My Irish Eyes

 

My Irish Eyes are Smiling

A'Smiling Up at You

Except my eyes aren't Irish.  If green means Irish, that's a pretty rare eye color. It's less than 2% of the population, and although the Irish may have a slightly higher concentration, it's nowhere near a dominant trait.

My father carefully laid out his ancestry, dating back to the Welshman who first came here in the mid-seventeenth century.  He carefully traces the subsequent 13 generations, but he doesn't often identify the original nationality of those they're marrying. I know they're references to English and  German, but nothing else specific. I'd like to think we played the field.  The only other reference is a vague late 19th-century warning not to marry the "damn Dutch". That type of warning makes me think somebody had already done did that.

My mother's side has no equivalent history.  There is a notion that many were Scotch-Irish.  That doesn't mean Irish. They were Scots who were enticed to go to Ireland (particularly Northern Ireland) to tame the native Irish and keep them in Great Britain. The plan kinda worked and kinda didn't.  The island is now divided between Northern Ireland (part of Great Britain) and the independent Irish Republic.

I've never taken a DNA test.  It may be interesting, but ultimately, I see myself as me, not as a personality driven by the "cultures" of arbitrary nation-states.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I don't drink beer, green, or any other color.  I've never been to a St. Patrick's Day party. Sometimes I wear green - if I think about it and am going to be around people who care. This year, probably not.  I don't expect to see many people.  But who knows? Because of this blog story, it's more on my mind than it otherwise would be.

This is me.  Yes, I'm lousy at taking selfies.  It was everything I could do just to keep my eyes open.  It's not enhanced like the model's up above.  Hard to tell on the interwebs whether that one is a natural eye color.

Hazel brown?  Hazel green?  Just brown?

I have no idea.  I'm glad there is no place I have to identify my eye color.

I'm not sure how relevant it is that I am or am not Irish.  I do know that Alison and I visited there a few years back, and we fell in love with the place. We have, on occasion, looked at what it would take to move there.  

In this age of the Orange Conman, there are a lot of places we've looked to move to.

The Most Fiery Consequence of Who is now President

 The blog article just before this answered the question Does it Matter Who the President Is?

It listed many consequences to the Trump Presidency, but I inadvertently left off the biggest one of all.

That's climate change. Global warming. It's not a myth. It's a scientific fact. And it's rapidly changing the viability and livability of our planet.

It's not happening as fast as originally projected. It's happening faster. Scientists are constantly having to accelerate the timetable for the deterioration of our climate.  

Extreme weather is becoming more and more common. Global average temperatures continue to soar. And, in the near future, climate refugees will even dwarf political refugees.

Our time to effect this is dwindling. Even if we had the right leadership, at this point, we can only mitigate rather than achieve a complete reversal.

The Orange Conman and his billionaire cronies are putting in policies that put us at the very top of this temperature pathway chart. Rather than embrace new technologies, they firmly embrace fossil fuels and all the devastation that their continued use will cause.

We are galloping, GALLOPING in the complete opposite direction we need to go.

The only way we could bring a quicker demise is if Trump's warmongering leads to nuclear war. Sadly, I can't rule that out.

It Makes No Difference Who Is President? Are You Serious?

 

The following is a Facebook post I posted on February 28th:

Shortly after Trump was announced the winner of the 24 election, someone told me not to worry. It really didn't matter who the President was. After one year of this madman, and especially this morning when the "Peace Presdient" has taken us to an unecessary war that will very likely result in the loss of lives of ourr sons and daughters (and the slauglter of countless Iranian citizens), I have to ask him, "Do you still think it makes no difference who is President of the United States?" But I can't. It might cause a rift in the organization we both attend.

He thinks himself neutral. He is not. He is very conservative, but with so much extremism around here, relative silence stands out as middle of the road.

For the last ten years, I have felt pent up and angry. It has been everything I can do to hold my temper in check.

I had an opportunity to ask him this about a week ago. I passed. Call me a coward if you want. But I have to constantly measure the collateral damage a remark can cause. And I decided it wasn't worth it.

But the question remains. Do you still think it doesn't matter who the President is?

Would we be currently engulfing the world in flames due to a war of choice? Would a school filled with young girls still be with us? Would any other President be stupid enough to be sucked in by Netanyahu's idea of obliterating Iran? The answer is no. No other president would have done this, especially without explanation or preparation. Bush and Cheney propagandized for a year or more before invading Iraq.

Would any other President been stupid enough to think that blanket-level tariffs were good economic policy? All that it has done has raised prices for average Americans and turned many of our allies against us. The big lesson for other countries is to build up their markets by excluding the United States. And hey, let's give 40 billion dollars to newly fascist Argentina, and prop up their beeef market over the Uniyted States! And hey, American farmers, don't worry! We'll bail you out with billionsmore of US taxpayer money!

Would Renee Good and Alex Pretti still be alive if we had a different President? Of course they would! And countless others who have been killed and/or dragged away by ICE. They're not going after the worst of the worst. They're dragging off and kidnapping US citizens, and that's bad. But they're not targeting the worst of the worst - those undocumented who have committed violent felonies. No, they're persecuting even those playing by the rules, people showing up for immigration hearings, trying to follow procedure. They're arresting people at workplaces - going after individuals - not the businesses that hire and exploit them. People are going to detention centers and then disappearing - no one knows where they've gone -deported, moved to another camp, murdered? We just don't know.* There is no exemption in Christianity where you get to treat people like they're less than human.

Would we have a President who, along with his cronies, is making billions off of corruption? No, there has never been anything like it. This is at a level we have never seen before and would never see with any other President.

Would the lgbtq+ community be made to feel less safe with any other President? I don't think so. The trans community, less than 1% of us, is being scapegoated and villainized. This is a trend in Republican politics, to attack and persecute minority communities, but the focus on trans people has been vicious and dangerous. Of course, hatred is not just reserved for them; they are just the most vulnerable. Somalis, Mexicans, Muslims - anything to make the blood boil in reich-wing America.

We elected someone who WEKNEW was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, the most notorious pedophile of modern times, who appears in the Epstein files more often than God and Jesus do in the bible. We have those in this country who close their eyes and pretend Trump wasn't involved. Trump wasn't a client. Trump was IN on it, part of the small inner circle planning and perpetuating this monstrosity. He owned teen beauty pageants and "modeling" agencies. He bragged about how his celebrity allowed him to get away with sexually assaulting women. They have tried to censor his name from what is released, but enough has slipped through that you have to know in your heart that he is every bit the monster that Epstein was.

I could go on and on. There are some things that are only happening, or happening at such an intense level, because we have a narcissistic, adjudicated sexual assaulter, adjudicated fraudster, convicted felon, racist, dementia-riddled, body-disintegrating, mad conman as President of the United States.

Of course, it matters who is President of the United States. Sometimes the differences are subtle. And sometimes they are apocalyptically crushing.

Guess which one Trump is?