Lest it seem that I am becoming a men’s rights advocate let’s take a look at another burning topic. Increasingly, State laws are legalizing marijuana for medicine and for recreation and in some cases prohibiting local law enforcement from participating in US Federal drug enforcement efforts against licensed marijuana industry. This collision between Federal and State Laws has been part and parcel to the political dialogue since the Confederate Congress first enacted the current US constitution in the 18th century. But smoke is rising Continue reading “Emancipation Toxification”
Knowledge is Freedom
Yesterday a newer old friend who never met my wife saw a blog article and forwarded it to me. The friend was afraid I’d get angry about it or be hurt. The article began: Last month should have been the 18th birthday of my oldest daughter…
Twenty-four years ago, my very short marriage ended abruptly and against my heart’s desire and wishes. Our child would have been 23 in December or January. I wanted children for as long as I can remember. But a miscarriage ended that hope and in four more weeks my wife had left me to grieve a double loss, and without any clear explanation.
During our marriage, three separate marriage counselors encouraged her to share her feelings and issues with me and she flatly refused. All three fired us for that issue. The last one gave her the permission to leave she’d needed someone else to give. In California, no-fault divorce meant that I had no real input into the process.
I was young and my wife was eight years younger, and only four hours after the ceremony I realized we had made a devastating mistake. Neither of us was who the other thought. But my faith and my disposition made it impossible for me to admit failure so I soldiered on. An event happened that day that was shaming and demeaning to me, and that left me so broken I didn’t see how I would cope. It was not the sort of thing one might guess. I felt like I was suffocating and began to grieve the relationship and the career that would never be possible when things played out.
Against this backdrop we agreed not to have a child until we were financially better established. When finances went from bad to worse, I brought her to my parents home, because I couldn’t make her homeless. It was horrible.
Parenting Matters
In retrospect, my wife was obviously and morbidly depressed. But she refused help. Her retreat left me with the burden of decision making for the both of us, something I wasn’t able or willing to do. My wife was very young and had been abused by a mother who refused to recognize that her children were separate individuals.
My mother-in-law was a self-pitying, malignant narcissist who used her home library, 20 shelves of self-help books and medical journals, to lend her self-pity an aire of legitimacy. She began on my wife at a young age by indoctrinating her with the idea that they both were suffering whatever illness or syndrome was flavor of the month. After all they were the same person.
My wife’s Daddy issues, that had been relatively silent, opened wide and swallowed me, the first week of our marriage. This included a session where she began speaking like a three-year-old for several hours. Over the following weeks she was fired from her job for sexually abusing an elderly, female patient, demanded that I quit school one semester shy of completion, and pushed me to work full-time at a local factory to support an oversize apartment we could not afford. She then crawled into bed and only crawled out again to eat the meals I cooked for her after long hours rebuilding automotive parts.
Physician health thyself.
We immediately got into couples counseling. She demanded we quit about the time the counselor got tired and demanded that she start honestly communicating her needs and issues with me. Over the following years we saw two other counselors. They both bottom-lined it for her in the same terms. She refused.
The irony is that her undergrad and practicum was in dealing with battered spouses. But in her world battered spouse was a gender biased term. Only women could be victims of spousal abuse, or at least only someone married to a man. From the time we were engaged, we had a list of unrelenting House Rules. Among them were:
No hitting: (men may not hit women but women are only being expressive with their fists.)
No name calling: (When I was fuzz-ball, Dick, Ass-hole, or worse. that wasn’t name-calling. Women aren’t capable of name-calling.)
No money hiding: (Men hide money so they can leave their wives or cheat, women are only providing a means of escaping abuse when they do the same.)
No castle secrets: (A woman’s privacy is sacred, a man is only using secrecy to do bad things or talking about his feelings with a third party to shame his wife.)
My upbringing had made me constitutionally incapable of hitting a woman. But that hadn’t really been the point of the rule. When I began amending her rules to be gender neutral that was considered abusive. Also, announcing that she was Klingon (aside from the lecture on Trekker vs Trekkie that should have sent me running) was not a mixed message, even when she was asking me to engage in the mating practices of next-gen Klingons. Something I was not into in the least. It made me sick.
