On the contrary: Love thy neighbor as thyself supercedes the Old Law

Ever since the RNC when Trump got the nom & the balloons stopped falling, she & Steve Schmidt...

...sat there in the dark and the ashes after Trump's apocalyptic speech talking about the Constitution and democracy and the republic -- Steve literally choked up.

I could tell they felt they were at the deathbed of the Party they had served, and quite possibly that of our republic. As a consequence I have followed their progress as commentators with interest ever since.

Here's how: you change the corporate culture and create a clear set of expectations...

...written up in the Employee Manual, which you give give to every employee now, and then to every new hire.

You create a competent EEO/AA department and have them create an employee training program going forth, starting with face to face groups and continuing with online training.

Once a year everybody in a supervisory position has to retake the onlne training course, pass it, and sign a statement that they understand it. Or you can just extend that to every employee from the ground up, because this business depends utterly on public good will.

We know how to do this. I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel here -- my template is County employment in California. It's not that hard; it just takes determination from the top and a recognition that this is important.

Starbucks has always been known as a good employer: they pay a decent wage and have good benefits. Thus, unlike Walmart, they are a good neighbor-- their employees are not routinely on food stamps or other state and county services.

As a consequence, I believe Starbucks means to make this work, and will make it work.

I think you mean "unpaid position." IIRC, First Lady is entitled to a small staff but no salary.

The small staff used to consist of a social secretary and a secretary to answer mail. She, or rather the potus, also gets a household allowance, out of which they are to see to things like groceries and the upkeep of the house they live in.

She's not "our employee," and never has been. She is expected to be the hostess for her husband's events, and to plan them (which is, contrary to some opinion here, actually a complex job). But she is NOT required to do any of this by statute, law, or the Constitution. It's the usual unpaid women's work in support of the husband as it has always been.

In other words, she can bow out if she wants to, and there is precedent.

If and when we ever elect a female president, a paid position will have to be created, because First Gentleman is certainly not going to do all of these things outside the usual male skillset, and for free.

That's it in a nutshell. "Those words" used against a man *always* imply weakness, unmanliness...

...and by no coincidence are synonymous with terms for homosexuality such as faggot. That last one's not a bundle of sticks, in the US.

Used against a woman they are demeaning and connote worthlessness and an attitude of "only good for one thing" in terms an incel would grasp immediately.

I stayed away from the other thread, where someone was persistantly Britsplaining how C was in common usage where he came from (and was, I gather, so harmless you could practically use it in a medical text regarding the female sex organs).

Over here, it's obscene. As obscene as N--r.

Why do you keep echoing Trump's words against the media? This is a theme...

...with some here. It's not about you, really.

We don't know what they know until they print it, or pontificate on tv, but we do know that journalists from the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN have all been hard at work ferreting out the corruption and pulling the threads to get to important stories. Rachel Maddow has commented that all the best work of bringing the story into daylight for the public to look at is being done by journalists. She feels it is the best of the First Amendment.

In all this mess many DUers have been speculating that Melania's disappearance has solely to do with vanity (nips and tucks) and they feel we all have a right to know the details. Has anyone checked the National Enquirer?

Personally, the longer this goes on the more I think of Martha Mitchell, and it's not a happy thought.

Dolores Huerta & Barbara Boxer are tiny older women, both minorities...

Each in her own way has given a lifetime to social justice and the Democratic Party. They are firey women -- but tiny, and now older.

They were egregiously disrespected by the young white males filling the ranks of the Sanders campaign. Bullied, physically intimidated, shouted down.

Our Revolution and Sanders need to recognize what's wrong with this picture before they gain the respect of Democrats.

Thomas Fire: 11 pm mandatory evac, no warning, power out, woke my husband, leashed the dog...

...threw our Rx meds in a basket, woke my husband again, insisted he come outside and look at the sky for gods' sake, so he shuffled slowly down the hall, after which he grabbed the big binder with all our financials in it, and we took our two old cars and headed out of the canyon.

Other than that, the clothes on our backs. The quick action and their sequence were reflexive after a lifetime of mental preparation.

