Horrible, Really Bad Deaths

I saw this on the news last night. A woman died in a house explosion. They showed an aerial view of the hole in the ground where the house had been. There was nothing left. Vaporized.The woman who died was house sitting for two dogs, and the cause of the explosion was under investigation.

Having worked as a house sitter, it struck home. Hopefully, she was killed immediately.

Of course, you wonder about the owner of the home, but this poor woman, just trying to make a living…

I have heard about some horrible deaths in the past several years because I volunteer to serve on ‘mock juries’. In many cases, the ‘defendant’ has already admitted responsibility (which is different from guilt), & the issue is what the payout would be.

The first bad luck death I heard about—you’d think I was making this up—a distant relative of the dead man found an ambulance chaser to sue a major ‘convenience ‘grocery for damages—even though it was very clear they had done all they could and the death had occurred on public property. Here’s what happened: a guy was a bartender at a local bar, and got off work about 2:00a.m. To get to a public transportation stop, he had to walk past the convenience store. In from of the convenience store, a guy dealt drugs, and there was always some sort of commotion. The owner & managers (of the convenience store) were constantly calling 911—emergency police—to break up fights. The mock jury had the 911 transcripts. The police admitted they circled around every 1/2 hour or so, and knew the drug dealer (notice, they were not arresting the drug dealer, even thought they knew he was dealing drugs—-welcome to America). The bartender passed the crowd…or rather, he stopped to harass a few people and apparently goosed a guy, who turned around and started arguing with the bartender, and ultimately punched the bartender & the bartender was unconscious lying in the roadway. The convenience store manager AGAIN called 911.

Meanwhile…a taxi pulled up to a stoplight in front of the convenience store. A police car was behind the taxi, and honked at the taxi driver, so the taxi turned right on the red light, not seeing the guy in the roadway, and ran him over. That’s what killed him (btw—I have gotten a ticket when police honked at me to turn left on a light that had just turned red. for real).

The taxi guy has no money. the convenience store corporate has deep pockets. You’d think this would be cut & dried, but no. Although we in the mock jury said the store were not culpable—at the real trial, the relative got a several million dollar settlement. Go figure.

I was on another mock jury where, due to an error in judgement, a nurse caused a child to be brain damaged. that was very sad. Everyone dropped the ball on this one. I wondered if race entered into such lax treatment of the mother, but no matter. It took the mother over eight years to get to court.

Recently, I heard the story of a poor old woman who suffered 2nd degree burns on 80% of her body when the dryer in her condominium’s laundry room blew up due to a gas leak from a gas station over 7 miles away. This was a fact. Worse, she had been in remission from cancer, but had an appointment scheduled because she had found an enlarged lymph node. The laundry room exploded, she had to be treated for the painful burns, and the hospital treating her didn’t do any other tests. You know, how often do you go to any hospital, and they always take your blood pressure, and may also take blood. The woman was thrown, but no xrays were taken, so her reoccurance of cancer was NOT discovered, and an after she healed from her burns, she died of cervical cancer.

Knowing what I know, I wondered how the Illinois EPA didn’t catch the gas leak that caused the explosion. As stated, the leak came from a gas tank under a gas station 7 miles away. The gas traveled. How long it took was not an issue, nor how they discovered where it came from, but ‘they did, the gas company admitted culpability, and the woman’s estate wanted compensation for suffering.

3rd bad death: On the day after Christmas, a guy was coming home from work on his motor cycle. It was dark, he was on a 2 lane road. Coming towards him was a large truck that was turning into a parking lot: A 3 axle truck. A car traveling towards the truck swerved around the truck to the left and avoided hitting the truck. Not the guy on the motorcycle. What was telling & decided for most of us was that the guy on the motor cycle did not run into the cab of the truck. It was not head on: he ran into the side of the truck (misjudged) and was killed. The family wanted compensation from the owner of the truck and the truck driver—who were not at fault. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT CAUSED BY THE MOTOR CYCLIST. The family’s lawyer talked about how young he was and had his life ahead of him and blah blah blah…he said everything except calling him a ‘good white Christian’. Out of 12 of us, 10 said no, but 2 jurors felt that because the truck company had insurance, they should pay out.

