Miscellaneous Thoughts

ON VOTER INITIATIVES:

Well, I see that the forces of hate have passed anti-gay initiatives in three states. Those who voted in favor of these abominations would, in almost every case, call themselves christians. But we know that Jesus Christ himself would have voted against every one of them, staunch liberal that he was, and would have advised his followers to do the same. Therefore, those who voted for these things were not following the teachings of Christ, and therefore are NOT Christians!

In Florida, the wording of the initiative was so bad that it would prohibit heterosexual "common-law" marriages, even longstanding ones. Were I, let's say, to move in with a widow in Florida, just so that we could each have someone there to call 911 if either of us had a heart attack or a stroke, and let's say that she had a pension from her husband, so cannot remarry without losing that, we would be screwed. Neither of us could make medical decisions for the other, and neither of us could inherit simply from the other.

I blame the passage on poor leadership from Obama and his workers. They had enough people on the ground to simply stop all three of these initiatives. I have already noted that Obama is no friend to gays, and to me, this proves it. Funny how there would not be black liberation today with Bayard Rustin, a gay black man, and top lieutenant to Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet blacks voted overwhelmingly in favor of these hateful, discriminatory initiatives. They don't even know their own history. In fact, the whole idea of black christianity makes no sense. The only reason we have a black christian church in this country is because the slave owners converted their slaves to christianity in order to control them--"you be a good slave, and obey the master, and after you shuck off this mortal coil you will spend eternity in heaven: but if you are a bad slave, you will spend eternity tending the hellfires of damnation." And to think that if I had not needed the money for college, I probably would have gotten on one of those busses to the southland to work for integration.

I remember a black guy I knew in Massachusetts in the sixties. He said that he had vacationed in the south the previous summer and that they were treating blacks much better than they had previously. He said that at one point on his vacation, he even had a black bus driver! "He looked funny as hell steering from the back seat...."

MY PERSONAL BOYCOTTS:

I have personal boycotts. I have never even contacted the people from the companies I boycott to tell them why I don't buy their products. I just feel good knowing that I have cost them thousands of dollars in business because of the way they have treated me in the past.

The first one would have to be Stouffer's and Lean Cuisine. I once stayed in a Stouffer's-owned motel in the Columbus, Ohio area, as a journalist covering a meeting in Westerville. I was packing a Kodak Retina IIIC camera to take pictures of the event. I went back to the motel room for something during the morning, and found the maid just finishing up in our room. I wondered why she insisted on staying until I left, but assumed that she had a pass-key. I felt her behavior was unusual, but did not know why. That evening, when we got back to the motel, my camera and strobe were gone, as were the similar items from a coworker's room. The police informed us that they had had a large number of reports of similar burglaries from the rooms in that motel. It turns out that the maids did not have keys to the rooms. Someone came in front of them and opened the rooms, and they were supposed to lock the rooms behind them when they left. They were packing the goodies into the dirty sheets, and the laundry crew came by and picked them up later from outside the room. Stouffer's had failed to notify us of the problem, of course, and refused to make good on the stolen equipment. I live alone, and buy a fair amount of products similar to what they produce, but I don't buy Stouffers! The have lost thousands of dollars in income just from my refusal to purchase their products. Still, I would rather have that camera back. It was a collectible camera even then, but it was also sort of a daily user. It took magnificent pictures, and folded up to fit into a pants pocket. It was beautifully machined in Germany, and had a Schneider lens with a Synchro Compur shutter. I used it a lot for available light photos outdoors at night, which is a hobby of mine. I loved that camera. I carried it with me that weekend in preference to my SLR because it was quieter and smaller, and just the ticket for the semi-casual shots I expected to take at the meeting. But shame on Stouffer's, and I will never buy another product of their as long as I live.

My bout with Ethan Allen is very similar. They owned a motel in Danbury, CT, next to their factory and offices there, where all of the people who call on them stay. I was a travelling salesman at the time, though I was not there to call on them. When I showed up to check in, I noticed that there were a lot of teenaged kids hanging around the parking lot. At the desk, I noticed that the manager had a monitor which showed the kids, in front of him. Since my car was plainly visible in that monitor, and my room was very close to my car, I did not bother to move my car to the spot in front of the room. The next morning, my rear(liftback) window was broken, and all of my samples were gone. I filed a report, and as I recall, my employer's insurance covered the damages, though in some cases--a motocross boot, for instance--where the product came in a pair, I only carried one with me, so they did the kids no good at all, and hurt me. (Policy was that I bought the samples, and could sell them or keep them for personal use when I was finished with them. I had intended to keep the boots for the occasional dirt ride, for instance.) Again, shame on Ethan Allen, and you don't have to worry about me buying anything from your company, either!

Another company I try to boycott, though it is more difficult, since few people know all of the companies they own, is Anheuser Busch. I drove 18-wheelers for a couple of years, and hauled a fair amount of Budweiser out of their plant in Baldwinsville, NY. They forced you to stay awake for hours and listen to the CB radio, over which they broadcast which truck they wanted to back up to which bay. Then you were still at least two hours away from loading, at that point, but they did not want you to sleep even then. No wonder every time it rained, there was always a load of beer overturned on NY Thruway exit 17, near Albany. It was a decreasing radius turn that was tough enough to negotiate when you were wide awake. It was a lot tougher when you had been unable to sleep the night before. People told me that the Miller brewery just up the street was a whole different story. There they told you to go to sleep in your rig, and when it was your turn to load, they would send someone to bang on your door to wake you up. You left that place refreshed, and ready to drive. Of course, since they treated the drivers so well, they needed any new drivers to pick up loads there, dammit.... Since Budweiser doesn't know enough to treat a trucker like a human being, I don't buy their product, either.

ON AGE OF CONSENT:

People in this country always seem to want to raise the age of consent. in fact, at least one state has an age of 16 on all of the individual laws, and then they have an age of 18 on their statutory rape law, thus creating what the legislators thought was an age of consent of 18. In actual fact, all of the district attorneys in that state--or state's attorneys, I think they call them--refuse to prosecute under the statutory rape law for a victim over 16, because they don't want to be known as the idiot who forced the supreme court to overturn the statute! Other states have lower ages of consent, and of course Canada is 14, and the Netherlands is 12, and THEY don't seem to have any problems! One thing here, of course, is that you would have to allow sex education in public schools in order to lower the age of consent that far, and most of these same idiots don't want the school educating their kids about sex! I have a neighbor like that--their daughter got pregnant a year ago by a 20-yr-old kid on the street, had the baby, left it at the guy's home while she went out with a friend, and the baby died, apparently with bruises on its neck. Well, the cops never arrested the guy, and now the girl is preggers again by the same guy! And is he ever UGLYYYYYYY! He's fat and useless, has never held a job in his life, and would not make a father at all. Why she would let him have priveleges I don't know. But the question I have--and assume a Click and Clack vocal here, as in "Doesn't anybody screen these calls?"--is "Don't they teach these kids ANYTHING about birth control in school????