Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I know this is a big word that most of us never use but it seems apropos in the context that I am going to use it. Antithetical means two things that could not be more different, just a different word meaning contradictory, which may be a word that gets more use in the English language.

I am stuck on words because I continually hear and am told things that are antithetical. I was told by ‘the former guys’ supporters that he should get full credit for the COVID19 vaccine but that it was also a global conspiracy by Bill Gates to implant tracking devices in everyone. I was also reliably told, by many, that COVID itself was a hoax even after someone they knew died for the virus. The old excuses are that they had pre-existing conditions even though they had been living with that condition for years. The masks don’t work mantra was a good one but when someone coughed around that anti-mask propagandist, they were the first ones to cover their mouth and nose inside the collar of their shirt.

I am sure you have all heard the Donny Dumbass is the most intelligent and honest President that this country has ever had and that his strength as a leader is both respected and feared by every nation. Confusing how the most intelligent man has a vocabulary of a middle school child that is trying to pass a spelling test or that an honest man is banned by the court from running a charity because he was stealing from it. As far as his strength and leadership, anyone that watched him on stage with Putin could see who was welding strength and influence and it wasn’t the baggy suit sitting with his fingers laced together. In his syphilitic mind he has influence and for some reason his followers that are stuck in an information eco-chamber believe it as well.

Now lets explore the Biden insults… He is sleepy Joe, a senile old man but at the same time his is the mastermind behind a crime family. Biden is a life long Catholic but according to Trump sycophants’ satin resides in the White House and Joe invited the Devil. The most hilarious is that the dime bag of cocaine that was discovered mean that Joe and Hunter are having cocaine fueled parties in the residence… I don’t know if any of the people spouting that B.S. have ever done coke or known anyone who has but high on coke a sleepy do not fit into the same category.

The final antithetical group is the House and Senate GOP that nearly unanimously votes against the infrastructure bill but are now in their home states and districts taking credit for the very thing they were against… I would really like a democrat to pull an Al Franken when he was in the Senate that went to a groundbreaking for a bridge in his state and he thanked everyone and then directly asked his republican counterpart, who had voted against the bill, why they were there. I suppose Sleepy Joe did do that in George when talking about an infrastructure project in Greene’s district and stated he would be there for the groundbreaking.

I wish that everyone would go back to the Sesame Street song ‘One of these things is not like the other’ and look past their adversarial team divisiveness and come to the realization that, as Lincoln stated, together we stand divided we fall.

Thanks again for suffering through my mental breakdown.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

In simple terms, courts use “standing” to ask, “Does this party have a ‘dog in this fight? ‘” Standing limits participation in lawsuits and asks whether the person(s) bringing a lawsuit, or defending one, has enough cause to “stand” before the court and advocate, since not anyone can go to court for any reason.

I am not a lawyer, but I do understand this simple concept… If a person has had no harm done to them by another person, they cannot arbitrarily file legal action in court. It seems that the act of Standing is no longer a criteria for legal action.

Last year Texas passed a law that any person could claim that another person had an abortion and if proven to be true the person making the accusation could collect a $10,000 bounty. The party making the allegation of termination of a pregnancy did not have to, in any way, be affected by accused termination. How in any world can one party charge or accuse another of a crime if they, themselves, do not have STANDING. But the law is still in act in Texas.

The Supreme Court just made a ruling on a Colorado case brought by a web designer, well someone that hopes to one day be a web designer, stating that their 1^st amendment rights would be violated if they were asked to design a wedding site for a same sex couple. The High Court ruled in their favor stating that they did have the right to discriminate based on their religious beliefs.

The crazy thing about this case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court has NO STANDING… This web designer that has, as of yet, not designed any web pages and was never solicited to design a site for a same sex couple. In fact, the person that they named as asking for a site to be made turns out to be in a heterosexual marriage for the past 15 years. What is even more ridiculous is that the Colorado State Attorney knew that the party named in the complaint hadn’t requested any such web site be designed.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a hypothetical case that had and has no standing, and their ruling now makes it lawful to discriminate.

