Nothing like some extended rest and recreation to recharge one’s batteries, even if that rest and recreation ended up being longer than I originally intended. I think that the computer and vision issues that led to my extended absence have been resolved as well as possible and that I should be able to return to posting here on a regular basis once again, which is good, because I have missed you all.

During my absence there have been a number of interesting political developments, especially here in the United States dealing mainly with the economic crisis. I am not going to deal with each specific event, but rather I want to talk about what I see as a common element in all of these events. That common element is a difference of semantics. Although everyone uses the same words like spending or investment, the two opposing sides on how to deal with the economic crisis mean very different things when each side uses those terms. And that is why there is no bipartisanship on this issue, nor will there be any until the two sides get a translator/
The easiest way to summarize this semantic difference is to say that the liberals – the Democrats – live on Main Street and want to focus on improving their improving their neighborhood, while the conservatives – the Republicans live on Wall Street and want to focus on fixing up their neighborhood. But Wall Street is not Main Street. In fact, that confusion of streets is what got us into this mess in the first place and we will not see the road to recovery until we end that confusion.
Let me offer a simple explanation of the difference between the two positions and how each side uses the same terms to refer to diametrically opposed concepts. In the process, we will come to understand the fundamental differences that divide the two parties.

Main Street is a euphemism used used to refer to average middle-class Americans. Although the left and the r9ight have somewhat different notions of what constitutes the middle class in the
USA, both side agree that the middle class is the backbone of the American social fabric. Both sides also agree that the middle class represents the largest voting bloc in the American electorate, which is why the middle class is so important in American politics.

As I said above, the left and the right have somewhat different notions of what constitutes the middle class. These opposing notions not only inform each side’s stand on policy issues, these differences inform the dialogue on those issues, so much so that it appears at times that, even though both sides use the same buzz words, the two sides are speaking two different languages.

What I want to do in this series of short articles is to offer some insights into the semantics of the discourse between the left and the right in order to help you understand what these politicians are really saying, and perhaps facilitate the dialogue over policy issues in these difficult times. We will start next time with a look at what each side means when they talk about the middle class.

You may have heard or read about the ice storm that hit northern Arkansas – my geographic location – on Tuesday, January 27. Here’s a personal account – mine – of that storm.

We lost our power a little before noon on Tuesday. We were without electricity until late afternoon on Thursday. That meant no running water, no heat ,and no computers. Our heat source was our fireplace. We also used it for some limited cooking. we melted ice that the kids gathered outside for water to flush the toilets once or twice a day. Until the power came back Thursday, we had no real hot food for two days. only hot beverages and fire-roasted hot dogs and polish sausages.

We lost our land-line telephone service late Tuesday. We finally got that back Saturday evening around seven. No land line phones means no Internet access since I use a DSL connection to access the web. That’s why I have not been able to post or do any administrative stuff on my blogs. we were unable to use our cell phones until Thursday, so for nearly 48 hours we were cut off from the world except for an old, but very reliable battery-powered transistor radio.

Our house was, until this storm, surrounded by lots of mature oak trees. As a result of this storm, a lot of those oaks as well as some beautiful evergreens are now gone and we will probably not replace them. Why?

The tree in my living room

On Tuesday evening at 6:40 PM – a date and time my family will remember for a long time, the top half of a 40-year-old oak that stood six feet from my front door crashed onto the roof of our house. A broken branch about a foot thick attached to that tree gouged a four- foot long  hole in our roof and living room ceiling,

My thirteen-year-old son Ian, who is autistic, had been sitting in his favorite chair directly below that spot until my daughter suggested we move his chair. She had a premonition that the tree was going to fall. Thanks to her sixth sense, we are all safe and unharmed, although several of us have colds now.

Thanks to the generosity of our neighbors across the road, who gave us a large sheet of heavy duty plastic tarp, we were able on Thursday to seal off that hole by creating a tunnel around the branch in our living room that went from the ceiling to the floor. It was attached to the ceiling with thumbtacks and duct tape. The house was considerably warmer after that.

All five of us slept on cots and mattresses in the living room, huddling with each other and our three dogs for warmth, especially at night when temperatures dropped well below freezing. The highs on Wednesday and Tuesday were only in the 30s Fahrenheit and yesterday was only in the low 40s. Today was in the 50s and tomorrow will be even warmer. Most of the ice is gone now, but the area still looks like a war zone with all the debris lying around.

Wednesday and Thursday there was so much ice on our driveway, which is an uphill incline of about 100 yard to the road, that we were unable to get out for supplies. We finally got out late Thursday afternoon, only because my wife had left our Kia Sport age at the top of the hill on Tuesday when she came home from work during the storm. we had only a very small amount of money available because my wife’s pay check was delayed until Friday. That was when we were able to get to the store for some real food and other necessities.

So, we are slowly getting back to normal. On Thursday night we did three loads of dishes to get all of the dirty dishes and between Thursday and Friday we did eight loads of laundry. today we had a tree service come in an remove the tree from the roof, the one from the back deck, two that were leaning against the house, plus cut down several more that posed a threat to the house. They also properly patched the roof with plastic tarp until we can get a roofer to repair it.

So all in all, we’re doing quite well compared to a lot of people around the area, many who will have no power for two or three weeks more.In a few days. after I have had time to hunt down some news articles, I will be back with more on the Great Ice Storm of 2009.

I wrote this Tuesday [January 20], but was not able to proof or publish it until today. I decided to leave the verb tenses in the present rather than potentially destroy the feel of this post. Hope you enjoy it!

Today is a very historic day in American history. Today we inaugurate the first African=-American President in our history. The fact that yesterday was the national holiday honoring Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. adds special significance to today. if that is even possible.

Dr.King often drew parallels between himself and his tole in the civil rights movement to that of Moses leading his people out of bondage. He said in one speech that he has been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land. He also said that he may not get there with us – a most prophetic statement.

Moses never got to the promised land either. The person who led the Israelites into the promised land was a younger man, Joshua. And just as Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land, perhaps Barack Obama will be our Joshua and lead us, all Americans irregardless of race, creed, or color, into the promised land, whereAmerica finally lives up to the promise of the principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

The Founding Fathers believed in the inalienable rights of man. That has never been an issue for Americans. What has been the issue for the last 230 years has been the definition of the word “man,’ that definition has slowly changed over the course of American history, moving inexorably to broader and broader interpretations of what constitutes man.

