GinBaby

What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.

What a strange question...

A lot of things.  There aren't many jobs here, and the Idahoan plant (it makes various processed potato products, mostly dehydrated mashed potatoes and crap like that) is about to shut down.  It doesn't pay really well, but it does employ, I dunno, perhaps half of the employed people here in town.  What does a town do when suddenly half its labor pool becomes unemployed?  The options:  Work somewhere, even at another Idahoan plant, that's further away--but there aren't a lot of jobs close by.  There's a fresh potato packing plant 17 miles away, but it pays really crappy and the hours are horrible, too.  Then there are more potato processing jobs in towns 50 miles away.  My husband works at one of those, and he freakin hates it, although it pays well and has really pretty good benefits (although no sick leave, so if you get the a really nasty virus from your KFC mashed potatoes, it's possibly my husband's fault).  He hates the commute, too, not to mention the bleedin price of gasoline.  Other options:  Move away.  Sure, but the people who worked at the Idahoan are pretty invested in this place.  Many own their own homes, and a lot of the recent Mexican immigrants who work there have a pretty good deal living in some state-subsidized apartments that just about make their lives here economically feasible.  Where to go?  Aye, that's the rub.

Then there's the weather.  God, this place has the worst weather of any place I've ever lived.  It's got the wind like Great Falls.  It's got the cold and the 6-month winter like any similar place--I lived in Montana long enough to be used to that.  There is no spring or fall to speak of (seriously, the trees go from lovely summer green to brown in less than  week).  And then the summer's are unpleasantly hot and dry.  Usually.  This summer--and last one as well, now that I think about it--are cold all through June so that you can't get your tomatoes to grow properly and you end up having bushels of green tomatoes in September.  Because of course, despite the fact that it was still frosting in June, first frost will come again around Labor Day.  Yah, good luck with those Brandywines, sucker!  So much for global warming.

It has the usual inconveniences of a town this size and this isolated, too.  It's an hour's drive to do any of the usual things--get groceries, see the doctor, maybe take in a movie--which forces you to cram all your unpleasant errands into one day if possible, which not only makes scheduling something of an art form, it makes your kids damned cranky and probably you as well.  

Besides that, it has its own sets of annoyances.  All places do, of course.  But this one is special.  I've lived in towns much smaller than this (this town has about 600 people, nearly half of whom are Mexican and most of the other half are Mormon; the town where I went to high school in southern New Mexico had only around 300 people, most of whom were Mexican but with a not insubstantial Mormon population as well) that had about 8 times the life in it.  The town where I went to high school had regular dances at the community center and rodeos and all manner of things like that.  There wasn't *always* something fun going on, sure, not like in a big city, but it wasn't bad.  There was a bar and a couple of restaurants, and one of the restaurants had a big kind of pool hall in the back where we could eat nachos (damn good nachos, too) and hang out and be stupid.  There's really nothing like that here.  There isn't a restaurant in town anymore, not since the family who ran the taco place had some kind of family trouble back in Mexico and closed down.  There's word that some Californians are planning to open a cafe here, but there is also word that they're aiming to make it a "bistro" type place, so it's anyone's guess if it will last.  The taco place did a booming business, so it's too bad about whatever happened to them.  No restaurant, no pool hall, no dancing, and certainly no large-scale drinking, as I doubt the LDS approves.

It's got me to thinking.  I've lived in a lot of religiously oriented small towns.  The towns in Arkansas were mostly Baptist; in New Mexico, mainly Catholic.  And there was plenty of sinning.  The Baptists (at the time--by all appearances, they've lost their heads now) and the Catholics--I've attended both churches but never paid enough attention and always had a kind of inborn faithlessness--seem to have a notion that we're all sinners but God forgives.  So, we may as well sin, then.  There's a theme in country music, actually, about the sins of Saturday night getting redeemed on Sunday morning.  I can live with that kind of religion, man.  But the Mormons seem to have some idea that God actually means for them to be, like, good people and not sinners.  I just can't get on board with that kind of thinking.  The thing is that most of the ones I've known are good people--relentlessly good people, such that you feel like some kind of dirty whore just for wearing a V-neck T-shirt when you take your kid to preschool.  The local bishop, who is an incredibly nice guy, the kind of guy you think, "That's a good man, there" as soon as you meet him, works with my dad at the Forest Service, and I remember feeling a kind of low-grade shock the first time I saw him wearing his uniform shirt with the top button undone.  Normally, he buttons his shirts all the way to the neck.  He and his wife are like the poster children of niceness, and their kids, predictably, are well mannered and orderly.  I want to make cleverly ironic comments about their niceness, yet even thinking about doing it makes me feel like an asshole.  I'm so much more comfortable among the sinning set, though.  Yeesh.

