Let’s start the new year off with a short rant about religion. Last month I finally purchased a copy of the Torah and as I read, I wondered what I could actually find in the Bible since most of the older religious documents of almost all religions are pretty blood thirsty.
Anyone who claims to admire and worship the biblical God has either abandoned all sense of moral judgment or has never actually read the Old Testament. Since most believers are good people, I prefer to assume the latter. I think the world would be a much better place if people would actually read the book. A.A. Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh, said: “The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.” Here are a few more of the Old Testament tidbits that will have you rushing off to church.
Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the [holy man] who represents God must be put to death. Such evil must be purged.
I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.
I will fill your mountains with the dead. Your hills, your valleys, and your streams will be filled with people slaughtered by the sword. I will make you desolate forever. Your cities will never be rebuilt. Then you will know that I am God.
Fight them until there is no more [disbelief or worshipping of other gods] and worship is for God alone.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
Whoso fighteth in the way of God, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.
Make ready to slaughter [the infidel’s] sons for the guilt of their fathers; Lest they rise and possess the earth and fill the breadth of the world with tyrants.
[God’s messenger] . . . was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The [holy man] replied, “They [women and children] are from them [unbelievers].”
Then I heard God say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all – old and young, girls and women and little children.”
“See, the day of the Lord is coming — a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger. . .. I will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty. . .. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted, and their wives violated.”
Keep [my holiday], for it is holy. Anyone who desecrates it must die.
The punishment of those who wage war against God and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified, or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter, they shall have a grievous chastisement.
“O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”
“And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me but walk contrary unto me; Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.”
“You shall acknowledge no God but me. . .. You are destroyed, Israel. . .. The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”
I for one am grateful that I was born after most of that craziness had run its course. There still are a few fanatics out there from all religions but they are thankfully very few in number.
It would be a wonderful thing to have the ability to predict the future. I’m not one to predict anything because my range of knowledge on many things is severely lacking. In the past I’ve taken the lead from science fiction writers whose ability to predict many future things is scary and all too accurate. These following seven items from Time magazine are a little bizarre and show that any of us can make ridiculous predictions and be as wrong as everyone else has been.
In 1992, TIME magazine offered up an article predicting what to expect in the new millennium. Lance Morrow, a writer, quoting political scientist Michael Barkun, wrote, “The human mind abhors a vacuum … Where certainties are absent, we make do with probabilities, and where probabilities are beyond our power to calculate, we seek refuge from insupportable ignorance in a future of our own imagining.” Here is a roundup of some of the looniest predictions since the advent of TIME — the magazine, not the concept — in 1923:
The future human will be a Cyclops. “In distant centuries or millenaries man will be a Cyclops, a Polyphemus, a being with one eye only.” So said Dr. Thomas Hall Shastid in a 1933 article.” This future eye, explained Shastid, would be in the center of the face, below a high forehead, where the bridge of the nose once rested.
Grandchildren of the television age won’t be able to read. TIME addressed the potential downsides of a newly television-obsessed culture. “By the 21st Century our people doubtless will be squint-eyed, hunchbacked and fond of the dark,” the writer predicted. “But why am I carrying on like this? Chances are that the grandchild of the Television Age won’t know how to read this.”
Every medical malady will be treatable with a miracle pill.
“Frogmen” will live in underseas bunkers and tend to kelp farms. One way to address food shortages of the future, according to the RAND Corp. in 1966: imagined that “Huge fields of kelp and other kinds of seaweed will be tended by undersea ‘farmers’ — frogmen who will live for months at a time in submerged bunkhouses.”
Spouses will be able to secretly control one another’s moods with “grouch pills”. RAND predicted that if one spouse is in a particularly cantankerous mood, his or her partner, “will be able to pop down to the corner drugstore, buy some anti-grouch pills, and slip them into the coffee.”
Tomatoes will be square. The mechanization of agriculture during the middle decades of the 20th century will drastically change the face of farming. “Another phenomenon in the not-too-distant future,” envisioned the Research and Development Chief at Deere & Co., “is square tomatoes, which, after all, could be more easily packaged by machine — and fit better in sandwiches.”
