I got a very heartening surprise this afternoon. My blood pressure medications were ready at CVS, so I stopped on my way back from Sedona to pick them up, debit card in hand. This was my first time picking up medications under our new insurance and I was astounded when the clerk informed me that there was no co-pay. THEY WERE FREE TO ME! That's because they are generic and this insurance covers them totally under their medicare plus.
Under the vaunted United Health care coverage we had last year, they would have cost me $3 each. Plus, they would now be charging both of us $28 each month for the privilege of being ripped off by them and we'd be paying $10 every time we visit the doctor instead of $5. I suspect the CEO of United wants another lavish vacation home or something akin. I think I'll draft a letter to AARP and tell them where they can shove their vaunted plan.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a staunch AARP member and take advantage of those discounts whenever I can, but they really need to look into this matter. We're blessed with having an insurance representative in Camp Verde who looks out for our interests. I called and left a message to thank him for getting us into this new plan.
Just had to share my joy.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Friday, January 10, 2014
I'LL KEEP ON COMIN'!
There are quite a few things on this earth that I thoroughly despise.
Religion (all religion) is one I've come to detest. The republican party, all it is and all it stands for, is another. I consider anyone who looks at the facts and defends the republican party an abject idiot. Anyone who clings to creationism and the mythology of the Bible or the Quran, etc. is also an idiot. I know, I fell for such lies and bullshit for awhile too (and, I was an idiot).
I woke up, however. I looked the facts squarely in the face and made a 180 degree about face. It wasn't easy. Admitting you've been a stupid ass is never pleasant, but it's the only way to quit being a stupid ass!
I try to learn something new and understand better every day I live. I have a coffee cup I use every day with a quote from Eleanore Roosevelt: "Do something every day that scares you." It takes guts to face life with that attitude and motivation. I don't have the opportunity to put it into action every day, but it's an ideal attitude I champion and try to live by.
There are endless things I despise because they outrage my sense of justice, truth and fairness. I try to emphasize those positive things as much as possible. Denouncing the negative just happens to be an unpleasant necessity to doing that.
The last thing I consider when I sit down to write stuff like this is whether someone will like it or not. I frankly don't care. This is where I'm coming from, and you can jolly well be certain I'm gonna keep on comin'!
Religion (all religion) is one I've come to detest. The republican party, all it is and all it stands for, is another. I consider anyone who looks at the facts and defends the republican party an abject idiot. Anyone who clings to creationism and the mythology of the Bible or the Quran, etc. is also an idiot. I know, I fell for such lies and bullshit for awhile too (and, I was an idiot).
I woke up, however. I looked the facts squarely in the face and made a 180 degree about face. It wasn't easy. Admitting you've been a stupid ass is never pleasant, but it's the only way to quit being a stupid ass!
I try to learn something new and understand better every day I live. I have a coffee cup I use every day with a quote from Eleanore Roosevelt: "Do something every day that scares you." It takes guts to face life with that attitude and motivation. I don't have the opportunity to put it into action every day, but it's an ideal attitude I champion and try to live by.
There are endless things I despise because they outrage my sense of justice, truth and fairness. I try to emphasize those positive things as much as possible. Denouncing the negative just happens to be an unpleasant necessity to doing that.
The last thing I consider when I sit down to write stuff like this is whether someone will like it or not. I frankly don't care. This is where I'm coming from, and you can jolly well be certain I'm gonna keep on comin'!
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
LOVE CAN BE AUTOMATIC
It's quiet here. Phyllis is watching TV with the dogs by her side in bed. I'm on the computer where I spend so much of my time.
Earlier, we took the poms out for some shopping. That makes them so happy, and more and more people recognize them and us now and know they can let all their joy hang out to the pom's joy.
In their entire lives, those two dogs have never growled or snapped at a single human being. Of course, they've never been struck or mistreated by us or anyone else. They expect to be adored and to adore back.
What a lesson in creature relations! If all a creature knows is loving kindness, that's what they will instinctively return. For agression or violent defense to enter in, fear has to first enter in. Our dogs are fearless for the most part. Therefore, they have no need for agressive defenses of any kind. It's a foreign thing to them.
I often wonder what happened in the early lives of narcissists and sociopaths that made them the unfeeling monsters they turned out to be. Yes, I mean reprobates like Herbert Armstrong. What was his childhood like?
It's easy to condemn the end result. Yet, I often wonder what laid behind it all. It's a long hard road to understand and hopefully change the condition of this world.
That's my thought for the day.
Earlier, we took the poms out for some shopping. That makes them so happy, and more and more people recognize them and us now and know they can let all their joy hang out to the pom's joy.
In their entire lives, those two dogs have never growled or snapped at a single human being. Of course, they've never been struck or mistreated by us or anyone else. They expect to be adored and to adore back.
What a lesson in creature relations! If all a creature knows is loving kindness, that's what they will instinctively return. For agression or violent defense to enter in, fear has to first enter in. Our dogs are fearless for the most part. Therefore, they have no need for agressive defenses of any kind. It's a foreign thing to them.
