To Vote or Not

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Genevieve

We have all been taught that as citizens of this fair democracy, we are obligated to vote. It is our duty to do so. Furthermore we have been taught that not voting would be an insult to those many fair women who fought so hard to ensure that the right to vote would not be restricted by race or sex. They won that battle in 1920. But, over the years since then, we have all lost. The problem is, we sat back on our laurels, expecting that the world’s ills would soon heal, as women would not tend to vote for wars and unjust taxes and such things. If our great grandmothers, who went home to justly celebrate their victory of winning the vote, were to come back and see the political situation as it exists in the United States today, they would be utterly appalled.

Since the early 1900s, the ability of voters to affect public policy has diminished to the point of absurdity. The candidates running for national office all kowtow to the dictates of Israel and the major corporations. For us, the 99% of the population and presumably the people who voted them into office, they have only disdain.

In today’s twisted world, voting is merely placing our stamp of approval on the business of government running as usual. The people holding public office on the national are the power brokers of the major corporations, and their concerns are for the interests of those corporations.

Our constitution began to lose its clout as early as the mid 1860s, when that war, was fought to determine whether a class of people should be considered property or whether they should be considered citizens. However, the right to be considered citizens was taken away from all of us in the late 1900s, when the Supreme Court granted corporations the status of personhood, leaving the rest of us merely animals. Again in 1963, the needs of the population of these United States were shoved under the rug, when Israel established, and our congress permitted it, the most powerful lobby in Washington – AIPAC, in order to bribe/influence congressmen to vote in Israel’s favor, at the expense of the needs of the American people. It was then that our Constitution stopped meaning anything – at least where people are concerned. People in this country who openly claim they have rights under the Constitution are now considered to be terrorists. So, obviously, adding more clauses and addendums to this document, in hope of alleviating the situation for real people in this country, would be meaningless. Those clauses would only be applied to the multinational corporations.

I feel sorry for those students who have staked their futures on the Occupy movement, who would believe that adding another law, another clause to the once meaningful document that our Constitution is, would be applied to anything except the corporations.

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Book Review

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Genevieve

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown; GP Putnam & Sons – 2011

Eleanor brown will have a following of enthusiastic readers, if she is able to sustain the momentum she started with her first published book.

She evokes a world that may or may not be very distant from the world in which she grew up. The father is described as being obsessively literate — a Shakespearean scholar who speaks primarily in lines from those beloved plays. When he is upset in any way, he uses such lines exclusively, and his wife and three daughters are left having to decipher what it is he is saying or writing, as his letters are often photocopies of pages from his favorite version of Shakespear — photocopies with lines and phrases highlighted and annotated, in order to make his meaning clear to anyone who understands his code.

As infants, lines from the Bard’s plays were among the first things his children heard. As they grew, the three girls were able to quote them nearly as easily as their father could.

Their mother is highly literate. She loves to read and garden and cook. But mostly she loves to read. She becomes absorbed in whatever book she is reading, and forgets that anything else exists, including dinner, merrily scorching on the stove. The girls grow up understanding that they cannot go anywhere — whether to a pub or a party, without bringing a good novel with them to while away the time. For them, life is full of time that is best spent reading. Eleanor Brown knows how to turn a phrase so well I get the impression that she spent many years of her life happily buried in books, much as her characters she describes so well.

The plot does not bear analysis. Three adult sister come back home, ostensibly to help take care of their mother, who is ill with cancer. In reality, they came home to lick their wounds, as the dreams they’d had for the way they should live their lives did not work out. Ultimately — within the year in fact — they do find careers that compliment their skills and talents, as well as the love of a good man — one for each of them.

But, as any lover of Shakespeare knows, it isn’t the plot that carries the story, it’s how that story is told. Are the characters so well developed that the readers can identify with each of them? The author’s insights on the lives women in our society are beautiful, expressed so as to leave you thinking. And that is the mark of good literature. It is essentially a feel-good story, wittily told and with enough insight into the human condition to leave her readers feeling satisfied.

