Oh please

Marvelous Mitt must be desperate to have something scary to say to distract Republicans from the religious wedge issues the public is getting tired of. He'd rather not talk about religion anyway and he needs of course, to distract from the dumb things he keeps saying. So he's had to come up with something dumber, if not quite original.

Remember when Darth Cheney told us in solemn tones that "Obama will be tested" and that there would be an onslaught of terrorist attacks should we be so foolish as to elect him; that candy-ass, ultra-liberal crypto-pacifist, watermelon stealing coward? Well Republicans may not remember, but we all know the result - more terrorists killed than ever and that includes Osama bin Laden. I think he's passed the test.

No, he didn't take our guns, he didn't make capitalism or Christianity illegal, he didn't appoint Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State and he didn't give us a huge middle class tax increase or a confiscatory corporate tax rate. He didn't institute Sharia law. In fact he's usually done the opposite of what the Chicken Littles have been squawking about for 4 years now.

So a return to objective reality not being possible when your entire platform and your strongest base are pickled in delusion and ignorance, what option does he have but to go nuclear? That's right, if we re-elect the president, the world will be blown up in a nuclear holocaust says Mr. Bluster of the plastic face.

" If I’m president, that will not happen. If we re-elect Barack Obama it will.”

I couldn't make this shit up, but then, I couldn't make this Mitt up. I couldn't vote for him either.

“Ahmadinejad having fissile material that he can give to Hezbollah, Hamas, and that they can bring into Latin America, and that they can potentially bring across the border into the United States to let off dirty bombs here — or more sophisticated bombs here.”

Sure Mitt, Just like Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were potentially going to be smuggled into Peoria in a briefcase even though he had none, nor the means to make them, and we had to blow a few trillion and kill nearly a million to wipe him out -- and why is Obama going to get us into a nuclear war? Why, says make it up as you go along Mitt, because he hasn't been threatening to blow Iran off the surface of the planet for even thinking about it and possibly because according to the Secretary of Defense, Iran hasn't been doing much more than thinking and blustering about building one.

"Potentially." It's such a great word to weave a plot around. Potentially I'm an NBA linebacker who writes music like Mozart and travels the world in his magic submarine fighting for justice. Is Romney potentially a President? Oh please.

Plan B From Outer Space

It's hard to observe the growing and comical chaos in the GOP without thinking of B movie icon Ed Wood and his Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein space aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop evil men from creating the 'Solaranite' bomb. With the Republican circus trying to breathe life into mouldering, uncouth candidates reciting ancient and eldritch formulae to fight the evil Bill of Rights, secularism and the Obama Bomb, it's harder and harder to avoid the suspicion that this is only a movie.

With the economy showing signs of recovery and the ability to substantiate the hysterical portraits of Obama as a Kenyan Communist, Indonesian Socialist ally of big banks, Wall Street and the World Caliphate fading, the GOP must feel like Ed Wood trying to piece together a movie with $273.50 left in the checking account and an unwritten plot. The rising star candidate and the great white hope is making such a fuss about the need for a gospel-based theocracy with sex by permission only that any platform they can cobble together at this point would be so far beyond city limits and so rickety it can't support itself much less a coherent and discernable political position.

Whispers are being heard, CNN.com writes today, about coming up with a new candidate for the GOP ticket and ditching the Chameleon, the Worm and the cut-rate Rasputin. Finding any brand new candidate with any potential of being passed of as sane or decent (if not quite qualified) is remote, as the Tea Party element and the Holy Rollers simply won't accept him any more than they did Huntsman. The rest of the black-hearted Plutocrats aren't going to support Ron Paul and even if they could bring back Reagan from the dead, he wouldn't pass muster as a Conservative in today's party. Who ya gonna call?

The prospect of an open convention with desperate delegates acting like football hooligans in Tampa this August must have Republican strategists doubled over with cramps trying to come up with a plan B before the Grand Old Barrel goes over the falls in November.

With an inability to field a credible candidate so late in the game, the voters are going to have to reconsider a blind allegiance to a party that can't run itself much less a complex 21st century superpower.

Sex. Lies and Santorum

"He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,”

lied Republican candidate Rick Santorum to an assemblage of Tea Bag idiots immediately after having categorized President Obama's "values" and his "agenda"as being

“not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,”

Yes, some phony ideal is on the agenda. A phony ideal involving liberty, Democracy and a constitution that never mentions God or gods or scriptures of any religion and declares that there shall be no religion in government. Science is a phony ideal to sanctimonious Santorum too because we all know that Senators Jesus, Mary and Joseph agree with the oil companies and that the president's job, as 'Rick' told the 'baggers, is to keep gas prices down (and the subsidies up, no doubt.)

