I’m heading out tomorrow to join in the celebration of my grandson’s fourth birthday. The day will be hot, but the kid is very cool, so I’m looking forward to spending a couple of days being a Grammy instead of someone whose name she doesn’t always remember.

When I made the post that asked the question, I didn’t know what to expect as answers. Here’s the question:

If you could make up ONE new law and have it enforced FOREVER, by goons, what would your law be?
Use your imagination, let your despotic instincts run free.
First, here’s my answer — at least as close as I can remember, since I didn’t make a copy of what I sent in:

I would enforce a U.S. law that would greatly limit tax write offs/loopholes and significantly increase the tax rate (to somewhere around 40%) on the income of individuals who make more than 2 million dollars a year (in gross income) and on corporations who make more than 2 billion dollars a year in gross profit. That tax money would be used to fund universal health care and also set up an updated version of the WPA to provide fair wages for work done to shore up and enhance the country’s physical infrastructure.

Now, you have to undersand that my dad was a centrist Republican who use to tell me that the older he got, the more he thought that the best form of government is a benevelent dictatorship. Of course, given human nature, we know that would never work because we’d never be able to find a thoroughly fair and moral individual to take the job. At any rate, that’s why I had no problem “letting my despotic instincts run free.”
However, there were several respondents who couldn’t do that and answered with the following:
— Well…mine would be paradoxical and self-contradictory, making it impossible??? The new law to be enforced forever by goons would be: No law forever enforceable by goons may be passed. (non-blogger myrln)
— Stu’s new law : Fascism is forbidden, e.g. you are not allowed to enforce anything, by goons or military might. (Stu Savory)
— Well, there’s the obvious One New Law: Henceforth, I get to make ALL new laws! But there’s probably a clause in the contract that results in making NO new laws and probably getting beaten up by the goons to boot. I’m really not sure, Elaine. All laws are flawed. For instance, what if all public schools got equal funding, but it was zero? Maybe a law outlawing goons. But then only outlaws would have goons. But maybe we do need some goon control laws. (Dave Rogers)
Then I had a few whose first thought was for the Golden Rule. I also believe that we wouldn’t need a whole lot of laws and wouldn’t have all these problems in the world if everyone lived by the Golden Rule. I just don’t know how even goons could enforce it:
— Well, it’s a close call — “Do to others what you would have them do to you” has a lot going for it, but it leaves a lot of room for equivocation and manipulation. The simple clarity of “Thou shalt not kill” wins for me. (AKMA)
— When I first read your question, my initial reaction was to demand the implementation of The Golden Rule: compulsory in all educational levels, from pre-school through university. I have always felt that if we could just submerge our young people with the cause and effect/action/reaction physics based on human emotion so that it is ingrained on all levels, in multiple dimensions within our beings … the world would be a much better place for all.
Then I re-read the question and saw the part about “the goons” enforcing this new law and well, … that whole passive, empathic ideal kind of collapsed in on itself. (Klondike Kate)
Then there were those, like me, who feel a little coercian can go a long way:
— my first thought is that we have all the laws on the books that we need. The problem is the laws are not enforced. Another thought is that a law banning all cars (except emergency vehicles) over four cylinders could solve a lot of problems.. A law banning private ownership of automatic or military weapons would make America a better place, but might cause a revolution. (non-blogger John)
— Equal funding for ALL public schools wherever they are. (Tamarika)
— My law would be that everyone would have to be polite and considerate of others at all times. (And no one could drive a car and talk on the phone at the same time). (non-blogger Bonnie)
— I would dictate that…that no one and no book would dictate to you how to live. (Steve James of Lunchmoney)
— 1. Mankind must never be allowed to use weapons of mass destruction ever again against each other, and includes but not limited to nuclear bombs and missiles, biological and chemical warfare, grenades, landmines, bullets, firebombs, arrows, and rocks. 2. Mankind must never be allowed to destroy any ecological system, nor treat in an inhumane manner, any living creature, and must be good stewards of the planet earth and its inhabitants one and all. (Cowtown Pattie)
— Nationalize the arms industry. the pentagon wants our tax money? fine; let them use it to actually manufacture weapons. maybe they’ll get a little more parsimonious with using them. this has the added benefit of taking profit out of the arms dealing equation, to my way of thinking. economic and military experts may have very good reason to call me insane on this one, but i’m just thinking if it’s not profitable anymore maybe the vultures will no longer rule our society. same goes for drugs. legalize it and tax it. maybe less gang violence then, no? and less deficit. spend some of the money on drug rehab and other programs for addicts. (Ex-Lion Tamer)
— 1. All politicians must henceforth be squeaky clean honest.
(a)No money may be accepted from any source other than the government for conducting political campaigns.
(a.1) While in office no money may be accepted from any source other than the government
(a.2) Upon leaving office the candidate may not work for, or serve in any paid capacity for, any person, company, organization or corporation directly and positively affected by any legislation voted favourably on by the candidate.
(a.3)All politicians must immediately resign their seat if any relative closer than 1st degree cousin assumes a paid position with any person, company, organization or corporation directly and positively affected by any legislation voted favourably on by the candidate
Penalty for breaking this law is life in prison without parole and no country club prisons either. (posted at Doug of The Alders)
— That everyone had to tell the truth. (non-blogger Joe)
— I’d have them repeal the Mann Act. (non-blogger Pete, who never takes anything seriously)
Any chance we can get those goons to sit on Congress until they deal with the global warming situation?