We will be able to feel and smell whatever’s on our television sets. According to Nicholas Negroponte, then director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, the 21st century will bring “full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output.” The images on your TV, in other words, will be feelable and smellable.
It boggles the mind that trustworthy publications and think-tanks would dare to put these crazy ideas into print. I suppose some people insist on getting their names and ideas out there for the public to ponder over. Any publicity is good publicity and helps them to attain their 15 minutes of fame.
Another year of pandemic, bad economy, fake news from the media, bad this and bad that. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted by it all. We can’t seem to trust anyone anymore about anything. I hope we don’t follow in the footsteps of our European allies. If the pandemic doesn’t kill them fast enough, they may start killing each other as they’ve done so often in the past. We don’t want to be dragged down that rabbit-hole again for any reason.
I’ve been hearing about how terrible the economy is all year and how those whiny retailers just never seem to have a good Christmas shopping season. Headlines like “Christmas Sales Fail to Meet Expectations” are the same every year it seems. Fortunately, this year a lot of that Black Friday nonsense before Thanksgiving didn’t happen and probably saved many people from being injured trying to get a big-screen TV into their shopping cart at Walmart.
It’s no wonder the people in this country are depressed after more than two years of the pandemic, mainstream media ranting and raving about every little thing, and presidential doom and gloom from Trump to Biden. We been beaten to our knees with a constant barrage of misinformation, innuendo, and outright lies.
I normally have a great deal of optimism for the future but that’s only true if the up-and-coming younger voters start looking and listening carefully at what they’re being told in the schools, universities, and everywhere else. They must learn the hard way how to teach themselves to recognize the truth when they see it and the lies when they hear them. Politics is an ugly game and has little or no mercy on the uninformed.
Things may not be great but it’s not the end of the world. It’s politicians attempting to propagandize the populace with crisis after crisis so we’ll throw the bums out and vote the other bums in. The pandemic is just one more thing in a long list of topics where we can’t rely on anyone to give us the whole truth. It’s an old and vicious game and we the voters continue to stick our heads in the sand and condone it year after year. Shame on us and shame on those responsible.
So much for the end of 2021. Good-bye and good riddance. I can only hope that things improve this coming year but don’t expect those irresponsible politicians, reporters, pundits, professors, and high school teachers to keep you and yours up to date with true facts. Read, research, ask the questions that need to be asked, and remain skeptical. It’s your duty as an American citizen to question your government, don’t hesitate. We can only hope 2022 will show some improvement and I think it will, if we don’t spend all of our time fighting amongst ourselves. If that continues, we’re all screwed.
Every Useless Thing will return on January 2, 2022.
Happy New Year! I’m a little embarrassed at this point after surfing the net and reading through some books trying to find quotations that were based on the start of the new year. I couldn’t have been more disappointed. The following few quotations are just samples of the drivel and worthless quotes I discovered in my search. I sincerely apologize. We’d be better off making up our own quotations because no matter how bad we thought they might be, they’d be better than these. Read them and weep. If this is the best we can do, were in deep trouble.
“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.” Brad Paisley
“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” Oprah Winfrey
“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” Benjamin Franklin
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” Edith Lovejoy Pierce
“May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!” Aleister Crowley
“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose, new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man-made New Year resolution, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” G.K. Chesterton
Now that I’ve given it some thought, here’s my quote:
“HERE WE GO AGAIN, keep your head down, make no eye contact with anyone, maintain your social distance, and wear a freaking mask.“
First of all, I’d like to wish all of you out there a Happy New Year. I’m also going to pass along some information concerning deaths that occurred on New Year’s past due to excessive alcohol consumption and the misuse of fireworks and guns. This information was collected from numerous sources in the USA and Europe. Enjoy the holiday but don’t become famous as another stupid-death statistic.
