Words From the Past
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| White |
The more things
change, the more they stay the same.
About a hundred years ago,
William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia (KS) Gazette, addressed
the futility of trying to reach that period’s violence-prone white supremacist
group, the resurrected Ku Klux Klan. He wrote that ‘no
arguments you may use, no facts you may present, no logic you may array, will
in the slightest affect these people … They have no capacity for receiving
arguments, no minds for retaining or sifting facts, and no mental processes
that will hold logic. If they had any of these, they would not be
Kluxers.’
Just replace
‘Kluxers’ with the names of today’s right-wing extremist groups, starting with
believers in QAnon, and you can see the progress we have made in a century is
not so great as you might want to believe.
JL
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On Religion
It is good to be somewhat observant of a
religion, any religion, just so long as it does not advocate harming other
human beings and fills your personal needs, leaving you feeling good. But don’t get carried away by it. It just might be enough to be awed by the
first Chapter of Genesis, the allegorical description of the Creation, whatever
version of it you choose to believe (even a scientific one), and not get any further
involved. If you do, you just might be
looking for trouble.
But if you look further, at least try to recognize
that everything else beyond the Creation story in any religion’s holy books is
merely commentary by those who think more deeply than most about such things,
which are there for you to take or leave.
On that level, you will find disagreements both between different religions
and within religions themselves to be rampant, some of which even lead people
to harm one another, which is not good.
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| Rushdie |
If Islam advocates harming or killing someone
who commits a sacrilegious, but non-violent act, like writing a book filled
with blasphemy (Rushdie’s crime), it had better have some very persuasive non-theological
arguments to support its position. (This
is one strong argument against theocracies, where there is no non-theological
alternative.)
Otherwise, they risk being as guilty of murder as
Christianity was for burning non-believers at the stake during the Inquisition,
a bad thing, and the early Hebrews were of stoning to death those who violated some
Biblical injunctions, another bad thing.
An extreme way of looking at it might be to ask if Adolf Hitler had not
committed suicide, and been captured, tried, convicted, and executed, would it have been for
writing ‘Mein Kampf’ or for carrying out that book’s ideas in the Holocaust?
Such behavior, endorsing taking a life because of one's beliefs or writings, however inflammatory, gives
religion a very bad name, and gives atheists and agnostics cause to smile. They may not believe in a ‘hell’ but they
know who deserves to eventually end up there, if by chance there is such a
place reserved for believers.
JL
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Who is Debriefed and Who Isn’t?
Anyone in government or the armed forces who
has access to classified information, on leaving their position and no longer
having 'the need to know,' is officially 'debriefed' or should be. 'Debriefing'
includes their being made aware of the possible penalties (imprisonment and/or
fines) for revealing, or even suggesting they once had access to, classified
information. I wonder where, as one proceeds up the hierarchy, 'debriefing' is
not carried out. Are former presidents,
cabinet members, members of Congress, generals, etc., ever 'debriefed'? On what rung of the ladder does the necessity
for 'debriefing' start to no longer apply?
JL
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Election Reminder
Just about a dozen weeks remain until Election Day. Without going into details, this will possibly be the final opportunity for Americans to challenge those who are intent on replacing our democratic republic with an autocracy.
The once honorable Republican Party has been taken over by those who cannot distinguish between conservatism and fascism. No Republican, at any level, who accepts the lies of the defeated former president, should receive the vote of loyal Americans.
Voting for State legislatures is now of more importance than ever before. Letting Republicans control them only serves to spread their political cancer. Look how they attempt to undermine the electoral college and take away voters' rights to fair representation through gerrymandering.
What can you do about it? Vote! And devote some time to urging friends and relatives to register and vote. Get involved politically. (In Florida, registered Democrats will choose between Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist in an August 23 primary to oppose the dreadful Ron DeSantis now sitting in the Governor's chair. Either one would be preferable to him. Also, Val Demings deserves the support of all interested in replacing the worthless Marco Rubio in the Senate.)
JL
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On Purchasing a Leased Car When
Lease Ends
A few years ago I leased a car
from a local dealership. I liked it so much that
at the end of the lease I decided to purchase the car, according to the terms
of the lease agreement. I contacted the
financer of my lease, a banking subsidiary of the car’s manufacturer and was
told that since they did not have a Florida car dealer’s license, according to
that state’s peculiar laws, they couldn’t sell me the car and I had to purchase
it through a local dealership which would go through the paperwork charade of
obtaining the car’s title from the
finance company, and then resell it to me under the terms of the lease.
So I contacted the dealership where I had leased the car three years earlier and to my amazement, even though they would never even see the car, the dealership tacked a ‘dealer fee’ of almost $1,000 onto the purchase price. When I objected to this, they explained that that was their practice, adding a dealer fee to the price of any car purchased from them, including cars from which, as in my case, they had gotten title from their finance company, sight unseen, for the purpose of selling it to me at the end of my lease. It didn't matter to these thieves that they had already collected a 'dealer fee' from me when the car was leased three years earlier. They just wanted to collect it twice.
So I
walked out and found another dealership, willing to handle my purchase without
a dealer fee. It wasn’t easy, but I
found one. (Both dealerships did tack on a few hundred dollars to my purchase
price for handling the transaction, but only the original dealership insisted on
that $1,000 dealer fee as well.)
The moral of this story is that
this dealership is really not interested in customers who object to being
ripped off. They just want to sell or
lease cars to dummies, of which there are many thousands in Florida. Incidentally, they are part of a nationwide
conglomerate which owns many dealerships in Florida. If my
experience represents the way they do business, they are to be avoided when one
is in the market for a car, because this kind of greed probably pervades their
entire operation. If they don’t screw
you one way, they will find another way.
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Apparently, some lease finance
companies don’t pay attention to Florida’s supposed requirement that they be
licensed to sell cars in that State in order to be able to transfer a car’s
title to a lessee at the end of a lease for a specified purchase price
according to the terms of a lease agreement. To them, transferring title to the
lessee on a lease purchase is not the same as selling cars. They just honor the terms of the lease over
the phone, online, or by mail. No one
comes after them for doing that, and they don’t charge a ‘dealer fee.’ (A
relative recently purchased their Mercedes at the end of its lease in that
manner. I couldn’t do it, however, with
my Lexus, whose financing subsidiary interprets the rules so that its
dealerships can profit from a lease-end purchase by the lessee.)
Dealerships just love this supposed
interpretation of the regulation since it gives them the opportunity to tack on
those obscene dealer fees as well as getting first shot at lending the lessee
the money with which to purchase the car at lease end, if they don’t have it
immediately available.
If you ever lease a car in
Florida, try to make certain that you will have the opportunity, if you choose
to purchase the car at lease end, to purchase its title directly from the
finance company and not be forced to do it through a dealership. Insist that this be part of the lease
agreement. If they will not go along
with that, insist on a specific listing being included in the lease of all fees
which might be added to the purchase price by a dealership at lease end. If the dealership will not do this, walk. There are both honest car dealerships and
dishonest car dealerships, even in Florida.
JL
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America Afloat
(A poem that is always worth repeating in these blog postings.
To learn more, visit this blog’s posting of July 30, 2022.)
America
Afloat
Jack Lippman
The greatness of America
Is
that it does survive
Attacks
upon democracy
Whose
flame it keeps alive.
The
laws that blossom from the words
The
Founding Fathers wrote
Still
serve us well today to keep
America
afloat.
This
doesn’t happen by itself,
We
cannot wish it true,
The
bottom line, my friends, is that
It
all depends on you.
JL
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