Yes, it figures that I would ask for comments (see previous post) on a day when Typekey comment feature is not working and my mother slips into some kind of weird mental place that requires my constant presence. But I am getting very interesting and unexpected email responses and will post them soon. If you haven’t responded yet, please do.

For those of you who know my son and are curious as to what he’s like these days, go here to see him and hear him speaking to the audience at the Portland Serenity benefit, wearing a Jayne hat. 🙂
By the way, the world-wide effort he coordinated has raised more than $64K (and still counting) for Equality Now.

I took a Politics Test and came up with this assessment:
I am a Social Liberal (70% permissive), an Economic Liberal (11% permissive). I am described, as a Socialist: You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.
Well, yeah. Shouldn’t everybody??
On the montage of famous people depicted in a visual representation of where they fall in the political spectrum, I fall somewhere between Gandhi and Boris Yeltsin.
At the end of the test is this:

AND FINALLY, if you could make up ONE new law and have it enforced FOREVER, by goons, what would your law be? Use your imagination, let your despotic instincts run free.

Leave a comment or email me your idea.
How would you answer that??

Intelligence — brain power — is a wonderful thing, but they wouldn’t know that over at March Together, where the resident blogger, never having heard of The Onion, mistook an article, by-lined by a writer who doesn’t exist, as serious instead of satire. And then the anti-abortion blogger made it even worse, including excerpting a definition for satire that omitted the fact that it is based on wit and irony.
b!X is right. This is the kind of person who voted for our current president. However, there’s hope if you look at the more than 600 comments and several trackbacks to this post.
The level of writing and critical thinking displayed on the March Together weblog makes it hard to take it seriously. It almost seems as though pro-choice people might have set it up to make a laughing stock of pro-life people. The scary thing is that’s not the case. These people are serious. Seriously uneducated.
Best line in one of the comments:

the opposite of intellectual Left is unintelligent Right

And so now the unEjumacated blogger thinks he can escape the criticisms of both his allies and his opponents by starting a new weblog at www.marchforlife.blogspot.com.
You can run, Pete, but you can’t hide.

There is so many awful newsworthy things happening throughout the world that this Tuesday’s Harper’s Weekly digest contains very few oddities to report:

“New research confirmed that smoking and obesity increase the risk of erectile dysfunction.[New York Times][Reuters] U.S. tax revenue was up.

“It was reported that Melinda Gates is more comfortable than her husband Bill when it comes to holding AIDS babies in Africa or talking to male prostitutes in India.[New York Times] The world’s oldest crow died in Bearsville, New York,[Associated Press] and astronomers observed what they said might be a strange glowing blob of dark matter sucking in gas.[New Scientist] …. .[Bloomberg] President Vladimir Putin of Russia explained that he had recently kissed a young boy on the stomach because he “wanted to stroke him like a cat.”.