In the beginning, man referred to white males only, usually of Anglo-Saxon descent. And this definition usually also mean these men were protestant in their religious persuasion. in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as a result of large0scale immigration fromIreland, Italy, Poland, Russia and elsewhere, the Anglo-Saxon restriction was lifted to include other white males. At the same time and into the twentieth century, the male restriction was lifted to include white females. But people of color, especially African-Americans, were still excluded from the American understanding of what constitutes man.

prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, the vast majority of African-Americans living in the USA were slaves. They were not considered to be people, but rather were classified as property. But even with their emancipation and the Civil War, there was little real change in the status of these people of color, nor was their much change in how they were perceived by white Americans.

The nearly 150 years since then has been the struggle of African-Americans to gain recognition as part of what we Americans call man. Over those 150 years there have been many laws passed to guarantee this right or that right to people of color. These laws all have one purpose in mind – to change the American understanding of what constitutes a man.

You can equate this progression of legislation as a form of Skinnerian behavior modification. Or Pavlov’s dog. If the new behaviors, in this case, treating African-Americans the same way we treat others we consider human beings, is enforced and repeated often enough, the new behavior becomes internalized, which removes the need for further enforcement or behavior modification.

we are not quite there yet. There is still a fair amount of racism in this country. but the Inauguration of Barack Obama has taken us to the mountaintop and beyond. We can now plainly see the promised land. If everyone involved lives up to expectations, we may actually get there in my lifetime.

Here’s the link to the YouTube video of Obama’s Inauguration Speech. I think he understands the historical importance of his election, so much so that the power of the moment overwhelmed him for just a few seconds during the oath taking.

Here’s the link to Obama’s inauguration speech, in case you haven’t seen it yet. I’d be interested in hearing what you thought of it.

One of the most common tools for political research, and I use the word research very generously, is the opinion poll. Political candidates use polls to see how the voters feel about them, especially during or leading up to an election campaign. Political pundits, especially those in the media, use them to, in their eyes, substantiate their opinions, usually formed prior to the polls.

The problem with polls is that they are often misleading and generally worthless. Here’s why. Polls tend to use what they call samples from the population group, say all US voters, whose opinions the poll is supposed to represent. But these statistical samples are quite often fallacious and ridiculously too low to really represent the population they claim they represent. A classic example of this is a poll about who the voters of New York State feel should be appointed to replace Hillary  Clinton when she officially resigns her US Senate seat to become Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

The Quinnipiac University Poll, a private polling service that focuses on the Northeast, conducted this poll at least twice and compares the results of those two surveys. My first issue with their statistical sample is whether the two surveys, about three weeks apart, surveyed the exact same individuals or whether each survey asked the questions of two different, probably randomly generated, lists of sample New York State voters. I do not care how accurate they claim their statistical samples are, unless they surveyed the same individuals in both surveys, their claim of a statistical error factor of +/- 2.4% is pure fiction. Only by measuring the same sample in a study over time can you really claim to have an accurate picture of changes in that sample. Anything else is scientifically invalid.

My second and main complaint about the statistical sample of this survey is its very small size. They only surveyed 1664 people in the entire state of New York. The most recent figure I could find for New York State is 8,624,000 registered voters. That means their statistical sample was .02% of the total number of voters in the state. Answer one question for me, please: what is statiscally significant about 1 out of every 5000 voters? Not much, if you ask me.

I took a statistics course in college. Granted statistics has gotten more sophisticated in 25 years, but, if I remember correctly, a good statistical sample, especially of a large, very diverse populatiom like the voter of New York, should be at least one per cent or about 86,240. Had the people at The Quinnipiac University Poll gotten the same results with a sample of that size, I would take their results more seriously. I wonder who is paying for these worthless polls. Hopefully, not our tax dollars.

As I said above, polls often provide article material for the media, and bloggers. The problem is that these journalists tend to select only those portions of a survey that support whatever opinion they may want to foist on unsuspecting readers as scientific fact or the gospel truth.

One that I want to comment on as an example of what I said in the paragraph above is Real Clear Politics, a conserative blog and web site:

Founded in 2000 by John McIntyre and Tom Bevan, Chicago-based RealClearPolitics.com (RCP) has become one of America’s premier independent political web sites. Updated every morning and throughout the day, RCP culls and publishes the best commentary, news, polling data, and links to important resources from all points of the political compass and covering all the important issues of the day. RealClearPolitics has become a trusted filter for anyone interested in politics.

RCP’s political commentary, election analysis and polling averages have been featured in national media outlets including The New York Times, FOX News, CNN, The Economist, Investor’s Business Daily, The Chicago Sun-Times and many, many more.
About RealClearPolitics

In their post about the Caroline Kennedy survey, they focus only on the few questions about how Caroline Kennedy is losing the approval of New York voters, which the survey and the authors at RCP attribute to the poor beginning Ms. Kennedy had at her first live interview as a player in the political arena. Ms. Kennedy’s experience prior to the Obama campaign has been in museum and charitable foundation work. However, she does come from a very politically active and astute family, so I suspect she is quite knowledgeable about politics, After all, it was Ms. Kennedy who persuaded her uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, to throw his very influential support to Mr. Obama. In my opinion it was the support of the Kennedys that sealed the nomination for Obama. And it is her role in that campaign that has all but guaranteed she will be the new Senator from New York.

What I found amusing about the RCP post was that, in the survey was a question about the media reaction to Ms. Kennedy’s somewhat nervous start to that interview in which her language was less than erudite, which the  voters of New York overwhelmingly said they expected the negative reaction of the media piranhas. But, TCP makes no mention of that question, Instead, they join the rest of the piranhas and imply that her poor preformance makes her unqualified to be a US Senator. All I can say about that is that if poor linquistic skills makes one unqualified for elected office, George Bush should never have been allowed to run for office.

I think Ms. Kemmedy’s poor performance was the result of a case of nerves. After all, she has led a politically sheltered life, probably since the death of her father, John Kennedy, in 1963. But given her academic credentials, an AB from Radcliffe College at Harvard University and a JD from Columbia University, graduating in the top 10 percent of her class there. Neither Harvard nor Columbia graduate people who do not have a high proficiency in the English language. I would venture to say that, normally, she is quite erudite. But she is also human and that means she is entitled to be nervous in what very well may have been a quite new situation for her. And, unfortunately, it is the nature of piranhas to go into a feeding frenzy at the slightest sign of blood.

