BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

[NOTE: This was originally posted in 2018 in English Swill.]    ENGLISH SWILL   ... Wordsmithery at the Bottom of the Barrel by Roy Santonil "DREAMING OF THE LAST AMNESTY " Tuesday, January 23, 2018  You may call me lazy. You would be wrong, and you wouldn't be alone. I know too many people who mistake my efficiency for laziness .  Nowadays, I don't care what you think , as long as you didn't SNEAK into my country against the law.  This is not xenophobia.   This is self-defense in the face of your lawless aggression, you jerks. From American Greatness , I've condensed a written piece by Victor Davis Hanson entitled "Mythologies of Illegal Immigration."    Professor Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was Professor of Classics at Fresno State University, and is currently the Martin and Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University Ho...

OPENING SCENE: A patient is lying unconscious in a hospital ICU. The camera pans down to follow the plastic tubing from his catheter, flowing and bubbling bodiliy fluids into a plastic tank. DR.HOUSE: "The drug addict . . . is peeing blood." CUT SCENE: A med school class where Dr. House is lecturing. He looks at a handful of yellow crayons, chooses one and begins coloring in a coloring book. DR.HOUSE: "How do they teach you to tell someone that they're dying?" (Blank looks from students wearing white coats.)   DR.HOUSE: "It's kinda like teaching architects how to explain why their building fell down." (Continues coloring book) "Do you role play at stuff?" STUDENT: "Yeah. One of us gives the bad news, and one of us gets the bad news." DR.HOUSE: "What do you have to do to get an A in - You're Dying 101? Do they grade you on gentleness and supportiveness? Is there a scale for measuring compassion?" (Changes crayons) ...

Hello friends, and welcome back .  I pretty much stopped writing since January. When your precious, charming, lovely, smart, witty daughter gets married and buys a house, you had better be there to help them make transition, or you have no purpose in life. I also got a part-time job at my true habitat, a local municipal golf course, so 2023 has been a bad year for my blogging. Still, in the past year, I have managed to cross off a couple of items on my musical bucket list, and learned the guitar solos to Hotel California and Kid Charlemagne .  Maybe it's time to start posting videos? Our legal journey can be summarized, so far, as follows: the Dobbs decision is a resultant of two primary vectors. These vectors are moral force and social experience .  Applied through Reason during the course of Time, our common law system arrived in 2022 at a place where logic could lead, where apolitical imperatives could survive, a place where -- after 50 years in the jurisprudenti...

Start here . I'll admit it. Three months is really too long of a break between blog posts.  Or has it been only two? It feels like a lot more than a trimester has passed since we last ventured into these post-Muskian Twitter Senior Citizen Cyber-rants. And another thing, why "a trimester?" It just seems so random.  Nothing is random. Hello Boomers and friends of boomers. ( Technically, I am NOT a boomer, but that is another issue for another time .) It's A Mestery Do you remember when trimesters were only a quarter? (Shutup, Dad) . On this day in 1973, legal use of the term "trimester" began costing us innocent lives, silenced hearts, and tiny ripped limbs. Until last summer's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Center for Reproductive Health 597 U.S. ___(2022) , the number of human embryos aborted surpassed 63 million.   63,000,000 is a lot of dead babies.  : ( sad face They coined that word -- trimester -- to serve as the skele...

Start here . Hello again, Boomers, Jonesers, and Non-Boomers alike. Nothing to talk about lately? What do we Americans do when the temperature starts climbing above 80, and the lawn needs mowing?  Well, for the last couple of centuries, there was this thing called Our National Pastime. Notice the word  "pastime" suggests an activity unabashedly and unequivocally meant to be an acceptable and civil  way to pass time . I would even go so far to say, pre-Internet distraction, there was a tapestry. a weaving of the fabric of your cultural character in sport, a mythos, conjured and nurtured for the benefit of inter-generational respect and  civility. Heck, even affection. Love you, dad. Alas, locusts and honey will have to suffice anymore "Oh, there you go again 15, being literal, and trying to find out what words mean." I suppose so. Unfortunately, in my blogging experience, if you are a fan of scholarly etymology and  reasonable contextual usage, with a dash of tro...

Start here . For you lawyers, do you recall this classic case study from Torts class?  Palsgraf vs. Long Island Railroad Co. 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928) is legendary because Judge Cardozo's analysis of proximate cause reinforced one of the basic elements required in order to plead a valid cause of action for liability on the grounds of negligence. But back to my point, since I refuse to walk back into those weeds planted in my brain during those hellish indoctrination rituals called "law school" and "bar exam."  Let it suffice to say that chasing Truth down rabbit holes is a journey full of surprises, and you never know where gritty, honest research will lead you. The Newtonian paradigm is gone. Quantum Mechanics and the Butterfly Effect are real things. Dark Matter and String Theory rule science.  For now. I simply wanted to discuss the problem of Factions in a large republic ( link here! ).  But, in a momentary lapse of reason, during the course of my s...

Do you hear Sopranos? Start here . Do you see part of the image above circled in red?  What the heck are those? Why are they hovering above the chamber of the House?  Apparently, they live . As you and I keep calm and cope with corporate media dialectics, staying the Babylonian money magic stream of lies pitting: left against right, conservatives versus liberals  male versus female black versus white  and of course, the currently popular diametric Russia versus Ukraine, that old imperial strategy seems destined for failure. It is time for the causes of our national malaise to fail, and to fail in catastrophic ways.  "Choose a side," they implored us. "Don't worry," they assured us. "We can fix this.  Yes, we can ."  Well, sorry, Your Highnesses, but that divide and conquer strategy is old and worn. It is dead. It started to die at Runnymeade. It got worse for you in Trenton. Your destiny was sealed in the fields of Normandy and the streets of Mosc...

Start here .   How many of us dozed off in the middle of high school English class whenever we had to read Shakespeare, or Milton, or especially, Dante?   Not me.   I knew that the Adam West Batman accessed the Batcave through Shakespeare. This week I'm focused on a particular line from the play Hamlet , where the protagonist Prince plots to avenge his Father's death at the hands of  Claudius, the terrible uncle who then married Hamlet's mother -- after killing Hamlet's dad!    Jerry Springer must have studied classical literature, ha ha. Interestingly, Hamlet's father's name is also Hamlet, but in the play, whenever he speaks he is called "Ghost."   Here's the full quote in context:  "Out of my weakness and melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds more relative than this. The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King [referring to Claudius]." What the he...