There are good points about living here, too, of course.  The price of housing is very, very reasonable.  Nobody cares what you do in your backyard, whether you keep chickens or hang out your laundry or sit around in your pajamas drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and reading Richard Ford novels.  The lot sizes are generous so that, if you can ever get the damned tomatoes to grow in this weather, you can have a nice garden.  The niceness means that when you have a baby you will get presents from people you really barely know who just simply wish you well and like babies and people will bring you frozen meals so that when you're all exhausted from having a newborn you don't have to cook.  It also means that if you're of the type who still unironically says "ma'am" and "sir" (as I am and want my kids to be), nobody will look askance and make cheap jokes about you and your backwardness.  There are no metal detectors in the schools, despite the fact that nearly all the kids live in houses with guns in them and go hunting with them, and you can feel pretty safe about your kids never running into any serious crime here.  There is really no need to lock your doors, although some people do and that's OK, too.

Mmm, all things considered, though, and I hate to say this, but our tolerance for this place has just about run out.  Actually, my husband's ran out long ago.  He likes the small town vibe, but there are just too many other complications.  My son hates it because there is no ocean.  I hate the weather and the days when we have to go into "town" to do all the errands.  So, I have a feeling we aren't going to last too much longer.  My guess is that this town will not be much more than a Forest Service town in a few years.  And we'll be on to some coastal small town somewhere.

How green is your school, office, or home?
Sponsored by One Million Acts of Green brought to you by Cisco.

I'm so sick of "green," you can't even fucking imagine.  Ooh, everyone in a competition to be the greenest act in town--mostly by buying yet more crap or jetting off to some conference somewhere.  Oh, sure, I admit I was pleased--so pleased!!--to be lectured at by Obama who thinks it's somehow appropriately green to take the helicopter to Chicago for the weekend because he's homesick.  Sure, sure...it's not your helicopter that's the problem, Mr. President. 

See, there's a lot that bothers me about this stupid "green" thing.  First, it's been turned by the capitalist machine into yet another consumerist trend.  Second, I can think of hardly anyone at all who doesn't think that it's everyone else who needs to green up, while their own habits and behaviors are perfectly OK.  I remember when Slate published that piece urging people to "date local" instead of having long-distance--and thus fossil-fuel-intensive--relationships, and people who considered themselves quite "green" (but I drive a Prius!  and have a Sigg bottle!) were all incensed that they should have to give up their weekly plane trips to wherever their companions live.  Ah, so much for green.  Nah, it's always other people who are to blame, and especially, it appears, rural people because of our silly refusal to implement public transportation or whatever.  Third, there is hardly any subject anymore about which people get more smug and sanctimonious, and it is generally the case that the smugger people are, the less I want to associate with them.  Fourth, seriously, I cannot take part in any cause that has motherfucking Ed Begley, Jr. as one of its prime movers.  Ed Norton, maybe I could get behind, because at least he's talented and I admit to finding him rather comely.  But Begley--ach. 

Don't get me wrong.  I hate seeing waste, whether of food or energy or whatever.  I do, and I wish Americans would be less wasteful overall.  But I can't get behind anything as groupthinky as this "green" business. 

I will wager a week's salary that that is not the answer you were expecting.

What's the biggest obstacle you've had to overcome within the last 24 hours?
Submitted by ILoveYouMr.Dragon.

Feck--scheduling.  We're way over-scheduled right now.  It's kind of a long story and with multiple complications--many of which have to do with our living in such a small town and only owning one car and having a husband who works this stupid rotating shift--but our 4-year-old is in swimming lessons every day right now and also in an art class on Wednesdays, and, see, we just had a baby...So, today, I end up trying to breastfeed in a McDonald's playland while me and the two kids are waiting for my mom to come pick us up, and then the 4-year-old gets pushed off the slide or some damn thing so I can hear him crying somewhere in the innards of the play tunnels, so I instinctively rush over there to try to find him, which makes the 3-week-old lose his grip on the nipple and blah blah blah.  It's been pretty ridiculous, but fortunately the swimming lessons are over tomorrow, and there are only two more art classes, so now we can start settling down into more of a routine where the three of us are actually home and then we can all just feed at our leisure...what was I thinking, scheduling so much crap at the beginning of June when I knew we would have a wee baby?  Oh, right...the stupid complications of living in a small town...sure.  Just glad we all survived, although I am ashamed to admit the schedule issues are related to the sudden appearance of Hot Pockets in our house.  We don't normally eat things like that; I'm a made-from-scratch kind of girl.  Hot Pockets have so much cheese, man.  So...much...cheese...

