Hogmanay is a Scottish New Year Tradition- HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Hogmanay (sometimes seen spelled Hogmany) is a Scots word that refers to New Year's Eve and the subsequent New Year celebrations.

Although Hogmanay itself is 31 December, the Scottish in fact celebrate the new year until 2nd January. This day is an official holiday only in Scotland, and not in the rest of the UK where the word 'Hogmanay' is not used.

Hogmanay involves a number of traditions, including the ancient custom of 'first-footing', the song Auld Lang Syne, and more recently fireworks at Edinburgh Castle.

Stuck at the Airport...?

A year ago, the Obama administration adopted new rules within the Department Transportation concerning airport delays.

“The new rule adopted by the Transportation Department sets fines of as much as $27,500 per passenger when airlines leave fliers stuck on a plane on the ground for more than three hours. Based on a delayed plane carrying 120 passengers, the fine could be as much as $3.3 million. The rule would apply to planes with more than 30 seats.”

OH, the unintended consequences…a year later a massive winter storm blankets the east coast in snow, closing major airports. Yet as the airports slowly clear the runways  and terminal ramp area, what are the airlines doing…why, cancelling flights. Rather than hoping for the best, perhaps a slim window of opportunity to get some flights out, the major airlines, fearing Obama retribution(in the form of fines) are cancelling flights, a sort of pre-emptive action.

“As many as 1.2 million airline customers may have been affected by almost 8,200 flight cancellations as the storm that hit three days ago closed major airports. Passengers were forced to try to make new plans, sometimes without being able to reach airlines by phone or online for help.”

Hmmm 1.2 million passengers times $27,500 fine per passenger, why that’s $33 BILLION dollars…what airline could stay in business with a hit like that?

Pre Christmas

Writing a lengthy discussion about anything 2 days before Christmas is absolutely not going to generate a huge readership. That statement almost seems like the most enormous DUH statement I have ever put to paper (screen?).

The last couple of days work has slowed down, as more and more people are taking off time to be with friends and family.

This afternoon it was me and two other women, and the security guard, so I left at 3:30PM.

The ride home was quick, reminiscent I suppose of traffic patterns 35 or 40 years ago, when the freeways were new here and the population was maybe 30% of what it is now.

Sacramento metropolitan area supposedly is about 2.2 million now, and when I was a kid was closer to what I found online, 589,000, which figures to be about 26-27%, so I was close.

Anyway, for those traveling this evening and tomorrow, be  safe, be alert, and have a Merry Christmas!

Ignarus electorate?

I don’t claim to be a philosopher, a profound thinker, or even all that well informed.

But when I read blogs where people denigrate political figures with name calling, I usually tend to think those folks are ideologues, dedicated to a single purpose and unwilling to think of other perspectives.

I thought that when people vilified Clinton, who as a person has some explaining to do about his personal moral code, but as a political figure, knew how to compromise when needed, even on issues he wasn’t particularly fond of.

 I really thought GW Bush was numskull, but after 9/11, I cut him some slack, and was not 100% behind some of his ideas…I personally thought the Iraq war was started on a bogus premise, and the while the initial execution could have been better, from a logistical standpoint the post “victory” period was totally screwed up by inadequate listening to the military, in favor of policy wonks that probably didn’t have a clue, since most of them never served a day in uniform. Be that it may, its water under the bridge.

Some folks now are apoplectic about Obama, and his hope change BS. Face it, he may in fact be evil, but I tend to side with the argument that he is probably the most incompetent leader in my lifetime, which means more than a half century.  

His incompetence is obscured sometimes by the crowd around him, both Republican and Democrats. Ramming thru legislation that was not read does not speak well for a republic, because the very idea of a republic is that the elected represent the vox populi- the voice of the people. So have we Americans become, as one commentator put it, too stupid to know what we are doing? I have long held the view that the answer is yes.

From my experience over the last 30 years, there seems to be a dumbing down in this country.

Example: As a young woman, my first job out of college was teaching for the Department of Defense in Germany. I fully expected to be teaching children the basics of English, literature, and perhaps hand writing skills. I spent most of my tenure there teaching young soldiers these skills, because their commanders said they had such a deficit in reading and writing that they were incompetent at their jobs. They could not understand manuals that told them how to do their jobs, and their learning skills were all non-verbal, as in show me how to do it. Many were only able to stay in the military because they used comic book style field manual for weapons and machines that was pretty much all pictures and very little words, so they could at least master those skills.