After she left, I went just a little bit mad. To provide context four women have stalked me in my life. No stuffed bunnies involved, but ‘C’ still drives by my house then speeds away just to see if I’m around. ‘B’ contacted my mother, two years after we lost contact, while I was in residential college, and tricked Mom into giving her my contact information so she could make menacing calls. ‘S’ looked me up when my wife left and kept showing up wherever I went in the local county. A fourth left a poem in my locked car in college:
Roses are red
Andorans are blue
Always remember
Someone’s watching you.
My wife confessed that one was her. We were engaged at the time.
In the counsel of many, there is dissonance.
Old friends and peers, church family, even strangers began to have very definite opinions about my marriage and character and feeling the need to share them. I couldn’t even go to Starbucks for a coffee and a chance to write, without a stranger walking up and engaging me in a conversation about marriage and how women can never leave a man unless he’s abusive.
It made me reclusive, something at odds with my natural disposition. A college friend refused a facebook friend-request with the message: I prefer to remember you as the friend I knew in college, and blocked me. The worst of it was no one who knew the both of us would share what her real motives might have been or why she chose to disappear from my life rather than leave a line of communication for the future. I grieved long and hard and the wounds kept reopening because of the third party abuse.
Knowledge is Freedom
When my friend sent me the link to my wife’s article, I took a moment to brace myself then read it with trepidation. It was shocking, in a very objective and physical way. Psychogenesis is not a game for children. But, on the heels of the lightheadedness was an overpowering sense of joy, peace, and freedom.
As I read, I realized the real cause of the divorce and finally got the closure I needed. I saw just how deeply ill and delusional my wife has been and I began to realize how the narrative she’d been perpetuating kept her trapped and unable to break the walls of grief and rage she’d built for herself.
It would be pointless to play the he vs she game at this point. In spite of the delusional nature of her recall, which has moved events around and even changed the year of her miscarriage and forgets the DNC she had before we were married (I was not the father of that one)–my wife believes the narrative. She remembers these fictitious or even dream events and the trauma to her is just as real as if they had actually happened. I grieve for her. I don’t however have any responsibility for those events, and it is freeing to know that the majority of those things she suffers over are not my doing.
I have to admit in retrospect there were strong indicators. More than once, she woke up from a dream convinced that the events in her dreams were real, I should know what they were, and I should be duly repentant for what I’d done in her dreams. IT was not her resonsibility to tell me what she had dreamed. Bear in mind that she was fully aware and admitted that they were dreams. But this was a castle secret.
My life and hers could have been much happier if at some point she’d been willing to admit what things she believed I’d done and what had happened. It would have helped me if I’d been able to overcome the machismo that made it shameful to admit I was a battered, emotionally abused, verbally abused, financially abused, and erstwhile grieving father. But I was the man so I had to be the strong one, the stoic, the invincible, the punching bag.
The bottom line is communication is critical, and privacy is a basic human need–but secrecy is toxic to every form of human interaction. In secrecy, sickness and insanity go without care. In secrecy, abuse, both real and imagined, goes unhealed. In secrecy, hope dies. In secrecy, delusion is omnipotent. But secrecy is at times the only defense against cultural bias and misandry.
The mediation will be socialized.
This is the point where most blogs would give a short, saccarine offer of hope and a hotline. I have yet to find a hotline that really deals with men abused by women except to blame the victim.
If you are an abused man, know there is hope. I have no respect for modern psychology or it’s religious technology alternatives. In place of a hotline, I recommend you get away, get safe, and get a Bible. When you have the perspective, find a friend that believes you, that you can trust, someone patient who doesn’t practice tough love. And get busy with low stress work and helping others.
Remember, when someone hurts you, it’s probably not about you.
Moving is tedious
The Court of Just Opinion
It is a fact that the USSC* (not SCOTUS, I’m sick of the play on POTUS) is empowered to Interpret laws, common law and statutes in light of the US Constitution. (NOT the other way round btw. No power exists to interpret the constitution in light of law or case law.) But can we just dispense with the ludicrous perception that the findings of the court, or ANY court, are truth or justice? They are the opinions derived from interpreting the facts in light of personal bias and law. Truth is an objective reality like fact, and can only be approached not completely ascertained. People make mistakes and courts–juries, judges, and justices–are people. They are people with power and the bias of authority that makes them difficult or impossible to challenge. But challenged or not, they can be wrong.
