From outside the box

I never liked the term "public servants." The only public servants are those who serve for little or no pay, such as city councilors and many board members. When you consider the perks and life time benefits that many politicians receive for only a few years of service, isn't it really the public that is in their service?

Most of us, in private, are not politically correct at all. We have an unspoken agreement to act that way around each other.

Why is it that when men cheat on women, they are jerks but when women cheat on men it is because they are not getting their needs met?

A great quote from my older brother Dan, one of the greatest philosophers of all time....a "Danism" if you will...."I'm not afraid to fly, it's the falling that scares the hell out of me!"

There are two kinds of people in the world....and I'm not one of them.

Don't companys know that when they send out christmas cards to clients, they go straight to the trash can?

If being vegetarian is not healthy, then why are the largest and oldest living animals on earth vegetarians?

My favorite Andy Rooney quote..."Why is it that the more wrong somebody is, the louder they talk?"

Rap music is not music, it's just bad poetry put to a beat.

Why are we afraid of ghosts? Aren't we all just ghosts in a body?

Another "Danism"....Once I asked Dan if he had ever ridden on a horse. He said, "No, I've always felt that if they stay off my back, I'll stay off theirs."

They say that when you get too stressed or angry, you should run or punch a punching bag or do something physical. That's boloney, try this...Pick up 11 items at the grocery store and go thru the check out line that is for "10 items or less"....trust me, you'll feel better instantly!

I don't like to travel abroad....too many foreigners

Don't you hate it when you get a speeding ticket and as the cop leaves he says, "Have a good day." Is he just being a wise ass?

Isn't it bad luck to be superstitious?

Last month I saved all my junk mail for one week and weighed it. It came to 16 ounces, or one pound. That's 52 lbs. of junk mail a year for one household. If there are 100 million households in the U.S. that is....damn, my calculator won't go that high.

Big feet and big noses run in my family. So do nylon stockings.

What is so "special' about being retarded?

Why is a hangover always called a "bad hangover?" Is there such a thing as a "good hangover?"

Why are liberals so big on everybody voting when it's always republicans getting elected?

I'll finish here with another "Danism"....Once I made a remark about how beautiful the women were that worked in the hospital. Dan came back with, "Yea, it's enough to make you sick!"

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Quantum physics and other sciences like string theory are turning everything upside down that we thought we knew about the universe and even consciousness itself. Scientists are delving into the sub atomic world and finding out that there is no such thing as solid particles like we have always assumed there were. There is only vibration and energy. This means there is no such thing as solid matter. It's amazing enough that our bodies are 95% water, but even more amazing to find that we are 100% space! To me this is hinting at a unified universe where all things are connected by a fabric of energy. We truly are one! There is no definite point where you stop or something else begins because all the "stuff" we see around us is only an illusion, just a coarse vibration of energy that appears to be solid but is not. Science is also discovering that information is constantly being exchanged on this quantum highway and the transmitting of this information seems to defy time and space. It seems that there is intelligence at the very core of this universal vibration. Is science on the verge of discovering God?

Maybe science will be the medium by which we all start waking up from our back water religious views and start asking bigger questions. Questions lead to knowledge and higher awareness. However, before we can ask the important questions, we must first get past the fear and/or complacency that keeps us from asking questions. Our worst fear is fear of God. If God is love, why would we ever fear love? Complacency happens because we are spiritually lazy. It is easier to be told what to do than to follow your own heart, even when there is little logic in the things we are told to do and to believe in.

When I think about God, the universe, life, eternity, soul, consciousness, and things of this nature, I am in total wonder and awe. I have nothing but questions. And for me, my questions were never answered by the bible (although I recognize the fact that for many, their questions are answered by the bible). My life's journey would have been much easier if they could have been, but not nearly as interesting.

Science and mysticism are closing in on each other. That is to say that scientist are starting to ask the same questions that mystics have been exploring for millenniums. And this curiosity seems to be spreading. People become curious when the things they have been taught no longer serve them, when the answers they are given no longer satisfy their curiosity. Western religions offer too many partial answers and much is expected to be taken on faith. If this is good enough for a person then they are right where they belong.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between science and mysticism. Science asks what, why, when, how, and where? In mysticism, it is questions and curiosity that lead you to the beginning of your journey. Eventually the search for truth must be dropped because at some point the mystic comes to realize that as long as you are searching for truth, it will always be like the carrot on a stick, one step ahead of you. Why search for what is already within yourself? This is where the search ends and the exploration begins. The mystic's have turned their attention inward because they have discovered that consciousness and self awareness are the starting place, the source of all knowledge. As science delves deeper into the sub atomic world, they are finding that consciousness itself may be the underlying cause to everything that exists! Like I said, the worlds of science and mysticism are closing in. They are on a slow collision course, and so far, western religions are choosing not to play.