However, today, for about a half an hour, I did manage to get both kids asleep at once.  Hurrah!  And now my husband is home, and I'm trying to work, but the thought of grading a bunch of punctuation exercises is, wow, really depressing.  Really, really depressing.  Commas aren't fucking rocket science, ya know?  How can my students be this bad at using commas?  And what the fuck is going on in public high schools that these semi-literates were somehow allowed to graduate?

Oooh, I need a drink.  

A conversation in the car today:

Son:  Do Liopleurodons have gills?

Me:  No, honey.  Liopleurodons aren't fish.

Son:  I know that.  They do, however, have gills.

Me (trying hard not to laugh):  Well, no, you know they're reptiles.  They have to breathe.

Son:  Yes.  But they have gills.  Well, only the males have gills.  The females don't have gills.  Males are always more fancy.  They have gills on their hips.

...Sorry, I just had to write this down somewhere.  I love when he uses "however."  What the heck kind of 4-year-old talks this way?  Why are gills considered "fancy"?  Why on their hips?  By the end of this, I was really struggling not to laugh.  He doesn't appreciate being laughed at when he's being scientific, though.  It didn't help that shortly after this conversation, he wanted to sing that Sammy Davis, Jr., song "Candyman," and he suggested we sing it together by saying to me, "You be the men part, and I'll be the ladies part."  He then sang the part of the backup singers in an *extremely* high-pitched voice, at times coming dangerously close to what one might call a shriek.  God, I love the way he talks.  I've been videotaping him a lot lately, trying to just capture his normal speaking, because it's incredibly awesome.  Four years old is such a great age.  I keep telling my husband that I wish we could keep a copy of him at this age that would never grow up; the real him could go on growing, but we'd just have this one copy around who could go on wild tangents about gills forever.  *sigh*

On a related note, I've always wondered why males of the human species aren't the fancier sex.  Unless by "fancy" we simply mean, "not soaked in leaking breast milk."  In which case, I guess they are pretty fancy.

It's things like this that make me hate women, especially the ones who think they're "feminists."  Oh, not the column itself--the comments.

Stay-at-home moms are "cute."  They're obviously intellectually inferior to working women, too, because, DUH, obviously being at home with kids and chores offers nothing in the way of intellectual stimulation (and, DUH, obviously that's all stay-at-home moms do with their days!).  It follows that stay-at-home moms are women without goals, without a life, obsequious and socially retarded.  It is equally obvious that women who become stay-at-home moms are "rich" (not moms who, as the column itself makes reference to literally can't "afford" to go back to work, even if they wanted to, due to the exorbitant prices of childcare and so forth--for some of us in more rural areas, the cost of transportation is itself prohibitive, and not everyone [yet] has the luxury of working online, as I do--my job effectively makes me a working-stay-at-home mom, which is really ideal for me). 

Oh, and I love the woman who writes that none of the well-educated women she knows don't work.  Where the hell does this woman live? 

God, women like this just do so much to advance opportunity and freedom for all women.  There is nothing that makes me, as a woman, feel more liberated and empowered than being told that I'm "cute" or intellectually inferior and poorly educated because I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. 

The ironic thing about it is that I was just helping a student, right before I read this, with his essay on The Awakening.  I've read that book about 5 times, and personally I've always thought it was stupid.  I don't think Edna Pontellier is notably oppressed by anything other than her own uselessness and incompetence (I understand that is not the generally accepted reading of the novel, and believe me, I caught hell in lit classes more than once for my opinion about it--in general, though, whining about how hard it is to break society's rules doesn't get anyone much mileage with me, although it does make me think of Devo...), but let's say she is.  Let's say Edna's real problem is being held down by all the sexist bastard men in her society.  She, because of her (flighty and weak) personality might be better off today, being told what to do by the female commenters of the International Herald-Tribune, but are we really to pretend that she would have fewer choices?  Or that the prescriptions and judgments laid down by today's society are actually less harsh and confining than what poor old Edna faced?  There is no real difference between being told you're intellectually inferior just because you're a woman and being told you're intellectually infererior because you're a woman who has decided, after surveying all your options, to stay home and take care of your kids.

