STARBUCKS. COWARDLY EXPLOITERS OF CHRISTMAS. IT'S JUST GOOD BUSINESS.

Those confused about Jesus, 2015

Dammit! They're taking Christmas out of the commercialism!

Charlie Brown

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed. Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?

Lucy Van Pelt

Look, Charlie, let's face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big eastern syndicate, you know.

———

The selling of red cups of coffee is not a war on Christmas as many have claimed, wrongly. To claim that Starbucks execs are waging a war on Christmas is quite the stretch. Never have Starbucks sold a cup of coffee with any depiction of the nativity scene, which is what Christmas is all about — a celebration of the birth of Jesus the Nazerine.

Starbucks Vice President of Design and Content Jeffrey Fields equally lied when when stated, “This year we wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories.” 

Now, here is reality. Since 1997, Starbucks execs have tried to exploit Christmas and the Christmas gift buying season as most retailers in the USA have done for at least 100 years. Through their winter cups, execs have tried to trigger memories about winter, likely, in hopes of increasing sales.

Cowardly, though, no one from Starbucks stepped forward to say that Starbucks seeks to increase sales during the Christmas gift shopping season and for that reason, they seek to attract Christian shoppers into their stores in hopes of selling coffee and other merchandise. Of course, when anyone from Starbucks says, "Happy Holidays," what they are saying to you is Merry Christmas. For more on that, check out SAYING HAPPY HOLIDAYS IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Likely, Starbucks execs decided to cut costs by having a cheaper red cup made. Perhaps they shaved a fraction of a penny per cup but over millions of cups, the outlay adds up.

That said, Starbucks execs missed a golden opportunity to market themselves by depicting persons on their cups sharing coffee and other Starbucks merchandise in acts of gift giving.

It's only a cup. If you keep loving, kindness and patience in your heart and let those qualities guide your action, not even red cups will bother you. If you give tolerance to those lost at least some might turn toward you and follow you.


 

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SAYING HAPPY HOLIDAYS IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING MERRY CHRISTMAS

If you read the title, you read English. The concepts that words label don't change to suit the needs of anyone. However, when enough misuse a word over time, mistakenly, many believe that word has taken on new meaning. One of those words is holiday.

Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst (1620)

Holiday is the Old English word haligdæg. To Old English speakers the word meant Christian holy day, consecrated day, religious anniversary; day of rest. To Old English speakers holiday had no other meaning.

When Old English speakers wanted to speak of other people and their religion, Old English speakers would say demonym adjectives prefacing the word holiday.

To English speakers, other people and their other religions do not have holidays. They have days of significance to their religion.

Americans came to say the phrase happy holidays as a Christmastime greeting, which the sellers of Camel cigarettes introduced in advertising to Americans in 1937.

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HERE IS A TIP. AMERICANS ARE THE MOST GENEROUS TIPPERS ON EARTH. FOREIGNERS WHO COME TO AMERICA DON'T UNDERSTAND TIPPING.

Today, I spent part of the day watching YouTube videos shot by Brits, Aussies, Germans, Estonians, Irish and the like explaining their travel and short-time living experiences in America. In almost every video, the host would say how he or she didn't understand the cultural habit of tipping in America.



When I was a kid, the tip rate was 10% of a restaurant bill total. Then in the 1980s, the hospitality industry went on a public opinion manipulation campaign. First, the tip rate went to 12% and then to 15% and then some pushed for 17%.

The wily ones claimed it was because of inflation. But that fails to stand to logic because if prices are rising, the sum of the tip will rise on the same percentage.

Today, foolishly, many have be suckered into believing the appropriate rate for tipping is 20%. But when you think about it, if your server (as they liked to be called) waited on you for a total of five minutes and your bill came to say $50 and you tipped $10, which is 20%, you would be paying your server at the rate of $120 a hour!

It seems impossible to believe a waiter ought to be paid at the rate of lawyers, plumbers and car mechanics for supercars.

Maybe a server ought to earn at the rate of $20 an hour. Now if you tipped at the rate of $20 an hour, you would tip 33¢ a minute or $1.65 for five minutes. That reckons to 3.3% of a $50 bill total.