As society evolves and becomes more enlightened, we will move further away from fear based thought and antiquated ideas that are based on two thousand year old stories created by mid eastern nomads. The gulf between fact and fiction will become wider, especially for the fundamentalists, if they insist on teaching concepts like eternal damnation or that the earth was created 6,000 years ago.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are monsters that roam the valley. They are thousand of times larger than any dinosaur that ever existed. You can hear them roar from miles away. They can be over a mile long. Once they start moving, they cannot be stopped. They destroy anything that gets in their path. And their path goes right thru the middle of our town and our college campus.

I'm sure there was a time when communities were built around the path of trains because they delivered everything a community needed to grow and to sustain itself. Then trucks came along and trains were no longer needed for local deliveries. Communities continued to grow around the established train routes until eventually the trains were all going right thru the middle of cities and in most cases, not even stopping because there was no reason to.

I grew up in southern California. As a child I can remember stopping for the trains every time we went into town. Then in the fifties and sixties they did something down there to fix this problem. Now try to follow along with this concept because I know that as a Chicoan this will sound foreign to you. What they did was to elevate the roads over the tracks so that the cars no longer had to stop for the trains. You know, that bridge thing, like we did here where road meets freeway. These "bridges" also had a positive impact for the vertically challenged, soberly impaired college student and local bums. They quit getting creamed as often by the trains because they could use the "bridges" too. When your walking high up over the tracks, it's harder to mistake them for a soft mattress.

I have a better idea to deal with the tracks in Chico than to build bridges. Move them. We don't need them running thru town anymore. Move them a few miles west where they will be in the green zone and no longer be a nuisance in town. This will serve two purposes. Not only do we free up the flow of traffic without having to build expensive bridges, but we can use the existing train route along highway 32 to build another highway 32. We could turn the existing highway 32 into a two way street from 9th St. going west out to Muir or even Meridian. Where the tracks are along this stretch would be a one way street going west and where the existing Walnut St. and Nord Ave. is would be a one way street going east. Then we have dealt with a major congested corridor without ever having to widen the existing streets and taking out real estate to do so. The train tracks could head west off of Midway, maybe below Durham, staying in the green zone, heading west until they passed Meridian Road at which point they would connect up with the existing tracks, bypassing Chico altogether.

Now for all of you romantics that would miss the sound of the train whistle echoing thru the valley as the nightbird sings his lonely lullaby beneath a canopy of glittering stars in the midnight sky, maybe we could put loud speakers where the tracks are now, attached to a series of microphones that would pick up the train whistle as it blows in the FAR OFF distant farmlands to the west?

But seriously, there are three reasons these ideas will never happen. Red tape, money, and the fact that we are in northern California. Northern California....this is the place that when I moved here in 1972 the big talk was that we were two or three years away from having a freeway built between Chico and Sacramento. Then three years later we were five years away from the freeway being built. By the eighties, the freeway became a four lane highway. Fifteen years later there was one passing lane built somewhere on highway 70. Now, there's not even talk anymore. So as our highways and streets get more congested and as we watch our tax dollars flowing south, like our water, I guess the best thing we can do at this point is to add more stop lights along our highways in a vain attempt to make them safer, because they're never gonna be freeways, and start an awareness campaign to teach the vertically challenged and soberly impaired students and bums the difference between a mattress and a railroad track.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I haven't seen "Sicko" yet but it seems to me that the term "affordable healthcare" is an Oxymoron, at least in America. When you consider all of the billion dollar industries that thrive on the amount of money we pay for health care in America, you've got to wonder how it could ever be affordable. Between the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the insurance companies, I don't see how the numbers could ever pan out for all Americans to have affordable health care. The reason why other countries can do it and we can't is because we pay out too much money to sustain the largest military in the world! Our military costs us more than all of the other combined militaries in the world cost their respective countries.

