He wrote back saying he was glad he was wrong.

My mother started a school for me, the [Gateway School of New York, because there were no schools for kids like me: I was what was then just beginning to be called learning disabled.  But the diagnoses my parents got were more like `minimal brain damage’ or or ‘minimal brain dysfunction’ or `mentally retarded’.  

My mother was, to put it mildly, a very determined woman.  She found another very determined woman (Elizabeth Freidus – pronounced freed us, and what a great name for a teacher in special ed)!  Elizabeth did everything that had to do with teaching, my mom did everything else.  I have two stories that may have some relevance (or may not  – but they’re good stories) regarding the founding of Gateway: One regards normality and the other regards rights.

This is Dedicated to My Pal Shauna

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The What, I walk dogs, I care for cats and occasionaly an odd assortment of little pet creatures. By industry standards at three years plus, I’m a longtime veteran.

I had planned on telling you how phenomenal my employers are, about how our mission statement might be a model for other businesses to emulate, but I made the doing the fun part first mistake of writing about the woozles, heh so this diary will be too long if I did.

The What part can wait and probably deserves it’s own diary.

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The Why, well that’s easy. I’m an animal lover, always have been and always will be. My wife is too and the joke around here is that we have 10 pairs of legs in our family: 2 humans, 2 pooties and 2 woozles. There hasn’t been a time when I didn’t have a pet and when it wasn’t a cat or dog, it was a lopp eared rabbit.

The more immediate question is why now, at 58? That answer has some history, all recent and none of it very positive really. Although I’m happy doing what I’m doing, the journey to get here was painful and there are scars still healing.

I’ve been self employed almost my entire life and I’ve reinvented myself three times, starting three completely different businesses on a shoestring, chasing a passion. At 48 I was ready again. I loved to cook, I’ve always wanted a little cafe and at that age, cooking seemed like a career I could continue until I was ready to retire or unable to work. Industry people I spoke with had their doubts but I know what I can accomplish when I make up my mind, so I went for it.

I spent two years learning in kitchens, working 14 -16 hour days, commuting for hours and honing my craft. I applied for line cook positions at two restaurants and set up both interviews in one day. The restaurants were across the street from each other and I was hired for both jobs, one morning shift, one afternoon.  

I worked my way up to managerial positions at both spots, trying new recipes, designing menus and managing staff. I was seemingly on my way, it all pointed positive until the the bottom fell out of the restaurant business here in Chicago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2007. It was the foreshadowing of our Great Recession and of worse things to come.

I was laid off from both restaurants the same week and I spent the next two years, the most difficult years of my adult life, without work. We’ve all heard the horrible stories about the new discrimination of fifty year olds, I was suddenly a statistic with a very odd resume. I never gave up looking and in a very quirky,

‘I really don’t care what I write on this application because no will really read it’, answer to a question about something I was passionate about, the answer got my app noticed.

I wrote paragraphs extolling the many virtues of our Honda Element. Worried sick about having to sell it because we were getting so heavily into debt, I was already beginning to miss it. I recieved a call from the interviewer the next day. We spent an hour talking Honda, he finally decided to buy the one he had test driven, oh and I was hired.

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I am really excited about the Super Bowl since I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of people will be hosting Super Bowl parties. Here are some recipes for party type food. Oh and go 49ers! 😉