I thought many of these young people were from impoverished areas with poor schools, but most were from big cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York…how sad is that?

So now these barely educated people muster out of the service, and inevitably come home to marry, start families, and well it’s the whole premise of the movie Idiocracy, the rise of the dolt to represent the mass.

Going a step further down the politically incorrect path, many of the people I deal with today are from foreign countries, and have mastered none of the language skills required to be successful in a society.

I have a friend that is of Chinese ancestry, whose father was a professor at the local university. Yet she has taken me to restaurants in town where 3^rd generation Americans barely speak English, let alone understand it. They routinely speak to her (and anyone else) in Chinese, which she really doesn’t speak, since her parents emphasized English to her and her siblings. Yet they can vote, because they too are citizens. I asked some of them recently, and most smiled and said they voted for Obama; same with the workers in the Mexican foods store I shop at sometimes.

How can the dull witted and linguistically challenged thrive in this country, when my some of my Swedish ancestors couldn’t? Well, because 130 years ago, if you didn’t learn to speak, read and write in English, your lot in life was pretty tough.

Our education system has pretty much continued to graduate people unable to effectively speak, read or write, and because of that, there is a concomitant deficit in critical thinking.

Several years ago a young woman working with me, who spoke pretty good English in spite of the fact that she would say things like “I have been this country 3 years only “

 (She emigrated from China) would come back from project meetings and sigh. I asked her why the heavy sigh and she lamented that in this country “No one know how to be critically thinking!”

Critical thinking, then, becomes key to the assumption I am making, that only a fool would elect a fool, therefore, Obama being a fool, must have been elected by fools.

“Critical thinking is reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe and do."

Assuming that critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do, a critical thinker:

1. Is open-minded and mindful of alternatives
2. Tries to be well-informed
3. Judges well the credibility of sources
4. Identifies conclusions, reasons, and assumptions
5. Judges well the quality of an argument, including the acceptability of its reasons, assumptions, and evidence
6. Can well develop and defend a reasonable position
7. Asks appropriate clarifying questions
8. Formulates plausible hypotheses; plans experiments well
9. Defines terms in a way appropriate for the context
10. Draws conclusions when warranted, but with caution
11. Integrates all items in this list when deciding what to believe or do

I applied these concepts to listening to candidate Obama, and quickly determined that he was using platitudes and unrealistic assumptions, especially budget assumptions, to promise the electorate what they wanted to hear. He had a vision- get elected President.

His secondary goal would then to do what is necessary to get re-elected President.

His goals are not necessarily my priorities, therefore I reject his goals, and vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with my beliefs, who effectively convinces me they understand the issues and have applied critical thinking to come to the position they hold.

It would seem that unfortunately for this country, that level of effort is not generally expended in voting. And we all suffer the consequences.

Hence we have a leader who has never been a leader, doesn’t have a understanding of leadership, and is not pre disposed to learning leadership.

So is he evil? I doubt it. Is he incompetent? That seems evident.

Fighting with Fat...so

Needing to lose weight is sometimes not just for vanity sake; because it also improves your health to be at a healthy weight, whatever that is for you. I am not talking about some idealized weight, but what is healthy for you as a person. I am overweight, and it impacts my ability to control my diabetes, blood pressure and other health issues that come to dominate the conversation with my doctor.

Used to be those conversations were about birth control, smoking, drinking, and inquiries about any casual drug use. Oh, those were the days…but I am off subject.

So in my quest to find things to help me manage my weight, I found a online food diary, where you list everything you did all day and all the food you eat, and you get an idea of how many calories, fat, carbs, and protein you have eaten, and how many of those calories you burned. If the burned is greater than the intake, yippee, you are using more than you ate.

