Doreen Michele

The Nazi Party officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  or NSDAP) Also from the above Wikipedia page, here is the origin of the term Nazi which isn't actually the acronym for National Arbeiter Zocialist (something) like my brain is determined to believe having grown up in a bilingual home which taught me just enough German to mangle it: Before the rise of the party, these terms had been used as colloquial and derogatory words for a backward peasant, or an awkward and clumsy person. It derived from Ignaz, a shortened version of Ignatius, which was a common name in the Nazis' home region of Bavaria. Opponents seized on this, and the long-existing Sozi, to attach a dismissive nickname to the National Socialists. I've been seeing talk of how desperately America needs a workers party "because Elon Musk and Donald Trump are Nazis!" basically. He who fails to learn from history is doomed to repe...

This is kind of a brain dump and probably messy. Remember: It's a BLOG post by a big fat fucking NOBODY, not a PhD paper and not a press release from a government official. I saw a piece where Trump was saying DEI may have been a factor in some bit of negative news, a plane crash I think, that I hadn't heard because I intentionally live under a rock and ignore "The News" to the best of my ability. I think I get what he's saying and I know people think that sounds racist AF, but he's right if he's saying what I think he's saying: hiring criteria OTHER THAN "the most qualified for the job" tends to undercut excellence in the workplace and for some jobs that require a high level of performance that can literally be disastrous. It cuts BOTH ways. Historically, the Mafia was incredibly racist and Italians only worked with Italians and Irish only worked with Irish etc and the most successful American mafioso was NOT racist and worked with everyone ...

Working off a dead horse is an expression from a few hundred years ago. When individuals joined the military to pay off debts as a form of bankruptcy, they were fed hard tack by the military as a cheap means to keep them fed while their pay went to their debts. The expression is double entendre. It both means they are working to pay off the debts and it means they are eating hard tack as their primary or sole food for long periods. The "dead horse" refers to both the debts and the unappealing meat they are eating. Russia most likely invaded Ukraine because Ukraine is the bread basket of the region and Russia is a large country in the far north and has trouble raising enough food.  My sons are part Viking on their father's side and have read up on the history and culture of the Vikings to understand their heritage. They have told me things about it that I cannot find a nice, neat source to cite with a blurb supporting their assertions but I think what they have told me mak...

I'm exhausted and I'm seeing different stuff in my notifications and wondering about some things. I don't agree with Trump's attack on birthright citizenship though I think I understand the line of reasoning. Currently, there are more than a thousand people a day flooding over our southern border. It's a lot and I think it's reasonable to be concerned. They do that because they hope for a better life for themselves and their children. And birthright citizenship is part of the draw. You can work the fields or whatever and even if you are here illegally, your children will be citizens. I once knew a doctor whose parents had worked the fields, so some of them do get the American dream  out of it, something most Americans no longer seem to get or even dream of. But we are going to run into a problem in that our current system relies on immigrants -- often illegal immigrants -- to bring in the harvest. Most Americans won't take those jobs and that is potentially ...

Humans wrote fantastical fictional stories for hundreds of years about going to the Moon before we actually traveled there. In recent decades, our movies and other fiction about the future frequently posit interplanetary commerce and by default assume a world government for every planet and a representative from each planet at some intergalactic governing body. As far as I know, most humans agree that only nutters believe in aliens from other planets visiting Earth. I don't know, I don't care and it's an irrelevant detail. We have a number of regional coalitions, like ASEAN and the European Union . I think the world is currently moving towards the organic emergence of a world government and our fiction that assumes a future in which a world government exists is part of the psychological process where humanity moves towards such. In any emergent human social phenomen where something new is growing out of unprecedented circumstances, there are typically competing ideas for h...

Some years ago, I had an Iranian boyfriend. This post is not about my personal life. That detail is to say I knew a man well and talked with him a lot and he was likely a student protester involved in the Iranian Revolution where they kicked the US out. I'm not going to bother to look up whatever politically correct bullshit Wikipedia says about why the US went into Iran and installed a puppet government or turned existing leaders into their puppets.  This man was substantially older than me. Those political events occured when I was a child, probably ten years old or less. I neither paid attention to the news about Iran at that time nor would I likely have understood it had I done so. But somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years ago, Iran kicked us out. And to this day the US -- the country routinely called the most powerful country in the world -- has sanctions against Iran. Our relationship to Iran is like an abusive parent continuing to fuck with the life of their abused ch...