Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Heck, purple sex may come to an end

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Re: the last post:

The GOP’s business…

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

…is not a lady’s business. Apparently:

This morning, Democrats tore into House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for preventing women from testifying before a hearing examining the Obama administration’s new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to their employees.

Some of these old misogynists ought to be paying more attention to their base in Mississippi.

Some random thoughts on Rush Limbaugh’s culture wars

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Look at the graph below about teen pregnancy in the US.

I have a number of thoughts in reaction to it which I don’t have time to develop into a long blog post. Among them:

A. Teen parents are far more likely to be incompetent parents.
B. Their children are far more likely to do poorly in school and life.
C. As a result they will probably help drive America’s high costs of dealing with dysfunctional members of society while denying us more productive (high tax paying) members of society.
D. The political fight to lay the blame for our high rates of pregnancy has prevented us from adopting a successful preventative.

The liberal answer would be to follow the secular European model of offering frank sex ed., contraception, abortion and the recognition that wherever people have functioning genitals they will have babies.

OR

The conserative answer – a religiously repressive model like in many Islamic nations of strict sex segregation and severe penalties for non approved sex.

I’ll stop with D but I’m sure I could add a lot more alphabet. I’ll simply end with this question. Which political party seems better poised to deal with the fact that 95% of Americans engage in premarital sex – the “liberal” one or the “conservative” one?

Where are all the girls…

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

Dr. Science weighs in:

It’s often said that humans are the only creatures who know they’re going to die, but I think it’s more important that we’re the only ones who know we’re going to get old, too old to find all our own food. When other creatures — even other apes — get too old to feed themselves consistently, they die. Animals have no old age in our sense, because every adult is self-supporting: if you get too old to take care of yourself, that’s pretty much it.

I teared up.

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Here’s the website.

Papaw

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Maybe its because I’ve just woken up from a glorious six hours sleep and maybe its because a week of racing around left me with a hoarse croaking voice last night as my fellow LDVer’s peppered me with questions at our Let Duluth Vote meeting but I feel very reflective this morning as I wait for the rest of my family to wake up.

At 6:10AM yesterday (After a fitful three and a half hour sleep) I woke to a persistent knocking on my foot and a soft insistent voice calling “Wake up Papaw”. My only grandchild was getting me out of bed. I’d been scheduled to be his babysitter for yesterday and today for a couple weeks and no matter how much LDV and personal business (of which there has been a helluva lot lately involving an entirely different set of lawyers and courts) had to be attended to I was going to devote my time to him.

The Tan Man is a couple months shy of two and already he speaks in four word sentences which puts him ahead of the class. I’d like to think his genius comes from superior genes but I know it mostly comes from having three very well educated and attentive adults around him. This is what’s missing from the Red Plan. Duluth is exchanging teachers for brick and mortar. The five million in so called annual savings is little more than the equivalent permanent layoff of fifty teachers. When we had twice as many teachers this might not have been significant but as we continue to shrink this is an alarming number.

My Dad wasn’t the first Papaw. That’s what he’d called his Mother’s grandfather and when my children were born that’s what he wanted them to call him even though that term of enderment had skipped a generation and I didn’t grow up with it. Dad died when my children were little but my daughter insisted that I be a Papaw too.

I played with Tan Man for six straight hours until I put him in his crib for a nap at 2PM. We watched a Thomas the Tank Engine because he loves trains and I took him to Canal Park as the sun warmed up the cold June morning. We tarried under the fully blooming apple trees by the Dairy Queen spending an hour picking up handfuls of white petals which had fallen copiously in the wind and through them repeatedly into the air like little blizzards. We walked into the clear where all of Duluth’s downtown looked down at us and I called the Tan Man’s grandmother from my cell phone. We waved at her window from Canal Park and asked if she’d like to have us join her for work.

We looked out through her window after lunch and saw an ore boat chugging through Lake Superior heading towards Canal Park and its rendezvous with the Ariel Lift Bridge. We’d been waiting to show the Tan Man this sight for months but the Shipping News always listed boats passing through at inconvenient times.

The Tan Man and I sped over to watch while I imitated the sound of the two whistles, the boat’s and the bridge’s, many times before I finally propped him up on the pier to watch the great ship silently pass under the lifted span. Like hundreds of other visitors to the Canal we waved at the crew. After the great horns sounded and the ship glided into the bay we strolled under the bridge as it rang out a warning and its span began its descent. We looked up through the span’s gtates and watched the sillouette of cars pass overhead on their way between the worlds longest fresh water sand island and downtown Duluth.

We walked over the bridge my holding hands tight where no railings guarded my speedy grandson from tripping into the oncoming traffic. I took off his shoes and socks and let him feel the terrible cold water soak into his toes. We skipped stones and played in the sand for an hour. It was delightful.

My Father and Mother used to visit us in Duluth several times a year and in the summer months we always took them to the canal where my Dad loved watching the boats come in and out. It always seemed a wonder to my Midwestern Dad, a WW II sailor, to have ocean traffic coursing through the center of the United States just a couple hours north of his home in Mankato, Minnesota.

Yesterday morning my Dad paid us one last call.

A boy like James

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Its not all that hard for me to tear up in my dotage but I was unprepared for it to happen reading today’s local view where the Trib’s editorials are usually found. Retired Judge Carol Person, today’s guest columnist recalls a moment in the courtroom.

When kids could be kids

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Vic sent me this. Pity the inexorable progress of today’s aspiring children.

Fox news vs Faux Christian

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

This video from Fox News demonstrates that an pretty face isn’t necessarily the best qualification for interviewing an oddball with stong convictions. The Oddball is from the gay bashing, Topeka, Kansas, Westboro Church. Its nice to see Fox News advocating for the liberal side for a change.

We’re not all in this (neighborhood) together

Friday, June 23rd, 2006

I just read this Wash Post story that was reprinted in the DNT yesterday. Its one more bit of evidence of the division of our nation into rich and poor. Now it seems that middle class suburbs – the kind that baby boomers all remember from their youth – are disappearing. Those of us who are being sheltered by Republicans from the dreaded “death tax” are all moving behind gated barriers to exclusive neighborhoods. Those remaining in the middle class have to decide if and when they can jump accross an ever growing abyss to keep up with the quickly retreating Jones and while leaving the title loan and lotto dependent poor behind.

Why gays will eventually be allowed to marry

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

If the anti-gay marriage folks can’t do any better staking out their position than Bill Bennett does in this discussion with Jon Stewart they will eventually lose.