Stupid Quote of the Week 16November2019

Stupid is as stupid does says and this week, UC-Berkeley instructor Jackson Kernion blew the bell off the top of the stupid post with these baubles of insanity:

This is the short version. He also said we should live uncomfortable lives and that we should pay more for health insurance. I'm not sure why rural Americans should pay more, but he thinks so. And if he thinks rural Americans, especially farmers aren't already living an uncomfortable life, perhaps he ought to spend a couple of weeks milking the ladies twice a day, 365 days a year. Or 366 days as the leap year comes around. ... Not to mention plowing, planting and harvesting all while playing the weather lottery. That is, if the equipment doesn't break down at the worst possible time.

Jackson supposedly teaches philosophy.  I've got a theoretical scenario for him: Why doesn't he philosophize what it would be like if rural America didn't grow the food he eats every day. Maybe after a few days of not having food, he might appreciate rural America a little more, and not wish us misery.

Who am I kidding? This is Berkeley, California ... the home of liberal brainwashing and probably its capital. 

Perhaps I'm being a little hard on Jackson. I've lived next to a dairy farm in Upstate NY for 41 years and counting, and I'm wondering what Jackson has in mind to make life more uncomfortable than it already is for my farming neighbors. The last time I saw my farm neighbors take a (real) vacation was ... oh yeah, never.

I have to compliment him on his unique choice of words The adverb unironically seems rather ironic in this instance. Nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is another combination of words I hope I never hear again. First of all, nostalgia is not a crime or bad thing, and if we're talking about imagined pastoral things, all the paintings of heaven I've ever seen are ... imagined and pastoral, if I'm not mistaken. If heaven turns out to be like South Chicago or East LA (or the Berkeley campus), please put me on the down escalator. I'll take my chances.

When the tweet went viral, Jackson apologized (sort of) and deleted it. Maybe being held up to ridicule had something to do with that. But the damage was done, and again we get a glimpse of how higher education really thinks. Jackson, if you think rural America is going to forget this one, think again.

In case you need something else to think about, give this some thought:

The big cities need rural America the hell of a lot more than rural America needs the big cities. Ideally, we both need each other, but I'm quite sure that if push comes to shove, we'll last the hell of a lot longer without you than you will without us. I'm not thinking those amber waves of grain have much to do with 1/4-acre inner city vegetable gardens.

Oh, and thanks for assuming some of us are good people. Unironically, we think the same thing about some of you.

PS: About the shaming part... Shame on you for being such a cluck dimbulb. 

I Can't Figure Out if I'm Honored or Insulted

I usually write when I'm motivated; if I'm forced to write, I turn out pulp. When I began a weekly blog about stupid things people said a while back, it quickly became a chore when the weekend arrived and I drew a blank.

Oh, that doesn't mean the week passed without stupidity, it just means nothing rose above my threshold of stupidity that week, or I missed something I shouldn't have. I confess I'm a tad sarcastic in my writings because ... I don't suffer fools easily.

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that the toolset of the blog host is rich; it gives me information on hits, sources, rough locations and the like. Occasionally, I peruse them mostly out of curiosity to see if real numbers are reading my writings. Some blogs are blah and some have some real good numbers. Publishing my work to Facebook brings many readers and if the blog is contentious (as some of them are), it also brings comments. Some are favorable, some are not. Either way, I don't censor them. If people honor me by reading my words, I honor them by letting them tell me I'm a bastard if that's the way they feel.

So it was with surprise that after my last blog, I saw a source visiting my blog I had not seen before: plagscan.com. Curious as to what that was, I googled and visited it. It turns out it's a plagiarism checking website; one with both single-user and business/education subscription tiers. I looked into their rates and it looks like they lean heavily towards educational subscribers to make money.

I asked myself "Self, what is somebody doing running my blog writing through a plagiarism scanning website?"

Initially, I admit I was somewhat miffed that somebody thinks I'm not the author of my written thoughts; so much so that they would check my work to see if it is/was plagiarized. Maybe they were hoping to call me out on it because they vehemently disagreed with my words. If it came back as plagiarized (and looking at how the scanners work, they start with three sequential words and go from there), maybe they could finish their comments with Go to hell, you plagiarizing &*!#@.

Let me assure you: My writings are original and the product of my ideas and work. If I embed somebody else's work inside them (as I did once when I credited Stilton.com for nicely phrasing my exact thoughts), I give them credit.

I've written some unpublished books and don't think I'll bother to ever get an ISBN number for them. I'm working on my third book and that one, I will probably publish. (It's about small town politics, my 12 years on the Town Board I live in and how 5 seemingly good and decent people can reveal what utter fools and sometimes outright crooks they are.) I also construct crossword puzzles when an idea tickles my fancy.

