A better way than this

A cartoonist posted this in his blog a few days ago:

You know what this is? It's a sculpture by Blake Fall-Conroy, the Minimum Wage Machine.
From the site:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage (and Ohio state minimum wage, too--)). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money.

I generally hate 'abstract sculptures', but this one seemed to reverberate in my very soul. I spent a few years of my life at that crank (granted, not working minimum wage), trying to wring out the pennies we needed to keep the household going. Now my husband is the one who turns the crank.

Granted, not all jobs are quite this bleak. Many people are able to make their living doing something they enjoy, or, at least, something that is not consistently monotonous. My husband works as a computer programmer, a "code monkey", as he puts it. Still, most workplace jobs involve a certain level of cranking. That goes doubly for the kind of jobs in which working women often find themselves.

This is one reason why the feminist anti-homemaker viewpoint baffles me. They wish to replace a system in which the man returns home from the crank to find beauty, warmth, and stimulating conversation. They wish to end a system in which the woman spends all of her creativity, intellect, and strength in fulfilling tasks that make life for her husband so much more than 'the crank'. They want to take her from her home and children.

Their idea of utopia is the man and the women both out at their own separate cranks, grinding away while the government takes half of what trickles out and raises their children for them. The feminist dream ends each workday when whichever parent finishes at the crank first having to stop and pick up his (or her) children from daycare, then to arrive at a cold, empty house in hopes of making things a little brighter for the sake of his (or her) mate.

(Of course, this changes the house life even on weekends and holidays. I see more and more women choosing to put their children in daycare on vacation days so that they can "get a break" and have time to do the chores. I hear them complain about vacations from school, grateful when their own children return to someone else's care. You have to live with a child to know how to 'deal with' that child. You have to spend most of your hours in a child's company to get into that child's groove, so to speak, to understand which sounds of frustration denote hunger and which sounds denote sleepiness. But I am getting off the subject.)

We laugh at books and magazines written in the '50's that encourage housewives to fetch drinks for their husbands. There is even an Internet meme full of advice such as making yourself pretty when he returns home from work and not bothering him with trivialities until he has had a chance to relax. We read it and scoff about what doormats those women were back then. The next time you hear that advice, though, and the next time you are ready to laugh, I want you to go back to that picture and I want you to look at that crank.

That cartoonist's blog post continues:

Picture that. Picture standing there for four hours, six hours, eight hours a day, turning that crank to squeeze out one penny at a time till you have enough to pay the rent, put gas in the car, keep the water, electric, wash the clothes, feed the kid, pay your taxes.... Your day revolves around being there to turn that crank. Your life revolves around turning that crank. Your precious limited time on this dear sweet earth is eaten away by that crank.

Ladies, your husband has spent his entire day at that crank. If you are a full-time homemaker, or even if you are a part-time worker, he has spent his day at that crank for you and for your children. He will spend tomorrow at that crank. He will work that crank until he is elderly, and he's doing it for his family. If he is like my husband, he may complain about his work, but he never complains about the fact that he will be winding away at that or another similar crank for most of his life. That 50's meme that so many women find ridiculous, the easy chair and the glass of his favorite beverage, the effort you take to look pretty and provide him with a hot supper... that is the least we can do in return.

The Name of Jesus

Indiana Jones, facing a minefield-trap with marked stones: The name of God.... Jehovah.

Henry Jones: But in the Latin, 'Jehovah' starts with an 'I'...

Indiana Jones: J... (takes a step and almost dies)

In one of the forums which I frequent, there was recently a discussion about a Christian Mythology claim brought forth by one of the members. The claim is that Jesus spent His early adulthood traveling to India to learn Buddhism from the monks. This is cited for the similarities between Jesus's morality and that of Buddhism, which entreats you to do revolutionary acts like caring for the poor and treating people decently.

Of course, there are numerous problems with the claim, among them the fact that it is very difficult to shoehorn Joseph of Arimethea into his proper role within the myth as secret favorite uncle (or great-uncle?) to Jesus. The problem that taught me the most, however, is the scroll that supposedly proves that someone of Jesus's description learned at the temples at around the time of His lifespan. This person carries the Arab/Indian name "Issa".

I thought I had seen that name before, and I was correct. "Isa" is widely and incorrectly cited as the "Arab name for Jesus." It is, in fact, the Muslim name for Jesus. Arab Christians call Him "Yasu".

Now some people might ask why that makes any difference at all. What is the importance of what Arab Christians call Jesus? We don't even have His name perfectly translated from the Aramaic. Jesus comes from the Latin "Iesus", which comes from the Arabic "Yesua/Yeshua", which is a diminutive of the Hebrew "Joshua/Jehoshua".