I'm not making a judgement call about what is more important between health care and the military, I'm just saying that other countries that have affordable or free health care do not have the expenses that we Americans do. Besides the military, what does illegal immigration cost us each year? What about the perks and retirement benefits of hundreds of politicians and ex politicians? What about the no bid multi billion dollar contracts awarded to Halliburton and other corporations that own....I mean, have close ties to politicians? What about the costs of pork barrel spending, the pet projects that congress is so fond of? What about the interest we pay on the largest debt in the world?

If we ever want to have affordable, or free health care, which isn't really free but paid for with taxes, then we first have to curb our appetites in other areas. Here's a few good starters.....Stop the war in Iraq, give the president a line item veto, tax churches, cut back Bushes tax cuts to the rich, balance the budget for a change and stop borrowing trillions of dollars, regulate the pharmaceutical and insurance industries better, make it less lucrative for corporations to outsource American jobs, and most important, implement some real -sink your teeth into- type of campaign finance reform. Then we could cut taxes enough so that Americans could afford health insurance, or keep taxes where they are at and have a socialized free health care system.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It is amazing, amusing, and a little bit sad as I read all the right wing hits against the Live Earth concerts. It seems that every time people try to change things, usually to fix an injustice or make the world a better place, the vision challenged conservatives start whining about how wrong the visionaries (progressives) are to even try. If it wasn't for people with a vision speaking out we would still be in Vietnam, blacks would be riding in the back of busses, there would be no recycling, Americans would still be paying taxes to England, Joe McCarthy may have been president in the fifties, women would not be voting, there would be no labor unions, Christian dogma would be law, folks would still be serving life sentences in Texas prisons for possession of a joint (a marijuana cigarette), and we would still be afraid to journey too far out into the ocean for fear of falling off the end of the earth.

The main difference between conservatives and liberals is this. Conservatives say that if it isn't broken then don't fix it. Liberals say it is broken and it must be fixed. So I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "broken". Supporting the status quo, never questioning those in charge, being afraid of change, only having enough sight to see the smaller picture, getting stuck in ancient traditions, my way or the highway, America, love it or leave it, these are ways of saying that it isn't broken. Liberals are saying that although there is a lot of right with America, there is a lot of broken areas and to survive as a free democracy, and indeed as a species, we must keep fixing, tweaking, adjusting, and changing.

Now when we fix, tweak, adjust, and change, we often do these things not being sure of the outcome. Sometimes the outcome is painful and sometimes disastrous. I'm talking about things like welfare, late term abortions, unions abusing their power, busing, preferential hiring, and a whole list of liberal based causes that really haven't worked very well, but can with the proper tweaking and adjusting. But here's the thing, we've got to try. Growth is always going to be painful, there will always be mistakes and then adjustments periods. Not knowing the outcome of something or being afraid of criticism is never a reason to stay with the status quo, especially when the status quo is defending something that is broken!.

So the Live Earth event may have generated a lot of pollution. We are loosing our planet and although mistakes will be made, we must do something, we must at least try! Isn't the purpose of Live Earth to bring more awareness to something that is either broke or in the process of breaking? I'm not sure that self centered, jet setting rock stars should be the spokespersons for changing our environment, but it's a start, at least somebody is trying something. We can learn from our mistakes and find more effective ways to get the message out in the future. I wish the conservatives would stop shooting the messengers and pay more attention to the message.

And to any liberals that would bash people like Anthony Watts for doing the research he is doing, they are totally missing the point. At least Anthony is trying to use science to back his beliefs, unlike many conservatives who would say that global warming is a hoax just because their political party or Rush Limbaugh says it is. The main point that many liberals are missing is this; we want the nay sayers on global warming to be right. We want to be wrong on this one. I hope we are proven wrong! But as I have mentioned in an earlier posting, we still have a polluted planet and we must do more than we are doing to change things, to clean up our messes and stop making more messes.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are few things I take serious in life (actually this statement is not true but it's good drama for my lead in statement) and driving is definitely one of them. I am an excellent driver. And how do I know I am an excellent driver? A few things: I'm 58 and I'm still here, I rarely get flipped off, never get in a wreck, and the only tickets I get are speeding tickets. Good drivers get speeding tickets because we know when it is safe to drive fast, and we do it safely and confidently. I just wish the cops understood that.

I have always said that driving is the most important thing that we will ever do in our life. Why so? Because when we are driving it is the equivalent of aiming a loaded gun at every person we pass on the highway, and we are out there slinging this gun around everyday. A car is a deadly weapon. Cars kill more people every year than cancer, guns, and choking on tic tacs combined (I'm making this fact up, it's easier than doing a little research and getting the true facts).