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Let Us Occupy

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Genevieve

The Occupy movement has spread nearly all across the country. Our young and idealistic see that something drastic has to change if we want American society, as we have been taught to cherish it, to survive another generation. They gathered together and camped out in the government and banking centers in most of the major cities across the country. In many cities, they are still there, even after strong-arm tactics from our police. People are joining them as they see that this is the way, if there is to be a battle between the common man and the major corporations, that such a battle will begin.

These kids may or may not be as sophisticated as the generation from the 1960s, my generation. We espoused the message, among many others, Turn on, tune in, drop out, as our way to fight the onslaught of the major corporation. Sure,. Psychedelics were part of that message, but turn on also meant; open your mind and spirit to the things that really matter.

Many people would say that these kids now, with their minor civil disobedience are far more innocent than we were then. We at least had the savvy to realize that there is no such thing as dialogue with a major corporation. Yet, that is precisely what this generation is asking for. They toss ideas for more laws and amendments to the constitution back and forth across the internet and in response, the upper so-called one percent laughs at them. You see, we have excellent laws, intended to reign in corporate greed, already on the books, but they are unenforceable. Our Constitution is a marvelous document. Some of the most discerning intellects of the 1780s hashed through all they understood of government, to create a plan that, if implemented, would be fair to most of the people living in the colonies, and would keep corporations out of the government. The document was not perfect. It ignored the status of the indigenous people who had been living on this continent for countless generations, and it kept another race of people in perpetual bondage. The one thing that document was truly intended to accomplish — and I reiterate — was to keep corporations out of the government. For a few years, the founders of this country succeeded at keeping their government free of corporate control.

Since then, our constitution has been trampled and twisted so many times by our governing officials that it is meaningless. That revered document now represents corporations and only corporations — ever since they were granted the status of person-hood and their money was granted the status of free speech. Our supposed elected officials have been bought several times over by the Israeli lobby. But first of all, they are key executives of the major corporations and they have plans in place to initiate a police state in this country.

I have been watching the news of the Occupy Movement, alternately cheering and weeping. Those kids have no idea of the fight that lies ahead, and when they claim that dialogue is what they are after, dialogue with the money junkies who really do not care who lives or dies, and would like to see large portions of the world’s population be systematically killed off — their innocence may be their death if they truly believe that dialogue will get anywhere. Though I suppose that is the way we must begin.

People accuse these youngsters of being anarchists. We forget that it was thanks to the likes of Emma Goldman, who was among Anarchy’s stoutest defenders, we did have a strong middle class for a few decades. Now, our middle class is dying. Our middle class is purposely being destroyed by those who have been dubbed Money Junkies It is not the fault of the workers who are struggling to earn a livelihood, that their jobs are being sent overseas by the thousands every month. Our corporate heads no longer want jobs that pay a living wage to exist in this country, as such jobs would promote a strong middle class, and a strong middle class would be able to fight back.
People toss around labels like Socialist, Communist, Anarchist, Fascist, Democracy, and others; forgetting that any form of government may be a good one, as long as its leaders are ruled by a social conscience. Once its leaders lose that sense of duty to the populations they serve, the government slides into being totalitarian, no matter how high its ideals were when it began, or which system its officials claim to follow.

We live with a government that cannot be fixed, certainly not with a little bit of dialogue. With dialogue, we wind up talking solely to each other — singing to the choir, so to speak. The ballot box won’t help either, as that was corrupted a long time ago. Dead people in this country have been marched from out of the cemeteries so they could vote, every year since the late 1800s. Now they are being brought out in force. No one expects them to prove that they are alive when they arrive at the polls. And everyone knows the problems we have had with electronic voting machines across the country. These machines are programmed to yield the vote that the corporations that had them manufactured want; not the vote the people thought they were punching into them. Our votes are being accidentally, or purposely lost, depending on who you believe. Votes are being counted in secret locations, and people are routinely denied the right to run for office, because the corporate world does not like them. Voting has become merely a sop — something to appease the masses, to make them believe their voices really do count. As Emma Goldman put it so succinctly back in the early years of the Twentieth Century, “If voting really changed anything, they would make it illegal.” Today that is even more true than it was when she first said it. We cannot fix it with attempts to confront our congressmen with our letters and petitions, as our congressmen are paid well by the corporations they work for, as CEOs and CFOs and lawyers so that they will ignore those things.