I think, actually, the thing that infuriates me most about this (because in reality I am reasonably confident in both my intellectual abilities and my education) is that I still hear so many women talk about how "men" and/or the "patriarchal society" judge women's choices.  It's true that they do sometimes.  But no man of my acquaintance has ever believed that I suddenly became illiterate when I decided to stop working for pay.  Of course, no man of my acquaintance would dare.

And why, pray tell, does receiving pay make something worth doing?  I mean, if I was doing a boring, repetitive job that I hated for pay, these women would be so OK with that.  If I'm doing a sometimes boring and repetitive but oftentimes amazing and quite stimulating job that I love for no pay, then I'm like something they have to scrape off their shoe.   This just doesn't make sense to me, except by some standard societal notion that people are only worth their salaries, but I utterly reject that notion and always have. 

Feh.  I've had the satellite TV shut off, so that I don't watch the news anymore, and usually the IHT just doesn't upset me all that much, so things in my life have been relatively calm and happy.  I watch the chard grow.  I read, especially because I'm trying to get as much reading in as possible before the new baby interrupts that.  I walk down to the river--a river that will be dry in just a few weeks since it only has water in it during the runoff.  You know.  That kind of thing.  A nice, peaceable life, in which I get along with people.  And then this.  Damn. 

I will now go back to sticking my head in the sand and teaching my son about evolution, our current lessons revolving around his obsession with prehistoric life.  I take a great deal of pride in the fact that today, when two Mormon missionaries came to visit us, my son offered them each a piece of his Easter chocolate--the last two pieces of it.  I thought that was pretty cool for a 4-year-old.  He loves people and is so generous and kind to people.  The bloody remarkable thing about it is that somehow, despite my own misanthropy, I've taught him that.  I guess other stay-at-home moms, being braindead, don't teach their kids anything at all.  I guess it's just by virtue of the fact that I do work for pay, albeit very part-time, that I'm able to teach him these things.  Stupid people.  I'm done.

I just love Mike Rowe:

So, on the subject of infrastructure, I've been wondering about two things:  One of them is something Mike already mentioned a bit, although I've been wondering about it from a slightly different angle.  The kinds of education programs that Obama seems to support don't really have much to do with training people for infrastructure-related jobs.  Granted some of these jobs do take a college degree (drafting, engineering, and so on require different kinds of degrees), but a lot of the jobs we most need people to fill--especially since they effectively cannot be outsourced--require apprenticeships rather than college of any kind (although some apprenticeships do have some technical school courses as a component).  But, as Mike points out, it's hard for Ivy League wonks to get their heads around the idea that these people who didn't go to college and work in some kind of dirty job or another have an inherently important role to play in society and can and do have meaningful lives.  I've said it a million times before, but going to college doesn't make a person smarter or their life more important or meaningful or anything, though most college-educated people like to fancy that it does.  And it seems clear to me that the last thing this fucking country needs is more people running around with lit degrees.

The other thing that has occurred to me is that Obama's big push to send people to college is really rather a setback for us, at the very least it is a setback in terms of competing with other nations.  There was a time when a high school diploma meant something.  It meant you were educated enough to be a functional citizen and capable of doing or learning most jobs.  It doesn't mean that anymore.  Now, so often in this country, you need some kind of college papers--even if it's just a two-year degree.  Effectively this means that we need a minimum of 20 years to turn out functional, employable people, where most other European and Asian nations only need 18.  There are, of course, further ramifications, including the ever-increasing need for remedial classes (only most colleges aren't supposed to call them that anymore, lest anyone be made to feel badly about themselves).  Since a college education, even at a university that offers advanced degrees, so often begins from a level that should have been mastered sometime in high school--and, believe me, some of the remedial composition classes start at levels that should have been mastered by the sophomore year of high school--the level of discourse in all classes is lowered (except, in my experience, some of the less popular disciplines.  Philosophy professors still seem to hold to a basic, if outdated, idea that if you don't understand the material, it's most likely your fault and you probably just need to study harder). 

