My Pet Peeves

1. DVDs that only play in wide screen. My TV picture becomes 40-50% smaller as a result. I hate it. I don’t believe the bull about “art” as the reason. 99.9% of all movies don’t come close to being art. They are entertainment for the moment. Soon to be forgotten forever.

2. Restaurants that leave the tail shell on shrimp. You have to get them off in hot soups, sauces, and all kinds of food. It’s a nuisance, can be messy, and certainly is unattractive to watch or perform.

3. Traffic lights that turn from yellow to red too fast. Most are fine, but lately lights are being moved from the center of the intersection to the end of the intersection. For a six lane road with additional left turn lanes, there could easily be 80 feet or more from entering the intersection to reaching the light. Even when you cannot brake in time to stop before the intersection (which means you need to get through the intersection to avoid getting hit), the light can turn red before you drive through it at posted speeds. That’s a safety issue. No one should deliberately run a red light, but if you are so close to an intersection when the light turns yellow that it’s impossible to stop before the intersection, there should be enough time to drive through the intersection at posted speeds before the light turns red. Also, do not like worrying that my fast stop for a red light so as not to be caught by the camera threatens me with being rear ended by the vehicle behind me.

4. Professionals who don’t take responsibility for their own mistakes. Give you an example. I had a tooth that was previously given a crown by the dentist that decayed because according to the dentist, there was too much space between the crown and the tooth allowing bacteria to easily get in. Well who put the crown in and therefore made the mistake of leaving too much space? The dentist of course. So did he take responsibility for his mistake and replace it for free? No. I had to pay what the insurance company did not cover plus suffer the discomfort that came with the decay and the dental work. My appeals including those in writing were never responded to.

5. The inane, repeated usage by parents of the “good job” compliment to every minute action taken by their children. I know you’re trying to build the child’s self confidence and that is important, but when it is for every little thing and when it’s not balanced by constructive criticism where appropriate, these children are in for a big shock when they enter the real world of college or business. Articles I’ve read indicate how woefully unprepared they are for the reality of failure and/or criticism. Failure/criticism should help us grow, but for children over nurtured by their parents to think they are something very special, they may not be able to handle real life failures/criticisms very well. Rebounding from failure is every bit as important a trait children need as is building self confidence.

6. Parents who refuse to utilize corporal punishment when it’s needed.

7. People who believe that measured corporal punishment is child abuse. . The idiots that call cops in non child abuse situations where measured, controlled corporal punishment has been administered belong in jail.

8. Phone solicitations.

9. Email solicitations.

10. A Federal tax code that taxes all my net capital gains in any given year, but only allows me to deduct a maximum of $3,000 per year in net losses to reduce gross income. I’ll be dead before the net loss carryover from year to year is actually reduced to zero. So will some of you.

11. Estate (death) taxes. Doubly so on IRAs and 401Ks where your children under age 59 ½ must not only pay the estate taxes by selling the inherited retirement funds to raise the money but also pay ‘early’ penalty fees plus income taxes on the withdrawals needed to pay the Estate tax. What’s left could be only one quarter of the original gross amount actually inherited.

12. Tax cuts that expire.

13. University and Colleges that promote liberal politics to their students and force professors to hoe the liberal line to gain tenure and promotions. You are supposed to teach students to think for themselves, not enslave students and professors in one philosophy.

14. Political correctness. Is this finally dead or is the replacement euphenism now “inappropriate”? ‘One thought is right’ pronouncements smack at our freedom of speech.

15. Celebrities who make political statements and the news media that publish it. Most celebrities, whether actors, musicians, or sports figures, do not have the educational ‘heft’, nor business background, nor real world experience of earning a living the hard way like most of us to add anything correct or meaningful to a political conversation or idea. They really do live in ‘La La Land’. Without their celebrity status, no one would publish their thoughts (or lack thereof). Put a sock in it!

16. Hollywood and TV movies that portray America, American corporations and executives as the ‘bad guys’ and terrorists and dictators as the ‘good guys’. Once upon a time, Hollywood used to understand right from wrong. No longer.

17. Hollywood movies that portray premarital and/or perverse sex (including gay sex and lifestyles) as ‘normal’. Listen, if gay lifestyles/relationships are ‘normal’, the human race would have ceased to exist eons ago. Now if you are reading this, don’t over-react. Violence against gays (or anyone else you disapprove of) is and should remain a huge crime. Don’t do it!

18. Comedians who cannot tell a joke without cursing.

19. Churches that tell you how much money or percent of income you should give to charity. One had the gall to give me a percent (20%) and emphasize it should be calculated against gross pay and not net pay after taxes (in other words, they wanted about a third of my actual net income). Maybe they should go out and earn a living in the real world first for 10 years before they are allowed to run a church..

20. Religious leaders that steal or just pay themselves exorbitant salaries and benefits.

21. Religious leaders that have sex with children (and/or their parishioners).

22. Religious leaders that seem to delight that some/many people will/should go to an eternal, burning, painful hell. I could never understand how people refuse to accept atrocities on earth, but delight in the punishment of others in hell. Any earthly atrocity (and I abhor them and believe in punishment including death) you can imagine is a ‘picnic’ compared to the religious vision of what hell is. How can you abhor atrocities on earth and approve of it in the after-life?

23. Politicians who loudly claim they want America to be energy independent, then do everything in their power to stop it from happening by blocking legislation allowing domestic drilling where big oil discoveries are likely to be such as in our oceans’ continental shelves, in Alaska, in our rock shale, and in our Federal lands. In case you haven’t noticed, the overwhelming majority of these politicians are Democrats and they have been blocking oil development at these sites for 30 years. Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and the rest of our foreign suppliers of oil are indeed very grateful to Democrats for making them rich at our expense.