Most would call you a cheapskate. But yet, tipping at that rate seems righteous.

Everybody is good enough for some change...

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BULLYING AND THE BULLYING LIBERATION MOVEMENT

Over the last few years, bullying has become yet another front of the Culture War. Fat tolerance, pro-homosexism, gender-bending — many adults who favor these for themselves have encouraged such in teens.

When the natural blowback of bullying arises, those adults who encourage teens to get their freaks on wail that we're living through a Bullying Crisis. Invariably, they demand rules get codified to classify behavior akin to hate crimes.



The answer to bullying isn't creating a political group, gaining power and bullying others through law to force everyone else to accept grotesque, distorted caricatures of ideal human nature. That would be mere hypocrisy. That amounts to little more than privilege-seeking and yet another move toward totalitarianism.

Yet, this is exactly what the "We're in a Bullying Crisis" want. They are fighting to define anew the culture and force all others to live by their vision of a future.
The concept of bullying itself is highly rhetorical. It is tied up in ethos, ethics, culture and human nature.

Culture is the nutrient medium from which humans interact and arises from the codified law and the codes of conduct. Ethics is the art of adhering to the ethos, the prevailing paradigm over what it means to be the ideal person among a people. Ethos reflects the interplay between culture and human nature, in short, how doe enforced laws amplify or distort the ways of being human.

Human nature is the way of being alive that arises naturally from design of the body and mind. The closer a man expresses himself in relation to the inherent design of being an idealized man as well as the closer a woman does to the idealized woman, the closer that man or woman is to being self-actualized.

So why do some allegedly bully others? Bullying seems to flow from the dark side of human nature. Yet, it is pervasive and happens among people of all ages, in all times, everywhere.

In short, outsiders as individuals get bullied because such individuals do not comport to a group ethos. Those who reveal themselves to be grotesque, distorted caricatures of ideal human nature get bullied. Sometimes though, those who seem exotic, foreigners from another land who live by another way get bullied.

Bullying is a way to engage group cohesion. Leaders and those seeking status from others within a group engage in bullying. It's one way people stick together in groups.

Parents become unrealistic when they encourage their children to get their freaks on and then expect other children to become accepting. Parents who demand that other kids accept their own and confer equal standing to their own kids within a group suffer from mind disorder and live by denying reality, the reality of human nature.

Stomping one's feet against human nature is a losing war. Status in groups gets earned. Yet, parents must come to see truth. If they decide on behalf of their children to raise their kids in such ways that go against the prevailing ethos and fail to instill strategies to overcome others, then their kids shall face tough sledding.

The answer to bullying is for each child to strengthen herself and himself. Parents ought to become better parents to lead their kids to become the action heroes of their own lives. Parents are the adults in relation to their kids and have the advantage of thinking with their pre-frontal cortexes.

The answer is for parents to become better parents and to become better individuals, to strive to self-actualize so that they can better lead their children. Parents must come to see reality and human nature. They need to adjust to reality as it is.

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DE BEERS, THE "DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER" ENGAGEMENT RING SCAM, BEAUTY AND MANLINESS

Peer pressure is a powerful force. 

For the female, the diamond ring represents her beauty. The more expensive the ring, the bigger her bragging rights against her peers to claim she is prettier, sexier, better at attracting higher-quality men and better at keeping a higher quality man through her sexual skills.

For the male, the diamond ring represents his manliness. The more expensive the ring, the bigger his bragging rights against his peers to claim how much more of a man he is and thus why he earns more buying power and can risk more on a woman.

Women go for the biggest wallets their looks can support. Men go for best looks their wallets can buy. 

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DIRTY, OH SO DIRTY SEX. EW OR AH?

ME

Sex isn't immoral. Making babies out of licensed-wedlock isn't immoral.

ANOTHER GUY

Sex isn't immoral?  By whose standard? 
If it's your standard, then it's just your opinion. There needs to be a absolute standard!

ME

What do you mean by whose standard?

Anyone who thinks by observation of the now can reason through what life was like before society, government and religion.