I often wonder what happened in the early lives of narcissists and sociopaths that made them the unfeeling monsters they turned out to be. Yes, I mean reprobates like Herbert Armstrong. What was his childhood like?
It's easy to condemn the end result. Yet, I often wonder what laid behind it all. It's a long hard road to understand and hopefully change the condition of this world.
That's my thought for the day.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
FEAR PARLYZES
Fear is such a corrosive thing!
Fear kept me in bondage to a cult for a couple of decades. I was literally paralyzed by the fear of being damned because I dared to think something contrary to the certitudes of those I had accepted as inspired representatives of a God I've since cast aside as a figment of other people's imaginations.
Every religious certitude I know of holds that fear of damnation, pain and horrendous punishment over the heads of its adherrants. If they're all right, then everybody is doomed to hell. Christians think muslims and other sects and denominations are and muslims have a correspondingly condemnatory approach toward Christians and other divisions of their own religion.
One of the most horrendous words humans ever invented is the word, "heretic." Thinking is made a crime -- a crime worthy of torture and death!
Religious faith isn't the only area of human life subject to the paralyzing effects of fear. Fear keeps people from taking chances that could bear very advantageous fruit if they'd just take a carefully considered or deeply desired step into the unknown. Just going to bed or getting up in the morning involves a certain level of risk. We can't play it safe all the time or we would effectively have no life worth living.
I've taken some of those steps, often with dire predictions from timid advisors about the big mistake I was making. Some were abject failures and others panned out just fine. In all cases, it was better than just sitting there, fearfully accepting the status quo.
Fear kept me in bondage to a cult for a couple of decades. I was literally paralyzed by the fear of being damned because I dared to think something contrary to the certitudes of those I had accepted as inspired representatives of a God I've since cast aside as a figment of other people's imaginations.
Every religious certitude I know of holds that fear of damnation, pain and horrendous punishment over the heads of its adherrants. If they're all right, then everybody is doomed to hell. Christians think muslims and other sects and denominations are and muslims have a correspondingly condemnatory approach toward Christians and other divisions of their own religion.
One of the most horrendous words humans ever invented is the word, "heretic." Thinking is made a crime -- a crime worthy of torture and death!
Religious faith isn't the only area of human life subject to the paralyzing effects of fear. Fear keeps people from taking chances that could bear very advantageous fruit if they'd just take a carefully considered or deeply desired step into the unknown. Just going to bed or getting up in the morning involves a certain level of risk. We can't play it safe all the time or we would effectively have no life worth living.
I've taken some of those steps, often with dire predictions from timid advisors about the big mistake I was making. Some were abject failures and others panned out just fine. In all cases, it was better than just sitting there, fearfully accepting the status quo.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
APPRECIATE YOUR GIFTS
I feel that urge to write again, and as Mark Twain liked to put it in similar situations, "You must suffer."
Hopefully, a few will enjoy my literary ramblings. Maybe, and hopefully, even profit from them.
An exchange with Janelle Hopkins, a friend who was a kid when I knew her years ago, is now a successful business woman who likes to write and exhibits other talents I pointed out to her were strong in her father, with whom I was a close friend in college and for years afterward. She was surprised to know he was a very talented writer and also a good tenor who would sometimes get into impromptu songfests with Garner Ted and others. As I also pointed out, her mother was also extremely talented in many ways, and I'm sure other close relatives were and are.
We're a marvelous genus! So many potential talents lie hidden in the vast majority of human beings. I often tell Phyllis she should have been a stand-up comic. She has that elusive gift of "timing" that is so important in that profession, and that wonderful abiltity to capitalize on everyday absurdities. I wish she would really write that book about "almost dirty words."
A few have the drive, tenacity and just plain luck to make full use of their outstanding talents, but most never do for any number of perfectly good reasons, and sometimes, excuses. For one thing, there's only room for so many outstanding people to spectacularly succeed in most fields. Many are so filled with talents that they can only develop a few chosen ones, maybe only one.
My friend, whom I've never met in person, Dennis Deahl, is exemplary of someone who should be world famous for things he has written on theology and religion, but he has to content himself with a commanding presence on a couple of blogs and earn his living in massage therapy which he describes as "rubbing people the right way." A few months back, he threatened to give it up and quit. I told him he couldn't do it anymore than I can. Bingo! He's at it just as strongly as ever.
I guess I could ramble on more, but I think my point is clear. Most of us have to content ourselves with whatever we've been able to attain. Sure is nice, though, to sometimes daydream about what might have been if we'd taken a few different forks in the road.
Kinda makes you wish reincarnation could be true.
Hopefully, a few will enjoy my literary ramblings. Maybe, and hopefully, even profit from them.
An exchange with Janelle Hopkins, a friend who was a kid when I knew her years ago, is now a successful business woman who likes to write and exhibits other talents I pointed out to her were strong in her father, with whom I was a close friend in college and for years afterward. She was surprised to know he was a very talented writer and also a good tenor who would sometimes get into impromptu songfests with Garner Ted and others. As I also pointed out, her mother was also extremely talented in many ways, and I'm sure other close relatives were and are.