No, the only way to fix what we have is to begin again with something fresh. And that will mean a tremendous world-wide struggle that will unfortunately have to go far beyond the bounds of mere civil disobedience. Though what is happening now may be the best way to get people involved and thinking.

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A Grammar Rant

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Genevieve

I grump and growl about the poor quality of education in the United States today. People who claim they have Masters degrees in any number of subjects are apparently unable to write simple sentences. It really isn’t their fault, and you the reader obviously do not fit within that category. Those people did what they had to in order to get through school, as there was little time or motivation to do anything else. And, unfortunately, they never had to learn the basics of written communication. These people prove how little they understand how the English language works, in nearly everything they write for the internet.

People in Mexico and Latin America tend to speak standard Spanish. People in Italy tend to speak and write a good, standard Italian. People in English speak a brand of English that is becoming another language, because what we speak in the US is deteriorating so rapidly.

I would advise Strunk and White’s little grammar on some of the finer points of English usage. However on re-reading it, I am not as impressed with it as I was several years ago, when I first discovered that classic. Perhaps a better guide to advise would be Eats Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. Ostensibly her book is about good punctuation. You cannot have meaningful punctuation, if you do not understand how English is constructed. Granted her point of view is Britoish, however she takes most of the differences between British and American punctuation into account and she describes clearly and with humor what works well and what does not. Believe me, punctuation is an important part of grammar and written usage. As Lynne Truss clarifies the use of commas and semicolons, she aptly describes the basics of English grammar.

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Being Jewish – And Loving It

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Genevieve

I am Jewish. For me, my faith is both nurturing and stimulating. I study the Five Books of Moses on a critical level. What was the historical context in which those books were written, and what do they say to us today? The old saw that two Jews talking together may easily represent three or more points of view, where religion is concerned, has a grain of truth to it.

However, I cringe whenever I see fundamentalist Christians using verses from the Old Testament in order to justify some fairly inhumane activities. The old saying: Spare the rod, spoil the child, has been used so many times to defend the practice of beating ones children that it has lost all meaning. This phrase originates in Proverbs 13:24, and goes: He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. The thought being that children cannot be permitted to live as the selfish beasts they think they would like to be, as such behavior would only get them into trouble when they eventually leave home and are expected to know how to get along with others. However, as we know, that interpretation of the verse appears to justify child abuse. Passages from the Old Testament also appear to justify keeping slaves, as long as they are not Jewish slaves. The keeping of slaves has been justified by the misuse of the Old Testament for many years. They were used to justify keeping black slaves and they may well be used again for the keeping slaves of other ethnic origins.

I always considered it to be unfortunate that the rabbinical teachings and discourses were dropped from what became known as the Christian faith, in their attempt to be different from the Jews. Now, I hear of rabbis in Tel Avive and Jerusalem justifying the total elimination of the Palestinian people, based on words from the Torah. They are totally ignoring all the teachings and discourses that make the Jewish religion unique and worth studying. I am proud to be Jewish, but I die a little inside whenever I hear of Rabbis telling Jews we should destroy every native inhabitant of the promised land, as well as any reminder of such inhabitants, as those things would presumably be a thorn to the Jewish people, because this is what the Torah says.

How do we as Jews accept the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza and the Middle East, by a country that claims its Jewish origin as the reason for those atrocities? Do we continue to say it is all good, that the Jewish people need a country of their own, and this need justifies the destruction of another nation? I was always taught to believe that two wrongs do not make a right. The first wrong was the Second World War, and all the terrible things that happened as a result of it. The second wrong is taking land from Palestinians who had nothing to do with persecuting Jews, and then demonizing and eliminating those people when they try to defend their homes.

