Presidential Issue 5: Don’t Tell Us Who Won Before The Polls Close

 

I just read, again, how the media uses exit polls and computer models and divining rods and palm lines and tea leafs and previous results to project election winners long before everyone gets a chance to cast their ballot. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

It’s too late this time, but I say let’s elect a president who will make a difference, who will stop it. Let them gather their voodoo numbers but make them keep it to themselves until after the last person votes. Except, of course, for people in Hawaii. I mean, who wants to wait that long. And California, like it’s any surprise what they will do there.

Now, I’m off to cancel my wife’s vote….

237 Reasons To Make Love

 

Remember on Cheers when Diane wrote a paper on Sam’s romantic history? Looking through it, Sam says, “she even managed to make my love life boring.”

 

Well, that’s what Meston and Buss have done in Why Humans Have Sex. Like all scholarly papers written by and for the so-called intelligentsia, this paper is long and dull, despite the topic. You can read sentences like this only so many times: “sex can be viewed as a fungible resource” or “the most comprehensive existing taxonomy, framed from a theoretical perspective of dispositional sexual motives”…. Yawn!

 

Like most academic research, this paper is flawed because the overwhelming majority of participants were college students, but that is a topic for another time. Of the 706 males and 1,287 females studied, the age range was 16 to 42, but 96 percent of them were between 18 and 22. Only 4 percent were married.

There are 237 reasons listed, and almost all of them are selfish and egocentric.

 

The most common reason was mere stress relief. “I wanted to release tension.” “I was bored.” “I hadn’t has sex in a while.”

The next most common reasons were for physical pleasure, but with a mine not yours attitude. “It feels good.” “It’s exciting and adventurous.” “I just wanted it.”

 

Then comes mere physical attraction. “The person had an attractive face.” “The person had beautiful eyes.” “The person flattered me.”

 

Then there’s simple curiosity. “I was curious about my sexual abilities.” “I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

 

Of course, there are reasons that just seem wrong by any standard. “I wanted to make my boyfriend jealous.” “I felt it was my duty.” “It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.” “My friends were having sex and I wanted to fit in.”

 

As a father of seven girls, these disturb me. “The person had taken me to an expensive dinner.” “I wanted to defy my parents.” “I needed another notch in my belt.” “I was competing with someone else to get the person.” “I wanted to impress my friends.” “The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.” “I wanted to be popular.”

 

Finally, a heads up for parents: one of the most frequent reasons unmarried males had sex? “[She] wore revealing clothes.”

 

Something to think about the next time your daughter goes clothes shopping.

 

Photo credits: Cheers, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Flinstones.

Bunker/Paulsen: No Worse Than Anyone Else

 

My slogan for the 2008 presidential election was “Anyone But Hillary.” I got my wish there, but I should have been more specific.

I am no fan of our current president, nor was I too pleased with the one before him, or especially the one before that. Like you, I’m tired of all the mudslinging and acrimony in politics. It’s all just posturing, at best, but mostly it’s just a bunch of lies, spread by an all too willing, lazy, uninspired media. Both parties are out of touch with Americans, so as far as our day-to-day lives go, there is little difference between a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.

 

Which is exactly how they and Congress want it. Our politicians, especially at the national level, learned a long time ago that if they can keep common people like us bickering between ourselves over relatively minor issues, they can do as they please. “They keep us doped with religion and sex and TV” is how John Lennon described it. That Chick-Fil-A spectacle is a perfect example. While we fight about that, we forget about or have no energy left for the real issues that are dooming us as a country, like rising unemployment and a multi-trillion-dollar debt.

Which is exactly how they want it. Infighting prevents us from remembering that this is our country, not theirs, and this is our government, not theirs. Petty bickering stops us from uniting, stops us from fighting the bigger issues, together, stops us from being good citizens.

 

Both parties are as guilty as the other, just as corrupt as the other, but we as citizens, we as voters, have to take the blame. Whichever party wins the presidency in November, little will change because both parties do what is best for themselves, not what is best for the country, not what is best for we the people.

In the photo, I’m wearing a 1972 “Archie Bunker For President” t-shirt. I’m old enough to remember Pat Paulsen’s 1968 bid for the presidency on the Smothers Brothers show. As I see it, we wouldn’t be any worse off electing them.

 

 

 

The Bunker image came from here, and the Paulsen from here. You might check Youtube for some Paulsen videos. The guy was funny.