Do I think Caroline Kennedy is qualified to be a US Senator? Most definitely. Certainly at least as qualified, if not more so, than Hillary Clinton was. And, as the survey points out, the vast majority of the survey respondents think Hillary did quite a respectable job of being a Senator. I think 51 years of being a member of the Kennedy clan should count for at least as much as Hillary’s eight years as Arkansas’ first lady and eight years as the First Lady of the US. Although she had not sought political office until now, I think her political savvy probably comes pretty close to that of her uncle.

In closing, I think Caroline Kennedy will make an excellent replacement for Hillary. If Caroline decides to follow the path of her uncle Ted and make the Senate her life-long home, she will end up a titan of that august body, and, who knows, perhaps in 2016, she may follow in her father’s footsteps and seek to become President. A Kennedy as the first woman president would not be so bad. We might even see a primary race between a female Kennedy and a female Clinton. No, not Hillary. Chelsea. Two daughters of former Presidents running for and one getting elected to the White Hous would rival this year’s election for historical prominence. And how’s the idea of one as President and the other as Vice-President sound?

Sometimes I absolutely hate computers! I had the rough draft of thus post all written and was trying to save it when I guess I hit the wrong key and accidentally shut the computer off, losing everything I had written. So, now I am trying to rewrite the same post, What you are reading is the result of that rewrite. Hopefully, it will be better than the original was, which, if I say so myself, was not too shabby!
 
 What also makes this rewrite interesting is that I am writing sitting at the dining room table, the first time I have ever done a post not sitting at my desk. I have to use my external flexible keyboard because I cannot read the gray letters on the built-in keyboard, but I am using the built-in mouse, which is quite different from my external optical mouse. Those o you Iwo are familiar with laptops will know what I am talking about.
 
 I know I said I was not going to return to discussing politics until after the Inauguration, but when somebody starts doing their job before they are even getting paid for it, that’s worth talking about. And when that person is the President-elect, then it’s really worth talking about.
 
 According to this article from the Associated Press, President-elect Barrack Obama has asked Congress for, and I quote, “access” to the $350 billion of undistributed funds from the financial services bailout. I take umbrage at the reporter’s use of the word “access,” because, if you are as distrustful of politicians as I am, you might think that Obama was asking for the money for some nefarious purpose, when, in fact, he is asking Congress to give him permission to take control of the money prior to his inauguration, so that he can distribute the money about a week after his inauguration. Somehow, journalists in the news media seem to have forgotten that reporting should be as objective and as straightforward as possible both in content and in style. This article makes use of lots of ambiguous language and the article is poorly organized.
 
 Taking control of the second half of the bailout out of the hands of the Bush administration is a good thing, since Bush has been roundly criticized for his handling of the original distribution. No surprise there, Look a the mess Bush and his cronies made of the economy and the war on terror! Plus Congress is going to require more accountability and put some sorely needed restrictions on how this money is spent. If we are really lucky, they may even require the recipients to actually pay the money back with interest, just as these institutions require us to do.
 
 My favorite proposed restriction, and one these institutions are strongly opposing, is limits on executive compensation packages. If Congressman Barney Frank has his way, the compensation restrictions would be retroactive to include the recipients of the original distribution. Right on, Barney! Give ‘em hell!
 
 I mean, the reason these companies are in such dire straits that they need a cash influx is because of poor management. Why should these incompetent boobs be rewarded with salaries that ribal the gross national product? Personally, the whole lot deserve to be sent to an institution for people with deranged egos, along with the executives of the auto makers and most of the top-level members of the Bush administration, including Bush himself. A place where they have to wear flax, eat rice and beans, and watch episodes of the Teletubbies all day.
 
 I did not think the bailout was such a good idea, and nothing has happened to change my mind. So, the more restrictions that Congress puts on the recipients, the happier I am. What these institutions have indulged in is nothing short of rampant speculation, the same thing the banks did back during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. His response to that rampant speculation wasto nationalize the American banking system, which is why we have banks with the word “National” in them. These banks fate back to the time when the government really controlled the banking system. Maybe this is a solution to the economic crisis the Obama administration should seriously conisder.
 
 I can remember a time when a bank’s worth was measured by the size of the assets of its customers, not by the side of its outside invesetments portfolio. A bank existed to serve its customers, not its stockholder. The bank considered its owners to be its depositors and morthagees, not some computeried stock trading entity. I am reminded of the compatison of the reaction of George Bailey to that of Old Man Potter to the run on financial institutions during the Great Depresion as presented in “It’s A Wonderful Life, ” ome of my all-time favorite Christmas movies. The current crop of financial exeutives seem mre like clones of Potter, when we really need more George Baileys.
 
 My only objection to the nationalization of the banks is that doing so woulld give the politicians even more control of our money than they already have. Given the moral fiber, or lack thereof, of our current generation of politicians, that could be quite dangerous. Being a politician was once a very moral endeavor. We have come a long way from the high moral standing of politicians like Wasgington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR. I womder if we will ever see leaders of that quality ever again. Probably not, sorry to say.

As you may or may not know, I am not a fan of Microsoft or its products. Because o that, I have been using a Linux distribution – Ubuntu – since late May on my computer as part of a double-boot system with Windows. The main reason for having the Windows OS – Bista – was to run my games, which cannot run in Linux.

Prior to a few months ago when we ended up having to buy me a new computer, I had been using Ubuntu plus Windows XP/ I hated XP and Ubuntu 8.04 was a definite improvement. All the good things I had to say here about Ubuntu was base on that comparison.

My new monster HP came with Vista [re-installed and I added Ubuntu 8.04. Then, in November, Ubuntu released 8.10, a major upgrade and which was supposed to be far superior to Vista. Well, I was disappointed. For  the two months I used it, it has been one problem after another. After it crashed about a month ago and needed to be re-installed, I decided to hold off and try Vista for awhile.

