Tucker let's his freak flag fly
But first, a brief note on yesterday ' s post. Scotch whiskeys can taste very different from each other, as can wines. (The process of making scotch involves smoking the barley malt over a peat fire, which gives room for enormous variation.) You certainly might like one more than another, and if the one you happen to like isn ' t the cheapest, so be it. But more expensive is not equal to objectively better, and professionals can ' t tell cheap from expensive in blindfold tests. Also worth noting that blended whiskeys aren ' t inherently inferior, on the contrary they can be consistent from year to year, which is an inheren...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 10, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A digression
While I dance on the graves of Pat Robertson and James Watt (only the good die young, it seems), let ' s take a break from more serious matters and consider this, which I have known all along.Wine snobbery is complete bullshit. Even the ostensible experts -- wine critics, sommeliers, collectors, winemakers with expensive labels -- can ' t tell Two Buck Chuck or a jug from Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. They can ' t even tell red from white -- they ' re fooled by food coloring. Put an expensive label on a bottle, and they ' ll make all sorts of elaborate comments about it ' s unique qualities and praise it to the skies, ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 9, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: The New Deal
Nehemiah 5 may be a tad confusing because it doesn ' t give context -- we just find the situation as it is. The society has become highly unequal, with a small ruling class exploiting the masses. The people are in debt, they don ' t own their ow fields, and have even sold their daughters into servitude. So Nehemiah does an FDR and puts and end to debt slavery and for that matter, to lending money at interest. He also renounces riches himself, in contrast to previous governors. I can get behind this, but it hasn ' t become a universal norm among Jews, of course, who span the political spectrum. There obviously isn ' t ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 7, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Technical Difficulties
My old ' puter was pretty much shitting the bed so I had to replace it. This required transferring its contents to the new machine, which ended up taking pretty much all day -- well, 3 1/2 hours plus commuting time with a tech support guy -- and then the rest of the afternoon restoring my logins, downloading cloud applications, and figuring out the new OS and whatnot. That got me thinking about the hassles connected with all the technology that ' s supposed to save us time and effort and amplify our powers. Somebody -- one of those radical environmentalist types like Murray Bookchin or E.F. Schumacher -- oh wait...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 6, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Book banning
Ch. 4 is pretty self-explanatory -- the neighbors feel threatened by the Jews rebuilding the city wall but Nehemiah is resolute and they do it anyway. So I ' ll take this opportunity to talk about the current book banning wars. There are some distinctions that people seem to elide in this controversy so I ' ll try to be clear about my own position. Of course there is plenty of literature that isn ' t appropriate for third graders to read, for various reasons. It might be just too disturbing, and give them nightmares. They might misunderstand it -- for example, literature featuring unreliable or malevolent narrat...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 4, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ha Ha
Not The Onion.Davis District pulls Bible from elementaries, junior highs ' due to vulgarity or violence ' Looks like somebody actually read it, for a change. (Source: Stayin' Alive)
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 2, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Hit the snooze button
Ch. 3 is the kind of list of meaningless names of which the Chronicler was fond. There is no reason to read this. The question is why it ' s here at all -- what was the author ' s purpose in making this list? We can guess that it ' s intended as a sort of honor roll, a way of building community by acknowledging everyone ' s contribution to rebuilding the city wall. I would presume that the people who are named didn ' t personally, physically do the work. That would be impractical, the actual building would have been done by a crew of appropriately skilled tradesmen, which would mean this is actually a list of donors, like ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 31, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Denial
I don ' t remember offhand if I mentioned this in my previous post on the subject, but Sarah Palin ' s grotesque lie about " death panels " also contained a reference to a claim by conservative economist Thomas Sowell:The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce
the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out,
government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay
the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the
elderly, and the disabled, of course. Sowell is obviously an ignorant idiot. As you presumably know...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The dung gate
Nehemiah 2 generates a mystery. Remember this is some 80 years after the original return of the Israelites from exile, and the Temple and city walls were rebuilt in the first generation. The history recorded in the Tanakh gives no indication of why the city walls have been burned in the meantime, so that ' s just an omission we ' ll have to live with, apparently. The " dung gate " is presumably the gate by which excrement and probably trash in general are removed from the city, but the rationale for the names of the other gates is not clear. The Jackal Well is called the Serpent Well in the KJV. The format of the excerpt h...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 28, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The world is flat
This article also mentions the chemtrails absurdity.Climate change denial and chemtrails go back a long way, basically since right wing politics in the U.S. and Europe went batshit crazy. They obviously didn ' t like the Affordable Care Act, but the reasons they said they didn ' t like it were hallucinatory.Remember Sarah Palin and " death panels "?The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby
with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama ' s ' death panel '
so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ' level of productivity in society. 'That was a total ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 27, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Shape of the Earth: Views Differ
A newly elected Republican district chair in Georgia wants to tell you aboutthe most pernicious and widespread conspiracy on, well, earth:
In an interview with David Weiss (AKA “Flat Earth
Dave ”) and Matt Long on her “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” podcast, Taylor
and her guests discussed biblical “evidence” that the Earth is actually
flat as a pancake. “The people that defend the globe don’t know anything
about the globe,” said Weiss. “If they knew a tenth of what Matt and I
know about the globe they would be Flat Earthers.” “All the globes, everywhere” Taylor said later in the discussion. ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 25, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Deja vu?
Ezra and Nehemiah were originally a single book, and as a matter of fact early editions seemed to assume that they were actually the same person -- that the story was told twice, in different versions. Certainly it does seem that there is an echo in here. Both characters are Jews who have favor in the court of Ataxerxes, who sends them to be governors of Judah, and they carry out similar projects. Whatever the case, historians seem to believe that Nehemiah was a real person,that he actually was the cupbearer to Ataxerxes, as the narrator claims to be. That means he was a highly trusted courtier -- his job was basically to ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 24, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: More biblical morality
This is the last chapter of Ezra. Obviously, the story is implausible, but just consider the moral principle here. Speaking on behalf of Yahweh, Ezra commands an untold number of men -- evidently a substantial proportion of the population -- to abandon their wives and children and, presumably, expel them from Judah. I can assure you that the neighboring states didn ' t have refugee resettlement agencies or Aid to Families with Dependent Children, meaning that the like fate of these people was starvation. That ' s the moral thing to do, according to Ezra and his psychopathic deity. I don ' t have more to say about thi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 21, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Diversion
To be clear, we are not talking about people who have committed serious felonies. That is another discussion. But the large majority of people who are involved with the criminal justice system are charged with fairly minor offenses -- what may be labeled disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, public intoxication, shoplifting or other petty theft, maybe getting in a fight or vandalizing property of someone they ' re mad at. As we have seen, a lot of these people have diagnosable mental and/or substance use disorder, limited education and job skills. As we have also seen, if they are convicted (or more realisti...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 20, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Un milagro
No post yesterday because I had cataract surgery. I ' d already had the left eye done a couple of weeks ago -- they do them one at a time, I think mostly so they can bill for two encounters. But aside from the padded bill -- and that ' s not the only way they sucked up extra cash -- the result was absolutely fantastic.To be honest, I ' d forgotten what it ' s like to see clearly. The surgery is actually no big deal -- painless, only local anesthesia, and instant results. Now I only need over the counter reading glasses and otherwise the world is new. So yes, medical services are expensive and there was a great deal a...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 19, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