We need these institutions. Without them we’d have the chaos of an unregulated democracy, because even an anarchy will resolve into absolute rule by the majority and suppression of the minority, indifference to the individual, and influence peddling by the privileged, beautiful, or charismatic. (If it sounds like I’m antidemocratic, you are spot on. The purpose of Good Government is to protect the minority against abuse by the majority and protect the individual from all collectives INCLUDING the minority.) But the point is, while these institutions serve our best interest, only an Idjit would mistake their findings for truth rather than expediency.
* This is just a one time usage. USSC is properly the United States Service Code which the body of statutes, broken into numerical sections called Titles, we commonly refer to as Federal Law.
Notorious Shooter Duly Notarized in the Press
The biggest motivators in the new sport of shooting mass killings, is media attention. Not the fact the tragedies are covered but the salacious way in which the shooter is notorized and his psychology is made such an amateur study. The role of a free press is to inform objectively and allow a well educated public to apply critical reason, make informed opinions, and coerce their legislators and executives to comply with the majority opinion.
When the press turns these incidents into media events and attempts to sway public opinion, they are no longer free press but editorial. There is no effective difference between a headline news reader who takes a biased perspective (yellow journalist) and a shock jock like Hannidy or Limbaugh. Their speech is protected under the same Bill of Rights they are denigrating.
However, it is dishonest and potentially criminal to purport it to be objective news coverage. That is no different from the much touted “Russian Influence” in the American political process. I’m far more concerned about Canadian and Anglo influence. IT’s far easier for the English and Anglo Canadians to masquerade as American citizns and act to pervert the political process in the US. IF Russians helping Trump with dirt on Hillary is criminal, then Canadian PACs advertising in favor of gun-laws or Barack Obama or (yes) Hillary is just as criminal for precisely the same reasons.
Leftist nuts and dictators are the only groups historically to have blamed violence on the prevalence of weapons rather than the prevalence of bad actors. Leftists need a disarmed public so that their extremist politics can be enforced on an unwilling populace. Dictators of the feudal, monarchical, fascist, or plutocratic need a disarmed public in order to enforce unwelcome rule on the . . . Hey! That’s the same reason!
Go figure.
Famous Spoofs and Other Lost Freedoms
The broader issue of the recent sexual abuse/harassment revelations is the depravity of the media based celebrity machine. Louie CK would never have been in a position to behave the way he did if not for the perceived authority attached to fame and media success. This is the biggest lie of the cult of celebrity. Entertainers, while a lot more fun than your average motorcycle mechanic or fast food delivery driver, are actually less important. This goes for the producers, editors, writers (Ugh! They got me, Joe) and technicians in movies and television as well. Actors like Spacey, producers like Weinstein, they are instrumental in providing a product you may like or pass on. But they aren’t important. Their failures, however criminal, don’t matter directly to you and yours, unless you are a victim or concerned with the very real problem of predatory sexuality. We all should be. And we all should do our part to change the social environment so that the victim is free and even comfortable telling.
The problem is the Baby Boomers have gotten increasingly paranoid and they’ve shared that paranoia with the Millennials. Every new violent crime, immediately brings out the [x] Broadcasting Company, or the [y] News Network to open the big top and pedantically call the play by play like some OCD sportscaster. “Okay, let’s go to Jimmy Joe who’s watching from the police barricade. Tell me Jimmy is the suspect wearing paisley with stripes? That looks like stripes. Did you know that Paisleys are made int the shape of the perimeter of the Himalayas?–”
This is followed by an endless cry for tighter laws governing every spoken word, meal item, clothing choice, etc. of the private citizen. Every move is strategically placed to further limit individuality, choice and privacy guaranteed by the US Constitution. From Louie CK to Civil Liberty? Really? Well, yeah. If louie had done the same thing in a protest against organized religion, guns, Donald Trump–staged on the White House lawn–the same people crying “foul unclean, go thee to perdition” would be celebrating his brave act of conscience in pursuit of PC values. The media would not be concerned with the collateral damage to young impressionable minds of children or young women. Why? Because as a celebrity, he would be perceived as having some authority on issues social and political.
This is the heart of it. If Weinstein were just an employer, a choice among many, women would have felt free to avoid his casting couch–and report to man for sexual harassment or rape. But as celebrities they had to protect public opinion about their private life. A Rumor of misconduct by those women, would have lead to an end of career. “A few phone calls,” and they’d “never work in Hollywood again.”
