American Heartland Disease

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story about the good people of the US Midwestern state of Montana electing some conservative thug named Greg Gianforte to the US Congress?  He was in the news recently for physically attacking a reporter who had asked him a question about the Republican Party health care plan and then lying about it until he found it untenable in the face of testimony from witnesses.  (He was apparently relying on some Fox News reporters to back him up but they opted to tell the truth for once suggesting some elements of the organization may have some latent professionalism and commitment to ideals beyond making President Trump and the Republican Party look good.)  The citizens of Montana are of course free to elect any sort of idiot they like to the US Congress and frankly one doesn’t expect much from a state sparsely populated by the most isolated and provincial of rural folk.  Indeed I was about to let it pass without comment as just one of those things but it did get me thinking about something I found mildly interesting: the tendency of many Americans to romanticize these flyover regions of the country by referring to them as the “heartland” of the country.  The phrase of course is a little play on words involving the notion of a heartland as the geographical center of a nation and the notion of the heartland as the portion of a nation exemplifying its true character.  The problem in this instance is that while the first bit may well be true the latter bit is most emphatically not.  As the results of the recent election in Montana so strikingly illustrate the people of the so-called heartland of the USA today exemplify mostly the effects of a sort of rot or cancer of the American character.  These hicks of the heartland appear to have thrown over our cherished ideals of democracy and free speech in favor of the rather more authoritarian small town virtues of bullying and lying.  I’m afraid it’s time to call it like it really is.  The true intellectual and moral heart of the USA is located not in the geographically central farmlands of the Midwest but in the coastal regions and the large cities where most American and in particular most educated and gainfully employed Americans actually live.

One question that occurred to me is where did this fascination with rural small town life even come from? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Freedom Comes to Indiana

Welcome friends!

Have you heard about what may be the latest twist on gay bashing from American conservatives?  It’s been all over the news.  The Governor of Indiana (if you don’t know don’t ask, but I think it’s one of those states in the interior of the country somewhere near Ohio and Kentucky I would imagine), a Republican of course by the name of Mike Pence, has recently signed a law some critics say would provide legal justification for businesses turning away gay and lesbian customers.  How rude you say?  Well, for Midwestern conservatives it’s all about religious freedom.  Any rudeness is purely coincidental.  Say what now?  I know, it is a bit confusing.  Perhaps I should explain.

One popular take on what’s going on here is that many conservatives in what is known colloquially as the Corn Belt region of the US feel their religion requires them to avoid fraternizing with certain groups of what they consider less godly folk, including in their estimation gay people for example, at least to the extent of refusing to do business with them if they decide to do something outrageously offensive like marry one another.  As far as I know these people don’t feel their religion requires them to tell gay people to go f__k themselves or hit gay people on their heads with baseball bats, so I don’t think this new law allows those sorts of activities, but certainly rudeness in terms of we don’t like ‘yer kind here and git the hell out.  But it’s all a matter of degree right?  The underlying principle is the same: people should be free to abuse other people if that’s what their religion recommends, at least to the extent of embarrassing them and making their lives more difficult by refusing to serve them at one’s place of business.

If you’ve read my blog before you’ll probably have some notion of what I feel is probably going on here.  Some people are opposed to what is essentially an idea, in this case the idea gay people have civil rights and should be able to marry one another, but they don’t want to leave their opposition in the realm of ideas and discussion, they want to take it out on people, in this case gay people or at least gay people who are interested in getting married.  They feel they should be free to do so because they’re just expressing their beliefs and opinions and what’s wrong with that?  A Republican senator from Arkansas, Bart Hester, expressed this all rather nicely when he claimed these sorts of religious freedom laws are about discriminating against messages (i.e. ideas) and not about discriminating against people at all, which would be fine except we’re not talking about refusing to do business with messages, we’re talking about refusing to do business with people.  Senator Hester went on to explain requiring conservatives to do business with gay couples wanting to get married is like requiring a Jewish baker to make a cake with a Nazi swastika on it.  (I know, it’s a funny analogy right?  In other words for conservatives gay people are like Nazis but without I suppose the fascism, nationalism, jingoism, racism, murder, and war mongering, while the conservative Christians who dominate political life in states like Arkansas are similar to Jewish holocaust survivors.)  Hmm.  I sort of see where he’s coming from, but I’m not sure it’s really the same thing.  Or let’s just say I’d have to think about that.  I suspect Nazi symbols might fall into some sort of special legal category because, you know, all that stuff actual Nazis got up to.  And it seems to me the postulated Nazi sympathizer with the sweet tooth could probably come up with something else to put on his or her cake in place of the offending swastika, but I’m not sure gay couples have similarly obvious alternatives to getting married.  I suppose they could join the local Baptist church and throw themselves off a bridge or something like that, but it hardly seems the same thing.