As far as Standing I would love for a reputable attorney find the party that is named in the case and represent them against the web designer and sue them for a million dollars. The party named has standing his phone number was listed in the initial law suite and he and his family did receive harassing calls… he and his spouse absolutely have a case and I would love to see any judge argue that they don’t. Just a short rant to day but this case really annoys me on a lot of levels…

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

 Promises, promises, we are all making and breaking promises. Some of the things we promise we know we cannot keep, like having a tooth pulled won’t hurt, I promise. Then it does and the child looks at you and makes you feel about two inches tall. 

   Now promises of a different kind, like the bank saying your savings are safe, or the government telling you that you do not have to worry about your retirement. These are more than such promises; these can be deadly. Even the rich know that they have to be able to produce a certain amount of cash or credit to pay the banker or the grocery bill. 

   The thing is right now we have a Congress that is loaded with very wealthy people that are looking at the Veterans Administration and saying we are paying too much for them to be around so let’s break our promise and stop caring for attending the cannon fodder. This like so many other budget cut ideas comes from the Republican party and is just another way of saying to those that have served, thanks sucker, best of luck. I am not sure how many veterans there are in the Congress but we know that Trump was not a service member. His brag is that he was fortunate enough to bypass VD in time square and that was his contribution to the war.

   Judging by the way he thinks I believe that he contracted syphilis, and it is eating his brain. He has to have some sort of problem as no one should be that delusional and classified as sane. His idea that every agency and every agent is corrupt if they do not hand him what he wants is definitely a sickness of the tiny gray cells.

   To have the House come up with a plan that takes away benefits of those that provided most of them with the opportunity to advance to a higher calling is just sick. Making the rich richer has never benefited anyone but the rich. The idea that the nation is going to be a better place if we put more pressure on the low and middle classes while rewarding the robber barons with tax breaks and excessive profits only proves that the GOP has totally lost focus on the reality of reality.

   If you take a pig and cut it up into roasts and chops and ribs and sausage you will have something for most everyone but not all as the prices to have the variety make parts out of reach of many. If you take the entire pig and make it into sausage, then you can feed everyone and leave nothing on the scrap bin. When we consider all of humanity then no one gets the roast but then no one is relegated to the chitlins either.

    I started with promises and one that was made to this nation at founding was that there was to be a separation of church and state. Now religion has got into everything including the public pocket. It isn’t enough to have a tax-free status and to collect from the folks that feel the need to show up every week, now we have to have tax money as well. 

   It is claimed that we cannot have independence without religion being the bulwark behind it. Independence implies knowing how to do things on your own without being lead around by your nose. Not to say that the tenants of religion don’t have value as a moral code but most religious groups are referred to as flocks, that implies sheep and sheep huddling together and never seem to know which way to go until a dog shows up and shows them the way. 

   Religion has been the boon and bane of mankind. All religions were started by men and men tend to run most of them. Women are of minor importance except for the fact that if they were not here neither would the men. Above that is the elevation of all things religious, churches tended to be the most opulent buildings in a city. The higher officials of the church seemed to be the wealthy and have the most privilege. You can still see some of those tendencies today. 

   On the other side of the coin they have promoted or allowed some of the most unbelievable events the world has seen. The inquisition, the slaughter of thousands because they did not believe the way they were told. The Salem witch trials, Jim Jones and the kool aid, Waco and tomorrow there will be some other event that makes the news that is negative. Yes it is said that if we lose the leadership of the church we tend to look for a leader somewhere else. Well if current events are any indication of lose of leadership when the religious right hangs their fate on the coattails of Donald Trump then religion itself is in trouble.

   Religions say only men can lead from the pulpit yet nations have had women run things for decades with marvelous results. Many men have taken a faith based organization and turned it into a huge money making deal. One opened a university what about the rest? If religious leaders want to or hope to attract members then perhaps they should start by being the kind of human they expect everyone else to be. 

