The Meme ... and More

Here's the one that's making the rounds these days:

Five Things I Just Don't Get

1. Why people don't automatically walk on the right side of the hallway or stairs, and leave room for people coming the other way.
2. Why there are so many drivers (and other people) who think that the laws and rules and posted signs just don't apply to them.
3. Why 99.99% of people with any authority at all are just assholes.
4. Why or how people can be mean to other people for fun
5. How anyone can take another person's life


Five Things, Other Than Money, I Wish I Had More Of:

1. Good health
2. Energy
3. The concentration to read more
4. Time and opportunity to listen to music
5. Winning lottery tickets


Five Least Favorite Words or Phrases:

1. Oh, never mind (when I didn't hear what was said and asked someone to repeat it.)
2. It just takes time, don't worry about it
3. Please excuse this interruption (before they make a long announcement in school in the middle of class)
4. Right after this commercial
5. Anything whined at me (that payback really is a bitch)


Five Famous People I've Spoken With in Person:

1. Alan Alda
2. Mike McCormack (Speaker of the House at the time)
3. Paul Simon (sort of)
These next two I didn't actually speak to, but my grandpa did and got autographs for me, so I'm counting them
4. Ed Sullivan
5. Cary Grant
And one of my kids ran into our Congressman at the local pizza place -- his house is across the street from it -- and talked to him for a while, and his kid goes to my school now; does that count for anything? Not so much.


Five Things I Do Nearly Daily That I Don't Enjoy

1. Take out garbage
2. Do dishes
3. Deal with stomach and other pain and discomforts
4. Wake up and go to work
5. Listen to people whine


Five Things That I Wish I Had the Chance to Do More Often:

1. See music and books, above
2. Go to Disney World
3. Go outside without a jacket on
4. Hang out with my sister (who met Howdy Doody, btw, although I didn't)
5. Be outrageously happy


Five Things I Have Actually Done That Sound Like Lies:

1. I had brain surgery
2. I dated a guy named Phantom for two years
3. I worked in a trophy factory
4. I took two math courses in college and got A's in both of them.
5. I didn't get into the state university in NJ because I didn't want to go there, so I left all the punctuation and correct grammar out of my application essay.


Five People I Hope Will Fill This Out:
Anyone who wants to. No one tagged me.

And now, the More. It's time to get *gasp* political again.

I just read an article about a former CIA guy who says that " [waterboarding} provided an intelligence breakthrough that "probably saved lives," but that he now regards the tactic as torture." Oh, yeah? Listen. We cannot ever ever ever sanction torture. Not ever not no how. The Geneva Convention was written and signed to prevent the abuses of torture, and that's beside the fact that torture is abuse itself. This end does not justify this means. And here's why:

It's all well and good if we have intelligence that helps our troops, and that's what I've heard people say: if torturing the enemy brings our troops home sooner, so much the better. Well, here's what happens. If we torture them, it's like we are giving them permission to torture us. That's how it works here, turnabout is very fair play in war. The very reason the U.S. signed the Geneva Convention was not to protect enemy troops, it was to protect our own troops. Right? If we hear news reports that any of our own military personnel have been captured and tortured, we will be outraged! And we should be! But what's to stop the other side from doing it if we're doing it to them? And if waterboarding isn't so bad, why don't we practice it on our own troops? You know why. Because it's torture, and we don't want our troops to suffer it. Let's grow a brain in Washington, shall we?

Next. Mike Huckabee has no business being the president of this country. He cannot separate church from state in his own mind and heart, and will not be able to do so in office. Besides that, he is crazy, and makes his religion mean whatever he wants it to for political purposes. (I believe it was he who said once -- I don't have the reference -- that Jesus must have supported capital punishment because when he was on the cross, he didn't say, Hey, it's wrong to execute people. Uh, okay. You know, I think Jesus had other things on his mind right then, little things, like having to decide to give up his earthly life to save mankind. He probably wasn't thinking about making political statements so that in 2000 years, some buffoon could use him for his own ends. Now that I think of it, Jesus was the one who established the separation of church and state to begin with. ["Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s."] Right? No one was more apolitical than Jesus.)

If you are not a Christian, and maybe even if you're not a fundamentalist Christian, for all I know, people like Huckabee are very very scary, and all these others who trumpet their religion above all are too. At first, Romney, pleading for understanding since his is not the mainstream Christian religion, said he just wasn't sure what place there was in this country for atheists and non-believers. WTF? Since when? He has since clarified that, saying there probably is a place for them/us, but come on: how could we see this and not be terrified? How soon will they be rounding up the people who don't go to the right churches, and can I book my flight to New Zealand before that happens?

(Ah, New Zealand. You all know how well I deal with change, which is to say, not at all. Can you imagine me moving to New Zealand? I'd have to be sedated for the flight and the first year I lived there. But it's far away from the craziness, and they speak English, and I understand it's a beautiful country. I only hope they have good cable and high speed Internet.)

WATCHING LAW & ORDER :: ENTRY #1645