This is America now, where people who have no way to build wealth, mostly due to bad life planning, and feel they should cash in when an opportunity arises.

Are Any of These Ideas Implemented Anywhere?

1. Make election day a national holiday. We already have at least 2 weeks of early voting in Illinois, but s for some reason, people wait until the last minute. Is it worth making election day a national holiday? Will we get better turnout?

• Should there a mandatory retirement age for politicians? As long as they believe it’s ok for companies to do age discrimination, shouldn’t it apply to all?
• Hire and train volunteers to process immigrants & refugees. It couldn’t be that difficult. We have many Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who speak other languages, and there is such a backlog. Get the ones who have families in the USA to their families, screen the rest, and toss out the single men.
• Time to enact windfall profit taxes on energy companies, They are the main cause now of inflation.
• Change the FCC rules and allow media companies to turn down ads that run lies. OMG, what we heard from Darren Bailey who was running for governor of Illinois was outrageous, and he scared a lot of people.
• Recently, in my neighborhood, a convicted felon who had served his time was picked up for both public drinking and public urination. Minor, right? But an asshole in the community. It’s not illegal to be an asshole, but then it turned out he was linked to another murder. Something’s going on when a man is so anti-social he just doesn’t give a shit.
• Mandate environmental education starting in primary schools and start retraining teachers.
• Quit fawning over missionaries in the media. They are racists, elitists, and full of chutzpah. What’s so great about going to another land, telling people what they believe is wrong, and bamboozling them to get them to believe in Jesus?
• For every dollar approved for military foreign aid, a dollar should be set aside to assist handicapped kids ^ the homeless. the military would never miss money they never got & they waste so much!
• No tax deductions for supporting religious institutions. If kids got raped by drag queens as often as they get raped or molested by ministers, we’d make churches illegal—& yet, kids are more often attacked by religious ministers than they are by drag queens.
• If we’re not going to make assault weapons illegal, we have to decriminalize drugs. There would be fewer murders if punks weren’t fighting & killing over turf. I don’t think people should take addictive drugs, but clearly what we’re doing isn’t working.
• Start holding physicians accountable for prescribing addictive drugs for pain when they don’t have weaning off plans.With all their education, shouldn’t they be responsible?
• Quit funding rehab for drug addicts.Medical insurance should cover this for prescription drugs. It’s a just a respite for most. Nobody quits drugs because someone else tells them they must. If an addict isn’t ready, why should we pay for his vacation? I know from what I speak. My father bankrolled my brother’s addiction for over 40 years & at least 3 rehab stints. it’s a money maker for psychologists. None of them have a record that shows their treatments are effective.

R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, Grooming Young Girls, and Sex Education

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Kelly

Do you know the age of consent (for sexual activity) in the USA is generally 18, with a few exceptions…yet virtually every state allows marriage of younger people with parental consent? So the state says you’re too young for sexual activity if you’re under age 18, but if you convince your parents…. it’s ok. If you are under 18 and get pregnant, these days you and your embryo are screwed. The guy who got you pregnant? The state doesn’t care about him, He is off the hook for responsibility.

Never mind foreign countries and non-Christian foreign religions. Lets just address how things are in the USA.

Millions of teenage girls become ‘accidentally’ pregnant in the USA every year. Do they not understand how they got pregnant? Did they not know how to defend themselves against rape? Did they think all rapes are violent? Did they believe they just wouldn’t get pregnant? Did they want to have babies (to show they are adults or have somebody to love them)?

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2019/10/28/why-men-get-away-with-impregnating-girls/2372145007/

I tried looking up “What per centage of men are prosecuted for impregnating an underage girl?” All that came up were news stories. If the impregnated girl won’t cooperate, the guy is off the hook. Teenage boys are NEVER prosecuted( If you believe this statement is wrong, please show me your cites) unless they are black boys who impregnate white girls.

