Cranky-D

So, Jon and Kate are getting divorced. What a remarkable result. I’m so glad they’re “just thinking of the kids.”

Please.

I think she’s a shrew. However, it’s most likely she has always been that way. So Jon-boy suddenly discovering that fact of life this late in the game is, well, stupid. If he thought people got easier to get along with as you get older, then he is doubly dumb.

He should have learned to live with it. She should have learned to keep her mouth shut more often, and not treated him like a child when they were in public. And when you’re whole life is on teevee, you are always in public.

They should have worked it out because marriage is not about “eternal love” or “eternal happiness” or any crap like that. It’s about raising kids, and they have a truckload of kids that need a lot of raising. You suck it up and go on with life.

They should have done the counseling thing or “encounter weekends” or whatever the heck it takes for two people to grow the hell up and act like adults.

Am I married? Nope. If I were to think about it, I would take it very seriously. It isn’t about hearts and flowers and the bride’s big day and eternal happiness. It’s about dealing with the same thing every day and learning to not let stuff that bothers you bother you any more. It’s about taking care of everyone else’s needs before your own. Your life is not your own any more, and if you have kids, your life is now theirs.

I know that, which probably keeps me away from the whole thing. That’s a lot to ask, and the older I get the harder it is to contemplate the whole thing.

Little Jonny didn’t know it, and now he looks like a loser, because he is one.

My father is in the hospital recovering from a triple bypass. He is 81. No spring chicken, but his mind is still good and his health overall is really pretty good for his age. I am not with him right now, but my older sister is. My brother was able to visit last weekend and will visit again this weekend. I will be traveling to be with him the entire month of December. Since I work for a software startup company, and I am already far from the owner of the company anyway, it doesn’t matter where I work. I have my laptop, will travel.

We tend to keep a close eye on our family when they are in the hospital. We track what they’re getting in the I.V.s. We make sure that it looks like the nurses know what they’re doing. We tend to spend a lot of time near whoever is in there. For instance, I was in the hospital 18 years ago, and most of the time my family was around, often in the room, even when I was in ICU. The nurses learned to live with it.

I tell you this not to elicit sympathy or concern, but merely to set up what happened the other night.

Apparently the night nurse on Sunday was inexperienced. A few others showed up. They were all fiddling with my father’s temporary pacemaker (which has since been removed) and asking each other if what they were doing was correct. That made my sister worry, so she found the supervisor and asked why these trainees were taking care of my father. She was first informed that they were not “trainees,” but in fact R.N.s. My sister corrected her; sure they have a degree, but that doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing yet. Somehow she decided that my sister should talk to a social worker. My sister, assuming that this social worker would have something constructive to say, agreed.

The first thing the social worker asked was if my father had a living trust. Yes, he does. My sister informed him that she has power of attorney for his medical issues (I have it for the financial side). He then told her that she was too close to him. He also told her that at his age every day he lives is a blessing. She told him that she would continue to be there, that my brother would be there again, and that I would be there the entire month of December to help take care of my father. My other sister will be there in January.

The social worker was stunned by this. Here, then is where my rant begins.

I think I can safely assume this social worker guy is a liberal. I have never met one who isn’t. Apparently we’re supposed to just stand by while The Doctors ™ and The Nurses ™ do their thing, and thank our lucky stars they will do their jobs. And, of course, when they are through The State ™ will take over to make sure our aging father will be “well cared-for” for the rest of his life. Presumably so we can go on about our lives and not even think about our parents as they slowly drift off.

What a crock of shit. The way I was raised, family comes first, before all other concerns (except perhaps G-d, but I think He understands). It is not a burden at all to be there for him. I’m happy to do it. He took care of me, and in fact still does sometimes when he can and I need help. I sure as hell won’t give up on him yet, like I am apparently supposed to do.