If you haven’t been around as long as I have I suppose I should mention this is all very much consistent with the traditional Midwestern American way of life circa the middle of the last century.  In the provincial small town where I grew up the local rednecks who ran the place refused to do business with all manner of people: blacks, Jews, Asians, foreigners, hippies, and so on.  Yes, they were opposed to a whole slew of messages in those days: the message that “black” people should feel free to mingle with “white” people, the message that the Jewish religion was as legitimate as the Christian religion, the message that Asian people belonged in the US as much as the ancestors of European immigrants, and so on.  All manner of messages.  Then the US government got all uppity and started all that civil rights nonsense and we lost a good deal of our freedom to abuse other people to clarify our positions on the messages they personified.  Talk about government overreach!  It was horrible.  No, wait.  What am I saying?  Actually it made the place a whole lot nicer than it used to be.  Sorry.  I got so caught up just then trying to think like a conservative I may have gone insane for a moment.  But I’m back now.  Yeah, as a liberal the freedom to abuse other people isn’t really one of my top priorities, whether it’s motivated by religion or not.  In my book it’s in the same basic category as the freedom to steal someone’s car.  I suppose it’s a sort of freedom but it suffers from the usual problem with conservative ideas about freedom: it fails to recognize the existence of other people and their countervailing claims to freedom.  But that’s conservatism all over, isn’t it?  Me, me, me.  No wonder the Me Generation laps this stuff up.

On the other hand maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick on this one.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Republicans in Indiana have been loudly proclaiming the last few days that other people just don’t understand the law.  They claim it’s basically the same thing that was passed at the federal level by President Clinton back in 1993 and that now appears in various versions in nineteen other states.  They intend to clarify what they had in mind and add language to the law establishing it does not in fact allow businesses to discriminate against gay people.  That should be very helpful for people like Governor Pence, who was on television the other day defending the law but who refused to say whether he thought it would allow businesses to deny service to gay people or not.  He was asked that question and didn’t answer.  Four times.  One suspects he thought it probably did but didn’t want to say as much.  That’s how Republicans typically operate these days.  As the undisputed masters of traditional political double talk they often say one thing in front of their more rabid supporters then turn around and shamelessly tell some other audience something else entirely or in some cases nothing at all.  But I don’t know.  Maybe the man honestly just didn’t know the answer.  I mean we are talking about the Stupid Party after all.  It certainly seems within the realm of possibility the Governor just hadn’t bothered to look into those sorts of details, not being gay himself.  He just signed the bill into law and went on his merry way.  At least, if he had thought the law didn’t support discrimination one would have thought he might have mentioned it, right?  Some people were clearly interested.  But anyway his fellow Republicans should make everything clear soon enough.  Governor Pence has apparently gotten ahead of the game and declared the fact the law doesn’t support discrimination is so obvious any suggestion otherwise represents a “smear” campaign against the law.

While we’re waiting for Indiana Republicans to explain how the law actually works I suppose we might as well spend a few moments speculating about whether it allows discrimination against gay people or not.  I mean, the law is on the books so we might as well consider what it might mean, right?  Along those lines I was just reading an interesting article that was full of fun facts and opinions on the topic.  For example, a University of Virginia Law School professor made the interesting point that as far as he knew it was already legal in Indiana to refuse to do business with gay people because unlike many other states Indiana doesn’t have anti-discrimination laws relating to sexual orientation.  (And don’t hold your breath waiting for any such laws.  Governor Pence has made it clear he opposes that sort of thing.)  So even if the law were to allow discrimination much to the surprise and consternation of its supporters (just a bit of humor to keep things light) it would apparently not be adding anything new but simply codifying existing practice.  Another interesting tidbit I gleaned from the article is that Indiana lawmakers explicitly rejected amendments that would have made clear they did not intend the law to allow discrimination and similarly refused to add an anti-discrimination clause.  Which brings up a funny story.  Apparently conservatives tried to set up one of these religious freedom laws in another conservative stronghold, Georgia, but they pulled their bill entirely when someone managed to add an anti-discrimination clause.  No wonder Governor Pence was so confused.  And then of course we have the simple fact that advocates of the Indiana law have been touting the idea the law allows businesses to refuse business relating to same sex marriages, which incidentally it seems only one year ago Republicans were still trying to amend the Indiana constitution to ban.  Indeed, as I suggested previously that appears to have been the whole point.  (Wasn’t I just saying the other day I thought one of the top priorities of the Republican Party in the next few years would be to find some backhanded way to get at gay people now their marriage bans have increasingly been found unconstitutional?  What a call!)  So what’s the answer?  Was the law meant to provide a legal justification for discrimination against gay people or not?  I don’t know.  But it smells a little fishy to me.