It has been argued that the Knesset is not me, and that I should not take what they do personally. That it is enough that I do not endorse the policies they enact. However, by association they are me. By the fact that they accuse any Jew who does not agree with their policies of hating himself and all other Jews, they claim to be me. No. I love the Jewish religion, and I love being a Jew. The people who advocate such policies do not deserve to be called Jews.

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The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Genevieve

Bruno is a chimpanzee who grows up to be a man. At least, that is what this book purports to be about. This writer sees Benjamin Hale as describing his own experiences trying to be a man, and to quell, or at least come to terms with some of his more primitive instincts.

Chimpanzees in the wild have a far more sophisticated means of communication than most humans give them credit for having. They know how to communicate immanent danger, sorrow over the loss of a loved one, affection for their companions, as well as ostracism due to shame and, last, but never least, desire for sex. I am certain this list has barely brushed the surface of what chimpanzees are able to communicate to each other. With varying results, humans have attempted to teach sign language to these animals. It has been observed that female chimpanzees who have learned sign language in captivity will teach it to their young. But ultimately, either chimpanzees have no interest in philosophy, or their human keepers have no interest in talking with them about it — even when the animals in question are capable of using sign language to express not only what they want, but their emotions as well.

Which brings us back to Bruno Littlemore. The story is a fairytale, or fable on the meaning of what it means to be human. Bruno is described as being a veritable genius for a monkey, and definitely a monkey who wants to be human. He begins his life in a zoo — a rather poorly kept one at that. When he is only a few months old he is pulled out of that environment, away from his family and companions and put into a cold little cage in a laboratory. It is an adventure story — how Bruno learns to talk, to speak English, rising above any physiological speech impairments the monkey may have with amazing rapidity.

Not only does he learn to talk, but he decides he is sexually attracted to human women far more than he is to female chimpanzees. He learns to wear clothes and he learns to keep himself clean and to appreciate fine food. He even learns to read and appreciate poetry and philosophy. And finally, he manages to buy and pay for a nose job, so that he has a real, human-like nose on his face. Towards the end of the book, he loses all his hair. All these things cause the reader to question whether Bruno is a highly developed chimpanzee, or a man who never learned how to control his more destructive impulses. I am inclined to believe the author was expressing problems many men have, attempting to fit their raw emotional drives within the society around them.

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The Box, By Gunter Gras

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Genevieve

Obviously, translations lose much. Nuances of meaning, puns and cultural references are inevitably flushed away when a book is translated from one language to another. The Box was originally written in German. The action is described in a series of disjointed conversations among the children of a rather far-flung family.

The father is described as a well known writer, who has hurtled from one marriage to another, and who has invited all eight of his adult children to gather together in order to record memories of their respective childhoods. I know little of Gunther Gras. Other reviewers have said this book is essentially autobiographical.

The number eight, where the number of his children is concerned, may be strictly metaphorical — a number used to indicate that the author was attempting to integrate countless aspects of his own life. He explains this vast number of children by saying that a few of his wives had brought children into the marriage from former marriages of their own and proceeded to have children with the father. Only two of these children stand out. The rest appear to be props to indicate that a conversation is happening, as it does not appear to matter who is speaking to whom.

No, this man was not a polygamist, he was a serial marrier. Whatever else his wives may have been, they are all described as being strong women. But none of them stand out, in terms of the author’s descriptions, though he claims to have maintained relationships with all his wives, even after he had married the next wife, and the next.

The children describe their father as being a mysterious character who sits in the upstairs room and writes until he cannot take it any more. Then he takes off and inevitably gets together with another woman. He is the catalyst that holds this family together, even as he is tearing it apart. Either that, or he is the god who sits on high and takes note only of what he happens to trip over, or perhaps of those things he appears to be ashamed. As described, the children occurred when he tripped in the wrong direction.

At the center of this story there is Mariechen with her camera from which nothing can hide. She aims her camera at people and places and the pictures that come out of it show them the way they were once upon a time, or the way they could be in the future, but never as they are when they smile at her box. That would be too mundane.

