WHY WE VOTE ON A TUESDAY IN NOVEMBER

How many of you know when Election Day is in America?  A Tuesday in November right?  Yep, but which Tuesday and why that Tuesday?  Federal Election Day is always on the first Tuesday following a Monday in November every other year.  The every year part is specified in the Constitution by the requirement that one third of Representatives stand for election every two years, and the President every four years.  But the Constitution says nothing about the day we have to vote.

It does say that the Electoral College must meet on the first Wednesday in December.  Before 1845 states were allowed to open polling stations in the 34 days before this Wednesday.  Then in 1845, Congress in all of its wisdom, decided to set one day in which poling could take place and that was on the first Tuesday following a Monday in November.  Well then why November, and why the first Tuesday following a Monday?

In the 1800s farming was the prevailing occupation of Americans and early November was the first month farmers could leave their crops without neglecting the chores that had to be done in order to get a harvest in, and allow the votes casted to be tallied before the Electoral College met.  Okay, that explains why November was chosen, but why on a Wednesday, and why it had to follow a Monday? 

In the 1800 there were some trains but most people had to use horses or walked if they wanted to go any distance.  Polling station could be as much as a day away so time had to be allowed for voters to get to where they had to vote.  Why not Monday?  Well most folks in those days would spend a good part of every Sunday in Church, and there was no way that they would give up church for voting.  So a Tuesday it had to be, but why the one following a Monday instead of just the first Tuesday in November?

I sure most of you do not know it but November 1st is “All Souls Day”, most are much more familiar with Halloween.  Now here I will go on a tangent, Halloween or All Hallows' Eve Christian feast of All Hallows or All Souls.  The Jew’s day does not start with sunrise, rather with sunset.  So the eve of something is not before it but the start of it, eve is short for evening.  Christmas Eve is not the night before Christmas but the start of Christmas Day.  Christian in those days was very unlikely to travel on the day of the feast of All Hallows.

So it was to avoid this conflict that the first Tuesday following a Monday in November was settled on.  You might say that it one of the first ‘get out the vote’ campaign. There are a number of people who have been asking “Why Tuesday?” and pushing to move voting from Tuesdays to weekends for years.  They believe that this move would increase voter participation.  However, critics of this point out that with the expansion of early voting and the ease of obtaining an absentee ballot make this unnecessary.

Lay At Night

Why, you ask, as you get on in years,

Does the days fly by so fast?

Why when I was a child

A day could last forever.

~

Well, yes it could,

Especially when you were but a day old!

A whole lifetime in a day,

But the next day it was only half a lifetime.

~

When you were a year old

A year become 1/365th

Of a lifetime,

At 10 1/3650th.

~

Look at how of your lifetime

A day is now.

Just a little fraction

Lost in all those other fractions.

~

But yet, a day is still a day

And a year is still a year

As you watch your children grow

Into the amazement you never dreamed.

~

A busy day seems to fly by

Until you look back upon it

From your rest at night

Then it seems an eternity since you arose.

~

A day with nothing to do,

All day long seems to drag and drag,

It just creeps along, until you look back at night

And wonder where it has gone.

~

It is events that build a day

Many events build a long day

One long event of hardly nothing

Builds a short day.

~

So fill your day with happy things

And you have a happy day.

Fill it with sad things

And you have a sad day.

~

It matters not, in the scheme of things.

Except to you

As you lay at night

And remember.

~

~

~

©

Rexx

Wake Up Time or Not If I Can Help It

Prejudice is an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts. Okay, what if you examine all the facts available and still have the adverse opinion does it stop being prejudice? To hold an opinion is a God given right that cannot be take away from anyone, regardless of how they come to hold that opinion.. Way to often today the term bigot is used to imply racist point of view but the word is applicable to anyone with a closed mind upon a subject, regardless of the subject.

People who universally condemn prejudice are bigoted on the subject of prejudice, and are prejudice against prejudice people and cannot see that they have placed themselves within that group with their intolerant opinion. That they can see no ironies in their condemnation of another’s pet prejudice is very humorist and sad to me.