The depressing news is that, according to the NY Times

“A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists” to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
“We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. “That’s a problem.”.

‘YA THINK??!!
Read the reports from the Southern Poverty Law Center here and here.
On this mountain home front, life is just as surreal, as mom wanders, babbling something that has the word “potato” in it. During lucid moments, she wants to help — cook, clean, all the things she knows how to do to keep busy. I can’t let her do anything because she’s a danger at the stove or with a knife, and she’s not supposed to bend down and everything she touches seems to wind up someplace else and then we can’t find it. She gets really mad at me, shouting that she hopes someone does to me someday what I’m doing to her. “I hope that someday my daughter will try to keep me safe and take care of me if I’m like you,” I say. “You don’t have a daughter,” she throws back at me as she stomps away.
I spent all day today making homemade chicken soup and trying to keep her calm. She just wouldn’t sit for more than five minutes; she paced and panted and cried and refused to lie down and rest. On top of that, I got up early today and colored my hair, which didn’t come out the color it should have. Feh. I’ll bet it’s the stupid minerals in the well water, which my sib says he runs through a softener. I think he needs a new one. FEH! (as my old Polish grandmother used to say.)

When I first started blogging five years ago, I was very concerned about protocol. Is it OK to go back and change what I had written in a post? Is it OK to delete comments that are just way off the mark or offensive to other commenters? I don’t care about any of those things any more. It’s my party, and I’ll blog the way I want to.
Oh, of course i don’t want a reputation for being inauthentic or manipulative, and to be honest, only once have I gone back and made signficant changes to a post, and that was to keep much-needed peace in the family.
I am, however, at the point of considering tossing a commenter out on his ear. He’s an “intelledtual,” he claims; he’s also confrontational . He doesn’t seem to understand that one needs to be affective in order to be effective. If he has a “totem animal,” I suspect it’s a beaver — gnawing, gnawing, gnawing away at the same spot until he makes it give away.
Back in May of 2005, I blogged an item about what “truth” is/isn’t that continues to generate comments. The early ones were informative; the later ones seemed to be a battle between linear logic and the the more illusive emotions. It seems to me that the goal should always be to combine both in any argument because individuals are both rational and emotional. What we feel affects what we think — it’s just human nature. Unless, it seems, one classifies himself as an intellectual and ergo doesn’t have to look beyond the apparent “facts.”
For now, I let the dialogue between the mind and the heart continue, with my interjections when I feel like it. After all, it IS my party.
And the truth here is that you’re invited to join in the comments over at my Whose Truth post.

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while; back in the “old” days, we all did a lot of that — especially as we women bloggers asserted our places in the blogsphere and commiserated on how to deal with commenters whose comments contributed nothing to the conversation and with the issue of just what family-related things shouldn’t be blogged. I finally had to resort to a system of commenter registration, as did Tamara, who wound up starting a whole new weblog.
Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: many of us have been called that and more by some males who have stumbled onto our weblogs. There is a book by that title (Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls’ Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes), published by the Guerrilla Girls. I indulged myself and recently sent for a copy.
The Introduction to the book has this to say about stereotypes:

It’s rearely a girl’s own choice. It’s a label someone else give you to make you less or more than you really are.

By empowering women to create their own stereotypes and to reject the ones our culture tries to squeeze us into, the Guerrilla Girls want to do our share toward saving the world from sexists and misogynists everywhere and have fun along the way.

A lot of us bloggrrrls are Guerrilla Girls at heart.
Which brings me to Shelley Powers (the blogger previously known as Burning Bird), who was a major figure in the blogoshpere before she took a long break. She’s baaaaack, this time with Just Shelleyas her home base, but with other sites as well.
And I think it’s funny that all of a sudden bloggers are discovering the clever, funny, talented, and prolific zefrank. I discovered him when I started blogging in 2001, and if you go here on my old blog and scroll down to May 16, you will see that I blogged about him then.
Ah, as usual, this crone is ahead of her time. (That’s my chosen stereotype, doncha know!)

(That’s this Crone, South Park Style)
And this has always been one of my favorites, thanks to Gary Turner over in the UK.

Stole his from Jeneane’s blog:

Can you tell my mom went to bed early tonight??