Ah, but there's the problem. "Yasu" translates nicely to "Yesua", and the Arab Christians have a very close form of Jesus's earthly name. "Isa/Issa", however, correlates far more strongly to another Hebrew name: "Isaac/Isaiah". (Some scholars say that "Isa" may be closer to "Esau".)

To veer into the realm of pure conjecture, I would like to ask this: Why do Muslims refer to Jesus as if His name was Isaac or Isaiah? There is, of course, the obvious conclusion: Muslims would say that Mohammed was correcting problems in the New Testament, while Christians and Jews would say that Mohammed was working off a flawed memory of old Biblical lessons, citing that earlier Muslim scholars were quite certain from his wording that Isaac and Jacob were both meant to be sons of Abraham. For the scroll from India, I would submit that the fact that it was not Jesus's name suggests that another man, either an Arab named Isa/Issa or a Hebrew named Isaac, Isaiah, or Esau once traveled up to India and learned from the monks there.

I like to look into both the physical and spiritual world when making conjecture, and I wonder sometimes if there is something preventing or, at least, discouraging certain types of heresies from comfortably using Jesus's name correctly when assigning Him to their belief systems. Why would I think that? Well, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Jacob's parentage, modern Islamic scholars have changed their minds from earlier times and now lay out the same Abraham-Isaac-Jacob line as the Jews and Christians. Nothing, however, seems capable of turning them from referring to Jesus as "Isa", even though I have known Christians to choose readily and without censure to refer to Jesus as "Yeshua".

Sesame Street Classics!

This is for the sake of my little daughter, Tricia, who has come to absolutely adore these videos. Just favoriting them on Youtube would be a pain, because they'd be entirely out of order, and I'm tired of having to search them each time I want to play them... which is nearly daily! So without further ado, I display for you the Sesame Street Pinball Machine numbers 2-12!

Isn't that supposed to be 1-12? Haven't found #1 yet.

When the doctor is wrong

Most mothers of young children will run across this problem at one time or another. It seems that the standard pediatrician office, even the excellent one, still may be behind the times in dealing with child-rearing. Their advice is unlikely to hurt your child, but you still may end up reading the newer publications and gaining quite a different opinion from theirs. What do you do then?

I ran across this problem just a few days ago. My daughter had her nine-month appointment, and they checked her weight and height. Her height was fine by their standards, lying right along the same point in the growth curve as her last appointments. Her weight, however, had barely moved. She had not lost any weight, but she did not gain enough to maintain her point on the curve, or even the point below it.

"We're not concerned yet," the pediatrician told me. "But I would like for you to push solids four or five times daily. Sit her down in her chair and feed her all she'll take. I'm an advocate of breastfeeding, and I breastfed my own children, the last one for two and a half years. But sometimes they just need that extra help. Besides, they say that you need to introduce solids during this time period or the child may become resistant to them."

Fair enough, I suppose. So I took her home and gave it a try.

My first problem was that my baby is not interested in solids. Oh, she loves to eat from a spoon, but she'll only consume an ounce or two before losing interest. To put this into perspective, the baby food jars labeled for her age are six ounce containers. Then, despite having eaten only one ounce of food, she will skip half a nursing session. That means that she loses probably about four ounces of breastmilk for one or two ounces of solids. The calorie count of solids runs from seven calories per ounce for vegetables like carrots or green beans to eighteen calories per ounce for a banana and cereal mixture. The average calorie count for breastmilk is twenty calories per ounce. So this effort is not likely to help her gain any extra weight.

I suppose that many doctors assume that low weight gain after six months on mostly breastmilk is a case of low milk output from the mother, and we will be able to add solids without reducing the amount of nursing sessions. This is not the case for my baby. I'm an overproducer, and she just isn't hungry.

My mother assured me that I underwent the exact same weight change at the exact same age. I told her the doctor's recommendations, and she told me that her doctor had made the exact same recommendation... thirty years ago! She had obediently pushed solids. "Did it work?" I asked. "Did I gain the way they wanted to see?" No, I hadn't, but introducing more solids into my diet hadn't seemed to hurt, either.

This is not the case for my baby, which brings me to the second problem with following the pediatrician's advice. From her earliest days, my baby has been strongly prone to intestinal trouble. Every feeding results in gassiness, and she used to have frequent episodes of reflux. These episodes died down over the past month or two, and I was hoping that the trouble was behind her. Every time I feed her, I sit with her for a while afterwards and help her work the worst of the bubbles out of her body.

Now I'd like to take this moment to clarify that I have not actually refused to start her on solids. In the morning, either I or my mother (if I am working) tries her on a basic, First-Foods item. She'll eat an ounce of it, or, some days, two ounces. It causes her a little bit of intestinal discomfort at times, but not too much. Then, in the late afternoon, she often gets fussy and wants frequent feedings while I'm trying to get supper on the table. I sit her in her chair and give her a handful of Cheerios. She eats most of them, and I get a break to cook and eat!