One cannot live without making assumptions, and I assume that all people came by their prejudices honestly. That is that their opinion came to then with a historical context. If some white are prejudice regarding blacks, or some blacks are prejudice regarding whites one has only to look at the history of how we have struggled with the relation between the races in the US for hundreds of years. They were winners and losers in that struggle and it is not surprising that the losers were left with a bad taste in their mouth and past that feeling on to their children. The amazing thing, to me, is that the race relations have came as far as they have come considering all the people use it for a horse for their own grandioseness.

The prejudice against WASPs and Fundamentalists is of a much more recent origin and spring from, in my opinion, a deliberate campaign to discredit them by some of those who believe in a secular agenda. The methods used are insidious, they consist of only portraying those they wish to discredit in as unfavorable a light as possible such as in moves as Elmer Gantry, and by attacking moves that do not, like the Passion of Christ.

Being unable to get their ideals passed through Congress they turned to the courts to have their will enforced by fiat, a judicial diktat. They invented the concept of a “Living Constitution” to justify their abandonment of the Constitution.  Prior to the reign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the courts were still largely populated with originalists, who properly rendered legal interpretation based on construction of the Constitution's "original intent." However, FDR grossly exceeded the Constitutional limits upon the authority of his office and that of the legislature in his folly to end The Great Depression (the latter falling victim to World War II -- not FDR's social and economic engineering). FDR's extra-constitutional exploits opened the door for the judiciary to follow the same path -- to read into the Constitution what was necessary to make it conform to the demands of the prevailing political will.

This notion of a "Living Constitution," was embraced by the secularist liberals who have an affinity with the godless communists of the world, judicial activists of this bent insures their type of judge was appointed and confirmed, and in turn they legislate from the bench by issuing rulings based on what they want the Constitution to mean, or at the behest of like minded special-interest constituencies. Way to many were nominated for the federal bench and confirmed in droves.

With like mined members on the court they attacked religion in America with a passion. The most insidious line of activist interpretations of our Constitution's First Amendment invoked the so called "Wall of Separation". In the words of late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, "The wall of separation between church and state is a metaphor based upon bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned. ... The greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intention of the drafters of the Bill of Rights."

If the liberals wish to continue their taking over of America and reinventing it in their image and likeness they have to do it through the courts, and this had led to the great battles over who to appoint to the court. Terms like “Strict Constructionist” applied to a nominee with insure the Democrat’s most furious opposition to his being confirmed.  Anyone who cares about the future of America should consider who any candidate for President will appoint to the Courts especially the Supremes.

The Federalist Papers, are the definitive explication of our Constitution's original intent, clearly define original intent in regards to Constitutional interpretation. In Federalist No. 78 Alexander Hamilton writes, "[The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment...liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments." In Federalist No. 81 Hamilton notes, "[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution...."

Our Constitution was written and ratified "in order secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" as set forth in the Declaration of Independence "endowed by their Creator." It established a Republic intended to reflect the consent of the governed, a nation of laws, not men. In order to bring their vision to fruition the whole concept of God given rights has to be done away with, as well as the concept of am immutable Constitution that can be amended but not open to judicial interpretation beyond the plan meanings of the word.  How many of you still believe that we are living under the rule of law when the President can suspend bankruptcy laws and impose his own settlement on GM?

To what ends are people of faith portrayed as small-minded, bigoted, superstitious fools. They hold science out as the answer to all of man’s problems. They present evolution as the only way to view creation if you are other then a fool. A bible thumping, Jesus is the only way to salvation, he who holds this opinion is condemned for his belief.i.e., that anyone who does not accept Christ as his savior is dammed to hell, as a prejudice bigot to whom it is aright to have a bigoted attitude about.  The same goes for any who believe that homosexuality is wrong and that marriage is only for same sex couples.

The progressive bigot are hell bent upon changing America into a country I do not know.  About 40 years ago I had a discussion with a devoted American communist, he asserted that his side would win and I told him, "Not if I can help it".  I went on to getting more education, improving my employment, and raising my children, and let the struggle slip my mind.  He,and his elk, did not. They have come much further along this trail than most of us realized.  Calling them selves liberals instead of progressives or communist slowly, by little increments, ratcheting up but never back until we find ourselves at this pass.  Until of late I have did little to live up to my assertion way back then, not if I can help it.  Now I have woken up, and am doing my best to wake up all Americans as to what is taking place before our very eyes and have been blinded to.
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There Is Life and Then There is Life

A stone may move

But it has no motivation to move,

Its motion is predetermine

By preceding event.