Addendum

I saw even more recently conservatives in the Arkansas state legislature made the national news for trying to pull the same stunt in that state.  (One might have thought they’d reconsider their timing given all the concerns about the Indiana law, but that’s how Republicans operate these days, always flying to the extremes.  Witness the motley crew of Republican presidential candidates rushing to support the Indiana law including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.)  I was all prepared to make some hilarious comments about Arkansas, which I remember from my youth for all manner of ugly scenes involving racial issues, but the Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, refused to sign the bill and instead sent it back to state lawmakers with a request they ensure it mirrors federal law and cannot be used as a legal justification for discrimination.  Whoa!  Didn’t see that one coming!  Just when I was about to launch into my usual tirade against Republican bullying he goes and spoils the punchline.  Just joking.  It’s always gratifying to meet the honorable opposition.  You know, I have no problem with religious freedom at all.  It’s just that I think we need to consider the freedom of other people as well.  I suspect Governor Hutchinson might just agree with that.  Maybe we can get together and work something out.  I know.  It’s weird.  Do I need to amend my mental map of the US?  Has the Midwest overtaken the Deep South in terms of conservative extremism?  We have the counterexample of Georgia of course, where as I’ve already discussed conservatives dropped their support for their own religious freedom law when opponents added language making it clear it could not be used to justify discrimination, but this story about Arkansas suggests a certain amount of change may be in the air.  I’d like that.

References

Indiana's Pence to sign bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  March 25, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/25/politics/mike-pence-religious-freedom-bill-gay-rights/index.html.

Gov. Mike Pence: Indiana “ not going to change” anti-LGBT law.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  March 30, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/29/politics/mike-pence-indiana-anti-lgbt-religious-freedom-law/index.html.

Indiana to ‘clarify’ religious freedom law.  BBC.  March 30, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32121317.

Is the controversial Indiana law ‘the same’ as a law backed by Obama?  Glenn Kessler.  The Washington Post.  March 31, 2015.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/31/is-the-controversial-indiana-law-the-same-as-a-law-backed-by-obama/.

Indiana uses religious freedom against gays.  Tim Holbrook.  CNN.  March 31, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/opinions/holbrook-indiana-law/index.html.

Arkansas lawmakers scramble to change ‘religious freedom’ bill.  Eric Bradner.  CNN.  April 1, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/31/politics/arkansas-religious-freedom-anti-lgbt-bill/.

Ideas and People Revisited

Welcome friends!

I was just sitting here thinking mostly of ideas and a little bit about people and it occurred to me the famous difficulty conservatives tend to have distinguishing the two can be expressed in two rather different ways one involving other people and their ideas and the other involving conservatives themselves and their own ideas.  I’m quite sure I’ve discussed both separately before but I don’t think I’ve ever remarked on the fact they’re actually two sides of the same coin.  So let me go ahead and do that this time around.  Should only take a moment or two.

The typical manifestation of the first expressions of this phenomenon, the one involving other people, is the tendency of conservatives to oppress and quite often physically assault people who express ideas they don’t like.  I was thinking about this the other day while reading a little news item involving the murder at the hands of Muslim religious zealots in Bangladesh of an American atheist author and blogger named Avijit Roy who was apparently visiting the old country in a rather misguided albeit noble attempt to introduce his former compatriots to more modern modes of thinking.  All joking aside let me just say I take my hat off to the man.  He died a martyr to the liberal humanist cause of promoting human reason and secular ethics.  A few more people like him and some of these more backward countries might actually get someplace someday.  Anyway, it seems Mr. Roy was attacked as he walked home from a book fair with his wife by a group of men wielding what one article described as meat cleavers and another as knives and machetes, although since we’re apparently talking about an entire posse of violent goons I suppose they may well have been armed with meat cleavers, knives, and machetes.  I wonder, what is it about Muslim religious extremists and edged weapons anyway?  When they’re not chasing someone down the street with a meat cleaver they’re chopping someone’s head off with a sword.  I suppose their choice of weapon doesn’t really matter, it’s all murder after all, but it just seems so damned weird and foreign to an American.  What do they have against guns?  Too modern?  Too Western?  I know they have them.  When I see news from the Middle East it often seems to involve footage of a jeep or truck of some sort careering through town with an unruly mob of bearded men in robes hanging onto the sides yelling incoherently and shooting AK-47s in every direction.  And didn’t we have a story just the other day involving some Islamic terrorists gunning down some random tourists at a museum in Tunisia?  But I digress.  My point is this is the sort of thing one expects to see whenever conservatives encounter ideas they don’t like.  We have examples of this sort of thing nearly every day.  Need another one but you can do without the bucket of blood?  Well, how about the recent case in Egypt involving a young college kid named Karim al-Banna who wrote a blog post supposedly promoting secularist ethics and atheism and was promptly sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting Islam.”  It’s ironic in a way because Egypt’s constitution ostensibly protects freedom of belief but it turns out they’re only talking about beliefs involving so-called “Abrahamic religions” such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and so on.  The only freedom associated with other beliefs such as humanism and secularism in Egypt is the Egyptian authorities’ freedom to cart one off to prison.

