Frenzied Daddy

I spent part of this morning looking for an image of the Family Circus’s “not me” schmoo. Because he and his brethren (”I dunno” and “Not My Fault”) have moved in. I would love to evict them; which means I need to teach my kids to take responsibility for their actions and to help find solutions rather than placing blame.

Not that I don’t do that now, but somewhere I’ve gone wrong with it.

But in searching for that image, I stumbled upon the Nietzche Family Circus, a parody of that damnably tepid comic. This quote made me pause; “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” I can totally see where Nietzche is coming from with that, and in some of my more angsty days, I could actually think that.

Hope provides a barrier, a resistance to acceptance. If you hope for an outcome, you’re not accepting some other outcome. I wonder what our Bhuddist friends make of this. “Life is suffering” is not that too far removed from “hope is the worst of all evils” — or is it? Both seem to lead one to an acceptance of “the bad situations we find ourselves in,” from which we can work our way out of them.

Lew Rockwell postulates some theoretical pros and cons of the breaking “the US Government’s monopoly” on postal service. In actuality, most of what he has to say was anticipated. In general, while I don’t consider it fruitful to argue this point (because I don’t see a change happening and because there are more important things to argue about), I thought one argument was interesting. One of his straw man arguments for, err, against multiple postal carriers is that we’d get more junk mail. And then he knocks it down with “there is strong market demand for less junk mail, not more” .

I agree- there is indeed strong market demand for less junk mail. And it seems reasonable to believe that multiple carriers would give us a possibility for some sort of heuristic sorting of mail into junk and not-junk categories. But, as we see in the Internet realm (Lew Rockwell also makes many parallels between the postal service and the internet), it’s difficult to decide what exactly is “junk.” Oh sure, anything with an address to “cia1is user” might be junk mail. But what about offers for credit cards? Someone (evil credit companies not withstanding) might want those. Or the letters from OPB asking us for money.

Basically it would come to some level of a value judgement on my inbound mail– and I’m not sure I’m ready to trust someone else with that yet. And multiple carriers would have multiple levels of junk mail thresholds; you might even ban certain carriers from delivering your mail if you get enough junk from them.

Humbug, I say.

Hershey Chocolate and a bunch of other chocolatiers have petitioned the FDA to redefine the makeup of Chocolate. Guittard and even See’s Candy are against this change.

Would you eat something called “mockolate?” I ate a lot of carob, growing up; I was allergic to chocolate. But even then I recognized that it was a poor substitute.

Seriously, if you want to keep cocoa solids and cocoa butter in your cocoa… go talk to the FDA, Here’s some guidelines on where to say and some suggestions on things to say.

Don’t mess with our chocolate!

Customers Suck, and this one almost got kicked in the chops.

… And girls shouldn’t read big books like that. It’s too thick. Boys don’t like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don’t you? …

Miss B has just finished reading the sixth Harry Potter book (and if she asks me to read the part where Harry kisses Ginny again, I may scream), and all I can say is, if big books make girls into lesbians, then get in the car, honey, we’re goin to the library! Lesbians won’t make you a teenage mom.

But seriously; what freaking kind of freaking mother would tell her daughter that? You’re supposed to freaking nurture and teach, and model, you complete and total yutz. I haven’t read the Traveling Pants books, but I hear they’re pretty good. Miss B seems to enjoy fantasy, though, so I’ll leave her to whatever she finds. In my house, whatever she wants to read she’s allowed; some of the books I’ve “proofread” ( just like my dad proofread my comics ).

On a final note, I’m not so worried about Bush declaring Martial Law before the next Presidential election and making our transition to an Orwellian dystopia complete. It was pointed out to me that my belief that Bush “stole” the 2000 election with Republican shenanigans means that he hasn’t been voted to be president twice and that he’s eligible for a third term. In a wry way, this is funny, but I can’t believe that we’d go there.
me

Um, yeah.
Bush Paves the Way for Martial Law

With Flickr’s integration with Yahoo, you can place your photos on a map, and then when someone looks at them, you can see where they were in the world! Awesome!

Wish I’d thought of that.

Banks charge an insane interest rate via overdraft fees. I admit that sometimes I consider; “if I buy these groceries now, and it turns out that I don’t have enough cash, is it ok to pay the extra $34 dollars the bank will charge me? Which is worse? Hungry kids or $34 in fees?” So in that regard, I’m ahead of some of these poor fools who think the bank will refuse to honor their purchase. Looking at the heinous interest rate, however, I’d be better off at a ‘paycheck loan shark’ … (mom: no, I would never go to one. However, if I *never would go* to them, I should *never pay $34 in fees* too ).

Almost every one of our overdraft charges can be traced directly to purchases via debit. The ones that happen when a check goes through? It’s because of debit purchases that weren’t taken into account before the check was written. It’s really hitting us, we’re living paycheck to paycheck exactly as this article describes. I’m working very hard to stop this.

Another thing about this whole process is that we’ve got about $400 in “overdraft protection,” maxed out. So it’s basically a 19% interest loan from the bank to cover my previous overdrafts. The bank automatically takes out some random amount for repayment of this loan; so it’s pretty difficult to always know exactly what’s in there.

I’m currently checking our accounts daily, which is about the only thing that keeps us afloat with regard to USBank.

My last two posts have been both wordy and political. This weblog is primarily my ‘my family’-oriented weblog. I have a separate weblog for work stuff, and two others for which I’m currently writing content (Portland Parents and Portland Scrapbooking).

I don’t see stopping posting political rants like these last two posts, and I’m concerned that they “dilute the brand,” that they mess with the family-orientation. Domain names are cheap (less than a double mocha) at Yahoo.com at the moment, and for a lightly trafficked blog, I can have it hosted for free.

Do you folks think I should move my political rants to a different blog?

Talk amongst yourselves.

I hate listening to Randi Rhodes. But I do it. I hate it because she uses a lot of the radio tendencies that conservative radio hosts do, like running roughshod over her callers, and like sticking to one thought for an hour and bringing back every. single. topic. back. to that thought. I listen to her because every once in a while she says something smart.

Like … about two days ago, she said that the Supreme Court didn’t step into the Anna Nicole Smith inheritance debate because they had jurisdiction over the issue. They stepped in because they wanted to establish that they did have jurisdiction over the issue– that the Supreme Court can address issues of who can marry whom, and who gets to benefit from marriage. In other words, they used the discussion around her inheritance to increase their domain.

She went on to expound on the idea that marriage is a state-level function, not a nation-level function. Note that this chart shows that each state has its own rules about age of consent and about common-law marriages. She’s got it right; the US Supreme Court should never have been involved in Anna Nicole’s inheritance battle.

However, Frist’s Plans are not a secret. While Frist is ignoring problems with already-established checks-and-balances (he’s pushing for this vote rather than focusing on the Presidental use of Signing Statements or on the Search of William Jefferson’s Office), he’s instead riding a doomed horse to get the House and Senate to pass a bill restricting State Rights to condone same-sex marriages.

And the Supreme Court has recently gone out of their way to show that marriage is a Federal-level issue, and not just a state issue. This Supreme Court, with the new Bush appointees. Really makes ya think, doesn’t it?