The fantasy of the camera box, from which nothing is hidden, tantalizes us with its literary possibilities, but ultimately it disappoints. The disjointed dialogue making up the bulk of this book describes stories that are equally disjointed, each of them centered around the pictures taken with Mariechen’s trademark camera — one that had amazingly survived the Second World War. The vignettes are like bowls of fruit wafted under the noses of the collective readers. They sniff eagerly, only to discover in each instance that the fruit was merely wax.

Does guilt shine forth in this book or is the author describing incidents from his own life that he would rather forget, as some reviewers have suggested? Regret perhaps. But a flaming guilt? This reader did not see that. This book is the second part of a three part trilogy. Does it stand alone? One could debate whether it stands at all. Perhaps the best that may be said of it is that the story probably works better in the original German.

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Maybe This Time ~ By Jennifer Cruisie

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Genevieve

I used to turn my nose up at those books marked Best Sellers, as they were almost universally not written for intellectuals; and I definitely was not going to consider myself anything less than an intellectual. There are other writers who I believe are better than the best selling authors ever were. Still, just to stay on top of things, I pick up a best selling novel to see what it is about this person’s writing that made her book a best seller.
Jennifer Crusie’s prose moves. Her scenes are described clearly so that her readers can follow and actually see where the action takes place and have a fair idea what most of the main characters look like. It is unfortunate that she introduces so many characters at once that it became confusing who was doing and saying what, especially towards the end of the book as she neared the climax. But then, romantic fluff novels don’t have to be clear about who is doing or saying what.
Alice Miller, the main character in this story, has a way of attracting some of the most ideal men I have ever seen described in romance novels. Her X-husband, with whom she has refused to communicate for ten years, is still very much in love with her. And he is wealthy, and he tries to be a good man by taking care of his extended family. See? Ideal.
Refreshingly, he is not the high maintenance sort of man who must be cared for and protected from the rest of the world, while his woman takes on the role of prince charming and Madam President, making sure everything he needs — and such men in many of those romance novels do need everything — gets done to perfection. No, he is a fine, upstanding, wealthy lawyer, if it is possible to include the words upstanding and lawyer in the same sentence.
However this gentleman is desperate — he wants his lady to do something for him. He has two children living alone in a very much haunted mansion. This is a story line that has been used many times over. Henry James wrote a love satire of this, back in the 1890s.
You won’t find unforgettable character descriptions in Maybe This Time, but you will find an entertaining little story — quick and easy to read. Did this book change my opinion about best selling authors? No.

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Why I Do Not Vote

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Genevieve

I was watching a news flick on the internet, and saw someone carrying a sign around at a protest, which read, Vote Democrat; Spineless is better than evil. He obviously has a great sense of humor. His sign said nearly everything anyone can say about the mess our government has built. I would like to add one more comment to this, also very descriptive of what is happening on capital hill. It was a comment anonymous had written in response to a complaint someone had posted in their blog over the fact that our elected representatives would not listen to anything he had to say. I will here have to paraphrase what anonymous said.

What are you complaining about? All you have to do is get together with a few hundred of your friends, and each of you contribute two thousand dollars — that is the maximum an individual can contribute, isn’t it?— to your congress critter’s election fund, and then he will listen to you. Problem solved. These two snapshot illustrations only begin to show the vast remove our government officials stand from their constituents.

Because of these things and more, I am among those people who have stopped voting, though I am registered to do so. Registering to vote has long been considered a basic right as well as a duty of being a citizen of this country. However, voting is now meaningless — especially on the national level. I have countless better things to do than waist my time with that. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are paid huge sums of money to do the bidding of the large corporations and of Israel. They no longer represent the citizens of this country.

Aipac funding controls who is able to run for office to such an extent that our erstwhile representatives must first make a trip to Israel to convince the Knesset that they will do the bidding of that country. They make a pledge, promising to made certain that they will not in any way undermine Israel’s power.

The only place the people of this country have in that set-up is as a fairly obedient source of tax funding. Therefore, I refuse to vote for something I do not believe in.