Why should an actors private sexuality, criminal misconduct, political opinions, religious affiliations, etc. matter one whit. They really aren’t stars. They are artists and craftspeople. They make a product you like buying. Nothing more. But nothing less. If a factory worker can’t get a job because he spent time in prison as a young adult, we say poor man. It becomes and Hallmark movie about human triumph, and we get Spacey to play the poor unfortunate. If a young girl struggling with too much celebrity and a total lack of privacy, shoplifts to self-medicate we crucify her and relegate her to years without work, until we forget and move on to the next victim.
The star system is nothing more than a particularly successful marketing scheme. It’s like fast food games and giveaway, BOGO, get your free gift with purchase, over a billion served. If it’s kept in propotion it serves its purpose. But when it creates a standard for vetting employees it is a problem. When that trend spreads and corporations begin vetting employees based on their social media, background checks, and an invasion of privacy worse than Big Brother, it is a threat to peace and security and needs to be put on hiatus.
When a young man has to wait 15 years to report a sexual assault by a drunken coworker, because he will be seen as a troublemaker and his career ended, due to his attackers Star status on broadway– When a writer finds it difficult to be published, not because of his skill with the elements of story and plot, but because he falls in the wrong canine classification– When a rising actress and comedienne can’t complain about a drunken lout masturbating in front of her because he thinks her discomfort is comedic–It’s not time for stars to fall, its time to take down the black velvet curtain.
Headline trump commits the same crime as Al Gore, Rutherford B. Hayes
In the 1860’s, when he didn’t like his showing in the Whig primaries, Lincoln quit and split the party, running as a third party candidate with fringe party with a dubious commitment to the constitution.
In 1873 the election was challenged and the justices of the supreme court sat on a special commission to decide the election. Issue? Voter Fraud. Some states sent competing and disputed “slates” of electoral college results. The issue of which were “official” had to be settled. Statute now makes this congresses’ responsibility.
In 2000 the vote was too close to blithely accept the estimated counts that were reported, and number of districts were using a faulty system for recording votes that was so egregious it allowed them to vote for multiple candidates without even intending to. It had to be handled by auto recounts and the automatic discard of faulty ballots lead to a real question as to who the people had actually elected vs who became the default winner after so many were denied the franchise.
Trump has refused to go on record, and thereby hamstring himself, as blithely accepting a closely contested race. His stated concerns have been that some districts my commit voter fraud and allow those adopting stolen identities (such as those voting on behalf of the deceased or illegal aliens posing as US citizens) to vote in a US election. Illegal aliens and the deceased, even if they are somehow managing to pay taxes are not entitled to vote in US elections. It is a crime. More importantly, it is not the will of the people.
Mr. Trump has any number of personality and character issues. Hillary has justifiably pointed them out, and he has fired back by pointing out that her character and personality are no better than his. This is the worst election cycle in the last 60 years. But the disingenuity of pretending not to understand the man’s unwillingness to commit ahead of time to the outcome in the event that there is demonstrably fraud is the cite Raymond Fiest’s favorite new word, the work of “idjits”.
Note: per Donna Pozdro Presidents and Presidential candidates who’ve said privately or publicly that election results were questionable or even worth challenging (legally or otherwise) include: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, Richard Nixon, Al Gore and George W. Bush, and John Kerry.
Missouri terrorists raped Texas Astronauts with weapon of mass dissemination.
On June 16 & 17 of 2015 (this month as I write) the AP carried a pair of articles about an alleged “breach” of the Houston Astros database, called Ground Control, by members of the management staff of the Saint Louis Cardinals. The New York press waded in with both fists grasping for something salcious and the talking heads of sports nationwide began to smirk and reminisce about the days of yore and stealing another teams playbook. It was a source of great amusement and called up allusions to a century of comedy, including such heartwarming midcentury television favorites as Happy Days. It was just so funny.
The aforementioned AP articles took the time to explain that the two teams use Saber metrics–just like in Moneyball. They assured us that all that was stolen was a bunch of statistics and anyway the FBI and the baseball commission are on top of it so let’s go back to looking at the Team rivalry, eh? After all isn’t it just so much fun? Besides The FBI is on hand and they want it quiet.
