Beautiful VS Pretty

Does The Eye of The Beholder Know The Difference?

Look at these images. Which one is beautiful and which one is pretty? Is the one on the right beautiful and the one on the left is pretty or is it the opposite? Study them carefully. Can you be definitely sure in your decision? Are you at an impasse where your brain can't decide which is which? Well, you are not alone. Over the course of human development, beautiful versus pretty has been a subjective issue for centuries. Salome, Helen of Troy, Nefertiti and Cleopatra were placed in high esteem when it came to their attractiveness and in some cases, literally placed on a pedestal. We have paintings and illustrations and statues of these women from these eras that makes the claim for the time in which they lived. Would their looks stand the scrutiny from today's level of social media judgment? No. There is something called body shaming that's prevalent on these social platforms. Somebody has decided that there should be a social standard to what constitute being attractive.

But let's put body shaming aside for a moment and focus on the beautiful versus pretty subject matter. In general, beautiful women comes with a bit of respect to the pretty women. Beautiful women are categorized as also smart and intelligent. Pretty women can be smart and intelligent too but the perception is that the two sometimes isn't a beneficial symbiotic relationship. We also here the “classic beauty” label applied to certain women but not necessarily a "classic pretty" label. Beautiful is also applied to any age as well. It has a longer lifespan than pretty. Pretty has a shelf life, it only last from the teen years to age 40. We have come to EXPECT, and I emphasis this word in bold caps because of societal norms, that women should always leave ho,e looking a certain way. The cosmetic industry rakes in billions for hair care, coloring, makeup, anti-aging creams, Botox injection, plastic surgery, liposuction surgery, breast augmentation and it just go on and on with new ways in making women have self-esteem issues. The horror stories from botched plastic surgery procedures has been a constant over the years or just the way the person turned out after the procedure where the person is filled with regret because the alteration is so sever that they don't look anything like their former self.

And it is not always the men who are seeking these perfections in women, it is women who are doing this to themselves. Women magazines are the patient zero to the culture of seeking a perfected look. In it's heyday, how many women sought out the Jennifer Aniston aka “The Rachel” haircut? It was profiled and wrote up many times in these magazines for women to go out and get this haircut because it gave them a sense of being Jennifer Aniston even if they weren't her. And that is just one example. Multiply the numbers when you have millions teen girls wanting to emulate their favorite pop star. Every award ceremony where the red carpet parade of women celebrities are asked what are they wearing and the next day, the knockoff dresses hit the stores. Being beautiful and pretty is expensive.

But why are we wired in this fashion to look for the beautiful and the pretty? Scientist have concluded that what makes a person attractive is the symmetry of the facial features. The more balance the face is, the more attractive the person is for the beholder.

There is also the debate of what word is better to calla woman, pretty or beautiful? The connotation is that women view the word pretty as a demeaning term while beautiful has more sustainability and respect attached to it. The women may be right about that but don't punish the men for using the word pretty because we didn't get the memo about which word is better. I personally like to use the word beautiful when describing a woman and pretty when describing children. If you're fortunate pretty transitions into beautiful if you have been blessed with the right genes. But that's not a true statement either, I've seen ugly people have pretty children. And in a recent study, researchers at the University of Nevada pay more attention to attractive teachers versus the non attractive teachers because they see then attractive ones as being more competent. But isn't that always the case with attractive people, they achieve more in life based on their looks. As a person with flaws, you may be more talented, smarter, and outgoing but you lack something special that distinguish you from the rest of the mongrel horde, being attractive. So you languish through life relegated as an “also ran” individual not reaching your full potential. And so you question the fairness of life.

We are strange creatures of all of God's creatures. The only reason we have an ugly dog contest is that we are the ones making that determination. Dogs don't see other dogs as ugly, just a dog. They will mate with it regardless of the appearance. But we humans with the big brains, we see something that's not attractive and declare that we won't touch that, not even with your dick or pussy.

I have seen beautiful people with ugly personalities. It's what makes them unattractive. Some pop stars come to mind because they think their looks excuse their behavior. And there are some beautiful people who thought their looks would help in their crimes ranging from Jodi Arias who murdered her boyfriend to Debra LaFave for having a sexual relationship with one of her students and who infamously said that she was too pretty for prison. If you Google 'Hot teachers have sex with Students', you'll get a list of at least 50 teachers or educators who performed such acts because they thought their looks would exempt them from prosecution or at the least, reduce their punishment.