I was quite pleasantly surprised. It most definitely is not XP. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of Ubuntu, without the hardware integration issues that make Ubuntu so difficult for the average computer user to install. You see, most computer hardware manufacturers have proprietary drivers designed for Windows and they do not make those drivers available to the Linux community. That means configuring Linux to work optimally with your hardware requires a great deal of technical expertise that most average computer users do not have, me included.With the increasing sophistication of computer hardware, that has become a real issue for Linux users.

but I was happy enough with my double-boot system to leave it as it was, and to slowly learn how to tweak Ubuntu to work better with my hardware. But then we had a hardware disaster.

My mow twelve-year old son Michael, who is a serious gamer, had been using a Compaq laptop we bought him last Christmas. He keeps buying himself bigger and better games, games that require more and more powerful hardware – like my monster HP.

Over the last month or so, his laptop was becoming more and more problematic. His older brother, who is autistic, pulled off about a dozen of the keys, so we got him an external keyboard to use. Then the dog chewed up the end of the cord for the keyboard. Then a couple of weeks ago, the computer crashed and we had to re-install everything. This time I insisted he use the Norton Internet Security suite trial to protect the computer, figuring the problem may have been malware from all the downloads Michael finds online. Everything seemed fine.

However, right after Christmas the laptop quit working, so we took it in to the Staples office supply where we bought it. The manager contacted HP and they agreed to fix it under the manufacturer’s warranty, which had just expired. Thank you, JP!

In the meantime, I decided to give Michael the monster HP and I could use the little HP Pavilion slinline that we had bought two years ago, with only Ubuntu installed on it. This had been my wife’s computer, with XP, for the last few months. Since my wife does not use a computer all that much, we felt she could use Michael’s if she had to do something on a computer until we got the laptop back from HP, at which point I would either keep using the Pavilion or I would take the laptop as my production computer. What little game playing I would have time for, I would do on the monster , if I could convince Michael to get off of it. Michael is passionate about his gaming, and since he wants to be a game designer when he grows up, I don’t have a real problem with that.

We got the laptop back yesterday, and with help from my daughter, who has become pretty familiar with Vista and laptops, since she has a better HP laptop than the one we just had repaired, I was able to configure that laptop so that I can use it even with my vision issues. Doing this was easier in Vista than in either XP or Ubuntu, so I am going to keep this laptop as a Vista-only machine.

So, I’ve gone mobile, which actually makes a lot of sense for me, I spend a great deal of time on the computer, which has meant, up to now, being  confined pretty much to the bedroom where my desk is. With the laptop, I will be able to move to other parts of the house, be closer to my wife and kids and stop being such a hermit. In the summer, I will be able to take my laptop out on the deck and keep an eye on the boys while they play in the pool. I might even get a tan this summer.

I can take my computer with me to Scout meetings, doctor’s visits, or any other place where I might end up sitting around bored because I have nothing to do. More productivity is always good.

In 2010, my daughter will graduate from high school. She wants to go to the Academy of Art in San Francisco and major in Art, probably with a heavy emphasis on computer art and animation. The best computers for that are Apples. Apple is the preferred computer for art and animation professionals. So, as her graduation present, we hope to buy here an Apple laptop. If that happens, I will use her big HP laptop, my wife will get this one, and my son Ian, the autistic one, will get the little Pavilion to use. If he beats it up, as he does with most of his electronics, so what?If it brings him pleasure, that’s fine with me, and heck, he might even learn to do more than play DVDs and audio CDs on it. He might even improve his language skills we can teach him to use it properly. That is the challenge that we will work on between now and then.

Since the political situation in this country is entering a period of transition with the change in administration, I am going to hold off commenting on politics for awhile, and, instead, I am going to sort of reminisce a bit as a way of making social commentary. Besides, with all the ugly crap in politics these last few months, I’ve gotten a bad taste in my mouth just talking about it. So, consider my reminiscing a sort of intellectual mouthwash for us all.

I was going through my music collection the other day playing some of my favorites – Led Zeppelin, Jackson Browne, Neil Young and Van Morrison.  These are some of the people whose music has shaped who I am. I’ve been listening to them for about forty years or more. What’s really amazing to me is that, with the exception of Lennon who has been dead for years, they are all still performing! Robert Plant and Jackson Browne were born the same year I was (1948)’; Young and Morrison are three years older than that. Us old geezers can still rock!

The reason that I find the fact that these guys, as well as many others of that generation, and myself are still rockin’ – in more ways than just musically, is that forty years ago, when we were in our twenties, we used to say, “Never trust anyone over 30.” And now we are all twice that! Totally blows me away!

I can remember back to the early days of rock’n'roll. I was still in elementary school. Adults like our parents said rock would not last, that it was just a passing phase, like bobby sox or poodle skirts. Well, it’s now been more than fifty years since the earliest rock music first hit the scene and, although it has gone through many changes and comes in many flavors, rock is still the musical accompaniment to our lives, and to the lives of our children and grandchildren. I think that 200 hundred years from now,  lot of the people like those I listed above will be talked about in the same breath with Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky and other classical composers. After all, weren’t these classical geniuses the rock stars of their generations? And the rebels?

my kids like a lot of the same music I do. My daughter for example, is a big Zeppelin fan, and all my kids, even my autistic son, love Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But they also like a lot of the newer groups, some of who, I an barely tolerate. But, unless the group condones sexism, racism, satanism, or other generally accepted forms of evil, I do not criticize my kids choices, even though I think some of these groups are musically challenged. I remember my own parents’ reactions to my taste in music and I try not be a hypocrite. I wish more of my generation would follow that rule.

Two of my kids are teenagers and the youngest will be one this time next year. As far as I know, their generation does not subscribe to the notion not to trust anyone over 30. That’s a good thing. We do not need the same sort of generation gap that existed in the late 1960s. The world is a much more dangerous place now then it was then, and our teenagers need to be able to trust at least some adults. We who grew up as rock’n'roll kids need to make sure we keep the faith so that we can be there for the teenagers of today when they need help and guidance.

And it is the shared bond of our mutual love of rock’n'roll that can serve as the catalyst for building relationships of trust with our kids and grandkids. Fr from being the devil’s music, rock is the music that can create love and trust between generations. As Chuck Berry said nearly fifty years ago, “Hail! Hail, rock’n'roll!”