It came to be when

Spewed from the volcano,

Then carried hence

By the great ice flow.

Animated once again

By a raging current

And left to lie

By cliff’s edge

To be pushed over the edge

In the storm’s wind.

There it lies until

It is moved once again

By a child’s hand.

~

So animation is not life,

The wind blows

The rain falls

The water flows

All of the laws of nature.

What then of plants?

They are alive,

Are they not?

But they do not decide.

They are but

A most marvelous

Mechanical system

Whose motions are dictated

By the same laws of nature

That control the

Motion of the stone.

By osmosis

Minerals and water

Seep into roots

Following the law of diffusion

And even distribution

It travels up the plant

Not by desire

But by law

The carbon is absorbed

By the leaves to

React with the water

To make carbohydrates

Then the law is transcended

The plant follows direction

And creates its reproduction.

Life, but no will

A plant does what a plant must do

It cannot rebel.

~

Then there are animals

From the lowly worm

To the mighty whale

Who gets to decide.

The worm in its wiggles under the soil

Must wiggle this way or that

And will go neither

Until it wills.

Each effort it makes

Is an act of will

But still,

It is bound to the earth

And cannot

Decide to fly

It can only spend its life

Eating, screwing, and crawling.

Now the mighty beasts

That roam the face of the earth,

Down to the tiniest of mice

After seeking and finding

Their substances

Find time to play

And enjoy

And look for someone to fuck.

And though they have will

They only live in the now

No concept of consequences

They follow their instincts

And walk into the road and die,

Fly into wind turbines, and die.

A snake cannot learn

That laying on the side of the road

Is dangerous

For it either crawls off

After a day of sunning

With no consequences,

Or it dies in its pleasure.

~

Then there is man

~

~

~

©

Rexx

Who are we but Creatures Of Action

When someone asks you who you are how do you answer?  As a creature of action we tend to identify ourselves with our action. Ask a field and tract person who they are and they will respond that they are a runner or jumper. Ask an accountant and he will respond that he is a CPA, and so forth, a student will respond that she is a freshman as so on, ask the teacher and she will tell you that she is a professor at the college.  To identify with one action is as old as mankind. The stalker saw himself as a hunter, the fighter as a warrior.  Women accepted the role that was left to them, keeping the camp, skinning, gathering and cooking, and called them selves by the name that the tribe who gave that action called it, be it squaw or housewife.

One's actions were once, and still are for many, limited to the action of making a living (staying alive) dominating the role the individual had to assume. As long as action is limited to the acts of survival the self-identification was limited. When one has to till the land the live long day he can only see himself as a farmer.  When one livelihood comes from the games he plays he will identify himself with those games. A Baseball Player, Football Player, Golfer and so on into the myriad of other games in which people have found to make a living. A pretender will call himself an actor; a person who gets his livelihood from a pension and Social Security will say that they are retired when asked what they do. Note that just about everything a person clams to be in one way or another reflects how they make a living. Even a housewife makes her living being a wife and a mother.

This action was and is the very essence of the individual, and to identify the self with the action was not just something the tribe imposed, as much it was something that the individual imposed upon the tribe. People tend to be proud of what they do and achieve, and they want the skill and expertise recognized by the tribe. That is why a Doctor insists on the Ph. D after his name, the X-ray techs at the hospital want to be called Technologists, the bio-medical tech wishes to be called a Technician. This is not trite, it is important because of all the time and effort they put into gaining the skills they have acquired, and want their services recognized.