The problem is that nobody really seems to know how to fix our public schools, do they?  Well, there are some ideas--even a few that I support--but it's all very political, and no idea that might actually work is ever going to happen.  So, what the hell?  Give up and see if we can just push more people through college.  For our kids, we're planning to use a combination tactic that includes homeschooling and some time in the paramilitary schools of Japan (kiritsu!).  Right now and for the next couple of years, my son goes to public school, but we supplement at home with our own program (his preschool is doing a good job teaching him phonics, so right now we're focused on science, arithmetic, and learning to read Japanese).

But anyway.  Today is one of those great days when I just don't care about the news, and thank goodness, because it's fucking dismal.  None of it--not Chris Dodd, not the breathtaking incompetence at the Treasury Department, none of it--is going to bother me today.  Because today was a beautiful day, and we took a stroll through the garden (the snow is all melted for now), and there is not only spinach coming up already but also the rhubarb is pushing up through the mud and mulch, and it's looking like a good year for rhubarb.  We're already dreaming of the rhubarb cake and cobbler and jam.  Oh, yum.  I guess spinach and rhubarb are related, right?  That's why they're our first two performers.  Oh, well, there is also radicchio, but I never know what to do with it anymore since my husband has decided he hates it.  And so, with the prospect of new fresh food on the way, we're starting our yearly push to empty out the pantry and freezer.  Tonight I'm putting a compote of dried fruits in the crock-pot.  We'll eat it for breakfast, and it should use up some of the fruit I dried last year.  Yum. 

On that note, I just finished reading Consuming Passions:  The Anthropology of Eating.  Interesting stuff.  That stuff you hear about how the Asian concept of "meal" is, basically, "rice" is true, at least for my husband.  He can eat a big spaghetti dinner and not feel full until he's gone and had a nice bowl of sticky white rice. The thing is that, for him, it's not just rice, but white rice, and not just white rice, but Japanese white rice.  The jasmine rice doesn't quite cut it, and if I make brown rice for dinner (as I often do, because I think it tastes good), he still needs some white rice after.  It's really weird.  I was talking about it with my mom (she's the one I borrowed the book from) and we were talking about what might be like "rice" for an American.  I speculated that it might be bread, but I actually think now that for most Americans, it's meat (and especially if you can expand your definition of meat to include eggs).  I think the American conception of a meal revolves around the meat, whatever meat it is.  Mine doesn't really, although I guess I usually assemble meals based on what's going to be our protein and then what will complement that, so I guess that's still the American mindset at work, because in Japan I know I cooked differently.  In Japan, I cooked more Japanese-ish, in that I thought, "OK, there's rice and there's side dishes.  Tonight for side dishes, I want X, Y, and Z side dishes."  Rice is always given, though.  I guess when I cook Japanese food now, that's how I think about it, too, but since we have access to so many different things here than we did in Japan, I only cook Japanese a couple of times a week (and almost never for breakfast, much to my husband's chagrin.  But you just can't buy natto around here). 

Now I'm re-reading a book from one of my philosophy seminars called Poor Richard's Principle by Robert Wuthnow.  I thought it would be interesting to re-read it in light of the current state of the economy, and it is.  I know when I read it the first time around I severely underestimated the importance of it.  Not "important" in the sense that it's going to make some big difference in the world, because, yes, I know:  nobody has read it.  But "important" in the sense that they probably should.

One final thing:  I've been reading on another site a debate about abstinence-only education versus comprehensive sex education, and people have been citing these statistics that purport to show that "abstinence education doesn't work."  To me, what they seem to show is that there is not much difference in the behaviors or attitudes between students who receive abstinence-only ed and those who receive comprehensive sex education (although every study shows something different, so who the hell knows?).  To my mind, that doesn't mean that "abstinence ed doesn't work"--it means neither of them "works."  I mean, I see that the point is that abstinence-only education doesn't cause extraordinary abstinence.  But that doesn't mean that comprehensive sex ed, then, must work better, just because we've set that up as the opposite.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't have a great impact on when kids start having sex or even how likely they are to use protection routinely.  In other words, I think this is a totally false debate.  Neither "works."  This is not at all surprising given the completely mixed signals kids get from our culture as a whole.

Meh.  Anyway.  Fruit compote! 

Well, it was bound to happen.

And if fetuses are OK, then why not infants?  Peter Singer has already gone there, basically, so what's stopping us?