Those of you who follow my rants and raves here know that I am a big football fan, especially college football, and you are probably guessing that this post is about the National Championship game tomorrow evening between the University of Florida and the University of Oklahoma. You’re right. It is about that game but not in the sense you might think.

I could care less about who wins and ends up ranked number one. Personally,  think the whole ranking system is tainted and we need a football playoff system like the one we have for college basketball, but that discussion i for another post. What I want to talk about today is the request by am Republican member of the House of Representatives, a branch of the US Congress,to delay legislative votes set for tomorrow and Friday, so that he and his fellow Congressmen from Florida and Oklanoma can attend the game.

Personally, I find that request quite disturbing. It appears that the football games is more important to this man than the business of running this country. If I were  voter in Florida, I would ask for a recall vote to remove this idiot from office and replace himwith someone who has his priorities straight. It is no wonder that we are in the mess we are in if our Congressmen think that a football game should take precedence over their dutires as Congressmen. I he is that obsessed with football, he needs to find a job that will allow him to indulge that passion and leave governing this country to people who understand that the business of running this country, especially in a time of economic crisis, us much more important than any sporting event.

To read the news article about this lown, click here.

On a more personal note, I want to explain my extended absence. It turns out that I havebeen fighting a battle with bronchitis the last month or so. I finally broke down right before New Year’s and went to see my doctor about it. I spemt tje ;ast weel pn amtibiotics and getting lots of rest. I am feeling better and, hopefully, have finally won the battle with bronchitis.

On Monday of this week, I spent the morning in the endoscopy lab at our local hospiral having a colonoscopy. Given that I had to maintain a clear liquid diet all day Sunday into Monday, and then ease back into a solid diet, I have been somewhat drained the past couple of days. I just have not had the energy to do much of anything the past two weeks.

I will get the result of the colonoscopy tomorrow afternoon The doctor’arly comments were that things looked pretty good in general, although there was ome polyp which they removed and are doing a biopsy on it. I’m not sure if the results ill be ready by tomorrow. The impression I ogt was those results would come in the mail in a couple of weeks. We’ll see. In an case, I will keep you all informed.

What follow is a quote from an email I got from friend of mine who got it from a friend of his who got it form a friend… You know how this works, right? Any, I’ve removed the names to protect the guilty.

The follow-on is a funny and true story shared with me by [name removed] who teaches Government at [name removed] High School . In one of [his] classes, they were discussing the qualifications to be president of the United States . It was pretty simple:

The candidate must be a natural born citizen of at least 35 years of age.

However, one girl in the class immediately started in on how unfair was the requirement to be a natural born citizen. In short, her opinion was this requirement prevented many capable individuals from becoming president.

[The teacher] and the class were just taking it in and letting her rant, but everyone’s jaw hit the floor when she wrapped up her argument by stating, “What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified to lead this country than one born by c-section?!”

And someday she’ll vote!

This story is both very funny and very sad at the same time. As humor of the “dumb blonde” genre, it is pretty funny, but as a commentary on the educational system in this country. Most states require every high school student to take a government class in either their freshman or sophomore year. This is where they are supposed to learn how to be good responsible citizens of this country. And this is where they would learn the difference between a natural-born and a naturalized citizen. It appears that the teacher who shared this story failed at least one of his students in not making sure all of them understood the difference.

This story raises a very serious and extremely important question: how can we expect to have an informed electorate, one that understands the issues facing this country and each candidate’s position on those issues when our public education system is failing to make sure that it meets its resoinsibilities to the students of this country? If you spend any time reading some of the social sites on the Internet, you will know just how unimformed and misinformed young Americans are on the issues. The poor girl who is the butt of this joke is far from alone in her lack of knowledge.

My advice to this teacher is not to share this joke as a means of poking fun at this poor girl, but rather use it as an example of the failure of the American public educational system, and perhaps of his own failures as a teacher. It’s because we have too many voters like this girl that we end up electing people like George Bush. And why so many of us believe everything we read on the Internet, no matter how ludicrous it really is.

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House’s electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

Bush e-mails may be secret a bit longer

That is what George Orwell called Doublespeak.Translated it means that George Busn and/or his cronies want to keep certain curcial and obviously damning information out of the hands of people who might want to prosecute Bush administration officials for their misdeeds during the eight years of the Bush administration. Anytime anyoe wantts to deny public access to computer records, they always claim there are technical issues, What they mean is they need more time to clean the digital trail.

This is the Bush version of the Nicon Watergate tapes. Just as we, the Americn people, will never know the whole truth of Nixon.s involvement in the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, so we will never know how much Bush knew about the truth of the intelligence community misrepresentations of the situtation in Iraq or the torture of Iraqi prisoners or any of the other things Bush is sorry for now that he is leaving office. Personally, I doubt heis sorry about anything, including the economic crisis we are in now.

Speaking of that crisis, there are some in the conservative camp who want to blame the economic down turn on the shift in the balance of power in Confress two years ago. To me, that is ludicrous. You do not create an economic depression of the scale we are seeing now in only two years. The economy was in very strong shape in 2001 when Bush took office. We even had a budget surplus that was acheived by the Clinton Administration after the first Bush administration had handed the American people a record deficit. Like faither, like son, I guess. And for all the conservative talk abot strong fiscal responsibilities and a balanced budget, how come it is the Republicans that put us into debt up to our necks and the Democrats who bail us out? Hopefully the Obama Administration will follow in the footsteps of the FDR and Clinton administrations and get us back on track.

Anyway, back to what is Bush trying to hide. I think its time to rewrite the rules regarding executive privilege and immunity. The curent laws remove any real personal respnsibility for the man in office. I understand all the rhetoric about how these rules are designed to not tie the hands of a President while he is in office, but we’re seeing way too much abuse of the office because of these privileges and immunities. A President needs to be held personally responsible, in the full legal sense, for any abuses and mismanagement under his watch. Maybe then we will put an end to blank spots in the Presidential archives.

After all, the President should be, and tecgnically he is, supposed to make a full accounting to the American people of everything he does while in office. The President is an employee of the American people and just like any employee, he must be accountable to his employer for his actions while employed by that employer. Even a corporate board of directors is responsible to the shareholders of the company and can be held legally responsible for any malfeasance while in office, so is the President of the United States accountable to the shareholders of the United States, the American people who eleted him. That accountability should inclunde the potential for criminial prosecution after he leaves office. And that should include all administration staff hired by the President. Maybe the idea of spending their retirement in prison will put the fear of the Lord into the politicians who think  they are above the law. Maybe then we will get government officials who put the American people first.