The real issue here is privacy. We in America are guaranteed privacy in the 4th Amendment to our Constitution. The Supreme court has in fact ruled stating just that. The 4th guarantees that no-one without a search warrant is empowered to search your business records, body, realestate, or personal property. The actual term is chattel but that’s just an old way of saying something that really, really belongs to you like your hair comb, your wallet, your car (in those days your pets, livestock and woman as well).
The government routinely ignores this with its surveillance programs, so naturally they want to keep the cloud of secrecy thick when they are actually mulling over the possibility that they might enforce one of the federal statues against cyber crimes. Remember, where the executive branch is concerned, the constitution is a smoke screen and federal statute is merely a suggestion. That’s what Nixon told us, right? “Its not a crime if the the president [or one of his agents or departments] does it.”
Then there’s the fact that Houston might not have done enough to secure the intellectual property, the data, their chattel. The law against theft only applies if you have the money and knowledge to guard your property, right? For instance if you have a nce bike and you leave it in front of your house while you take a much needed bathroom break, then it’s perfectly legal for the nextdoor neighbor to take it and keep it. You left it unguarded and he’s bigger than you so that gives him clear ownership. Isn’t that how things are supposed to work in America?
It’s similar to how a young, physically weaker coed who wears a mini-skirt and crop top is actually inviting and sex with the first guy brave enough to take it from her. She’s intentionally seducing him, after all. And if you can’t afford a domicile then you have no right to privacy anyway, because you haven’t done due diligence and locked your doors and windows, signalling the government that you expect privacy. Isn’t that just how the founding fathers intended the constitution to operate? And we can leave it to the good guys in the Secret Service, FBI, IRS, NSA, etc. to decide for us because, ultimately they have our best interest at heart. And drone beach patrol units are for shark watch only. Where did I leave my red pill?
Cyber security is a growing problem and the biggest culprits are the very gate keepers who design and enforce the security standards that we are dependent on. It is never in the interest of those who enforce law or prosecute war to make it harder to spy on you or search your person, properties and business–so it remains easy. You have little recourse and so long as we, as a people, remain convinced that their is a terrorist in every back cupboard and a bomber under every bed, things will only get worse. We have to say know to the war on terrorism just like we did Joe Mc Carthy’s War on Communism.
War is a perfectly reasonable tool of diplomacy between political entities. Between a political entity and a movement, ideology, or behavior–its not war. That sort of war is oppression–for better or worse, I certainly support the oppression of thieves, rapists, murders etc.–and using posse commitatis and the whole military infrastructure to hunt and kill individuals for their, admittedly insane, religious and political beliefs, even when those beliefs make them violent, is equally insane and cannot coexist with a free and democratic society.
Murder, death, kill. PETA causes extinction of species.
The irony of the “animal rights” movement is the wild eyed murderous attitudes toward a particularly beloved primate species. How can you claim to love animals and insist that they be allowed to express their nature while attacking humans for exercising their instinct to hunt and prey? It’s laughably self contradictory.
This spoof meme is a perfect example of the hate rhetoric that hunters and omnivores suffer from extremists like PETA. The picture is a link to an article exposing the silly responses that this photo generated on social media. Some got the joke, some like the author of the article only got part of it, and some may have missed the point entirely.
“Jay” the individual who originally posted the pic, was of course making fun of the big game hunter memes, including one that featured a young athletic female with her rifle and her kills. I think that one was photoshopped but regardless, the reaction was hysterical in every sense of the word. The ones who got the Jurassic Bwanna meme featuring Speilberg (above) simply reacted with the frenzied vitriol that so often attends real imagery of the sort. This lead them to stay in the moment so to speak with regard to the hunting incident and spoof the insanity of the animal rights lobby, as if the tricerotops were really the victim of a homicide.
If the concern is conservation of species, bear in mind that latest research argues that at least in the sea, predation drives population growth rather than suppressing it. The conservation movement was begun and grown by sportsmen attempting to preserve sufficient numbers of prey to continue the sport. bear in mind that without predation you can’t have your KFC, McDonalds or sushi. Or for that matter a reasonably healthy and alert human population.
In fact, sportsmen with their low stress approach to species management will be critical to a healthy biosphere as just one of the natural predators necessary to restore a balanced ecosystem.