Sadly, on the weekend I am busy and burn off a lot of calories, while now during the week, I eat too much and don’t do enough to burn them off. No big secret what happens then, as all those extra calories turn into fat, which settles into layers of blubber, leading to “beached whale syndrome”. That’s what I call it anyway, because when I am real heavy, I think I look like a big blob of blubber. (Geez, talk about poor self image)

I am probably being harsh on myself because I have a picture taken of me when I was in Germany on my mirror, a time when being thinner and healthy was so easy for me. I mean I would drink beers, eat pizza, generally not do anything healthy and stayed a decent size for me, a 12.  

Now I look at food and gain weight. Hence the obsession with trying to figure out the problem, and as much as I don’t want to acknowledge it, the truth is I am eating more than I am burning, not by a lot, but enough that I stay in this budgie mode.

A few years ago I was pretty close to being back to the skinny side of me, I was happy with myself, and actually cried when I tried on some jeans previously way to tight and they fit. Not a real comfy fit, but I could sit down in them at least.   Then I got the thyroid problem, which accounted for why I was able to lose the weight, since I had a overactive thyroid speeding up my metabolism.  Following the radiated iodine I took, the function of that gland went down to normal, and I piled on the pounds.

So I have been slowly making progress, but need to stay focused and try to start doing more and eating less.

I wrote this while eating a big bowl of macaroni and cheese...OMG, I can't stop... :)

Say austery one more time....

Sometimes for not much reason at all, I start to feel sad, and want to cry.

That’s not true, there are reasons. Like doing the bills, and realizing that sometime next month, I am going to be broke before the end of the month.

Recently in a morale booster at work (hint, this is heavy sarcasm, OK), they decided since the tax laws seems to be worked out, they could relent on confiscation of 15% of my, and everyone else’s, salary at my work. So now I only have to deal with a 5% pay cut…and an increase in how much I pay towards retirement, a decrease in how much they match in retirement, and an increase in my health insurance. Which pretty much means my net pay stays about the same....thanks.

It’s really not that bad, because by now we are well used to hearing complaints met with  the expression, “Be glad you still have a job”, and they have quit saying that. What used to be that was greeted with open hostility, is now hostility is muted since they decided to lay off about 1,000 people, a bomb they dropped the Monday after Thanksgiving…more precisely, the  email notice went out at 3:50 PM, well after early day shift employees had gone home at 2:30.

Why do companies always seem to say “Hmmmm, when could we screw the employees the best, hey I know, let wreck Christmas!!!!” .  So some of us more senior employees kicked in and had a Christmas, oops, Holiday (what friggin Holiday is it anyway?..ChristmasKwanzaHogmanay?) party in the production area, which usually is full of stuff, but now is a large vacant area…we paid for all the stuff and treated about 200 employees to lunch, turkey, ham, salad, a real potluck, with tons of food. What was left over we gave away to people, or took to the mission down the street. We did this the same day corporate executives were celebrating at the “official Holiday celebration” priced at a modest $27 per person, with catered food consisting of hors d'oeuvres, no bar, salad and (seriously) “brick oven fired gourmet pizza”. GIVE ME A BREAK.

I know I had more fun paying for 20 people to eat at our alternative party than I would of at the schmoozer party.

Austerity – A personal rant

I think I wrote in one of these blogs about the latest great scheme management came up with, consolidation of nearly everything. It’s a part of the newest buzz word in big enterprises, austerity.

Austerity.

As in lets consolidate everyone from everywhere into the company to headquarters, by first figuring out who we can chop and stay in business, then let’s eliminate as much as possible. Let’s scale down the company, so that all hopes of promotion are gone, and managers are leaving by the droves. Let’s consolidate, and make senior level employees (like me) do managerial duties (without the pay), and IT support, and all the stuff she used to do before the new Austerity…

So today on my way home, I heard that damnable word in a news story, “Webster’s dictionary says austerity was the most looked up word in 2010”. I started crying. Not the boo hoo,  red faced,  deep gut ‘ I wanna let it all loose’ crying, but the kind of ‘clench the steering wheel’, and feel the tears start type of cry.  

It was over fairly quickly, as I reminded myself, well, I still have a job. And then the other type of crying started.  Bummer.

Angel Flight

No one asks to be a hero but sometimes it turns out that way Semper Fi

Radney Foster music video for "Angel Flight" Proceeds benefit Texas National Guard Family Support Foundation. Available on CD "Revival" at radneyfoster.com Buy this video for iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/video/ange...