The problem with calling the slippery slope a logical fallacy is that it's something more than just a logical fallacy.  It also happens--a lot.  This is why people, at least those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to be concerned with things like morality, worry about whether allowing X will lead to Y.  With embryonic stem cell research, the first concern is that we are making a decision--however we euphemistically describe it--that either the blastocysts aren't "alive" and therefore warrant no moral consideration at all (also the stance many of the extreme pro-choicers take, as I've argued before, although I don't think that's how *most* pro-choicers feel), or, alternatively, that this life just isn't worth as much as the life of someone with Alzheimer's who may someday be cured by those stem cells.  Either way, we've made a moral decision, and because we are too cowardly to admit it, we have no language available to determine why this case is allowable but another, similar case might not be.  So, fetuses were bound to be the next step, and we will again hear argument that this must be done to help those who need kidney transplants and, anyway, these products of abortion would be *wasted*  It's really no different from organ donation, right?  Except that these fetuses had no say in the matter, but since we've already pushed fetuses outside the realm of moral consideration (via the abortion "debate," among other things), then that doesn't matter.

What's interesting to me in all this--or, one of the interesting things--is that the notion that we can or should find a cure for every disease and save everyone's life is taken as given.  One reason I find this interesting is that some of the same people who apparently have no moral concerns with the idea (if not, certainly, the reality) of extending human life as long as possible speak rather viciously about those of us who have decided to have children.  The decision of whether or not to have children, and if so, how many, is supposed by some to be a kind of cost-benefit analysis in which the overall cost of the child to the planet and to society's systems is to be considered a major factor.  The decision, on the other hand, of whether to prolong the lives of the sick and the elderly is apparently not.  I guess the sick and the elderly aren't responsible for any fossil-fuel use.  Or death is only bad if it occurs in someone who already knows how to talk.  Or something.  I really don't see any logical or ethical consistency there.

And, yeah, it's totally because I have something against people with kidney damage, and I just want to see them suffer.  Totally.  At least, that's how simple minds will read this, I'm sure (just like if you have any moral qualms about abortion, or at least about the way it gets framed, you must be anti-abortion, right?  Right!).  It's just that there actually is a complex moral question being hidden by a debate that purports to be value-neutral and only concerned with "science."  This is misleading at best.

Worse, though, is that by covering up what we're really talking about, we don't have the moral language (or the cojones) left to put the brakes on the real-life slippery slope when we want to.  That's one reason why social conservatives are right to be concerned about it, and, yes, it does matter, unless you're comfortable with a gradual speed up in the slide to nihilism. 

I think Eric Holder was mostly wrong in his assessment of our ability to talk about race.  For my money, we talk about race more than is really helpful.  But we sure the fuck are a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about morality.  The Christian right is comfortable with it, but they do it far too rigidly and often hypocritically (not that the left is less hypocritical in most cases).  Actually, we're worse than cowards because what we're usually trying to cover up is that we prefer one moral choice over another because it's either more convenient for us or for some other baldly self-interested consideration (e.g., once we're old enough to do so, we all fear disease and death, especially horrible ones like Alzheimer's.  Rather than cope with those fears on an adult level, we have any number of devices to cover over our fears and push them away, and if it means we can't find a way to stop the slide to infanticide (not that we have to slide very far for that one--we have more than enough infanticide, and instead of just letting those babies get thrown away, we should totally harvest their kidneys, and then throw them away), then so be it.  We just won't talk about it, and then it will go away.  Much easier that way.  

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/10/opinion/edstem.php

Yeah, God forbid we should worry about morals!  Who fucking cares about morals anymore? 

Nevermind, of course--OF COURSE--that this decision is not value-free.  In the background is an implicit moral decision, to wit that life can be created and destroyed in the cause of possible medical and scientific advancement.  That is a moral decision, albeit one that many people find immoral.  Of course, PETA and the vegetarians would find it immoral if, instead of human embryos, this discussion was about rats and chimps.  Christ--now I've made myself think of Peter Singer, unwittingly, and my blood is aboil.  He, of course, has become so desensitized to the notion that human life has any worth at all that he thinks the right to abortion should extend to some time after birth, essentially to infanticide.  But, hey, what's the difference, right? 

But something is being lost here.  We, as a people, are losing the ability to talk about morality and make moral decisions.  Those crazy ideologues in the Christian conservative movement are right that we're losing our sensitivity to subtle moral distinctions.  That's why any criticism of abortion seems to automatically mean that you're not pro-choice, which is just fucking ridiculous.  How did Americans get so bloody Manichean?  The left criticized GWBush for that all the time, but they're just as bad.  The left feels it necessary to talk about embryos and fetuses as if they aren't alive.  So, I guess a beating heart and spontaneous movement aren't enough to make something "alive." 