But enough of that.  Let’s move on to a typical manifestation of the second expression of this phenomenon, the one involving conservatives and their own ideas, which is the tendency of conservatives to portray themselves as unjustly put upon by people who reject or criticize their ideas.  This is a very common form of argument here in the US.  The conclusion is generally that liberals and humanists are intolerant jerks (“like Nazis” as most populist conservative windbags would phrase it here) because they criticize conservatives’ ideas.  You also see this sort of thing with conservatives abroad.  Witness for example the many foreign Muslim persons “insulted” by people who fail to abide by their religious prohibitions on cartoons, depictions of Mohammed, and all manner of other things.

Maybe I should just go over this whole idea versus people distinction one more time.  Being tolerant of other people is good.  Politeness is a virtue.  Being tolerant of what one perceives to be a bad idea is not good.  We needn’t be polite to bad ideas.  Why?  Ideas aren’t people.  One isn’t doing anyone any favors by not calling out a bad idea as soon as one sees it.  Of course when one is calling out a bad idea it’s always preferable to at least try to be polite to the people who might support that idea and confine one’s arguments to the actual idea itself.  This can sometimes require a bit of attention because our language has an unfortunate tendency to personalize everything.  For example, when one encounters a person spouting off some bad idea the best way of expressing one’s disagreement is to say what that person is saying is wrong.  But how easy is it to slip into saying instead that person is wrong as though the person were a proposition that could be right or wrong?  And who doesn’t get annoyed when someone personalizes an intellectual discussion like that?  The emphasis is all wrong.

Now I wouldn’t have thought this whole idea versus people distinction would be particularly difficult to grasp so why do so many conservatives seem to have so much difficulty with it?  Well, since you ask, I think there are two things going on.

First we have some conservatives who are anti-intellectual in the sense of not being interested at all in entertaining ideas that are different from their own and who simply lust after power over their fellow man and woman.  These people aren’t confused about anything in particular.  They just don’t want people contradicting whatever they happen to be saying, which is more often than not something of a religious nature.  If they could climb into one’s head and control one’s brain they’d be happy to do that but failing that they’d at least like to control such outward manifestation of mental processes as what comes out of one’s mouth.

Second we have some conservatives who actually are interested in ideas but who want to discuss ideas in popular venues where some entertainment value attaches to personalizing otherwise dry intellectual debates by introducing gratuitous ad hominem attacks and an underlying us versus them narrative.  I find this sort of conservative relatively benign.  To be perfectly frank this sort of thing is practically a requirement if one intends to engage in any sort of political discourse here in the US.  One would like to think most people would be above such things but the reality is many people are not.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned before this is where all my talking about “conservatives” come from.  To state the obvious: what I don’t like are conservative ideas; I don’t know beans about the people holding the ideas beyond that for one reason or another they appear to be attracted to bad ideas.  But that doesn’t stop me from going on about conservatives, does it?

So if everyone is doing it then what’s the big problem?  Well, I suppose it must involve the presence or absence of some sense of proportion.  One doesn’t want to get lumped together with the sort of person who might brandish a meat cleaver or throw a college kid in jail for writing an essay.  If you feel you need to personalize things a bit to keep some people interested in what you’re saying then go for it but proceed as quickly as possible to the substance of your argument.  Don’t just sit there and blab on and on about how horrible you find The Other.  Say something sensible.  And by the way it doesn’t hurt to have a sense of humor about these things.  I suppose you must realize when one makes ad hominem attacks one is basically making a complete ass of oneself, right?  Hopefully one is at least being a funny, entertaining, or engaging sort of ass, but an ass nonetheless.  When it’s time to get serious forget the person and take up the idea.  But just so you know in my experience talking about ideas can be a lot more difficult and confusing than talking about people.  Some people just don’t have the patience for it.  One will necessarily lose some percentage of one’s audience.  So what’s the optimal mix of ass and philosopher to function effectively in a popular American context?  Well, I don’t know.  But I’m working on it.  I’m always working on it.  I’m working on it right now.

