Thoughts on a blizzardy day in Minnesota

You might wonder what Minnesotans do when it's 15 degrees out with winds over 30mph.....well, in our family, we ski into town to get ice cream, and then when we find (boo hoo) the ice cream shop is closed, we get donuts. 

We had a wonderful time at a youth concert yesterday, and when tempted to complain, we can remember people like Bob, Tom, and Todd.  Bob is about 60, and lost his eyesight and his eyes 30 years back to diabetes.  Many would have been content to just take Social Security disability checks, but not Bob.  Through four transplants (three kidneys and a pancreas), he's also gotten a master's degree and worked for 25 years.  He just retired, just had heart difficulty, but you'd never know he'd had difficulty from his attitude.

Our family has also known Todd and Tom for years--twin brothers born with a congenital muscle disease that also entitles them to lifelong disability checks, they have both gotten degrees and--this is remarkable in this economy--both have found work in their area.  They are wheelchair bound for life and need special assistance in many areas, but you will no sooner hear them complaining then you'll see them wearing a dress.  My hat is off to them, at least.....when I'm inside. 

A question of the philosophers

Women are evidently routinely mocked because of wearing ill-fitting "Mom Jeans".  Now given that I, and most of my (male) colleagues wear loosely fitting denim as well, why are men not mocked for wearing "dad jeans"?

I blame the patriarchy!  We have met the enemy, and he is us!

Our political problems, illustrated by bridge construction

Now I have no idea whether Governor Christie actually intended the partial shutdown of the George Washington Bridge to be political retribution against political rivals--given he won in a landslide last year, he'd have been insane to do so--but there is a reality that very often, local politics is the dirtiest.

That, in turn, is a difficulty for those who would hope to clean up the system, because we find that even Presidents are often drawn from the ranks of community organizers who manage to persuade the courts to unseal divorce records of their opponents.  So if we wonder why we have a President who, after literally thousands (perhaps *billions, really) of felonies committed by the NSA and other departments, still has yet to even bother to fire anyone, let alone indict the perpetrators, we have only ourselves to blame.

We did not, after all, turn out the city council member or county commissioner who used his position the same way in our hometown, or home county, did we?  He might have been a member of our church, or a "respected businessman", and we didn't call him on it.  And now we might call him Congressman, or Governor, or even Mr. President, and we're all wondering why he's doing exactly the same things we let him get away with when he was an alderman, a county commissioner, or a state representative.

Well, duh.

*Yes, billions and perhaps even trillions; each lawless search of private records by the NSA is a count of that felony.