And this debate will move on into the next decade and on and on, the subjectivity of beautiful and pretty and all of the adjectives that deals with attractiveness. The beautiful and the pretty will eventually fade to gray and a new generation will take their place. That is the course of life. I wonder if Adam ever called Eve beautiful or pretty? Only God knows.

Donald J. Trump: The 2016 Gold Medal Winner for White Male Arrogance

Hillary Clinton Takes the Silver

During the run up to the Iraqi invasion by the U.S. military under the then George W. Bush administration, I had noticed this level of coarseness that went dormant for a while but seems to be back in full bloom under this administration. This dormant coarseness had been fully awaken by none other than Vice President Dick Cheney when he had taken the position that the U.S. Forces would be “greeted as liberators” as it related to the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq. That was a big balls statement to make. What politician would come out and say something like that? Was it chutzpah, was it gall or was it simply plain old white male arrogance? Had all the data been collected that would confirm that this would be a true statement? Were the Iraqi people so enamored by the impending invasion that by the sheer first contact with American soldiers that the Iraqi people would swoon and sway to the Coalition Forces as if they were at an Adele concert. Well, that didn't happen. In fact, a lot of things that was suppose to happen didn't happen according to the after action reports.

At the core to all of what went wrong in the Iraqi war and up until now is attributed to one thing at the crux of the war, white male arrogance. White male arrogance looms large in certain powerful sectors if you are in power. Donald Trump suffers from white male arrogance. He's infected with it. He grew up with it and it is so ingrained into his personality, he can't seem to distinguish his ego from his arrogance from his benevolence. There are people who have come to judge him on his arrogance but many are blinded by their own arrogance because his arrogance has become the gold medal standard of arrogance. And because is arrogance is so profound, it overshadows their own arrogance as they attempt to thwart his campaign by trying to find ways around it so as to ensure that their close circle of power is not damaged by his arrogance.

Hillary Clinton has arrogance too. Even though it's classified as white male arrogance, she suffers from it as well. Her arrogance began in Arkansas. We soon realized that her style of arrogance comes accessorized with lipstick and earrings. We were subject to billing records from her old Rose Law Firm that mysteriously shows up in a room at the White House and nobody had an answer as to who put them there? We had a vast right wing conspiracy as she described it with the attacks against on her husband and president, Bill Clinton, when he lied about his involvement with a White House intern. She was cavalier and arrogant with a news agency when they sat down with her to discuss the Whitewater investigation where she expounded the phrase,”would of, could of, should of” in recalling the events of that time and her involvement of that situation. Fast forward to now and that attitude remains the same with her Benghazi subcommittee hearings and the bungling of her server and classified emails.

So, where does white male arrogance come from? It's been with us for centuries. Wars have been started based on arrogance. Rome and The Caesars ruled with arrogance. The British Empire had teams of arrogance in many skirmishes including with the U.S. during the Revolutionary War. Union soldier General George Armstrong Custer's arrogance with defeating Native American tribes led to his demise at Little Bighorn. Slave owners were filled with arrogance. Richard Nixon was an arrogant president that was revealed with his elaborate taping system recording his conversation with others and how he personally felt about the person or issue. His arrogance led to the downfall of his presidency and jail time for others involved with the Watergate cover up and break in. 

And while Vice President Dick Cheney became the standard bearer and current bronze holder and poster boy for today's white make arrogance, his protege, President George W. Bush, while not as arrogant, did get an honorable mention for what he said after he was reelected for a second term in office when he said that the American people gave him capital to do what he needed in continuing his war campaign and failed hunt for Osama bin Laden. He failed to interpret and understand what the reelection really meant and it wasn't to freely give him capital that eventually led to the biggest financial disaster of the 21^st century. 

 And on a side note, you have to wonder if arrogance played its hand with U.S. Olympic medal winner Ryan Lochte or maybe it was just plain old stupidity with a hint of arrogance?

Arrogance will be judged accordingly. In history, it may have served some to victory as well as in defeat. Donald Trump's arrogance is built on flawed grounds. He had no struggles growing up, no Horatio Alger type of rags to riches story that the common man and woman could relate to. His life is all about business not public service and it bleeds through every ounce of the man. Donald Trump must come to terms that this isn't the same world that he wants to hold on to and he knows this. He is not a stupid man. He has chosen to now ignore the poll numbers but was willing to acknowledge them when the numbers were in his favor. You cannot have it both ways, Donald Trump, but the arrogance that you evoke blinds what lies beneath which may be a responsible and genuine person. We may never know. Arrogance is a hard mask to remove after you've worn it so proudly.