How about girls having sex( with older men) who don’t get pregnant? Who want to stay with a (so-called) abuser? Girls we refer to as ‘groomed’?

It looks like R. Kelly flaunted his sexual life. Some may consider him perverted. None of my business, but what compelled him to film himself in sexual activity? & with underage girls? Why do guys do this? You don’t find women doing this unless coerced.

How does this happen at all? The girls R. Kelly is charged with abusing have, for the most part, not cooperated with prosecutors. Maybe they feel they weren’t abused. If they feel that way, this is what we have to ask:

Were they not feeling loved and supported by parents?

Did they see being with a wealthy older man as a way out of poverty?

Did anyone ever talk to them about men manipulating them when they became sexually mature?

Now we have to ask ourselves some questions:

Are parents doing an adequate job preparing their daughters for real world experiences? My mother told me that the man puts his penis in a woman WHEN THEY ARE MARRIED (and at age 7, living a middle class life, it never crossed my mind. that unmarried people would have sex).

Do you know that in at least 14 US states, sexual education doesn’t have to include factual information?

Nobody ever talked to me about being groomed or assaulted. I believed strangers attacked women on deserted streets. You wouldn’t get raped by somebody you knew. Also, although it wasn’t spoken about. it was considered a good thing if a single older man took an interest in you. You would no longer be your parents’ problem.

I don’t doubt that the girls who became entangled with R. Kelly or Jeffery Epstein were ‘groomed’ or manipulated, but where were their parents? If their parents had no influence, that tells you a lot about why these girls were vulnerable.

https://parentinfluence.com/askwomen/35

Book Review: Brainiac:Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, by Ken Jennings

Do you think you know enough facts to compete on Jeopardy? History? Shakespeare? Opera? Sports?

This funny and engaging , well-written, funny book will set you right. You probably don’t have enough minutiae stored in your head.

You might wonder how much anyone could write about being on a game show, but this book is more than about Jennings historic 75 wins over 182 days. It the history of trivia competitions, who competes, how they train, how questions are written, and how competitors who do well think.

Jennings is a great writer (although I believe he also had a great editor), He tells us that he is not particularly smart—he just remembers a lot. What he has in common with many trivia buffs is that he loves collecting information that most people don’t care about. Being on Jeopardy was his dream, and he never expected to do as well as he did. He just has a quick recall, and because how Jeopardy is written, he can pull information up quickly.

This book is as much about the history of trivia competitions as it is about Jennings. The book was published in 2006, so yu’ll probably have to find it on Amazon. If you love Jeopardy, you’ll love this is book.

Why Do They Hate Us?

As many of my regular readers know, I have embraced Sikhism. I knew nothing about Sikhi several years ago, except that men wear a small sword and didn’t cut their hair. That was it….except for them always being mistaken for Hindus or Moslems, as so many of those men keep their heads wrapped.

The Moslem men keep their heads covered before God. I’m not sure why the Hindus do (although I’ve been told it was a sign of prestige to have cloth to cover your head). Religious Jews wear a yamulke, or kippa, as a sign of respect before God.

What I learned was that the original guru(leader) was Nanak, a Brahmin, and he started questioning as a child, He was given a sacred thread to commemorate a life change stage, and wondered why his sister didn’t also get the thread. In many religions, women are worth less than men.

I’ve learned you can be any religion and become (or work at becoming) a Buddist because in Buddism, the focus isn’t on God, but your own inner self-realization and light: nirvana.

I know a few people who have become Ba’hai, and they believe of the oneness of all religions with a focus on one God. They are very focused on meditative prayer several times a day, as well as community projects.Sikhs believe in one God as well.

The focus of Sikhs is being kind, tolerant, and altruistic. You gain peace from feeling the happiness and kindness you contribute to the world. Because the Sikh have always been a minority, but a visible one due to dress and hair, they’ve absorbed a lot of prejudice through the centuries and have responded, as they teach themselves, with patience, humility, and grace.In fact the big Sikh mantra, aside from loving your enemies and seeing the humanity in their souls is defending the faith and yourself. You don’t just acquiesce.