These are the kind of people who want to decide things for us. They make me sick. I told my sister that if I had been there, I probably would have punched the guy out. Certainly, in my current mood, which isn’t great due to a lack of sleep, my concern, and a previously emptied patience tank, it is very possible that I would have done my best to break his jaw. If not, perhaps a nicely bleeding broken nose would have sufficed. That’s about as much concession I have in me.

One final note. My sister, annoyed that my father’s primary care physician had yet to visit him, called him up and left a message to the effect that he had better get his act together. He didn’t go in person, but he did call my father. My father informed him that after he gets out he is coming after the Doctor with a baseball bat.

That made me proud.

But after that conversation my father did indeed feel better, less abandoned. It doesn’t take all that much to make a difference. I think the fact that the family is there can be the difference between recovering and giving up.

They would just as soon you stayed away. You know how quick the left, easing into their culture of death (over the top? you be the judge), are happy to throw the pre-born and the old to the wolves.

This was cross-posted to protein wisdom

I just glanced at the idiot box, which is on CNN, and I’ll be damned if Al Gore isn’t preaching his global warming crap to the masses. Hallelujah. Can I get an amen?

Amen!

Why does anyone listen to this man?

By the way, did you know he did not win an oscar™ for that movie? All he did was narrate it.

Anyway, it’s hard to dispute that the earth is getting warmer. Did you know that Mars is getting warmer too? As well as other planets? What could be causing that? Hmmm. Tough to figure that out, isn’t it?

Oh, wait, I know. It’s the Sun!! Who would’ve thunk that the sun goes through cycles in which it runs a bit hotter as well as a bit cooler? And for some bizarre reason, the earth’s temperatures seem to fluctuate in a direct proportion with the amount of solar radiation that the sun emits. It’s an amazing fact, I know, and yet our measurements seem to bear that fact out.

The earth has been both warmer and cooler than it is now in the last 500 years, and I doubt anyone could argue (though they might) that humans had anything to do with that. And yet, many otherwise intelligent people (giving some the benefit of the doubt) are running around and whining as if the world were coming to an end.

It isn’t.

The climate change alarmists are focusing on how much carbon dioxide we’re emitting, all the while ignoring a few facts. One of them is that mankinds contribution to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible compared to other sources such as volcanos. The other is that water vapor is a much more prevalent and effective “greenhouse gas” that CO2. But G-d forbid they’d let the facts interfere with their religion.

And mankind-induced climate change is a religion. I think it has one major foundation. That foundation is that the earth is somehow a fixed system that never changes, except when mankind does something to change it. The worries about species dying off (I don’t want them to die either, really, if we can reasonably do something about it) has help fuel the fire, and bad climate models and just plain bad science driven by a religious fervor that is pro-Gaia and anti-human have resulted in us getting to the point where even the president (no conservative he) is acknowledging climate change as a man-made problem.

Yikes!

The entire thing is political. It’s all about left-liberals feeling good about themselves purchasing carbon offsets which do absolutely nothing and trying to restrict what the U.S. does industrially while China dumps CO2 like nobody’s business and talking down to people who want to actually see some decent science first before strangling our economy for a result that most likely means absolutely nothing. The only way to actually reduce CO2 is to permanently sequester it somehow. Those trees will give up all the CO2 when they die and rot.

If people really cared, they would instead try to figure out ways for humans to weather (pun not intended) the climate changes and help us to adapt as much as possible. They would also be clamoring for nuclear power, the only viable way to generate electricity that doesn’t cause an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. If you’re going to blame CO2, shouldn’t you be willing to really do something about it?

Ultimately, it’s about power. The left-liberals see this as another chance to gain power and advance their transnational progressive politics by having their agenda dominate the national narrative. Too many people are going along with it. It’s dangerous and unproductive and distracts us from what’s really important. They’ll “save” the earth, having no real effect, while allowing the true threat to grow without bounds due to their demonstrated desire for inaction.

If you don’t know what the true threat to mankind is, I cannot help you.