This will be my last post before Christmas. I am taking the next few days off, after I do one more pos on The Threshing Floor, to spend time with my wife and children to celebrate Christmas. So let me wish you all a very merry Christmas or whatever holidsy you celebrate this time of year. May your holiday bee filled with love, family and good cheer. Until next week, peace.

A week from tonight is Christmas Eve, the night Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ at least perfunctorily anyway. For most of the children of the world, it is the night that Santa Claus comes and rewards them for their good behavior.

However, this year will be a lot different than most of those kids, especially in the USA, are accustomed to. The dire straits of the economy will make it hard for many parents, myself included, to do much in the way of providing Christmas presents for our children, and that is very painful. When I was much younger, growing  up as an immigrant kid outside of Philadelphia, I remember a lot of Christmases where times were tough.

To this day, I remember our first Christmas in America in 1952. I was four and we had just moved to Philadelphia from a chicken farm in New Jersey. I wonder if there are still chicken farms in New Jessey. Working on that farm was the first job my Dad had in this country. We moved to Philadelphia because my Dad had gotten a better job working in a mattress factory.

Times were tough for us. All my brother and I got for Christmas that year was a giant size Hershey bar and one toy each. I got a hook-and ladder fire truck. I did not gt much in the way of presents, but I was as happy as any four-year-old could be. I was loved. The house smelled of my mother baking Christmas cookies and stollen, a German sweet yeast bread with raisins and candied fruit. I don’t remember what we had for dinner, though. Besides, I was more interested in the cookies and the stollen!

My wife, who is German and Polish by descent, and the granddaughter of immigrants, is taking next week off from work as her annual vacation. She is going to do the same things for our kids that our mothers did for us: bake cookies and stollen, so our kids will have an old=fashioned German Christmas, complete with roast boar- ham. We don’r have much money for Christmas presents this year, probably something along the lines of when I was four/ But our kids will know the true Christmas spirit. And that is what really matters. Whether you celebrate the holiday as a Christian or something else, Christmas is about love and family above all else.

It has been extremely cold here and we’ve had sleet and freezing rain for the last few days. Not much, just enough to create hazardous driving conditions on the rural mountain roads around here, and so, I’ve been up early every morning listening to the radio for school closings. The kids have not had school yet this week.

As I was listening to the local radio station’s broadcast of the ABC national news at 5 AM yesterday, they did a short piece on the problems of parents faced with the economic realities and Christmas fantasies of their kids. They had some head shrinker on, talking about how it was okay to tell your kids that the economic crisis is also affecting Santa Claus and that means less this year under the tree.

I though t that was pretty cool, until the last sentence. I can’t remember if it was the shrink or the broadcaster who mentioned it, but it seems that a lot of parents are seeing shrinks about this problem I have two things to say about that:

First, these are probably people in the more up-scale economic brackets, not working class or poor people. Seeing a shrink is something that is generally reserved for the more fortunate. As far as their woes about presents for their kids go, well, welcome to my world.

Secondly, instead of spending hundreds pf dollars to see a shrink, spend the money on your kids. Who’s more important in your life anyway – your shrink or your kinds?

I think there is a lesson for us all this Christmas. Christmas is not about conspicuous consumption. It’s not about shopping till you drop. It;s not about giving your children everything material they want. It’s about showing them the true meaning of the holiday. The fundamentalist Christians call it “putting Christ back in Christmas,” but the holiday and the reasons for it are far, far older than Christianity, going back to the ancient Egyptians and probably even further. The holiday is about love, hope and the return of the Light, no matter what name you use for that Light.

The blessings of the season and of the Light to you all.

Everybody and their uncles seems to have a solution for the global economic crisis. There are literally as many roads to recovery as there are politicians. All of these roads have one thing in common, whether the road is a liberal solution or a conservative one. They all are too simplistic.

A case in point: Fred Thompson, a Republican Presidential-wannabe, who appears to be gearing up for a run at the nomination in 2012 already, offers his solution in a very interesting sound bite here. But that is all it really is. Just a good media piece, bot a real plan for recovery,although he does make one very good point.

Thompson says that the problem is that this country, both the administration and the populace as a whole, has been living high on the hog using borrowed money and we have been doing that for quite some time. I certainly agree with that. 100 per cent.

Thompson goes on to say that the liberal solution to the economic crisis is more spending of money we don’t have. He says the purpose of any proposed economic stimulus package is to encourage us to spend, spend, spend. The implication here is that this spending will be more or less on frivolities – more conspicuous consumption. That may be true if you are in the same economic bracket as Fred, but for most working class Americans, those stimulus checks will help get the mortgage caught yup, pay the utility bills, buy new clothes or the kids, or, if we have been lucky, allow us to save some of it for an emergency – if there is anything more of an emergency than our present economic situation.

Contrary to Thompson’s simplistic analysis, money will have to be spent to create new jobs, and not just the hole-digging and hole-filling ones Thompson talks about. If need be, we should revive the WPA, the federal agency that put people back to work during the Great Depression.There are a lot of roads, bridges, public buildings, national parks, etc. that need repair and/or replacement. The point that Thompson misses is that people cannot save or spend if they have no regular paychecks.

Thompson touches very briefly on the mismanagement rampant in corporate America, the mismanagement that we, the American taxpayers are now footing the bill for with the financial markets bailout and the pending auto makers bailout. The root cause of this mismanagement is not the incompetence of these corporate executives, although that is a significant factor, but rather the rampant greed and conspicuous consumerism that is endemic in American culture. That, coupled with the planned obsolescence that is inherent in almost every American-made product you buy,everything from the cars built by the Big Three to Microsoft’s software.

We, the American consumer, are sold products that have a life span of, maybe, five years. A five-year old Ford or Chevy is ready for the scrap heap and replacement, unless you want to have it in the shop for a complete overhaul. Unlike the Japanese and European car makes, we do not build cars that last for ten years or more. There’s no profit in that. And no profits means unhappy investors. And unhappy investors means the directors and executives get the ax. And since it is the directors and the executives who make the decisions, they will make decisions that will guarantee they keep their jobs.