Many people condemn this self-imposed identity and tell others that they must give them up, I assure you that is a lot easier to say than to do. People like to be known as a wife or a husband, a father or a mother. The names of what they do for a living gives them an identity, which can be expressed with few words but convey a wealth of information. True, we all assume different roles in our lives, at night we are the wife or husband, during the day we raise our kids and or go to work to support ourselves and our families.  However, if you ask a Dentist what he does seldom will mother or father, wife or husband is the first description given. Virtually without exception the Dentist will answer that he is a dentist, the Welder that he is a welder, the NASCAR Driver that he drives NASCARs, and this is true of just about, if not all professions.

Is this wrong? That which a person has to do well enough to support themselves has to occupy a lot of their time, both at work and after they leave work. The more satisfying and fulfilling the work is the greater the identification with the work will be. A hamburger flipper, or car-wash worker will not identify themselves with their jobs near as much as a Doctor or Lawyer will.

I am confused in my identity, I want to say I am a horse trainer when I am asked, but I also want to be an author, and a husband, an adventure, a wise man  and maybe before I die I will figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

~

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©

Rexx

The Instinctal Horses

A discussion on what we know and do not know about the main driving force in a horse’s behavior, and that is instinct. Understanding of instinct is essential to one's ability to understand and relate to horses. Without this understanding you will be like a blind man in a world of hidden hazards. You may find yourself from here to there, but you will never see what you are doing.

There are two types of instincts, the inborn and the gained instincts. The inborn instincts are the inherent disposition of animals toward a particular behavior. I other words they are born with a preprogram that dictated certain behavior under certain circumstances, fight or flight if you will. A bird need not be taught how to build a nest or how to fly.  The knowledge when and where to migrate from is inborn.  The same is true of all migrating animals from the antelope to the elephant.  They are born knowing how and what to feed their young.  The wolf will not eat grass (except maybe to make himself puke) and the horse will not eat meet, they could be separated from their kind from birth and still know these things.

The “gained instincts” come from the instinctive learning nature of the horse, this instinctive learning nature of horse is primarily for its self-preservation and manifests itself by it adaptation to the environments in which they live.  In the wild when horse are going from one grazing field to another if they have passed water in the pass they will remember it and go that way again instinctively, they do not have to think about it they just react to the memory of where water is to be fount on that rout.  This explains why horses are easy to train, it is their instinctive nature to adapt to the environment that we have created by taking them out of the wild and making them, fortunate/unfortunately, a part of our world in which they must live in.

Whether we know it or not we train horses by manipulating their environment and their perception of it, and by exploiting both their inborn and gained instincts. Their gained instincts are what they have learned and do instinctively to live in their environment. They do not think, they cannot think, they react. To prove this to yourself just ask and answer this question, “How do we train people?” and consider the different. Horses do process information, they have to do this to adapt to the environments in order to preserve themselves. It is this ability of theirs that allows us to train them. The horse instinctively responding to our changes and manipulations, and ends up doing what we want them to do.  No mater the method you train your horse you are using conditioning reflex to do it, you are conditioning the horse to do this or that after he has been given certain cues.  You may do this knowingly or unknowingly but that is what you are doing.

When you put a horse in a round ring he is running away from you and cannot understand why he cannot leave you behind.  By putting him in the ring we have changed his environment, and by the application of pressure we manipulate his feet, making him run, making him turn, and letting him stop.  The horse learns and remember what it is that relieve the the pressure he detests, and will do it instinctively.  They will not have to think about it, they just react to it like a marshal artist who practices his moves over and over for year such as he no longer has to thing when attacked in any manner, he just reacts as he has tough himself to do.  The only different is that he decided to do this and the horse does not decide this you do.  Treat or clicker training is no different, you are using instinctal ability to learn, remember, and react.  Reacting requires no thinking, that is why they are so much faster than us to respond to fear, before we even consider that it might spook them, they have jumped half way across the road.

Now to all you barn moms out there, no horse is ever going to accept a human as a member of their herd. Nor will a horse ever look to a human as a leader. The horse will respond to its rider according to its training it has received, never because it sees its rider as a leader. I can put a 6 year old on some of my horses and they will do as the rider asks.  Other would give him a problem. Why? Because of the amount of training each has received.  We can train them to do as we wish, but cannot train them to see us as horses.  We can train them to accept us as their companion, rider, driver, and provider, but they will never be fooled into thinking that we are horses.  People who make pets of their horse are making a big mistake.  It is respect that you should earn from your horse, but gaining its respect does not make you its leader.  You can form a partnership with your horse, but it will never view that relationship as you do.  It is a horse and can never be human in any way shape or form.  You are human and never can be a horse in any way shape or form, get over it, and get with it.