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Mark Twain’s Autobiography

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Genevieve

Down through the years a number of versions of Mark Twain’s autobiography have been published, each of them with the caveat that there was a host of archived material that, according to his will and his family’s directive, could not be printed till he had been dead for at least a hundred years. Those of us who grew up seeing Samuel Clemens; aka Mark Twain, as a legendary humorist awaited the publication of those manuscripts — looking forward to some great humor. Some of these people have been let down. They forget that Samuel Clemens was, first of all, a philosopher. They are a treasure trove of the man’s thoughts as well as a glimpse of our history as a country that is well worth studying.

At first blush, this most recent edition, published by the University of California Press; 2010, tossed everything — all his notes on about what it means to be a writer, and what it means for a well known writer to compose an autobiography, into a basket. Then they gently stirred the resulting heaps of essays until they were well mixed and served the resulting mess between a set of hard covers. That is not quite the case, but at first glance, it would appear to be so. Almost from the first time Samuel Clemens sat down to write his autobiography, he realized he would have a very difficult time being truthful about himself.

It is human nature to want the world to think the best of us. Samuel Clemens had achieved the sort of fame during his life that few people living now will be able to achieve. I could here write several paragraphs about how we do not value the arts as we once did, but that is not what this essay is about. Clemens described the various ways he tried to master his internal editor — though he did not call it that. Because of this editor, it is nearly impossible to write about oneself and tell the absolute truth. So, he wrote many essays describing the people around him and what he thought and felt about what they said and did. And as every biographer has discovered, it is impolitic to say negative things about people who are still alive. Candid words make bad relationships.

Samuel Clemens was a man of conscience, the sort of conscience we seldom see celebrated in this world where our governing officials consider lying to their constituents merely something to laugh about, and he was most careful to keep his actions within the bounds of what we consider to be right and honest. He loved honesty when he found it in other people.

He made copious notes on the ins and outs of the political situation of his day, as he was in an excellent position to do so, as he knew at least a few of our presidents personally. At first glance, it would appear that this most recent set of editors simply tossed all of his notes into a basket, now that the old man has been dead for a hundred years, and published it as it stands. It is a marvelous resource for anyone who wants to study the way Samuel Clemens thought.

While there are some lovely and humorous moments in this set of manuscripts, what was most important to Samuel Clemens was expressing his insights on being alive. These manuscripts are like a time-capsule, giving us a window on what it was like to be alive during the late 1800s and early 1900s, and what it means to be a writer in any age.

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Work

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Genevieve

Do we work too hard in the USA? Those of us who have a job work longer hours than do the people in any other first world country. And we get fewer vacations. Long hours raise neither performance nor productivity. Anyone who works every day knows it is easier to concentrate on any one job for short, specified periods of time, than it is to sit at one’s desk, slogging through that job, hour after hour until it is done — only to have another job piled on his shoulders. The old saying goes; A job takes as much time as you give it. When you know that your deadline is short your concentration and creativity tend to go up. However, we sit back and permit ourselves to be exploited in order that corporate heads may keep the cost of labor down and stock holder profits up.

I am in the business of writing for the long haul, so I have experimented with many ways to schedule my writing time. I have done so in order to pace myself, so that I can keep going from one day to the next without getting burned out too quickly. I expect that I will be writing until I am well into my upper seventies, perhaps even my eighties, as long as my mind works. The notion of writing a complete book within a month has no appeal for me at all. I have no desire to knock myself out with one project only to have it be poorly done. Anyone can sit down and write lots of words. Or if not write them, type them into their laptop. It takes perseverance to go back through a manuscript as many times as necessary to make it worth while reading. That is simply a matter of building up a habit. Few people realize that the real work of writing a book only begins once the first draft has been written. Editing and rewriting come next and those things can take far longer to do than simply writing the rough draft took. It is time-consuming, mind-bending work, but it is this work that makes the difference between a piece that merely shows promise of being interesting and a piece that people will enjoy reading.