Instead of focusing on planned obsolescence to make profits, the car makers, to continue with our example, need to focus on building better and more efficient cars, cars that will make people want to replace their old one, not have to replace it because they have to. That would lead to profits. maybe not as high as the current system, but profits nonetheless.

It is the emphasis on profits, obscene profits in some cases, that is the root of our economic crisis. Corporate America has become obsessed with profits above all else. We used to pride ourselves on the quality of American products.Not any more. In fact, most American products are not even made in America anymore. They may be assembled in America, but the parts come from somewhere else. And the reason for that is these parts are cheaper than American-made parts. Cheaper parts means more profits to satisfy investors.

The original purpose for the investment industry was to provide working capital for manufacturing, to develop new and better products, to provide more jobs. Now, this investment capital is used to provide insane corporate salaries, ridiculous executive bonuses and perks, and to line the pockets of investment bankers. Millions and millions of people have turned to investing in the stock markets as a way to build wealth for themselves. But the only ones who will get rich and stay rich, as the current economy makes very clear, are the corporate fat cats.

No, Fred, saving is not the answer,not the whole answer. A shift in focus in America from conspicuous consumerism and the spending money we don’t have that accompanies it, is a good start. but, until we put some serious limits on things like corporate executive compensation, tighten credit, and, most importantly, put some serious curbs on speculation in the financial markets, this economic crisis will only continue, not recover. Unless the American people are willing to make and demand some fundamental changes in our economic policies, we will have to put up with all the voodoo economics of politicians like Fred Thompson and all the rest of the political witch doctors.

I wish I had heard about this protest, scheduled for tomorrow, a bit earlier so I could have helped spread the word sooner, but late is better than never. A gay couple from West Hollywood is calling for gays and gay rights supporters, like me, to take the day off from work tomorrow to protest referenda in California, Florida and Arizona banning same-sex marriage. These referenda were passed in the aftermath of the California Supreme Court decision last year that declared laws banning same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. The supporters of same-sex marriage now want, and this is the proper way to deal with this issue, federal legislation protecting the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

Contrary to what the religious fundamentalists may say, marriage is first and foremost a legal social contract that provides certain legal responsibilities and privileges to the married couple. It is not a religious arrangement unless the couple decide to make it such and there is a religious ceremony in addition to or in lieu of the civil ceremony. My wife and I were married in the Cook County court house in 199. We would have liked a church wedding, but there were issues back then that made a church wedding impractical. We are planning our church wedding for out twentieth anniversary in 2011.

Does that mean we feel we are less married than, say, someone who was married in St. Peter’s Basilica performed by the Pope himself, or married in Westminster Abbey in London by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or married in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC by the late Billy Graham? Not really and we certainly have not been denied any legal marital rights because the Roman Catholic church, my wife’s childhood religious affiliation, does not recognize our marriage because I have been divorced and therefore, considers our three children to be bastards. This is from a religious institution with a history of clerical pedophilia and institutional cover-ups of that history. Guess what I think about their opinion of my marriage!

Marriage, in the civilized world at least, is, as I said above, a legal contract that can be entered into by two people irregardless of religious affiliation or sanction. A legal marriage in one state here in the US is, to the best if my knowledge, recognized as valid in every other state of the Union. a legal marriage in the US is also, as far as I know, recognized in every country in the world. Toy do not even have to be a citizen of the US to get married in the US as long as you meet the required residency rules. Yet we are depriving citizens of this country the right to enter into a legal contract because some people’s religious sensibilities are offended. Are we going to then refuse Muslims living in the US the right to get married because Islam offends some people’s religious sensibilities? Do we not allow homosexuals to get a mortgage to buy a house? That is a legal contract analogous to a marriage contract, but nobody refuses to take the money of a homosexual homeowner. But they cannot get married. What a crock of….!

Contracts are governed by federal law. Marriage is a contract. Therefore they fall under federal law governing contracts and discrimination laws that govern contracts. That should be enough legal grounds to declare any state ban on same-sex marriage as a violation of the US Constitution, but apparently it is not.

So let’s get the necessary federal legislation passed – the Civil Rights Act of 2009 – that makes it very clear that marriage is a civil contract that can be entered into by any two consenting adults living in this country, irregardless of race, creed, color, religious affiliation, ethnicity, sexual preferences, gender, body type, fashion preferences, or whatever else the lawyers need to put in there that tells the fundamentalist and the states rightists that contracts, including marriage, are civil contracts governed by federal law and that no state has the right to deprive an American citizen or legal resident of the ability to enter into any contract willingly, even marriage.

Contrary to what the fundamentalists preach, this country’s official religion is freedom of religion. That means freedom from the tyranny of any religion, even Christianity. We are so fond of talking about our Pilgrim fathers, Well, those founders of one of the first white settlements here in the USA came here to get away from the tyranny of a state religion. The Founding Fathers, when they drafter the Constitution, remembered that and put in an iron-clad guarantee to keep us free from religious tyranny for as long as this country exists. The fundamentalist want to trample that guarantee, and the Constitution with it, under the feet of their misguided conception of God.

The recent federal election was a major political defeat for the fundamentalists. Let’s keep the ball rolling by enacting the necessary legislation to make the spirit of the law into the letter of the law, so no one misunderstands or misinterprets it again. Let’s enact the necessary federal legislation to make sure every American, even those we do not necessarily approve of, has ALL the legal rights of every other American.

“You got bailed out. We got sold out.”

That, according to this story from MSNBC, is one of the rallying cries of 200 fired workers at the Republic Window and Door Company in Chicagoan have staged a sit-in at the factory where they used to work.  It seems that these people lost their jobs because of the financial markets crisis when Bank of American, according to a company spokesperson, cut off the company’s financing.  The employees were fired with little notice, no severance pay and they did not receive payment for accrued vacation time. Bank of American, who received a substantial payment from the recent government bailout, has said it has no responsibilities for money that Republic owes the fired employees.  the Illinois Attorney General is investigating the situation.

Ht is a brief summary of the facts of this potentially historic workers’ demonstration. What makes this event so newsworthy is that it is attracting a lot of national attention, including that of President-elect Batack Obama. I’m not all that surprised that Obama has publicly stated that these workers are “absolutely correct” in demanding the monies owed them, because this sit-in has the full support of the union these workers belong to, and union support had a lot to do with Obama winning industrial states like Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The fact that this labor action has the support of the Rev. Jesse Jackson comes as no surprise either. Jackson is a long0time supporter of worker rights.