But I don't steal other peoples work, and that's why I'm confused when I see somebody, probably with educational system ties run my work through a plagiarism scanning website. Do they think I'm not capable of writing what they just read? Do they think I'm a word thief? Are my ideas so unoriginal that they deserve to be called out as old news?

I don't know. But now that I'm tuned up on plagiarism scanners, I decided to run my last blog through one of the free scanning websites to see if in fact I was a plagiarizer. It turns out ... I'm innocent.

Here's a snapshot of some of the referring sites that hit that blog including plagscan.

I trimmed the picture to not display now many hits came from plagscan, but I will say it was more than one.

So, should I be insulted or honored that my words motivated somebody to run one or more of my blogs through a plagiarizing scanner? As I jokingly tell people when I'm answering an obvious question ...

I'm ... so ... confused.

Crimes Against Humanity, Then and Now

One of the first decisions of the Nazi war trials held after WW2 was what crimes the defendants were to be charged with. In the first Nuremberg trial, 21 high-ranking Nazis were tried for crimes that fell into 4 categories:

• Conspiracy to wage aggressive war
• Waging an aggressive war
• War crimes
• Crimes against humanity

Nobody seriously disputes that the Nazis conspired and waged an aggressive war and also committed war crimes. Sometimes history softens as time goes by, but not in this instance. Ironically, war crimes weren't limited only to the Nazis; for example American GIs machine-gunned 50 unarmed German SS prisoners of war in a barbed-wire enclosure and the Russians committed many atrocities as an act of revenge as they advanced into Germany. Nobody was ever charged with crimes in those instances.

Crimes against humanity is rather broad and is certainly appropriate for the indiscriminate killing of millions. Humanity definitely suffered, but the question of whether or not crimes against humanity are actual laws or were made up on the spot to address genocide was never asked. Humanity has always suffered during wars and still does to this day. Seeking justice, we tried them, sentenced 11 of them to death and 7 to lengthy prison terms. Three were (surprisingly) acquitted. Goering cheated the hangman a few hours before he was to be hanged and the rest of them walked to the gallows. In 103 minutes, 10 top Nazis were dead.

In total, there were 13 war crimes trials at Nuremburg; 199 defendants were tried, 161 of them were found guilty and 37 of them were sentenced to death. Not all of the 37 were actually put to death and in most cases, the prison sentences were commuted early. For what it's worth, the British were the most prolific at hanging Nazis; between 1945 and 1949 they hung 210 war criminals including quite a few women. Their skilled hangman Albert Pierrepoint practically turned their gallows into a (dis)assembly line.

Ah, but I digress; something I often do. Let's get back to the subject.

To be sure, the Nazis committed war crimes, but crimes against humanity are usually used to address large-scale genocide. 60 years later, Saddam Hussein ended up on the wrong end of the rope for the same charge.

To see how this could even come to pass, you have to look at the rise of National Socialism in Germany and what quickly ensued when they took the reins of power in 1933. First, consider how bad things were in Germany as the Nazis rose to power. The German people were so desperate they ceded power to these extremists (lesson learned - never give power to rabble-rousing rioters or extremists) and that set the stage. Also consider the irony that Adolf Hitler ran in 1932 and lost the only election he ever ran in.

In that same election the Nazi party took a fair number of seats (about 1/3) in the Reichstag and under pressure, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933. Shortly after that, the Nazi juggernaut began rolling towards absolute dictatorial control. Things happened fast after that, very fast. A little more than a month later, the Dachau concentration camp began construction in March 1933, which coincidentally is the month the enabling act was passed. The enabling act gave Hitler and his cabinet power to enact laws without the Reichstag. With this power, Hitlers edicts, laws and decrees set Germany on the path to the holocaust and global war. When Hindenburg died in 1934, the last obstacle to Hitler's total power was gone. In September 1935 the Nuremberg decrees took rights away from Jews and other untermensch. (He wasn't the first head of state to take citizen's rights away with pen and paper; Abraham Lincoln did pretty much the same thing during the civil war when he suspended habeous corpus and imprisoned newspaper editors who opposed him, which clearly wasn't constitutional and still isn't.)

Throughout the 12 years of the Nazi Reich, more laws were implemented that simply made stealing property and killing legal. To them, they weren't breaking any laws at all. They just made what they were doing legal with words on paper as they deemed necessary.

Why am I boring you with all this WW2 Nazi trivia when the subject is crimes against humanity?

What the Germans did was in fact a crime against humanity; also consider that they thought it was perfectly legal. And that is the crux of what I want to emphasize here: Laws may make something legal, but it doesn't always make them moral.

