Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

A person that really should have represented the USA with great candor, intelligence, and common sense is to once again be indicted on charges, this time for mishandling classified information. This is a subject I was introduced to 59 years ago and have had many occasions to reference and read this type of information in connection with my career field.

To be flippant about classified material is extremely stupid not to mention dangerous. The sort of material and the amount of material held at the Florida location could have gotten people killed. The information contained in those documents was or is very needed to maintain our national safety. 

The very cavalier attitude that Trump took was to believe he was empowered to do as he damned pleased, and the material was his to do with as he wished. If it was to go to the highest bidder, he just did not get to the auction in time. He kept saying that Nixon had been paid a lot of money to get back things he had taken when he left office. More than anything this was a get rich quick effort. As with almost everything else he has dabbled in, it is the money that is most interesting. Was this really a gambit to see if the government would pay him to return the documents. He stated that there was no way he would accept a plea deal or maybe only one, if they gave him a lot of money. Hopefully I am not the only one connecting the dots.

His efforts today to get the mob going seem to have been rather low key, he did say peaceful demonstration in his requests for support. There was an object that could have been a bomb found but nothing seems to have happened. The very sad part of all this is the fact that there are so many people still following him down the rat hole. 

To gain power in the form of white supremacy they seem to be willing to live in a country run by a very stupid and very villainous man. It is bad enough that one of them is present on our political scene but with a couple of the other states having governors that are equally as eager to run things according to their brand of vile ignorance is enough to make me believe that they have all been smoking wacky weed that the dog pissed on.

The need to force others to follow your ideals seems to be the major driving force behind these rather caustic people. We see this in countries run by religious zealots and now we have these idiots running around here thinking they can get away with the same crap. Every day we hear about another that knows all that is going to make the country better by taking away what we have and giving us the disease, they have.

During 2016 we heard all about human slavery, baby rapists and eaters,  people that were running for election against me and America. Now we are hearing that the current administration and everyone in government that is not bending down and kissing Trump’s ass is somehow a communist, a fascist or some sort of deviant when all the things he is talking about are standing proudly in front of him when he brushes his teeth. 

If anyone is all the loathsome things he names it is himself. His entire premise is that he can say the rule is this, and it is just because he said so. Not the way it works, may have worked in his corporate world but in the real world it does not work that way. The law of the land says that you follow established rules and if you choose not to suffer the consequences.

There is a very real chance that he could go to prison and others have gone for lesser things so take it for what it is worth. He needs to be off the ticket for election as he does not what to be President, he wants to be Dictator and he only qualified to be Richard Cranium.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The former guy was arraigned yesterday on 38 counts of mis-handling sensitive documents, this is on top of the conviction in civil court of sexual assault and still he leads the polls for the Republican nomination. This is astounding to me, do his sycophants truly believe that all the crap he has done throughout his life and the 4 years he sat in the White House are all made up just to make him look bad?

Going back in time, Democratic candidates have been ejected from the field of contenders over unsubstantiated allegations. Gary Warren Hart was an American politician, diplomat, and lawyer. He was the front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination until he dropped out amid revelations of extramarital affairs. He represented Colorado in the United States Senate from 1975 to 1987. John Edwards who was running for President in 2008 though he was not convicted of any crime, the revelation that he had engaged in an extramarital affair and fathered a child while his wife, Elizabeth, was dying of cancer, gravely damaged his public image and essentially ended his political career. Al Franken, Comedian and 2 term Senator from Minnesota had a photo surface and allegations of sexual misconduct apologized and resigned from his senate seat. These politicians stepped up and resigned even at the mere sign of impropriety, far less than what DJT has provably done.  

Supreme Court Justice Thomas has been accepting lavish vacations from a billionaire for decades and still sits on the Highest Court. Other justices have miraculously had properties that had been on the market for years suddenly sell weeks after they were appointed to the court. Some have wives that receive huge salaries from organizations that often have cases before the court. Recently Justice Amy Coney Barrett was given her lifetime appointment even though she had only two years in private law practice in Washington, D.C., she became a law professor, joining the faculty of Notre Dame Law School in 2002. She was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. President Donald J. Trump nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat on October 27, 2020.

So, I guess the standing rule is, if you happen to be a Democrat and you are accused of any impropriety, proven or not, you must step aside. On the other hand, if you happen to be a Republican there are no standard or rules that apply, in fact the more unqualified and/or corrupt you happen to be that only improves your standing in the party.

The party of ‘Law and Order’ and ‘Family Values’ that proclaims themselves to be devout Christians only hold their political rivals to those standards. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the Democratic party today hold themselves up to higher standards. Politicians are elected to represent their constituents and should be held to a standard that is fitting of the trust they are given. One Party feels that they are above reproach and although elected have zero accountability to those that elected them.

So, I guess nothing has changed, the divisions have only become more pronounced.

Thanks for putting up with another rant.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Kindness seems like a basic concept but somehow it is lacking in the world we currently live in. Everyone has their nose in their cell phone and rarely looks up to notice if there might be someone near them in need. I know if you live in any large city in the United States, you see homelessness and people holding signs and asking for help, honestly most of us ignore them and I am as guilty as anyone.

There is a saying “No act of Kindness, no matter how small, is never wasted.” I realized that today, I am a generally nice person. I hold doors and greet people with genuine friendliness, too many times I have a joke or comment about something or nothing at all that I have zero compunction sharing. Today, like any other day I stopped to get gas and I noticed a guy sitting on the curb with a gas can, not asking for anything, just quietly sitting. I asked if he was waiting on someone, and he told me that he was out of gas and was just trying to figure out how he was going to get some because he only has a couple dollars. Filling up his 1-gallon gas can wasn’t going to break me, so I waved him over and filled it up. He thanked me and walked over to a car that was parked next a to pump and started to pour the gallon into the tank.