   When a person of the cloth shows up to a funeral they should be as ordinary as the people they preach to not driving a BMW. Don’t tell your congregation that you need a new car and that college tuition has gone up for your daughter so fill that collection plate. Above all else don’t ever be so busy that you cannot make time for one of your members. All this and more has been observed more than once and just like not wanting to hire a crooked cop you don’t want a lazy minister. 

   Could any of these issues be why church membership is going down. When you work two jobs and can’t make ends meet it is difficult to get to church and if you go it is embarrassing to not put something on the plate. It does not help to know that your pastor, priest, minister, or whatever title will be playing golf on Sunday afternoon while you are putting in another shift at the gas station.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

   The Fourth of July is a day of gatherings and judging by the number of and duration of the explosions of fireworks there were some quite large gatherings. The totally celebratory events get some coverage, the ones that have a shooting or multiple shootings are the ones that get the attention.

   All the world watches as we kill one another off one block party at a time. They wonder why we would choose to have laws that require school children to have to be put through live shooter exercises to prepare for the event that could come on any day in their school. They wonder why we have a former President that has caused an insurrection and continues to call upon his followers to create problems for the rest of our society, and he has not been jailed, or as in some countries, taken out and shot. 

   He has not gone to trial yet, but daily he is being tried by society and history. His legacy will not be written by him so he will not appear as the noble, brave and true leader that he fancies himself to be. Rather he will be found to be very unsavory and instead of featuring his picture to replace George Washington his image will better serve to replace Mussolini hanging upside down next to his mistress.

   The United States was founded to be a just country. We do not conduct purges as Stalin did. We do not create and environment where your belief would require you to go to elaborate measures like building priest holes as the Catholics did under King Henry VIII. We were not founded that way and yet members of our congress today would gladly pursue those tactics if they could muster enough power to put Trump back in power. 

   The raping of women’s health rights and putting it in the hands of your neighbors to spy on you and turn you in for profit if you violate one of the many punitive laws enacted. Neighbors spying on neighbors is the method that was used to keep track of the East Berliners, and the more radical in the Soviet Union. Those type of rules plus open carry laws for weapons might be a great way to reduce the surplus population, for the Red states I am sure that they are hoping that it is the folks that voted Blue that end up as the targets for this benevolent law.

 Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

 Here is a question for you. What are you going to do when they announce the end of the world? For some that will be when Trump doesn’t get reelected for others it will be because something important happened, like getting hit by a meteor.  

   If you are like the NCO I had near me in Desert Shield Desert Storm when they told us the air war had started, he sat on his cot, read his bible and cried the rest of the night. Since the air war did not require any effort from me I went back to sleep. 

   So the question is should that kind of thing be made public information or should we keep that kind of information confidential until all hope is lost in trying to stop it from happening? If the public is informed are people going to go to work and keep the lights on? Will panic occur and people go out and do things that they would not normally do? Keeping the status quo may be a terrible lie for the government to tell the public but if a last minute save happens it would not be necessary to re establish the grid, If nothing saves the situation then it will make no difference anyway.

    If you knew in advance what kind of things you would do, make sure those you love know you love them. Would go out and get drunk, get laid as often as possible, eat yourself sick or spend your time on your knees praying for some intervention. 

    We all have different ways of dealing with crises and the news of total destruction would probably bring some really outlandish reactions.  We have people that have built elaborate facilities to survive the most terrible things that man can throw at man. I don’t believe those efforts will help if total destruction is the outcome.

  Are our efforts to pollute helping to weaken the systems such as the ozone layer to offer protection of a natural type? Has our development of rockets and explosives been advanced enough to protect us from everything except the loss of our sun?  

    These are questions of total destruction not personal loss so in order to wrap your head around this problem take a much broader view of the term loss. We may have developed technologies that have a good chance of accomplishing the task of saving earth but at what cost. Will our technology work after that effort has been expended? Are enough of us versed in how to survive to make the effort to save the earth worthwhile? All valid questions and concerns the real answer is when we either do or don’t survive and prosper.

(Feel free to rely with any comments)