The Lesser Despicable Me

So now we are in the mean season of presidential politics. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Tea Party, Sanderites, whatever your leaning may be, we are in it drowning under the rhetoric of old guard jingoism for the Democrats and outright fear mongering from a candidate that has no bounds and has a gift for letting his foot land in his mouth on way too many occasions. So, who would you choose, these lesser of two evils?

Hillary Clinton has been around for decades. She's like that infection that just won't go away. You'd think that when her husband, Bill, was president for eight years that she would fold up the tent and call it a day. Prior to that, she was a governor's wife. Being First Lady had it's moments but she had bigger ambitions. She just didn't want to bake the cookies or plant the flowers, she wanted to make policies. And try as she might, she did just that but was met with fierce opposition. After all, she wasn't voted into office to make policy, her husband was. Was she overstepping her boundaries? For a lot of people in the Washington beltway, she was doing just that. She wasn't making any friends real fast. But that was the pattern before the ascended to the White House. Bill and Hillary Clinton has always been surrounded with innuendos and speculation about their business and personal dealings. There was always the constant rumors about Bill's roving eyes and hands and mouth and other bodily parts. Women came forth to pronounce Bill's attempts at forcing sex on them or just plain out having a sexual relationship with the man. Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers are the most noteworthy of the women who came forth in the beginning against him for sexual harassment and for having an affair respectively. And when the youthful Monica Lewinsky was outed as the White House intern who obliged Bill Clinton with oral favors, you'd think that this would be the thing that would derail them but it didn't.

Hillary Clinton was on the defensive. None of this was true. Even Bill Clinton infamously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” in a finger pointing speech to the public. As lies would go, that's right next to Richard Nixon's “I'm not a crook”. But Hillary took the prize by going on national television to decry a “vast right wing conspiracy.” But in the end, the truth and DNA evidence by way of a semen stained dress, bore out. You would think after all of Bill's questionable behavior and this huge stain on the Oval Office that she would have walked away, but she didn't. No one could figure out why she stayed?

But you have to go back to the Whitewater episode and that first round of behavior. Whitewater was a real estate deal that went wrong for a lot of people. Bill and Hillary were players in the game who became insulated with, some would feel, the help of Jim and Susan McDougal, owner of the Madison Guaranty Saving and Loan, that conducted the transaction for the Whitewater land deal. Bill and Hillary and Jim and Susan were thick together and were from the old school were loyalty is rewarded. Jim and Susan took the fall for Whitewater. Bill and Hillary enjoyed the perks of the White House. Susan served time. Bill pardoned her.

For those who still remember that time, one of the things that stood out during that time was the sit down interview Hillary did with a news outlet and this is where her pure arrogance and white privilege shown true. When asked of her practice as an attorney during the Whitewater era, somewhere in that response was “would of, could of, should of” in such a cavalier, I don't give a rat's ass way of saying you have nothing on me and I am untouchable. It was the equivalent of “fuck you, fuck your horse you rode in on”. And it was strange that her law firm's billing records mysteriously shows up in a White House room and nobody has a clue as to how they got there. After all, this is the White House, the most secure office on the planet where everything and everyone is monitored and yet, law firm billing records show up out of nowhere. And you wonder why she has bad poll numbers when it comes to trust. Sixty-eight percent of the people find her untrustworthy. The Clinton administration gave us Whitewater, Travel-gate, haircut-gate, renting out the Lincoln bedroom for big campaign donors and Monica Lewinsky. That's enough for three presidents.

So they move out and on from the White House. They create a foundation, Hillary decides to be a carpetbagger New Yorker and runs for the Senate and wins. The Clinton raked in the dough with speaking fees and donations. She then wants to run for president the first time out and assumes the position that she is entitled to this ascension to the throne. But wait, some upstart wants to horn in on her rise to the top. That upstart is junior senator Barack Obama. She dismisses him from the start but wait, there are rumblings on the way to the throne. It seems that Obama has legs in this fight. He challenge her and Bill. How dare he get in the way of Hillary. Word gets back to Obama that he should wait his turn, it's Hillary's time in the sun. Bill I going off on a tangent. But we've seen Bill's tyrannical behavior before. We get a glimpse of his tirade when he first ran for office. And we see it again we he is combative with the late ABC News journalist, Peter Jennings, when Peter confronts him on the issues of his administration and the scandals. It is interesting to see that being contrite wasn't Bill's approach when he was caught in the scandal and accepting responsibility for it rather than standing fast on your ground and maneuvering around the words as if your were avoiding land mines. Who can forget when Bill Clinton, in his deposition said, “It depends upon what the meaning of 's' is”. That was the moment the general public witness the ultimate hubris of who this man was in all of his spectacular glory.