Look, I don't mean that it's necessarily wrong to do this research.  My point is that this decision does imply a moral choice, and I don't know why we should pretend otherwise.  To do so just takes us further and further away from a point where we're able to publicly discuss morality at all.  Maybe most Americans are content to be a society without morals, but for me, it's disgusting beyond words. 

Obama, you're one arrogant son of a bitch, man.  In that, you are no different from your immediate predecessor.  I suppose that's what it takes to want to be president.  Jesus effin Christ.  I just want to rip my hair out.

You know what?  Fuck it.  I do secede.  Fuck this miserable collection of undereducated, arrogant, self-righteous, whiny zealots who call themselves Americans.  The past few weeks I have been utterly blinded by disgust at the citizenry of this nation.  What a bunch of dumbfucks.  But the worst kind of dumbfucks--dumbfucks who think they know everything.  Dumbfucks who want to be relieved of every sort of responsibility but who want more and more "rights" not that 90% of our population has any real conception of what that word means, just that we know we're supposed to have them and lots of them.  Nevermind that we have become incapable of even basic moral reasoning.  We have also become ignorant of our own history--apparently completely so.  Yet worse, we seem to have become completely incapable of the kind of fundamental self-reflection that might enlighten us when we're being hypocritical jackasses.  Right now, I am especially enamored of the people who claim to want science and reason to guide our society but then do incredibly stupid shit like refuse to vaccinate their kids, making some kind of bogus claim that vaccinations "weaken their immune systems" or something equally ignorant.  Where the fuck did you people come from?  How do you even manage to function?  Why am I supposed to believe that you are overworked and overstressed when you seem to have endless hours to sit around at work and update your goddamned Facebook status? 

Eh.  I just went on a long rant about some of the things that have been filling me with such rage and disgust lately, but it's not worth it.  It's just pointless.  I completely give up on this stupid, rotten country.  Or at least the people who inhabit it. 

We tell white lies every day, but have you ever told a big lie, and if so, why did you do it? Confess!
Submitted by Sophie.

Well, what the hell.  I guess I can talk about it, though I'm not very proud of it.  I'm a liar.  I lie all the time.  Big ones, small ones.  I lie for no reason at all most of the time.  Although I can somewhat trace the origins of this behavior, I don't really know why I do it.  I don't do it (usually) to keep myself out of trouble.  It's more like a game, like to see if anyone will notice.  Usually, people don't.  Partly, it's because a lifetime of routine practice has made me really good at it.  Partly, it's also that since I have some weird things going on with my affect--I believe I have said here before that my emotional functions are not all optimized, or something like that, and they're not; they malfunction routinely, worse than Windows even--my affect lies with me.  Er...if you see what I mean.  My affect is so good at this by now, too, that I wouldn't be surprised if I could fool Robert DeNiro's character in Meet the Parents.  And a big part of it I've come to realize is that most people won't notice most lies because most people will believe what they want to believe--and even hear what they want to hear--anyway, no matter what comes out of my mouth.

Other than my parents, though, I don't lie to people I love.  Well, sometimes I fail to tell them things which they might or might not consider important.  My mother calls these "lies of omission."  But for the most part, I think I'm pretty good with people I care about.  I try to be.  It's a little bit like breaking a lifetime bad habit, though, as if lying were some kind of narcotic.  I suppose it is, in its way, some kind of archaic defense mechanism that just became a reflex.

I try not to lie to my parents anymore, either, but of course that's where this whole business began, so it's especially hard to break that habit.  Like I said, it's usually not to keep myself out of trouble or anything, though.  It's just all very stupid. 

I don't lie on GinBaby either, for what it's worth.

I suppose I've told some big lies, although most of the lies I can remember telling are inconsequential, unless you buy the Kantian argument that any instance of lying degrades the ultimate truth value of language--which in a post-Derridean world seems a little goofy anyway, no?

Hmmmm...so I think the big confession here is really that I lie habitually and with little rhyme or reason.  Or I used to.  I don't do it so much anymore because when you think about it, it's a rather ridiculous habit.  I don't think there are any really big lies to confess to per se.  Seems like a bit of a letdown, no?