Ok, so now that it sounds like I know what I'm talking about, and since we've established that I am an excellent driver, I would like to take this opportunity to share some of my knowledge of this subject. The number one factor in being a good driver is to always drive consciously. When you are talking on a cell phone and driving, you are only half conscious. You are also driving half conscious when you are too tired, high on drugs or alcohol, or slapping the kids in the back seat. Driving consciously means being aware of everything going on around you at all times. It means reading the cars ahead of you as well as behind you and to the side of you. When you drive consciously, you save the lives of stupid drivers as well as your own. In fact, you should do everything in full consciousness. Live your whole life consciously! But that is another subject for another day.

The second most important aspect of driving is to drive defensively. This means expecting that everybody else on the highway is going to try to kill you. Be ready for others mistakes. They don't mean to kill you, they just do. And getting killed is a bummer, I hate it!

The third most important aspect of driving is to not tail gate. It is illogical and dangerous. You don't get there any faster. In martial arts there is a defensive posture known as the "critical zone". This means that you always stay at least arms and leg distance away from a possible opponent so that you have time to react to whatever that opponent may try to do. When you are face to face doing that testosterone macho thing, either person can knee to the groin or head butt without the other person having enough time to react, no matter how fast or skilled the other person is. This is the same situation when you are tail gating. No matter how fast your reflexes are, you can not react to a sudden stop when you are 10 feet behind another car doing 60 miles an hour. I am a believer in the 1 foot for every mile per hour rule, or a car length for every 10 miles per hour. You get there just as fast and much safer.

Fourth rule: be very carefull passing on a two lane road. I remember traveling south on highway 70 somewhere between Oroville and Marysville doing about 65 and have some idiot pass me when it wasn't safe, almost causing a head on collision, only to watch them do it again with the next car a few yards down the highway, and then 20 miles later I pull up right behind this idiot at the first stop light I come to in Marysville! How smart was all that?

Fifth rule: when traveling on a two lane highway, hug the right side of the road when cars are passing by. This puts a little more distance between you and the cars flying by you going in the opposite direction. If somebody starts to drift over to your lane, you have more time to react. Note to self....Shouldn't this have been mentioned under defensive driving?

I would like to share a thought about highway rudeness. When you get that urge to lift your right hand in the air and flip off another driver, please stop and think about this before you do it. Isn't it really more effective to roll down your window and extend your left hand out and flip with that one? You can wave it around more and they see it better.

Well that's it, that's everything you need to know about driving....except for a lot of other stuff. If sharing my expertise on driving can save just one life, it will be worth the 30 minutes it took me to write this. If it had taken me an hour to write this, it would not be worth it, my times too valuable.

One last note, to any police officers that may be reading this. If you see a guy doing 75 in a 55 mile zone and he's not tail gating, he's got good tires, he's had a good nights sleep, and he 100% conscious, I mean totally in the now (and especially if he's got gray hair driving a white 2005 4 door dodge ram....gotta exercise that hemi), leave him alone, go after the idiot who's driving 55 miles an hour right up on somebodies ass, because he's the dangerous driver, not me....I mean if I ever drove that fast and I don't.... mostly.

Posted by Joe Shaw at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I spent the first 18 years of my life as a catholic and the last 40 years trying to undue the psychological damage. I did 3 years hard time in catholic school, 10 years of Saturday catechism, and a couple of years as an alter boy. I think I am about 99% cleansed. Maybe writing about being catholic will purge the last 1% of guilt, shame, and fear that was pounded into my brain during those formative years. Or maybe catholic is just a part of who I am and always will be. That might be OK because there were some good values taught along with all the ridiculous crap, and those values are also a part of who I am.

I was never molested by a priest and I don't think that any other catholic boy I knew ever was either. Most of the priests were chain smoking alcoholics who screamed a lot, pretty common behaviors in those times. My abuse and torture came at the hands of nuns. The nuns that I knew of in the fifties and sixties were not spiritual, loving, or kind. They were terrifying. I can remember kneeling for 6 hours on a concrete floor because I shot a rubber band in class. Sometimes they would draw a circle on the black board that was eye level and make you put your nose in it. You had to stand on your tip toes to do this and you had to do it until you were ready to drop. They were never too hard on the girls. I think they just hated males. These holy women of God oozed of unresolved issues.