References

US-Bangladesh blogger Avijit Roy hacked to death.  BBC.  February 27, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31656222.

Police arrest man in hacking death of Bangladeshi-American blogger Avijit Roy.  Farid Ahmed.  CNN.  March 2, 2015.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/02/asia/bangladeshi-american-blogger-death/index.html.

Watchdog: Student jailed in Egypt’s crackdown on atheism.  Eliot McLaughlin.  CNN.  January 13, 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/13/us/egypt-student-atheist-jailed/index.html.

Georgia On My Mind

Welcome friends!

You know how I’m always saying I think it’s a mistake to link any particular religion, such as Islam, with the ignorance, intolerance, and violence that I think can really be associated with pretty much any religion but especially any of those rather emotional and hot headed creeds that have arisen over the centuries in the Middle East?  I know it’s a tough sell because one hears so much more these days about people living in Muslim lands that I think one can easily get the wrong impression.  When one hears about ostensibly Christian fanatics running amok in Western countries it always seems to be so much more localized and idiosyncratic than the wholesale hatred, chaos, and carnage that popular religion seems to fuel in the Middle East.  But as I always say, I don’t think it was always that way, nor do I think it will necessarily stay that way.  I know I did a little story on what some fundamentalist Christians in Uganda were up to a little a while ago but I’m sure the point was probably muddied by factors such as race, culture, and ethnicity, so I suppose many American and European Christians had difficulty relating the story to their own situation despite the fact that many people suspect the behavior in question had a great deal to do with the influence of certain American evangelical Christians.  (October 28, 2011.)  Fortunately (for pedagogical purposes anyway) I recently read a story about some suitably pale complexioned and at least quasi-European people calling themselves Christians in Georgia that I think might serve to make my point.  No, I’m not talking about the US state of Georgia, although I wouldn’t rule out doing a comparable post on that particular locality some day.  I’m talking about the country of Georgia: that ever so ancient and eminently eastern backwater of Europe tucked between Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia and probably best known in the US as the birthplace of everyone’s favorite bloody tyrant: former dictator of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin (aka Iosif Dzhugashvili).

So what was the good news out of Georgia that caught my eye this week? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Mitt Romney, Bully in Chief

Welcome friends!

I guess I’m a little behind my time this week.  Sorry about that, but I wasn’t feeling well for a few days there.  Anyway, let’s go back, back, back a couple of weeks to that story about when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was a teenager at some fancy prep school or other (actually, I think it was Cranbrook, which is appropriately enough located in the US state of Michigan, now famous as a midwestern haven for conservative bullies of all stripes).  Seems that one day young Mitt got together with some of his buddies, jumped some kid, and cut his hair... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Bully for Michigan

Welcome friends!

I suppose you’ve been reading the newspaper stories about the problem of bullying in schools in this country.  Apparently it’s quite the epidemic.  But did you catch the story about the US state of Michigan (or more accurately Republicans in Michigan) passing a law that actually protects religious bullies along with miscellaneous other bullies as well?  Yes, that’s right.  The story is almost too incredible to believe but apparently the good people of Michigan have passed a law against bullying in schools unless the bullying is based on a “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction.”  Now since I’m sure most serious and systematic bullying has some basis in a religious belief or some cockeyed moral conviction about the relative worth of the bully and bullied the bottom line is that this law, ostensibly an anti-bullying law, is more properly considered a pro-bullying law.

To add insult to injury Michiganians named their pro-bullying law Matt’s Safe School Law in reference to some kid named Matt Epling, who apparently committed suicide at age fourteen after anti-gay bullying at his school... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Spy Cam in NY

Welcome friends!

It’s old news of course but I would like to just revisit for a moment the tragic death of Mr. Tyler Clementi a few weeks ago.  You may recall the sad and rather peculiar story.  It seems that Tyler, by all accounts a nice, quiet young man (19 years old), an accomplished musician, and a student at Rutgers University, died after jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River.  Apparently, Tyler’s college roommate, some kid from New Jersey named Dharun Ravi, had set up a spy cam in Tyler’s bedroom one night when Tyler was having company and broadcast Tyler’s intimate activities to the world over the internet.  This bizarre and no doubt entirely unexpected intrusion into his private life seems to have precipitated or at least played a significant role in Tyler’s subsequent decision to kill himself.

Now why in the world would someone set up a spy cam in someone else’s bedroom? ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!