During the study period (2020), we found that over 1,000 people were killed in fatal collisions across the United States on New Year’s Eve or Day. In fact, there were:
916 total fatal crashes
1,004 fatalities
341 fatal crashes involving drunk drivers
377 people killed in drunk driving crash
In terms of total crashes, Texas (188), Florida (167) and California (154) had by far the highest number. However, these three states are also the states with the highest population. When looking at fatal crashes per 100,000 licensed drivers, the safest and most dangerous states were much different.
The five states with the highest crash rates (most dangerous states) were:
Mississippi
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Wyoming
Texas
Without a doubt, the hours between 1 am and 3 am are the most dangerous during the New Year’s holiday. These hours were numbers 1 and 2 for total fatal crashes involving a drunk driver. Interestingly, fatal crashes drop significantly during the midnight to 1 am, as people everywhere likely stay where they are to enjoy watching the ball drop.
The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates that 384 people may die on U.S. roads this New Year’s Day holiday period. Holidays traditionally are a time of travel for families across the United States and many choose car travel, which has the highest fatality rate of any major form of transportation based on fatalities per passenger mile.
If celebrating and dying on New Year’s Eve in the USA isn’t scary enough, read the following. Europeans are just as crazy as we are. They apparently prefer killing themselves with fireworks rather than vehicular homicides. New Year’s Eve data from 2020.
In Germany, at least one death was reported early on Friday of a 24-year-old man in the eastern town of Rietz-Neuendorf, who died when homemade fireworks detonated shortly after midnight.
Another case of improvised firework’s explosion left one man’s life in danger and two others injured near the western German city of Osnabrück. They were working with explosives, trying to create a pyrotechnic, when there was an explosion shortly after midnight.
After they were barred from setting off fireworks in public spaces, some Berliners instead tried to launch them from their homes on New Year’s Eve, leading to dozens of fires across the German capital. Between midnight and just six minutes later, the Berlin fire service said it was called to 18 fires, with more following deeper into the night. No one reported any immediate serious injuries.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention those fun-loving Arabs in Iraq. What’s New Years without mowing down a few of your fellow citizens with meaningless gunfire.
At least one civilian was killed and 25 injured in celebratory gunfire and fireworks marking the New Year in different parts of Iraq, a health official said on Friday. Fireworks were set off in several parts of the country despite a government ban on mass gatherings to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
PLEASE HAVE A HAPPY AND SAFE NEW YEARS CELEBRATION
After posting my resolutions yesterday I found this list on a website (www.ba-bamail.com) that’s loaded with all sorts of humorous jokes, gags, and limericks. Their list of resolutions was funny, but I thought it needed a little of my tweaking. Here is my modified version of their list, a list I know I can really accomplish. I’ll try to complete yesterday’s list, but it’ll be much more difficult than this one.
Put on at least 30 pounds, more if someone pisses me off.
Start buying lottery tickets at a luckier store.
Go commando at all times.
Stop exercising forever.
Let the hair in my nose and ears grow unchecked.
Shave just twice a week, the face is optional.
Watch more pornography.
Never again load the dishwasher.
Procrastinate more.
Do less laundry and use more deodorant.
Drink more – my liver needs the exercise.
Buy more on-line junk from China. I need to be scammed more often.
It’s time for me to switch from my Christmas preparations since it’s almost here, to my annual prep for New Year’s. Since I’m planning to abandon the blog for a few days over each holiday, (24-26 Dec & 31-02 Jan), I thought getting my New Year’s resolutions posted early made a lot of sense. I enjoy making them every year but almost never live up to my own expectations. The important thing is to keep trying. There’s the challenge for you.
“New Year’s Day now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” —Mark Twain
Read a minimum of 50 books this year.
Spend more quality time with the grandchildren.
For the third year in a row (failed three times), I won’t walk naked near the front picture window. It freaks out the bicyclists, joggers and neighbors.
Drink less than last year but more than next year.
Complete the Recipe/Photo book I’ve been working on for years.
“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” —Bill Vaughn
Keep the F-bombs to less than ten per day.
Spend less than $50.00 a month at Dunkin Donuts.
Lose 20 pounds of ugly fat.
Complete at least five new paintings.
Be a kinder and gentler pet owner. The cat requested this one.