Clearly, laws should always be cloaked in some form of morality. Otherwise, what's the reason for enacting them?

That was the then part, let's talk about the now part.

Fast forward about 3 decades after WW2: In 1973, Roe v Wade made abortion legal by washing the Federal government's hands of the issue. Abortion is legal as I write this, but that doesn't make it moral. Since then, most estimates agree that over 60+ million viable human beings in America have been aborted.

I've heard the arguments on both sides. Women's rights are the motto of the pro-abortion advocates. (They prefer to be called pro-choice and I prefer my description. Since I'm the author, I get to choose the words.) I only ask one question when I hear this: Since when did anybody get the right to extinguish a human life?

Crimes against humanity can take different forms, it seems. What did I say about the indiscriminate killing of millions before? Oh yes. It fits the description pretty close.

America is suffering major political dissension as I write this. In recent years, about 120 million or so take the time to vote in a Presidential election year and it's pretty close as to the split. What's not said is that about 90 million do not vote and not only is that sad, it makes a statement about how much apathy there is in our country. Things are heating up and political parties are now being aligned and weaponized in an attempt to subvert the constitutional election and power of the President; one big reason is that the appointment of conservative judges to the judiciary has the possibility of reversing the big issue liberals really care about, and of course I'm talking about abor, er, infanticide which currently appears to be legal regardless of which side of the uterus it occurs on.

I've seen predictions of civil war a few times already, and I'm not sure what the outcome of this is going to be. I'm approaching old age and the last thing I want is to see the country suffer (and myself along with it) in large-scale civil unrest. If it happens, I hope I'm not around to see it. If I am, I hope to sit it out. If that's not possible, then I will follow my moral compass wherever it leads me.

Looking at it from the top down, I'm not sure those 90+ million are going to sit it out if it happens. I'm betting the radicals are not going to prevail because its an easy guess most apathetic people aren't radical; rather, it just takes a lot to stir them to action. But if it happens, a new day is going to dawn after and I'm betting a whole bunch of people are going to be held responsible, just as they were 75 years ago.

And that brings us back to the question of crimes against humanity. Remember, legality is not always morality.

If the Germans thought passing laws to make mass extermination legal justified it, how is the United States different when well over a million viable human beings are legally slaughtered here every year?

The question begs: If the extermination of over 60 million human beings since abortion became legal isn't a crime against humanity, what is? Worse, if we don't recognize it for what it is and fix it ...

Then we're no better than the Germans were 75 years ago.

Good Riddance

It's rather ironic that NY Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted good riddance after he found out Donald Trump filed papers to change his domicile from New York to Florida ... especially after uttering words quite contrary to that earlier this year. Of course, I'm talking about when he said  God Forbid the Rich Leave  when he was talking about the problem of wealthy people fleeing New York State.(click on the link to read my previous comments).  Here's the tweet, and may I add it's a toss-up as to whether it's a Halloween trick or not.

That's a classic, Mr. Cuomo. Last February you pissed and moaned about rich people leaving NYS. Now it's good riddance? And do you really think he escaped paying your highest-in-the-nation NY taxes? I'll take odds that he's paid far more than you have cumulatively, Andy.

It's not just the rich leaving, it's a good cross-section of New Yorkers. Individual reasons may vary, but inevitably they all end up at the same square in the flow chart: Liberal Democratic policies. Paradoxically, good riddance is something 47 out of 62 counties in NY State tried to tell you when you ran for re-election last time, seeing as you only won 15 counties ... but they were the populous ones (downstate, NYC) and that put you back in office. Meanwhile, upstate still suffers from atrophy and the result of that is a large population loss, the likes of which NYS has never seen before. For example, in one recent year alone, NYS lost somewhere north of 50,000 people. In reality it was over 125,000 long-time NY residents because you imported more than 75,000 from other countries to become proud NYS residents ... and eventually, they'll even pay taxes. But for 5 or so years... they won't. Integration takes time, as well you know.

I love the upstate rural area where I live, but I hate how NYS has been ruined by liberal government. When 2 major things keeping my wife and me here are resolved, we plan on joining the thousands of New Yorkers who leave NYS every year - for good. Oh, we'll come back and visit as we desire, but the lifetime of money and assets we've accumulated are going south with us.

So, Andy ... Another billionaire leaves NYS and you somehow conclude that's a good thing. Let us know how that works out at budget time and how you plan on making up the difference. As you are well aware, he's not the first billionaire to leave and I'm wagering he won't be the last, either.

Also, remember plenty of us poor folks take our money with us when we leave.

As Everett Dirkson, the renowned Senator from Illinois used to say ....

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.