I took her home from the doctor's office and started her immediately on the solids regimen. On the first day, she ate pretty well, and I thought that this was surely the right thing to do! But on the second day, her appetite had fallen off significantly, and by the third she was in agony for most of the day with stomach trouble and constipation. On the fourth day, she ate very little and then threw up in the evening...

What do you do when the doctor is wrong?

I had a long talk with my mother and with the lactation consultant, and they both told me the same thing I had already guessed in my own heart. This baby is not like the typical bottle-fed baby not moving to the next step quickly enough. This baby is a different case. It's in her genetics to slow her weight gain at this juncture. Her ribs do not show, she has little fat folds on her legs, and she sleeps through the night. She is a very happy, active, healthy baby when she is not having severe intestinal pain. I have been reading about some babies whose intestinal tract mature more slowly than others. Some of them need to be nearly exclusively breastfed for two or three years as they are very slowly transitioned to other foods. Nearly all of them have shed the majority of their difficulties by age six.

Therefore, I am going on record to say that I will not be following my pediatrician's advice. I am going to return to her previous schedule, with a mashed food introduced in the morning and Cheerios (or bread) given in the evening, and I am going to keep breastfeeding her as much as she'll take. Now for the concern... am I going to get into trouble?

In this country, there seems to be a movement towards further government interference in the health of the population, which often translates to further government interference in the raising of young children. Already, doctors can label a child with the dreaded FTT (Failure To Thrive), and that diagnosis can cause a good parent all sorts of trouble if that good parent would rather follow the guidelines of the World Health Organization instead of the conventional wisdom of thirty years ago. Some pediatricians are more proactive than others and will put you in contact with the dreaded Social Services... simply over their disagreement with your method of parenting.

Some pediatrician groups are convinced that they know what's best for your child and you do not. These are the ones who groan when they find out that one or more of your children are homeschooled, because that immediately puts you into a different group entirely, an independent-thinking, intelligent woman who is not likely to follow their advice to the letter if she disagrees with it. Admittedly, sometimes they have cause for concern. At times like this, however, it may simply mean that they become frustrated with the mother's refusal to fit like a cog into the Great Machine.

Now I may be maligning my own pediatric group, so let me state that they have typically taken the individual approach much more kindly than most. I do not foresee being sent to Social Services over the amount of green beans that my baby may not be consuming instead of breastmilk. Still, I find myself making my decision and then preparing for my next appointment as if for battle, to fight for my right to care for this baby in the way I feel best.

Sheeple

It's been a good couple of days for this old accusation. Let me take a moment and repeat verbatim what I was told on my journal recently:

The sheer fact that you take Rush Limbaugh seriously tells me that I shouldn't pay attention to anything you have to say at all. Thanks for being such a sheeple, and for not actually thinking through what Rush says.

I was thinking about this when I heard that the House had passed a healthcare bill even larger and more dangerous than the one we successfully shot down in town hall meetings earlier this year. It seems that the Stupak Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortion in government-run health care, was added to the bill and several blue-dog Democrats decided to vote in favor.

This happened over the weekend, and Rush Limbaugh was not there to tell us poor sheeple what to think. We got the next best thing, however, when the American Family Association (Dr. Dobson's "empire") released a statement on Facebook giving praise that the amendment had been added to the bill. There, we sheeple were told what to think. Right? People like the poster quoted above, would probably think so.

That's not what happened.

The majority of comments were not in agreement with AFA. Within ten minutes, over thirty people had weighed in to explain that the amendment was not a victory, as without it the bill probably would not have passed. These people having been given the cues to cheer, refused. Each one spoke with different wording, and many approached the issue from different angles, making it very unlikely that they were parroting from the same source.

Now, the first Rush Limbaugh show since the vote is running. The transcripts have, of course, not yet been released, but the gist of it is that Rush was talking about the terrorist attack until a caller brought up the healthcare bill. What did the caller say? He said that he wasn't happy about the Stupak amendment merely because it made the healthcare bill a pleasant enough pill for the blue dog Democrats to get on board and pass it.

Think about that for a moment. We sheeple, who are supposed to take our cues from our masters, openly defied one and told another what we thought of the issue before he even brought it up. Isn't that kind of odd behavior for people who can't form an opinion on their own?

Wealth

It's that time of year again. I watched the enormous truck back into the driveway. My son watched in fascination as a man with a thick, greying beard connected the pipe. Within minutes, our oil tank downstairs displayed its little floater at the top of the gauge, and I was writing out a check. We fill our oil tank twice a year, once around November and once around March. Of course, living in the northern hemisphere in a cold-winter area, we use significantly more oil in the winter months. But that's hardly my point today.

