Stop Fanning the Flames

I'm begging people to stop feeding into media frenzy about, well, everything.  Name cause.  Watch media blow it up and sensationalize and create hysteria, emotions, panic, DIVISION, etc.  Ultimately, you only have control of your own actions.  It's you and you alone that you can control.  Be the positive change you want to see in the world.  You don't need a banner, social media post, whatever, to do that and tell other people what to do or not to do.  Why do people feel the need to label everything?  Labeling is just another word for division - meaning that it's different than something else.  Isn't that what we are trying to do away with?  Let your inner light shine; radiate that energy and act accordingly.  It's contagious. 

All we are saying, is give peace a chance. 

Two Days In A Row

Two days in a row I have come across two different new acquaintances and their dogs.  In both instances I bent down to give the dog a pat.  In both instances the owners of said dogs stated, "I've never seen Fluffy take to anybody right away.  My dog is usually very standoffish, but he likes you."

Moral of the story:  There is hope for my grouchy old soul.  I'm working on it. 

Nobody Wants Your Crap

Ahhhhhhh, I could take the title of this blog to so many places.  However, today I will be extremely literal.  Nobody wants your crap. 

All of this staying home has spurned the massive cleaning of closets.  Great.  Now, just where are you going to take the stuff you no longer want?  Nobody is taking donations of things.  They will take your money, but not your stuff. 

The parameters have changed.  Since the pandemic, people are more leery of accepting used goods.  Thrift stores are mostly shut down.  Mountains of used goods are accumulating.  People are desperate to unload their stuff.

Perhaps this is a good thing.  Think about that when purchasing things.  You will be stuck with it for a very, very long time.  Do you *really* need it?  It's about time that the disposable society we live in gets a wake up call.  We are very wasteful and our consumption habits could use an adjustment. 

Buffalo Springfield

Battle lines being drawn.  Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.  Singing songs and carrying signs.  Mostly say hooray for our side.
 

Domestic Violence

There's an issue of violence and murder that is so deeply ingrained it does not get any attention.  The whole world goes nuts when a black guy gets killed by a white officer.  The black community is up in arms.  They take to the streets and justify destroying property.

Stop right there before you mutter under your breath that I'm racist. I'm in no way condoning what happened in Minneapolis. 

My point is that for every black man who gets killed by a white officer, thousands upon thousands of women are killed, beaten, abused (both psychologically and sexually) by men.  Where are the protests?  The ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) still has not passed.  Women still to this day don't have the same rights as men.  The abuse against women is age old; older than whatever race wants to claim how they are victims of prejudice and suppression.

What I find ironic is that these same black men rioting against injustice will go home and beat the crap out of their wives because dinner was not what he was expecting.  We are so blind to it as a society that the song "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix about a guy shooting his woman down is played without anybody thinking anything of it other than, "Wow...Jimi sure could play a guitar."  When I read Malcolm X in college I was outraged that he treated women like shit, but was out there demanding respect for himself. 

You personally know of a woman who has been beaten and abused.  You can't say that's true about the other situation that I mentioned above about a cop killing.  Chances are that the abuse you witnessed was your own mother at the hands of your father.  Chances are that after your father beat the crap out of your mom he then went on to beat the crap out of you.  There are countless murders of women that happened by their husbands.  Think about that when looking the big picture of what's going on and the number of instances in which violence and murders happen. 

Email and Facebook

Want to know what email and Facebook have in common?  They are used by OLD people.  Never thought I'd type that 10 years ago, but here I sit typing it. 

I guess that makes me old.  If the shoe fits.......

This whole shelter-in-place deal has forced me to look to more streamlined ways of collaborating with my colleagues.  We can no longer meet up in person for lunch on a project.  We no longer sit in conference rooms together.  Mind you, this is not a complaint. 

There are collaboration platforms that make sharing documents, information, ideas, tasks, etc., that have eliminated the need to email.  When somebody makes a change or an edit I get a notification as to what was changed and as to whom did the editing.  Everybody is working with the same set of documents at once.  Thank goddesses.  My email inbox is still full, but I have eliminated quite a bit of it.  The tiresome procedure of group emails has finally been tamed.  It took a mandatory shelter-in-place to nudge me to learn this stuff (and I'm still learning).

Now I'm discovering that most email is junk from outside organizations trying to sell me something or phishing attempts.  If somebody really knows me and has business with me, it comes from inside the collaboration platform. 

So, the moral of the story is that if you are still using email as your means to communicate with anybody you work with you're out of date.  That goes for posting political crap on Facebook as well.  Well, that goes for posting ANYTHING on Facebook.  LOL  .   Out of touch old farts.  ha ha ha

News Media: Walking The Line Between Two Evils

We all bemoan the news media.  We don't trust it.  There's a reason for that.  News media has sold out not only to corporate (money) interests, but also to certain political parties trying to influence the masses.  News media is all about horrible, tragic, and controversial headlines trying to grab your attention.  Why?  Because that is what sells.  What is the news selling?  Advertising time or space. 

Well.....why don't we just have a government run news program completely funded by the taxpayers to keep money out of the news media?  Just ask China how that's going for them. 

It's a no win situation. 

I finally did it.  I stopped watching television news.  Go ahead, accuse me of burying my head in the sand.  What can I do about it anything anyway when we are ordered to stay at home?  We all live in a virtual world.  My virtual world just happens to exclude television and social media political posts.