It was always understood that in catholic school you were given a better education than you could get at public schools. I guess. Our higher education included learning things like everybody who was not catholic would go to hell when they died. This included communists, protestants, Jews, and, well....everybody. It even included us Catholics. If we committed a mortal sin and died before Saturday confession, we were on our way to hell. The problem was that most of what I did was a mortal sin! I remember what a relief it was after Saturday evening confession to know that I was cleansed and that if I died, I would not be spending eternity burning. However, this only lasted about a day. By Sunday afternoon I had probably said "God Damn" at least once, had an impure thought, ate less than 3 hours before communion, or let the communion host touch my teeth. Now I was on my way to hell again and had to live with the stress and fear until next Saturday evening. I still remember my Dad telling me on my 7th birthday that I was now of the "age of reason", meaning that as a catholic, I was now capable of sinning. He was warning me that now I could go to hell! I have a theory that ex Catholics don't scare very easy. After facing the prospect of hell for 18 years, what is there to be afraid of in the real world?

I was always the inquisitive type which is probably why I eventually dropped the church. I think that if there is one thing that all ex Catholics have in common, it would be the fact that we had simple questions that nobody in the church could answer. Institutions and governments that seek to control do not like inquisitive types. I used to wonder about things like....Wasn't it better to die young, before you had the ability to sin, so you could go to heaven? Is holy water still holy after it evaporates and when it evaporates does that make the clouds part holy? If God demanded worship didn't that mean God was an ego maniac? If God was perfect, why did He get angry so easy? How could our sins hurt Him? Why was God a He? OK, I'm starting to feel like an idiot for even remembering these stupid questions. They sound childish and silly, but the sad part is, the adults weren't asking these questions! And many still don't! Amazing stuff.

But like I said, there was a lot of good that came out of those childhood experiences. The beautiful haunting melodies the choir sang at Novena and high mass had a strong influence later in life on my song writing. I learned a lot of good values, even though they were taught from fear rather than from love. Values like not stealing, not killing, and uh....Ok, well I never stole and I never killed anybody, and I do credit the church for that. Actually I did steal something out of a grocery store one time in high school. It was more out of curiosity, I just wanted to see what it felt like to steal. Of course I became overwhelmed with guilt and confessed my terrible sin in confession the next Saturday. The priest told me to pay the value of the thing I stole into the church collection the next day at Mass. I always wondered why he didn't tell me to pay it back to the store I stole it from.

I do not regret being raised Catholic because I have learned that every experience in our life has led us to be who we are right now and if you take any of those experiences away, then you would not be who you are today. When you are happy with who you are, there is never any regret over anything.

I do believe that the past is ours to learn from, the present is our opportunity to demonstrate who we are by applying what we've learned, and the future is an open book, it is our book to write our story in, whatever story we choose to write. On a positive note I can honestly say that I learned and grew and became a better person because of the church. But then again, do we not learn and grow from every experience in our lives?

I believe that every action we do in life, everything we put out, is coming from either love or power. Love gives and power takes. This is the yin and yang of life. Thru love we give, we release, we set free, and we uplift. Love seeks to bring out the highest aspects of who we are in each other. Thru power we take, we need, we hold onto, we oppress, we create fear. Power seeks to control others for ones own purposes or is demonstrated out of ones own insecurities, or fears. Nothing is completely neutral and nothing stands still. Everything you do, every action, every word, and every thought you put out, no matter how subtle, is a demonstration of love or power. That is how we learn and grow from everybody and every situation. When love is demonstrated, we learn what works and we copy that. When power or fear is demonstrated, there is usually some kind of pain involved and we learn what does not work. Sometimes my parents used love and sometimes they used violence. I choose to learn from both. I imitated their love with my own children because I learned that it worked. I vowed never to use violence on my children because I learned that it does not work. The church, like my parents, demonstrated love and power. So in this respect I learned and grew from the church.

One last thought I would like to convey. I am not educated in psychology and it is not my intention to sound like a professional. I have been accused of writing in a way that sounds like I am preaching to others. Most of the things I write about come from my own life's experiences, so I am really talking about things that work for me, or my own truth (check out my first posting called "Truth versus Viewpoint"). There are many great writers on this blog site who research and write their articles as well as any professional journalist (actually, some of them are). I am not one of them. I am just sharing ideas and experiences. I am too lazy for research, I just do this for fun (and maybe a little self therapy). If you appreciate that, then I appreciate you. If you do not, then I have to wonder....why are you still reading this?

Posted by Joe Shaw at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)