We're a marvelous genus! So many potential talents lie hidden in the vast majority of human beings. I often tell Phyllis she should have been a stand-up comic. She has that elusive gift of "timing" that is so important in that profession, and that wonderful abiltity to capitalize on everyday absurdities. I wish she would really write that book about "almost dirty words."
A few have the drive, tenacity and just plain luck to make full use of their outstanding talents, but most never do for any number of perfectly good reasons, and sometimes, excuses. For one thing, there's only room for so many outstanding people to spectacularly succeed in most fields. Many are so filled with talents that they can only develop a few chosen ones, maybe only one.
My friend, whom I've never met in person, Dennis Deahl, is exemplary of someone who should be world famous for things he has written on theology and religion, but he has to content himself with a commanding presence on a couple of blogs and earn his living in massage therapy which he describes as "rubbing people the right way." A few months back, he threatened to give it up and quit. I told him he couldn't do it anymore than I can. Bingo! He's at it just as strongly as ever.
I guess I could ramble on more, but I think my point is clear. Most of us have to content ourselves with whatever we've been able to attain. Sure is nice, though, to sometimes daydream about what might have been if we'd taken a few different forks in the road.
Kinda makes you wish reincarnation could be true.
DEJA VU!
I was doing some cleanup, and as usual, when my body is busy with habitual routine, my mind takes off.
I started reflecting how similar my experience with Herbert W. Armstrong and his infamous Worldwide Church of God (his way of saying "catholic") and the USA post about 1980 is.
In both cases, intellectual midgets with a gift for salesmanship, imagination-grabbing cliches and mass trumpeted certitudes gained control, first, of a theological abortion and later, a whole nation. What transpired theologically is now hell bent for leather nationally. Unless it's checked, the same kind of disastrous trainwreck is inevitable.
Just like the elitists and sociopaths gravitated to Worldwide for the power and control they yearned to have, the same kind of warped and hypocritical people gravitated to politics and through lies, half-truths and prejudice-inspiring cliches, they have warped the United States of America totally out of any semblance of the great and respected nation it once was.
I can only hope that the destuctive, self-seeking grabs for power that doomed that original religious organization to in-fighting and fragmentation will set in the GOP and that malignant tea party.
Sociopaths usually end up savaging each other.
I started reflecting how similar my experience with Herbert W. Armstrong and his infamous Worldwide Church of God (his way of saying "catholic") and the USA post about 1980 is.
In both cases, intellectual midgets with a gift for salesmanship, imagination-grabbing cliches and mass trumpeted certitudes gained control, first, of a theological abortion and later, a whole nation. What transpired theologically is now hell bent for leather nationally. Unless it's checked, the same kind of disastrous trainwreck is inevitable.
Just like the elitists and sociopaths gravitated to Worldwide for the power and control they yearned to have, the same kind of warped and hypocritical people gravitated to politics and through lies, half-truths and prejudice-inspiring cliches, they have warped the United States of America totally out of any semblance of the great and respected nation it once was.
I can only hope that the destuctive, self-seeking grabs for power that doomed that original religious organization to in-fighting and fragmentation will set in the GOP and that malignant tea party.
Sociopaths usually end up savaging each other.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
ECOLOGICAL INSANITY
The internal combusion engine, jet turbines and all the manufacturing have provided us humans with an endless array of products and services we'd now be lost without. While we were comparably few in number, a measly 2 or 3 billion, and the majority of those were too backward and poor to even consider getting around that way, we got away with belching all those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with comparatively light results.
That's not true anymore. All those millions of chinese, indians, etc. have gotten into the act, and our atmsphere is no longer changing at a crawl. It's now a sprint! A mad dash!
That's great for the billionaires who grow fatter and more entitled every day, but soon even they are going to start feeling the effects. They are just as dependent on the world's eco system as the rest of us are. They just don't see it yet and don't want to believe it because of everything they have riding on the status quo.
I honestly can't see this all ending well. It terrifies me! I just can't shrug it off because I'll soon be out of here forever.
Hydogen and solar, dammit! If we insist on using up all the fossil fuels before we do the sensible thing, it will be too late! You can't belch millions of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in a few score years and get away with it!
What's so hard about that to understand?
That's not true anymore. All those millions of chinese, indians, etc. have gotten into the act, and our atmsphere is no longer changing at a crawl. It's now a sprint! A mad dash!
That's great for the billionaires who grow fatter and more entitled every day, but soon even they are going to start feeling the effects. They are just as dependent on the world's eco system as the rest of us are. They just don't see it yet and don't want to believe it because of everything they have riding on the status quo.
I honestly can't see this all ending well. It terrifies me! I just can't shrug it off because I'll soon be out of here forever.
Hydogen and solar, dammit! If we insist on using up all the fossil fuels before we do the sensible thing, it will be too late! You can't belch millions of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in a few score years and get away with it!
What's so hard about that to understand?
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