Regardless of all theories relative to creation of man and of later formation of society, religion and government, we can suppose of a man on earth formed before society, religion and government. We can suppose that once created, that man became conscious of his existence to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to feel, to think, to act.

Thus, such a man created was (and still is an independent agent). As a free agent, a man would be right to exercise all or any of his powers or not as he willed. Such a man would have been right to live, to kill himself if wanted, to go wherever his powers could carry him, to use as much of the earth, to enjoy the full product of his work and the full experience of his living.

And what would be true of that man would be true of a woman also living in his time. And as free agents, being right to exercise all of their powers as willed, sex would be one of those powers.

The standard is the inherent design of each of us, as humans. The standard about sex doesn't come from the mind of any man who claims authority and to whom others grovel like spineless worms.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Scholastics would have said it to be of the lex æterna, the eternal law, that is, the law from God.

Yet no one need to appeal to medieval Scholastics to see that sex is not immoral. Sex is integral to what being means to the natural free agency of mankind.

To believe sex is immoral is to believe mankind is immoral. For what is moral versus immoral but good acts versus bad acts undertaken by anyone within the crucible of nature.

That guy couldn't be here without the good, moral act of sex undertaken by his mom and dad, likely more than once and enjoyed.

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SAME AS IT EVER WAS IN THE LAND OF GLUTTONY AND SLOTH

These clips come from a small work published in 1910, titled Individual Responsibility written by Frank Wallace Patch.

As you can see from the clips, little has changed for Americans for more than 100 years. That change has not come reveals an indictment against all the means of mediation between individuals of America — all of our government and its institutions.

You can read the full work after the clips.

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HAVE FEMINISTS WON? GRAMMAR FEMINISM SPOKEN BY OBAMA

"It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own," he told hundreds of Israeli students in a speech. "Palestinians have a right to be free people in their own land." ~ President Obama

On March 21st of this year, the USA Today published the foregoing quote from Obama of something he said during his trip to Israel.

Their is an Old Norse word, þierra, which entered into English about the year 1200. It is the possessive (genitive) form of the third person pronoun they. Their replaced the word hiera.

Their is the THIRD PERSON possessive determining adjective. Most often, a speaker says the word right before saying a noun. So you might hear, their houses or their dogs.

The right use of the word their relies upon a preceding third person subject noun or third person subject pronoun. English speakers ought to recognize the former because of the letter 's', which signals to listeners such. Likewise, English speakers ought to recognize the third person subject pronoun every time they hear it. It's the word they.

Obama should have said: It is not fair that Palestinian children can not grow up in a state of their own. Obama could have said: It is not fair that a Palestinian child can not grow up in a state of his own. 

When Obama said the phrase a Palestinian child, he spoke a singular noun of the subordinate clausethat Palestinian children can not grow up in a state of their own.

Various grammarians have different labels to name such clauses. Some name them as complements. Others say declarative content clauses.

However, the subject of what Obama said is the singular pronoun it. The main, independent clause Obama spoke is It is not fair.

For years, feminists have attacked English, wishing to rid it of good, useful words. They hate the word woman because they hear the word man. Yet, man is the English word for person. It does not mean male.

English speakers once had a word for male men. That word was wer. You recognize the word wer in the word werewolf.

What feminists fail to see is that with English, it is males who get shorted. English speakers have reverence for females. That is why they get their own pronouns — she, her, hers. English speakers care little to differentiate between males and sex-irrelevant things.

Obama, feminists and the great swath of middling intellect Americans reveal likely how languages change. Because such suffer from the equivalent of functional illiteracy in speech, they drive out good speech with their popular, bad forms.

You can think of it as Johnson's Grammar Law — bad language use drives out good, much like Gresham's Law — bad money drives out good — as coined by perhaps the greatest economist of all-time, Henry Dunning MacLeod. 

Interestingly, Obama gets it right when he says "their own land", tying that to Palestinians as shown in the second sentence of the quote. That Obama can get it wrong in one sentence and then get it right in a sentence right after reveals profound disorder in his mind and reveals the war that goes on in the minds of many during major upheavals in languages. You are witnessing the change of English in action.