 

If This Is Being A Sheep, I Say “Baaaaa, Baby, Baaaaa”

 

 

I came across this photo essay on MSN, and some of the pictures made me smile, and some of them made me wonder if I’m as nice to others as I could be, inside and outside of my home and my small circle of friends.

 

The problem is that articles like this make it seem that acts of kindness are rare, newsworthy, but they are not rare. Most people are thoughtful, and most people do kind things for others  – with no thought of praise or attention – all the time. I mean that literally, all the time.

 

But kindness rarely makes the news. More likely is a story about someone breaking into that vending machine or someone stealing the bike seat, or one about how America is to blame for that poor, shoeless girl’s plight. Unkindness and bad news are what sell in the media, and sadly, the reason misfortune sells is that we keep buying it.

 

And the more we buy it, the more we believe it, which makes it less likely we will act with kindness, thinking “why bother.” The ultimate end of such a path is we will be like lonnie5000, who commented:

 

“There is no such thing as kindness, random or otherwise. It’s all just propaganda meant to spread false hope in a failing society. And the quicker you sheeple realize this the better. Thumbs down if you are a mindless sheep being herded by the corrupt government or you are just a dumb***.”

 

I’m guessing lonnie5000 watches CNN and a subscribes to USA Today. What do you sheeple say?

 

 

How USA Today Headlines Are Deliberately Screwing With Your Head

Scanning the headlines on this page, USA Today, August 23, 2012, it is obvious that we are in serious economic decline. If you read the copy, however, that’s not the case. Why is it reported that way?

 

 

One snippet of the always fluid stock market shows a 30-point drop over a few hours. It was up to13,292 a few days later.

 

 

The 2000s were hard on the middle class in that 60 percent of those who left went up in income level, above $118,000. So apparently not just the rich get richer….

 

 

Placed under the middle class decline article, but above the fold, the impression is more doom, gloom, despair. But the article is about how the stock market has been within one point – one point – of matching the level it was before the “financial crisis” of 2008-09, and within 1,000 points of the all-time high. Which sounds like a full recovery to me, but not according to USA Today.

 

 

Yes, HP desktop sales are down, but only minimally, simply because we are less and less of a desktop world, as everyone knows. Apple picked up the slack, so wouldn’t that be a wash for the economy? As for the $8.9 billion reported loss, $8 billion of it was the result of HP buying another business, not slumping sales. Why would USA Today mislead us like that?

 

A non-story based on minutes from a meeting weeks earlier, back in July. The Fed isn’t going to step in, at least not before “late 2014,” so why scare us like this?

 

 

Mullaney, Taylor, And Pew: More Reasons Not To Trust USA Today And Other Measly Rags That Bash Successful Americans

 

If you read a headline that says “2000s hardest on middle class,” you’re going to assume that economics aren’t too good for millions of Americans classified as middle class. Right? Well….

That’s the approach USAToday takes in the August 23, 2012, article by Tim Mullaney. The first six paragraphs tell us how dismal the past decade was for those who used to do pretty well. Now, according to Mullaney, 29 percent of “middle class Americans say they are still cutting back and having a hard time paying their bills,” and “one in six reported trouble making rent or mortgage payments,” and “the middle class got smaller.”

 

Lacking a credible source, Mullaney quotes Paul Taylor, vice president of Pew Research, the company that conducted the poll. (My journalism instructor would have slapped us for such sloppy, lazy reporting.) Taylor says it is no longer true that middle class Americans enjoy “a rising standard of living,” and that this was the worst economic decade since World War II. To prove it, Pew says that only 51 percent of Americans are middle class, compared to 61 percent in the 1970s.

Well, that does indeed sound like bad news for the middle class. But let’s look at some of the numbers Mullaney, Taylor and Pew use, and some of the facts they seem to ignore.

Middle class is defined as households that earn between $39,000 and $118,000 per year. Having been in that group from time to time in the past 30 years, I suggest that most households sometimes have to cut back to pay the mortgage and bills. This isn’t news.

 

What is news, if Mullaney’s numbers are right, is that 5 of 6 middle class households report not having trouble paying rent/mortgage, and that 71 percent of middle class Americans are not cutting back. That sounds like prosperity to me, you know, the American Dream. That’s great news. Why isn’t that the headline?