So what does this have to do with time and work habits? I schedule my time — and I consider myself supremely lucky to be able to do that — so that I work in forty-five minute blocks of time throughout an eight hour day. I make certain that I am concentrating through each forty-five minute stretch, then take a short break and sit back down with the project at hand. By the end of the day, I have completed an impressive amount of work.

Corporate heads, on the other hand, are more interested in getting as much work as they possibly can from their employees, knowing that when one person burns out, there is a tremendous supply of workers to take his place. Our workers have fewer vacations and less paid leave of absences than the workers of any other developed country.

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Bin Laden Has a Fascinating History

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Genevieve

Bin Laden has a fascinating history. The first time the vast majority of us had ever heard his name spoken was on September 11, 2001. On that day he was blamed for the deaths of several thousand people and the destruction of the World Trade Center. We were told. Until we could all repeat the words in our sleep, that it was virtuous to hate him. That he was a Muslim of the worst degree and that Muslims are intrinsically evil. We were very not so very subtly told that Muslims are to blame for all the problems in this world. I think politicians and disgracefully funded corporations are really to blame.

Even though our government’s official reasons for the events of 9/11 were surreal at best as no fire has ever caused towers, which were built as tall and as strong as the World Trade Center buildings were, to collapse so perfectly into their own footprints. People whose job it is to demolish buildings will tell you that it takes great skill to make a tower collapse as perfectly as those three buildings did. It is not something that can be done either by firing a rocket into the side of the building or by starting kerosene fires in every trash-bins in each of the offices contained in such a tower.

Someone with the schematics showing where each steel girder and truss met had to drill into the walls in every room and down every hallway, in order to lay a charge in each junction. We know from past experience that when a tower, such as those of the World Trade Center, catches on fire, the building acts like a chimney, encouraging said fire to last for days. As people across the internet have been saying, if what our government said was true, established norms of physics could not have operated on that day.

Then there was Bin Laden himself — that enigma of a person who, according to at least a few news hounds at the time, may never have existed. I know at least one reporter who did a thorough search and could find no evidence of a person with that name. Up until that day, there was nothing anywhere in the world’s news concerning that man. But on that day the blame was laid at his feet and our government officials began to beat their drums of hate and war. Since then we have learned that Bin Laden was in fact an under-cover operative working for our CIA, in order to undermine the Russian presence in Afghanistan. That was why no one had heard of him before. If he had ever existed, he had been working under cover for our government. There is much evidence that he died soon after the buildings came down. Look up the articles here and here. But our government officials base their careers on how well they can laugh at the truth and even deny that it exists. And as for us sheeple, it is easier to believe what they say than it is to find good ways to fight what is happening to our society.

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Scheduling our Time

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Genevieve

There is a rather large and lucrative industry based on the idea that people want help learning how to schedule there time. Remember when we used to simply buy a little notebook, write the dates in on each page by hand, and jot down any appointments, meetings, or otherwise, which we needed to attend on those days? It was very simple. And if we had to record more stuff, we used a larger notebook. Cost to consumer; a dollar at most.

Now we have people who call themselves coaches. They charge fifty to sixty dollars and more per hour, to tell us how to lead our lives. We also have the option of buying personal calendars that tend to run close to forty dollars for a year’s worth of preprinted paper. There are a lot of those, from Day-Timer’s It’s All About You, to Franklin-Covey’s, Embrace your Inner Organizer. And there are more online possibilities for keeping track of your time than I would care to count — all with the intention of helping you do as much as you possibly can with each second of your life and then record the results. The results for this writer tend to fatigue of both mind and spirit.

I really do know how useful a schedule can be, until I begins to feel like the little hamster on its exercise wheel, just racing and racing, because I only has all day to make that wheel go infinitely far and faster than light.

Over-scheduling my time is an excellent way to avoid doing some of those time consuming things that are not much fun. People I really don’t want to see, and papers I know you should file with the bank and with the City Hall, but have been avoiding because it would mean spending most of the day waiting in one line or another, and it would not be possible to maintain the usual race from one client’s needs to another on that day. I couldn’t possibly do those things — I simply don’t have time. Every minute has already been scheduled.

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