I always get a thrill from filling the oil tank. It's the same thrill I get after a good grocery shopping session, in which there have been a lot of good sales and I have filled my cart. It's the thrill I get when the church giveaway room has several outfits out for the taking, all the right sizes for my children. I simply love having Plenty.

This isn't just an odd quirk of mine, mind you. It's a pretty common human condition. In Western Society, we have the curious desire for sparser homes and thinner women. Throughout history, the cultures have trended in the exact opposite direction, probably because wealth was not nearly as common as it is in the present day. Consider the example of the needy taking pictures of soup kitchens on their cell phones. We hardly understand what poverty really is anymore. I can't claim to truly understand it either. Even when we haven't known if we could fill that oil tank again, we've still had a weathertight house and the expectation that nobody is likely to destroy it in war or for spite anytime soon.

I like to focus on and enjoy the simplest and truest types of wealth. Recently, my family and I sang for a Salvation Army coffeehouse. One of the workers there found out that I have a baby girl and offered me some free diapers. I hesitated, automatically saying what I usually say in similar situations. We'd love the help, and I'll definitely use anything we're given, but I'm sure there are others in more need than us and they should probably be aided first. My mother told me on the drive home that we are in fact 'salt of the earth humble' and probably not much less in need than the other families in that area.

This surprised me, to be sure. In my reckoning, we're doing pretty well. Sure, you can look at us as a family who can't yet afford to replace the carpet as it wears thin, we're basically one major car repair away from disaster, and it would be nice to have enough money in the bank to replace a major appliance should it suddenly die. However, I tend to look at the plenty. I look at the pantry piled high with consumables, the lovely big yard, the clothing so plentiful that we can afford to toss pilly t-shirts and holed socks...

...and the filled oil tank, ready to give us heat and hot water all winter long.

Last year, it was only the sudden dip in oil prices that allowed us to fill that tank at all. We're in better shape this year, thanks to the mortgage refinancing done before Obama's plans made the process nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't missed a payment. My baby's hospital bills are all paid off, and we're starting to put money back into savings.

Still, I'm never going to take a filled oil tank for granted again.

So simple, even a housewife can understand

This feels strange. These days, I read the news, and I immediately spot the flaws in the Democrats' plans. I do not own a business. I have had no formal education in business. My bachelor's degree is in Computer Science, for heaven's sake. Yet still, I can read these proposals, and the flaws show as clear as day for me. Is there something unusual about me, or about them?

Today's beauty comes from a Reuters article that I picked up from Newsmax:

Democrats are looking at the possibility of a windfall profits tax on insurance companies as part of healthcare reform, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

Pelosi said she had asked House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel to examine the possibility and report back to her.

"This is very preliminary," she told reporters.

But she added that insurance companies would get some 50 million new consumers, many subsidized by taxpayers, under reforms Democrats are planning and "we think they can put more on the table."

Okay, it doesn't take a genius to put this plan together. We're talking about switching out the public option (at least in part) for taxpayer-subsidized private options, kind of like what Congress has... but not quite as posh. It seems they want to keep from raising taxes on the middle class by doing it to the insurance companies instead.

This sets up a neat bit of circular logic.

Only a fool would consider it a victory to let someone else take his profits and use them to buy his product.

Remember that profit is what's left after you have paid for your supplies and paid your workers. It's the part that you get to keep for yourself. It's a percentage, sometimes a small percentage, of what your actual product costs. In this plan, you are only going to recover a small percentage of what was taken away.

Now we've had some discussions about profit. Where does it actually go? It pays the salary of the business owner. So technically, if you earn $25,000 per year as a business owner, you have a profit margin of $25,000. In this society, however, it is also paid out in percentages to stockholders. Who owns stock in the company? Why, anybody can own stock, including the workers, who often are given stock as part of their pay.

If your salary is being decreased by the government and you need more money, the only way to do it is to lower your costs or raise the price of your product.

So where will this "windfall tax" money be coming from? Part of it will come from the CEO's salary, and I am sure that's what the Democratic Party is claiming as the source of the entire tax. In truth, only part, probably a small part, will come from there. The rest of the money will come from the middle and lower class in the form of raised premiums, lower stock returns, and fewer workers employed.

Yet again, the Democrat plan basically involves taking from us to spend on us... retaining a percentage for their own purposes, of course. It's a scam, and as scams go it may look good on the surface, but it is fundamentally flawed.

I'm just bewildered that it seems so obvious to me. After all, I am not one of the elite ruling class that the Democrats deem capable of making my own financial decisions. How can I be clever enough to understand the problems with the way they want to spend my money?