We Jews like to think that we are all Jews, but we are in a swampy area. The Orthodox believe we Reform and Reconstructionist Jews are not ‘true’ or ‘real’ Jews. That is… until their insular Orthodox communities need defending—-, particularly in Israel. Our religion is a weird one: Our scripture is a lot of stories of us defending the temple and areas from —-not Christians—-as there were none when Abraham agreed to circumcision, but pagans, heathens, and those who worshiped multiple gods.

Although the Old Testament (what we call ‘the Bible) is our base, we also have Talmud, and very few other than rabbinical students, have read the Talmud. In the Talmud we learn of the 613 commandments. There aren’t just 10. Why would the Christians say there are just 10? Think about it. How many followers of Christ would you attract if you had to learn and follow 613 rules? & yet, I still know of people who keep the lights on from Friday afternoon through Sunday morning to get around the ‘not doing work’ commandment,.

Here we go, the huge differences between Jews and Christians (and all the sects): Although the Christians consider our Bible part of theirs, it is the gospels that they follow. Those disciples of Jesus certainly came up with a lot of rules, if not commandments, to keep those with no education on the straight and narrow. Jews don’t really have a tradition of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. That’s not what we are taught. Fairness and righteousness are stressed more. If you’re ‘bad’, you have to live with that. God is not forgiving you. On the other end of the spectrum, the Christians start teaching their kids right from the start that they were born in sin, of sin, and are imperfect. The only way to get to heaven is to accept Jesus Christ, the only child of God (we Jews feel we are all God’s children) as your savior (not God) and ask Him for forgiveness…and you go to paradise.

Paradise/Heaven is described in a variety of ways, but when I think about it, I realize that if I believe in heaven, then I go to eternity with a bunch of liars, cheaters, and self-righteous bullies who haven’t changed their ways. Do I want to go to a heaven like that?

As Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”

But a larger difference is that Christians are charged with SAVING the rest of us from eternal damnation. They must proselytize and tell us what we believe is wrong, and if we don’t accept Jesus, we are going to HELL.

Not only that. People of color are lesser, meant to be slaves, so they will get to maybe a part of heaven, but will never be equal to whites. Homosexuals won’t go to heaven at all, no matter how much they ask Jesus to save them. You can cheat, you can lie, but you can’t be a minority race or homosexual. You can be an alcoholic, and beat your wives and children, but you can’t cross-dress. And—a big one: since life begins at conception, if you have an abortion and prevent someone from being born, you’re a murderer.

There is nothing about homosexuality in the old testament. When the Sodomites came to rape the angels, it is interpreted that the angels were male, and the rape isn’t condemned, but the wanting to have sex with (supposedly) men, is the problem. Rape is an act of violence, not sex.

I can go on and point out more contradictions, but you can find them on your own. In the Adi Granth, one long poem, you are told to keep God in mind, and not worship stuff. The rest is handed down culturally.

As a Jew, living in a religiously (although not racially) diverse community, in Skokie, Illinois, we all got along. Most of our Christian neighbors back then were Lutheran, and we all accepted each other.

Somehow, in some way, I guess because they were losing Christians who read the Bible and see all the contradictions, the Christians have decided to tighten up and are very vocal about not tolerating the rest of us.

They tell their children to tell our children we are going to hell. We really have to defend ourselves.

There was a time when I stopped believing in God. These days, I’d say I am more spiritual. If you know anything about biology, you have to recognize that something in the universe causes a logical coming of relationships between plants and animals, symbiosis, and calculus is no accident.

Do they hate us because we are at peace, not feeling ashamed because we don’t believe Jesus can or will save us, and if their kids start believing what we believe, their whole system of control and manipulation falls apart? hmmm…I wonder. However, if we can win their kids over with logic and humor, we just might be able to save the planet.