We are very fortunate on many counts: first, I was awake. The wind was up, the dog and I were both edgy, and the last thing I read on FB before the lights went out was a post from a friend in Santa Paula saying there was a fire there. I went down the hall in the dark and woke my husband to tell him that -- he said no worries, it's 10 miles away. Less than an hour later it was practically in our backyard. Our new home has double paned windows -- I did not hear a damned thing when the cops drove up and down the street with their loud-hailers. Instead, in the corner of one window I saw blue and red flashing lights, went out on the front porch and hailed a passing civilian car to ask what was going on.

Second, we had someplace to go to, namely hubby's brother and wife who live only a few miles away in a flatlands tract and not in the foothills -- tho it was iffy for awhile everywhere, and the fire came right to the back door of City Hall. We stayed with them for two weeks.

Third, our neighborhood was spared, all except one house. The first night the fire passed over, and the next day when it came back from the other direction the water-dropping helicopters were able to do their job. The surrounding hills, tho, were black for months. We looked at a lot of houses last Spring, and many of them are gone.

Well, that's all for now. We all have our stories...

Our reactions to Melania's illness say more about us than they do about her...

"Benign" in this context just means non-cancerous.

My burst appendix was not cancerous. Most people are out of the hospital in 24 hours after an appendectomy, but I was in for 5 days. I actually almost died.

People can die of "benign" brain tumors -- a college roomie of mine did; she wasn't even 30. It wasn't cancer, but it kept growing despite multiple surgeries from high school onward, and she died a lingering death.

We are not being told what the deal was with Melania's kidney, but it's serious enough that she is being kept a week (or 4 days, depending on your newscaster). Not saying that she is at death's door -- just that it was a serious matter. The "embolization" wouldn't have been for a stone (which is painful as hell, just ask my BIL), but maybe she was peeing a lot of bright red blood.

Her husband is a pig. That's not really her fault.

We don't have to like her to be humane enough to wish her a speedy recovery. Our reactions to her illness say more about us than they do about her, regardless.

Oh, I like that. I read a LOT of Heinlein as a kid, quite uncritically early on. It was in the house

...so I read it.

It took awhile for it to sink in that no matter what he only had 3 female characters -- My BIL says: "Only one woman, made of very thin cardboard," but I am willing to grant him the Maiden and Mother and Mistress. The creepy thing in retrospect is that the Maiden is always 12 years old, and he gallantly waits for her to grow up. Usually. The Mother is a wimpy dweeb who knits socks for her son going into Space Academy, or (as in FF) a toxic wreck who must be replaced. And of course there are no Crones.

Part of my discontent that had no name was explained when Schmidt wrote his Telzy Amberdon stories. Suddenly there was a girl! A self-activating, very bright and inquisitive 17-y.o. iirc. I must have been 15 or 16 when those came out. Then the author abruptly died.

So much of what I was looking for was simply not yet written.

But back to RAH, sis-boom-bah. Since I was very clear in my mind that what I was reading was fiction, I was somewhat aghast to discover there was a literal cult springing up around Stranger in a Strange Land. In college, someone told me he was going to emigrate to New Zealand with his water brothers and form a nest. I wondered what the actual residents of that country would think of that.

I read Farnham's Freehold with a straight face, whenever it was it came out. It feels like I was in high school. Satire? I saw nothing humorous in it whatsoever. I saw that he killed off the unsatisfactory daughter and her bastard child, disposed of the unsatisfactory wife, and literally castrated the unworthy son. He seemed to be of the opinion that it was all their mother's fault. I thought he was also maybe trying to hold a mirror up to contemporary racism, but it didn't exactly work for me.

I grew up with Heinlein -- and then I simply outgrew him and moved on. If I were to be assigned to write a paper on him at this point in my life (70) it would be scathing.

He was in his own way a very good writer -- there are things that have stayed with me all these years, and things that became catchwords among my sibs. The cat who is looking for The Door Into Summer is one of those. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows about that, even if they never heard of RAH. So I picked up a copy at a used book sale a couple of years ago, and discovered that while Pete the Cat (Petronius Arbiter, in full) was much the same, the entire rest of the book had been -- you guessed it -- visited by the Suck Fairy.