24. Individuals who are too stupid to realize the truth of point 23 plus fail to recognize the great expansion in worldwide demand for oil without a corresponding increase in the oil supply reserves and continue to falsely blame ‘Big Oil’ for our high energy prices.

25. Democrats who falsely promote the false slogan that the Republican Party is the party for the rich as they invent more ways to take more taxes from the poor and middle class.

26. People who don’t show up on time (or anywhere close to on time) and do it repeatedly but never let you know in advance that there’s a problem.

27. People with cell phones who answer them at movies, plays, and restaurants so that they disturb others trying to have a good time.

28. People with cell phones who use them while driving and consequently are distracted enough to drive poorly and/or dangerously.

29. Waiters who allow me to completely finish my drink before refilling the glass.

30. Judges usurping the powers of our legislators by making and/or overriding new laws instead of interpreting current laws.

Ideas on Religious Issues

1. Much of the world’s violence today centers on hatreds among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Yet, when you extract the most important beliefs of these religions, they are essentially identical. One God created the universe and all the people and creatures that occupy it; God should be loved and worshipped; people should make sacrifices to honor God. All three religions believe in those most important tenants of their religion. The way worship and sacrifices are performed differ in style, but that does not subtract from the value of these different religions. So when a terrorist kills in the name of his/her religion, imagine the questions God might ask them in their next life. These might include “why did you kill these people that believed in me?…loved and worshipped me?…..honored me with personal sacrifices? Does a terrorist actually believe he has a satisfactory answer for those questions?

2. Evolution versus Creationist theory. Religion is based on faith, not science. Creationist theory which teaches that God created all creatures and people as they are today or if extinct, as they were when they were alive and there has never been evolution is a matter of faith. There is no science behind it. To call it science cheapens the faith of those who believe in Creationism. Religion needs to keep out of science. Look at the Catholic Church imprisonment of Galileo centuries ago because he believed that the earth was round and (heretically) circled the sun. Most scientists believe in God. Their study of science only reinforces their faith. Who are we to tell God that he only could have created us and the creatures of the earth as we always were and never have allowed evolution? What sets man apart from all other living creatures is that God infused each of us with a soul that brings life after death. If he chose to wait until a creature evolved who was worthy of that blessing, he could have done it that way. Right now, scientific theory strongly backs up evolution. If evolution is someday proven to be a fact and not a theory, it takes nothing away from God nor the soul he has infused us with.

Having said that, religion should not be taught as Science, especially in our schools, as it is being attempted. Also, if there is no evolution, Creationists need to explain how, since we are all descended from one man and woman of the same race and color (since Eve was taken and made from the body of Adam per the Bible), Adam and Eve, man has ‘evolved’ to have color and facial differences – White, black, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Eskimo, pygmies, etc.. If there is no evolution, then wouldn’t we all have the same color and facial features. We know that all these races and colors are the same human race, by their identical DNA, by the fact that we all have similar blood types that can be safely transfused between the races, and by the fact of our common high intelligence.

3. The age of the earth. Some people believe in the strict interpretation of the Bible; some who believe think much of the Bible is figurative, not literal. Those who believe literally in the Bible believe it sets the age of the earth and the entire universe at less than 7,000 years old. That means dinosaurs lived with man and not millions of years ago despite scientific carbon dating. That means all the stars we see now are less than 7,000 years old. How do you explain that some stars that are millions and even billions of light years away are able to be seen. That should be impossible if they have only been in existence less than 7,000 years. Maybe that means that the usage of “day” in the six days that God created the universe and all its inhabitants in the Bible was merely a term that ancient man could better understand than “light years”. Could ancient man have understood the complexities of the science that God may have utilized to create the universe? Should God have infused ancient man with this knowledge or leave it as one of the many things man needed to learn on his own? Most importantly, shouldn’t religion spend its efforts on the morality needed to live a life worthy of the rest of mankind and most importantly God, rather than enter into scientific debates? Isn’t there a great need for that now?

4. Why did God, through human surrogates, write the Bible? Two major reasons come to mind. Establishment of the fact that there is only one God and God is the creator of the universe and everything in it. Secondly, establishment of moral values and laws for mankind to live by. Take those moral values and lessons literally from the Bible. It seems unlikely that God created the Bible as a science book. He left it to man and man’s intelligence to find out on his own how to develop tools, engines, electricity, fossil fuel extraction and usage, clothes, shelter, agriculture, cars, planes, mathematics, etc.. Why would he then give us a detailed account of the science of creation? Wouldn’t he leave it to us to discover for ourselves, just as he did for everything else? And if he did give us all those scientific details and there enormous timelines in the Bible, could early man have really comprehended it? Is it no wonder that the details of creation in the Bible may have purposely been meant to be ‘figurative’ in scope except for the cause of it all – God himself? He may have wanted us to use the intelligence he gave us to make these discoveries as he did with all the other discoveries man has found and is still finding. It gives purpose to life.

5. Gay Marriage.
If being gay was merely a lifestyle ‘choice’ and all of mankind chose it, then mankind would cease to exist in a little over a hundred years. That alone should indicate that gay sex and therefore marriage is a perversion. It is not in the interest of society to endorse gay marriage because in effect it would be endorsing its own extinction. The sanctity and values of marriage should not be diminished by making gay marriage or unions a legal institution. At the same time, other important points need to be made. There should be no violence against gay people. That is totally immoral and intolerable. There should be no discrimination in terms of jobs, housing, voting, etc.. Also, whether homo or heterosexual, can’t we all “go back to the closet”? Our children are learning much too much about sex at too early an age. Some experiment with sex before the age of 10! Part of the reason is they are exposed to so much talk and video about sex and they are naturally curious. It isn’t fair to them. Keep your sex life private no matter what you are.