What I find most intriguing about this is that it happened at all. It has  been a long time since workers, especially union workers, have done anything quite so radical and, dare I use the word, so socialist in this country. Organized labor has been one of the bulwarks of blue-collar conservatism for quite a few decades. To see union workers again really standing up for workers’ rights and actually being applauded for it is heart-warming and awe-inspiring for someone like me who is a long-time supporter of the spirit of the labor movement.

I;ve belonged to several major labor unions in my time: the Teamsters, the Steelworkers, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Back in the 1970s as a member of AFSCME, I was involved in a wildcat strike by state unemployment compensation workers over the firing of several union members that nearly shut down the unemployment offices citywide in Chicago. The state ultimately gave in and reinstated those employees as well as all those who walked the picket lines, bu by then many of us had found other jobs, although we did man the picket lines as much as possible.

While that strike started out as an illegal one, it did gain a lot of support from, not only AFSCME, but other unions, many of whom refused to cross the picket lines. That was one of the major factors leading to the concessions made by the state.

In this most recent action in Chicago, one anecdote about a young man, not one of the fired employees, who came by the factory to see what was going on, and then came back the next day with lots of prepared food for the demonstrators, struck me as quite telling. The young man said he wanted to help because his grandfather was a member of that union.

Such a show of worker solidarity is, for me at least, a hopeful sign. I hope that as this sit-in continues, it will gain support from other members and supporters of the labor movement. What happened to these 200 hard-working members of the working class in the USA could happen to many more working people. If companies are allowed to trample on employees the way Republic has then this country will never recover from our current economic crisis.

Fortunately, it appears our next President understands that, unlike the man currently in the White House and the current Congress, who both seem to think the road to recovery is paved with government bailouts of bloated and mismanaged corporations. The current administration and Congress seem to have forgotten that it is the workers, not the investors, that are the truly productive members of our society. The fruits of their labor is what makes the profits of the investors possible, bot the other way around.

Here are some things that our limping lame-duck soon to be ex-President has to say about his policies and actions during the last eight years. I’ve added my own sound bites to what Dubya the Dumb has to say. Hope you enjoy the quaking.

U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday urged Congress to help those ailing automakers that can survive and said the jump in unemployment last month reflected the fact that the U.S. economy was in a recession.

“Today’s job data reflects the fact that our economy is in a recession,” Bush told reporters after the government reported the highest jump in monthly job losses in 34 years. It was the first time Bush has publicly acknowledged that the economy had fallen into a recession.

“We’re working to stabilize the markets and make credit more affordable and available,” he said, adding that some thawing had occurred in the credit markets. There is “still more work to do, but there are some encouraging signs,” he said.

Bush urges Congress to help automakers

Of course, Bush wants US taxpayers to bail out Detroit’s Big Three. Bush is clueless when it comes to spotting mismanagement. Arte all, look at the wonderful job he’s done these past eight years managing this country.

President George W. Bush expressed remorse that the global financial crisis has cost jobs and harmed retirement accounts and said he’ll back more government intervention if needed to ease the recession.

“I’m sorry it’s happening, of course,” Bush said in a wide-ranging interview with ABC’s “World News,” which was airing Monday. “Obviously I don’t like the idea of people losing jobs, or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system. I mean, we’re in. And if we need to be in more, we will.”

Bush sorry economic crisis has cut jobs, 401 (k)s

That’s very nice, George. I just have one question for you: Where’s out bailout? Or do you not think that the working people of this country are worth saving? Or are you so stupid that you think that by saving the fat cats they would in turn see to it that the working people of this country would be provided for? The only way those fat cats do anything to help working people is if the government makes them do it. Their priority is keeping their investors happy, not their employees and their customers.

That’s what’s wrong with the American economy. We’ve gotten away from putting the customer, who may very well be a customer as well, first. Instead, we’ve put stock prices and dividends before the customer, the working people of this country. The markets, which Bush was so eager to bailout, are not the people, and most definitely not the working people, of this country. They are not even real capitalism, but only the illusion of capitalism.

This last one is my favorite:

George Bush, the US president, has said that he came to office “unprepared for war” and that his “biggest regret” is his country’s “intelligence failure” on Iraq.

In an interview with ABC television’s “World News Tonight”, Bush also said he was “sorry” that the global economic meltdown was taking place and predicted that he would leave office on January 20 with his “head held high”.

Bush regrets Iraq war intelligence

He was referring to the reports of weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly being manufactured an stockpiled by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Those weapons never materialized. so, it appears our reasons for invading Iraq were spurious and 4,000 plus American soldiers and who knows how many Iraqi civilians died because George Bush, due to a lack of intelligence, both in the sense of information and the sense of mental capabilities, blundered precipitously into s war for which he was totally unprepared. In other words, George Bush, by his own admission eight years after the fact, was unqualified to be President of the United States.

I totally agree that he was unprepared, no only in the ways mentioned above, but also he had then, and still does, a serious lack of maturity, of wisdom, of the ability to make good decisions, and a very naive understanding of morality, not to mention a serious lack of understanding of both world and American history. He also was a very poor judge of other people, as exhibited in his choice of advisers. Had he made better choices in his advisers, he might have had better information and more intelligent advice on both Iraq and the economy.

He may very well leave office with his head held high because he is too stupid and insensitive to realize that it was his errors as President that have made the mess this country is in now. As Harry Truman said some sixty years ago, “The buck stops here.” And that, Mr. Bush means, in case you don’t have the necessary intelligence, responsibility for this country ultimately rests with the person in the Oval Office. For good or bad, what happens on your watch is your responsibility.

The fact that you are sorry for the mess is totally unacceptable. For once in your life, be a mature, responsible person and stand up and admit that you messed up. Fortunately, it is too late to impeach you for your ineptitude and incompetence. Chances are you will avoid any kind of legal repercussions. The only judge you will have to face, other than the one on Judgment Day, is the one whose lessons you ignored, whether out of ignorance or arrogance, I don’t know. That judge is history, and I suspect history will judge you quite harshly.