You argue, "My horse is smart, it can think just like I can.  It figures out how to open the gates and the latched on the feed shed!  It knows when I have a treat for her, he know that I am going to put him to work and want let me catch him, but when I don't he comes right up to me."  And so forth and so on.  Yes the horse is smart, and can figure things out but he cannot reason things out.  He figures thinks out by trial and error, and remembers what works and use that.  If he goes up to a new type of latch the first thing he will do to try and open it is the same thing that worked on the last one.

If you put an electric charge on the latch he will learn that and react to his memory, he will not think, "That is hot I better not touch it."  He becomes conditioned to the fact that the fence is hot and avoid it not as a mater of concentration, but in reaction to the times he got bit by it.  If you feed they at a certain time they will remember that, just as cows do, and come expecting to be fed at that time.  If you fail to feed them on time they will not think that you no longer love them, they will give up and go looking else wheres.  

Just because a horse cannot think does not mean that it cannot remember and react according to that memory.  If one person is mean to it, and another is kind they will react to the mean one not because they think "That guy is going to hit me", rather the memory will force a reaction to them in a self preservation way, i.e., get the hell out of Dodge, or kill the SOB.   Your horse will never love you, the best you can hope for is respect and affection, most of us just get tolerated.  The love is all on the owner's side, the horse is his slave and has no option in his situation.  If you open the gates to your pasture how long would you horses hang around?  Oh they might hang around the neighborhood  like mine do when they get out, but that is because it is the environment that they are used to, not for any love of me and what I do for them.

I doubt that I will change the mind of those who just know that their horses can think and have a language that they communicate with.  Well they sure do communicate but not with a language, other that with a few verbal sound they mostly use their body to communicate.  This is what we metaphorically call "Body Language", and they are masters at reading it in both horses and humans.  but body language is not a language at all, we just call it that for lack of a better word to describe what we are talking about.  A language requires words, agreed upon meanings, an approved (approved by the one speaking it) way of string those words together, among other things.

I am reminded of those who claim to have tough apes sign language, and that they use it to communicate.  I believe it for those particular apes, but I will not believe that they have tough them a language until and unless they go on to teach other apes unassisted by humans how to sign like it the movie "Rise of the Planet of the Apes".  Other wise all they have done is to have tough their apes a bunch of very complicated tricks.

A path is a way that shall never be trod twice.

Since we only get to set foot on the path as we trod it one step at a time, and cannot ever re-trace the path  and take the different forks, to say that another way would have been better is only speculation. 

Robert Lee Frost's "You Come Too" 1916

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.”

Now as much as I love Frost, this assertion that taking the road less traveled made all the difference could only be known if both roads had been traveled at the same time and the results compared at the end.  Each decision made opens up a completely different set of choices from which to chose then another decision would allow.  The only way to know which path would be the best path would be to walk them all and compare the outcome.

Alas this cannot be done, thus we are left with making the best decisions we can at the time with the information we have available to us.  That another is “wasting” his life is a personal opinion that really states nothing more than the observers disapproval of how that person is living their life.

To claim that another caused one to waste their life is to remove the responsibility  from that one for the decisions that they made to live the life they lived.  If we are free beings, and are not coerced into a decision by force then the good or bad that comes to us because of our decisions are own responsibility.  If we are not free beings then this speculation is pointless because then we would have no choice in the path we tread.

A path is a path because many have followed that way, had no one followed it, it would be naught but a direction with many obstacles in the way.  Our various religions are paths that have been trod by many before us, atheism is another path that some follow, but few of us get to trail blaze a path.  Jesus, Mohammed, Siddhartha, and Ron L Hubbard are four of the few who have.  Most of us track along following the way others have made.  Some of these paths are so old nobody can be said to have blazed it, Hinduism for example.  As to which past is the best is a matter of faith, not knowledge.

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©

Rexx

©

Rexx