I suppose I had done my good deed and could have just walked away knowing that I had helped a little but something in me wanted to do more. I walked over to his car lifted the pump handled and tapped my card on the gas pump and put $20 in his tank. I drive around all day and know a single gallon isn’t going to take you very far. This guy, never asked him his name, was genuinely grateful for my small measure of kindness he said, “thank you” then said that he wished he could repay me, but he couldn’t. I told him that I was in a position to help and there was no need to worry about it and hoped his day got better. I walked back to my car believing that our interaction was over when, this guy who I had helped, came over to me and again said thank you and surprisingly asked, “I know it’s not much, but can I give you a hug?”  I accepted the hug, which I did not expect, and this guy told me that I didn’t know how much I had done for him.

A Small act of Kindness helped him and a hug from a stranger reminded me that ‘Kindness no matter of small is never wasted.’

Sappy I know, not my usual rant but I wanted to put this out in the universe as a reminder to everyone that kindness doesn’t cost you a thing but can mean everything to someone else.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

June 12, 1967, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Crazy to think that was 56 years ago… in was born in March of 1967 and to think for the first 4 months of my life it was illegal for someone to marry an another that didn’t have the same skin color. It actually seems like an absurd case to have to bring before the Supreme Court… the right to marry someone you love just feels like too much government control over another’s life.

The Supreme Court overturned a Virginia Law banning interracial marriage base on the 14^th Amendment a unanimous Court struck down state laws banning marriage between individuals of different races, holding that these anti-miscegenation statutes violated both the Due Process and the Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is the exact prevision of the 14^th Amendment they sited, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That same language was used to grant a woman’s right to choose in Roe vs Wade and recently to grant marriage rights to same sex couples. This is one of the amendments that we all should know but sadly most only focus on the 1^st and 2^nd amendments.

Recently this stacked lopsided court overturned Roe Vs Wade in holding that the Constitution does not provide a right to abortion, the Court overruled Roe. First, the Court held that the right to an abortion is not a fundamental right recognized by neither the Constitution, our Nation’s history and traditions, nor encapsulated by other, broader rights. This is a giant step backward from this court that continually like to present themselves as originalists that can only read into a 240-year-old document exactly what was intended at the time it was written. The 14^th amendment was drafted and adopted in 1868 at a time when racism was alive a well and women had no rights.

So, what’s next on this right leaning Federalist Society docket of laws to repeal. We know that Roe was the first on the hit parade. Obergefell v. Hodges granting marriage equality to same sex couples passed by 5 to 4 margins in 2015, now the court has a 6 to 3 right wing majority. Will that be next? Loving was passed by a unanimous majority in 1967 but that doesn’t mean it is safe from this court.

Only once in history has an amendment been repealed, that was the 18^th amendment ‘The prohibition law’. This court seems like they would like to repeal parts of the 14^th amendment or at least ignore them.

Let’s celebrate our steps forward and fight like hell not to go back to whence we came.

Thanks again for undergoing through another diatribe. 😊

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

The world that we live in is in the right place for us to survive and thrive. We are in the “Goldilocks” zone, as scientists call it. It is a special place and a fragile place as well. We know from observation that a little farther away from our sun and we would freeze and a little closer and we would burn to a crisp. The core of the earth is hot and parts of it seem always ready to come visit us from under the mantle. 

Nothing wrong with a little heat, it allows plants to grow and keeps us comfortable over much of the surface of the earth. Too much heat and things burn and die and provide a covering of smoke and ash that makes it harder to breathe and reduces our ability to raise the food we need to stay healthy. We are also very fortunate that we learned how to use heat to prepare our food which has provided us with larger brains giving us the capacity to be more intelligent than most of the other creatures of earth, but it does not always guarantee that we will act as if we are.

The earth does not move in a circle around the Sun; it is more of an elliptical path and our center of gravity moves as we go through this journey. If our planet had a major change in the route it takes on the journey or if for some reason it should tilt further on its axis we could be in very serious trouble. The fact that sometime in the future our Sun will no longer be there to nurture us and then we are all going to expire very quickly.

In the meantime we should be aware of how much we are causing our world to heat up and keep in mind the effects that may have on our future. For those that are sure it means nothing we will be hard pressed to change any minds. This is another argument like getting the vaccine to fight covid, some think it is needed and some feel that it does no good. Many of those that have felt that the vaccine was of no value are now pushing up the grass instead of walking on the grass, but we did cut down on the surplus population, can’t be all bad. (If you are not familiar with SARCASM you best start getting used to it).

We are all the inhabitants of this blue marble and regardless of whether you think global warming, the vaccine, or limiting who can own or carry a gun and what kind of gun is a right, or should be ignored or whatever, the common factor is that everyone feels that they are entitled. This does not always prove to be true; you may take the view that no one’s rights are any more important than mine and yet no ones are any less important than yours. In situations of this nature it is time to look to the common good and go from there. If that means you choose to always wear a mask so as not to pass on or hopefully catch an illness, wear the mask. If that means you forgo the ability to own or carry a gun everywhere you go, so be it, did you need to walk around being a threat or a target? As for global warming, be aware of those things that cause problems or make current problems worse and try not to contribute to them. In other words, “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do Unto You”