“New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” —James Agate
Those are my ten official resolutions for 2022. Although as I was surfing the net earlier today, I discovered two more which I’m unofficially adding to my list.
11. I will not act my age.
12. I will not sit in my living room all day in my pajamas. Instead, I will move my computer into the bedroom.
“I’m a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a little bit rounder, but still none the wiser.” —Robert Paul
With the end of the year in sight my mind turns to things financial. Today is as good a day as any for a short history lesson on the ever so popular Social Security Program. Back in the day my parents thought that FDR could walk on water because he saved us all from imminent destruction by fending off the economic disaster that was the Great Depression. It’s true to a point but what he did has evolved over the ensuing years into a serious liability instead of an asset. His world saving programs have morphed over time and are currently responsible for some of the misery we are experiencing today. Here’s your history lesson . . .
Social Security Cards up until the 1980s expressly stated the number and card were not to be used for identification purposes. Since nearly everyone in the United States now has a number, it became convenient to use it anyway and the message, “NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION” was removed from the card.
President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) program. He promised:
Participation in the program would be completely voluntary. No longer voluntary.
The money the participants elected to put into the program would be deductible from their income tax for tax purposes each year. No longer tax-deductible.
The money the participants put into the independent “Trust Fund” rather than into the general operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other government programs. Under President Johnson the money was moved into the General Fund and spent.
The annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income. It is now taxable thanks to Clinton/Gore.
Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month and then finding that we are getting taxed on the money we paid to the federal government to put away for us. I thought you might be interested in the following:
Q: Which political party took money from Social Security and put it into the general fund so that Congress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the democratically controlled House and Senate
Q: Which political party eliminated the income tax deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party
Q: Which political party started taxing Social Security annuities?
A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote while he was Vice President of the United States.
Q: Which political party decided to start giving annuity payments to immigrants?
A: That’s right! Jimmy Carter and that Democratic Party
Immigrants moved into this country and at age 65, began to receive Social Security payments. The Democratic Party gave these payments to them, even though they never paid a dime into the system. Then, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away. The worst part about it is that millions of uninformed citizens continue to believe these lies. Take the time to explain it to your family, especially your kids. They’ll ask questions you may not want to answer.
While we are all waiting for Christmas to arrive, let me rant on for a few minutes. I’ve been reading a book called Number Freaking. It’s a book of statistics about things you would never normally think about. It allows you to discover how far you might have walked in your lifetime, how many people have lived since the beginning of time, and how to cure the world debt. I’m going to use some of the information gleaned from that book to convince anyone in their right mind to never smoke.
I began smoking cigarettes at age 14. I never bought cigarettes, but I stole most of them from my parents who were both fairly heavy smokers. I did it to look cool because it was the thing to do in high school at that time. I continued smoking more than two packs a day from the time I attended college until 1983. That was the last time I ever held a cigarette which makes me a former smoker who hasn’t smoked for 38 years. As always, I seem to be arriving late to the game, but good sense finally prevailed. Here are a few facts you might find interesting or maybe not, but here goes anyway.
The average smoker in America smokes 13 cigarettes a day. One of the maxims of the anti-smoking lobby is that every cigarette smoked knocks 11 min. off your life. Based on this truism, about one year will be lost for every 10 years that the average smoker smokes.
95% of smokers start at or near the age of 16. The average life expectancy at birth in the United States is approximately 78 years, i.e., 62 years after the age of 16. We’ll assume the life lost due to smoking is deducted from these 62 years. Here are three questions to make things a little clearer.
Question: How much life does an average American smoker lose per year of smoking. Answer: 36 days, six hours, 30 min., and 45 seconds
Question: At what age, approximately, will average American smokers who start smoking at age 16 reach the age that the habit is predicted to kill them? Answer: 71 years and six months.
Question: At what age, approximately, will 40-a-day American smoker, starting at age 16, reach the age that the habit is predicted to kill them? Answer: 62 years and nine months.
? ? ? ? ?
By this calculation even one cigarette a day would cost you nearly 6 months of your life.
If the nicotine in 200 cigarettes were to be taken as a single dose, you would die.