When she ran for president the first time, she tried to make herself a sympathetic victim of the old boys network. She made the claim that she was under sniper fire while in Bosnia was untrue. Brian Williams made some similar statement that got him booted from the anchor chair at NBC News. But Hillary is a crafty politician. She schemes, she plots, she has allies laying in the wings waiting to do her bidding. She knows how the machine works. If you need her to cry, she cries. Boom, a bump in the polls. She is human, she is caring. But is she likable. During that time, Obama made the statement to her that she's “likable enough”. What that meant spoke to her coldness to things. She will go along with what is popular but not what is right. She went along with the Iraq war and could not envision it down the road of what the consequences would lead to. She now calls that decision a mistake. She's had a lot of those in her career, “mistakes”.

She loses out to Obama for the presidency. He hires her own as Secretary of State. She still hasn't left the public eye at all. You can see the wheels turning in her eyes as she takes that position with ulterior motives at play. In some aspect, she reminds you of Livia, Augustus Caesar's plotting and scheming wife from I, Claudius. Every move is calculating, every move is deadly, she strikes like a snake but you don't see it coming, it's stealthy. The only thing she is doing is allowing Donald Trump to play right into her hands. He is letting his mouth derail any chance of a determinable challenge to the presidency. Clinton's latest mistake has been the email server scandal. While Hillary is steady grinning like the Cheshire Cat, Donald is imploding on his own narcissism.

Donald's run for the office was looked upon as a joke. After all, thus guy had made promises in the past that he would jump in a take a run for the office. And as the primaries rolled along and he kept, as Charlie Sheen would say, winning, he would become the presumptive challenger removing the likes of seasoned politicians like Jeb Bush. Along the way, he made enemies from all corners. He had enemies on the left, enemies on the right and enemies in between. He's alienated Muslims by wanting to bar them from entering the country because of the spate of terrorist acts and he wants to build a wall along the Mexican-Texas-California border to keep the illegal immigrants out and it doesn't improve the situation that he called many of them rapist and murderers. Maybe he was referring to the case of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez aka Angel Maturino Reséndiz, Rafael Resendez-Ramirez aka Angel Maturino Reséndiz, otherwise known as the Railroad Killer. He killed at least 15 people and sexually assaulted many of the female victims. But that doesn't make every Mexican national a murderer or rapist just like not every billionaire is a major league asshole with a god complex.

Donald has been in business for all of his adult life. He treats people in a business like manner. He treats deals in the same way. He knows how to work the system and he knows when to file for bankruptcy when it fits his agenda. Running a business, however, is not the same as running a government. The politicians he offended, should he win the office, are the same he needs to work with in order to get anything accomplished. It's the necessary evil that's been in play long before Donald was a gleam in his father 's eye. The art of the deal in politics will not be some 384 page manifesto of glad handing your opponent from across the aisle. It's more like The Godfather, you make an offer that your opponent can't refuse. With business, as in politics, everything is The Godfather, leave the gun, take the cannoli.

Donald must love the taste of his feet. He keeps it in there all the time. But is he the better candidate when comparing the two? I've stopped listening to both candidates. Whenever any of them show up on the screen, I hit the mute button. I don't want to hear them speak. All of it is contentious rhetoric. Nobody is saying anything that needs to be said. It's just a snipe hunt of the lowest form. Of bullying and grandstanding. Hillary refuses to go away. She's been in our faces for over twenty years. We've seen her aged from a smart dress wearing, long flowing hair woman to a mom haircut, pants suit wearing, androgynous being with heavy bags under her eyes who needs to stop grinning at everyone with those teeth. Donald has turned out to be a disappointment. I don;t see him turning it around anytime soon. The likelihood of either one of them becoming president is a nightmare. Was there anyone else who could have ran for the Democratic party without Hillary's machine corrupting the system? Bernie Sander's sure felt that one after it was disclosed that his own party conspired to keep him alienated from reaching the influence of party leaders. It's no telling what more we will find out with the additional Wiki leaks coming from the breach of the DNC computers? Hillary and Bill have learned not to leave fingerprints behind from their past dealings. With the exception of one infamous stain, maybe there might be another.