If the middle class is shrinking, then Mullaney’s implication is that many thousands of households have become poor. It isn’t until the next to last paragraph that we learn that 60 percent of middle class households that left the classification – 3 of every 5 families – have earned enough income to be classified above the $118,000 standard. They have become rich.

That is also good news. Why is it reported as more tragedy for American families? What is the motivation behind this negativity?

 

Disclaimer: You and I know this was a rant, to expose one small manipulative technique disreputable media can use, but what you don’t know is that I am highly allergic to surveys. The sample in this survey was extremely small, only 1,140 people. And, those 1,140 people were adults “who said they are worse off.” The cherry pickers at Pew Research don’t say how many people claimed not to be worse off. Their answers were ignored.

Nothing Against John Moe Personally, But….

 

I paid $1 for an abridged CD version of John Moe’s Conservatize Me, an account of his attempt to “become a righty with the help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and beef jerky.”

The insights weren’t worth half of what I paid.

To be fair, my copy was abridged, so perhaps any intelligent or interesting points he made were edited out in this shorter version. As it is, he spent five hours and 55 minutes bashing Conservatives – not Conservatism, mind you, but Conservatives, with hard core, mean spirited, relentless mocking and insulting attacks – and devoted five minutes to glorying in the wisdom of his so-called profound conclusion.

I am conservative, in many ways, but the conservative culture he describes is foreign to me, implausible, ridiculous. The book was nothing but sweeping, unkind generalizations and vicious stereotypes, condemning anyone who shops at Walmart, eats meat, drives a truck, listens to country music, lives in Rexburg, Idaho, wears anything red, white or blue, or actually believes in the Constitution and appreciates our country and our past. It’s just more hate speech disguised as (attempted) humor, flat, mean humor, again illustrating why some think that the liberal view of freedom of speech applies only to people who think like liberals do.

The weighty, insightful conclusion that Moe seems so proud of – that none of us is 100 percent conservative nor 100 percent liberal, and that we should all get along – is something most people already know, you know, but to John Moe and people of his ilk, it is a hard-earned epiphany.

Of course, he had this epiphany before writing the book, so judging from the condemning, critical nature of his words, his ah-ha moment didn’t take.

____

Photo from this site.

Give Me A President Who Makes A Difference Where I Live: Part 1

Apparently there is going to be yet another presidential election this year. I started voting when  Carter beat Ford for the Oval Office, and while there have been men I have and desperately have not wanted as president, generally speaking POTUS makes little difference in what I do day-to-day. Real power for change or influence in America is in the Congress, so whether we have a Republican or a Democrat president is largely irrelevant.

Rather than all this yap yap yap about things presidents can’t control – jobs, the economy, Chick-Fil-A – I’d vote for a candidate who will make a stand on real issues that we all face every day, things that really matter, things that would make our daily lives much easier, much more satisfying.

Issue 1: Men Without Shirts

Even if we all looked more like this guy than John Candy, it's still gross.

There are no public situations where we should see a man without a shirt. The same laws that discourage women from walking around without shirts should apply to men. Why men think they can and should mow the lawn or play tennis  or drive around or sit around outside bare chested is beyond me. I won’t play shirts and skins basketball, because not only do you see sweaty men without shirts, they brush their hairy backs and greasy bellies against you, and it is sickening. There ought to be a law against it, with a president willing to enforce it.

Issue 2: Cheerleaders At Sporting Events

Down by 40 with two minutes to play, the girls with the too-short-skirts start chanting something about “we’re number one and we can’t be beat.” Or waiting for the first free throw of a two-shot foul, they go into their rebound, rebound routine. Learn the game, girls, pay attention. Those chants? What could be more ridiculous. Oh, yeah, spirit fingers. Cheerleaders are just in the way, a distraction, but not a good kind of distraction. Let them compete against other cheer teams all they want, or let them pole dance, which is the next logical step, just keep them away from the field, off the court and out of the stands. The games are good enough on their own.

Issue 3: Cell Phones In Movie Theaters

It was bad enough being dragged to the midnight premier of that vampire movie where people turn into big dogs, but having dozens of phone lights swirling around like 30-pound lightning bugs throughout the show was enough to make me wish I had a paint ball gun handy.  Phones in the theater ought to be like jumping onto the baseball diamond during a game – a large fine and a guaranteed night in jail. It would be easy to enforce. The offenders are the ones with the front half of their faces lit up.

_____

While waiting for Part 2, drop me a note. What real-life changes would like to see?