On a side note, oddly, Obama seems to be hung up on trying to define fairness everywhere he goes, from taxes in America to territorial borders of Middle Eastern people.

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"DIDN'T NEED NO WELFARE STATE"

Though Edith and Arch sang the opening song about the 1920s, the show took place during its times, the 1970s. 

For those who lived through those years, the 70s were a mixed time. Some of the best rock music came from 70s — Pink Floyd's Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals; Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street; the Clash's London Calling.

Some of the best movies came from the 70s — Star Wars, Dirty Harry, Jaws, Rocky.

Yet, the 70s were a low point in American, Canadian, Australian  and British history. Years of government ownership of industries and excessive regulation in markets held living standards low.

The 70s were the years of syndicalism — a mix of socialism, unionism and oligopoly industrialism. The 70s were an ugly time.

Energy was expensive. People couldn't afford cotton so they wore polyester. Heavy-handed car unions led to horribly made and unreliable cars compared to earlier times. 

The college university Ph.D. preached plans for poor blacks and Hispanics. Thus, bureaucrats corralled  them like in animals in free-to-them welfare housing, called projects. The Projects were crime-infested war zones.

Graffiti was written everywhere, on everything, Already overpaid union workers went on strike often. Garbage piled on the streets of the cities. 

Politicians of the 1960s had stuck Americans into a horrible, useless war against the Vietnamese. As most know, 58,000 Americans were killed, many forced to fight as they were drafted by crazed politicians to fight an unneeded war.

People tried to escape through sexual swinging and transcendental meditation. They tried to escape through psychedelia  music first and then through disco and later through punk rock angst. 

Mostly though, people escaped then as they do today, through television. CBS aired a show called All in the Family starring Carroll O'Conner as Archie Bunker,  who represented old America, the white male past, playing a white-haired clown-bigot who lacked a university degree.

His son-in-law, Mike Stivic played by Hollywood TV royalty Rob  Reiner represented progressive America. Mike was hip. Mike was university educated. Mike had colored friends who know were calledblacks.

Actress Jean Stapleton played Edith Bunker, the daft, supportive housewife of Archie's. Edith represented American Christians, as she played the simpleton who chimed in with well-meaning comments from a loving,  kind-heart. 


Those Were The Days
——————
Boy, the way Glenn Miller played!
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!

And you knew where you were then.
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!
——



The Roaring 20s might have been the times for some, but the Herbert Hoover 1930s were horrible. Hoover, a tremendous meddler, instituted  crazed policies caused the Great Depression. Later, FDR  tripled-down upon on Hoover's crazed meddling, doing what Hoover had done but on a scale comparable to the Hoover Dam.

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HEY AMERICANS, WE NEED TO STOP SHOOTING FIREWORKS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. HERE IS WHY

Fireworks represent the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Fair enough. However, no War for Independence battles started on July 4th. 

Fireworks ought to be shot off in commemoration of the start of battles in which Americans won and only for meaningful wars such as the War for Independence, the War of 1812 and World War 2.

All of the other wars Americans fought never should have been fought. Such wars did nothing to protect Americans.

As well, many of those wars were little more than expressions of military adventurism, mercenary wars on behalf of the political establishment, but paid for by taxpayers, consumers and with the lives of killed and maimed soldiers. The list of useless, wasteful wars is long — Spanish-American, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan.

It seems all too silly and maybe stupid that fireworks get shot off on July 4th. 

Here is a list of days worthy for fireworks:

• 19 April — Battle of Concord (1775) — First victory of the Colonial Army
• 7 October — The Battle of Saratoga (1777) — Turning point of the War for Independence
• 19 October — Battle of Yorktown (1781) — British surrender, war over
• 11 September — Battle of Plattsburgh (1814) — Defeat of British ending the War of 1812
• 4 June — Battle of Midway (1942) — Destruction of four Japanese carriers, veteran pilots
• 7 August — Battle for Guadalcanal (1942) — First offensive defeat of the Japanese in WW2
• 6 June — Operation Overlord (1944) — Allied invasion of France in WW2
• 23 October — Battle of Leyte Gulf (1944) — Largest naval battle in history. Destruction of the Imperial Japanese Navy

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