No sir, all that Washington, Jefferson and Madison secular prattle is phony and if we're looking for full employment, a decent quality of life and personal liberty you must turn to The Christian Scriptures which forbid us to charge interest on a loan or obtain a divorce or marry whom we will or even to enjoy sex when it isn't only for making babies. Some churches I won't mention have interpreted it to demand a king chosen of God rather than an elected government, but don't bother Rick with that. It's already on his agenda.

So why is this sex-fearing, woman hating, half-witted fake theologian; this lame-brained Longinus and meretricious medievalist mewling about theology while pronouncing Ernulphian maledictions on what he pretends are President Obama's values, cursing them one by one? Because theological statements don't have to be true, you see; don't have to be supported by evidence and are easily and frequently used to do horrible things to people. Cognitively impaired, confused and historically ignorant "conservatives" seem pre-lubricated to receive ecclesiastical wisdom without discomfort and Faith invents facts as well as it rejects them to the despair of brother Ockham.

So Obama, who thinks a Harvard Law degree makes him as good as a white. Christian man, agrees with Justice Scalia that religious freedom does not legalize acts done in the name of religion and yet, conservatives still want to shove the notion that he's a radical, Liberal, Christian-hating Sodomite Commie up the national hoo-ha and true to form, the 'baggers assume the position and take it.

How can any curse suffice?

Virginia, the Rape Me State

Sic Semper Tyrannus is the motto of the State of Virginia, but as with any matters involving Republicans, a government is not a tyranny if it subjugates individual liberty to the prejudices and perverted morals of the Religious Right. I read over at The Impolitic that Virginia passed a law last week forcing any woman seeking a legal abortion to have an ultrasound examination. For those who don't know, this means that for a pregnancy in the first trimester, she must, by law, have a probe inserted into her vagina and maneuvered around by a technician until an ultrasound image satisfactory to the state is produced. As Libby points out, without that state mandate, this meets a general description of rape.

It doesn't take much to imagine the feelings, for example, of a 14 year old rape victim being violated a second time by the accursed state that murdered Lincoln and had no reservations about taking children from their mothers and selling them -- or raping those mothers for that matter. It's a state that talks a lot about Jesus and distrusts those who don't. It's a state wherein people tend to like Rick Santorum and others who have a lot to say about what consenting adults can do with what and with which and to whom -- and talk about Jesus and small government a lot.

Keep in mind, this is not an examination done for a medical reason. It's not done to protect the public from a disease or to protect the woman to whom it's being done. It's not something that one can opt out of. It's an act of intimidation and a deliberate act of humiliation. It was passed because of the religious objections of men who were elected to represent everyone, but instead represent preachers and priests -- and in a state that has just decided that a single cell has civil rights but a breathing female of child bearing age has not, can't we be excused for wondering whether these "conservatives" will either ban contraception soon or require some other humiliating procedure before allowing it?

Can't I be excused for seeing this insane drive to bring back the horrors of medieval Europe in high-tech form to a nation that was formed by repugnance for it as anything at all but Conservative?

Where is the outrage from actual conservatives? You know, those people who insist on a government too weak to do anything but leave us alone. I guess when those sentiments put them in a light that makes them seem too much like Liberals who designed a government that must leave us alone and respects the sanctity of our persons, our bodies, our homes and our rights, they scurry like roaches when the lights are switched on. They scurry because they're the same roaches who supported the horror of slavery, the obscenity of racism and are still at war with the rights of women and a government that protects them.

Conservatives, and this liberal, often decry the trend, falsely identified as Liberal, toward seeking safety by making the public helpless and dependent on authority, but it's in conservative strongholds like the secessionist states that we see just how much that obscene ecclesiastical tyranny has made the weakest and most vulnerable totally dependent upon the state in the most personal way. Small government my ass, it's the old Confederacy out of it's coffin like a putrefying zombie, its pockets filled with church money, corporate money, the money of tyrants staggering toward Washington to eat your freedom.

Mars needs women

It's an odd fact that, for some male astronauts like former Space Station resident Mike Barratt, spending 6 months without gravity produces changes in vision that often are irreversible. He went up nearsighted and needing glasses for distance and came down eagle eyed and needing reading glasses. His condition seems permanent. The phenomenon is under serious study at NASA which is concerned that the possibility of a long trip to Mars might just carry the risk of blindness. Just why it happens and whether or not it can be prevented may be, according to CNN.com, the determining question as to "whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds."

Prolonged weightlessness causes papilledema -- a swelling of the optic nerve for about half the male astronauts, some of whom recover and others, like Barratt do not. Women seem to be immune. Of course another question that doesn't seem to be addressed here is why we don't just hire more female astronauts? Sometimes we obsess so much about a puzzling matter that we neglect to look at obvious alternatives.

Every sperm is a baby

It will always be impossible to convince all religious people that religion isn't the mother of religious fanaticism and of the self-righteousness that makes fanaticism so dangerous. In fact they may be right in that such ego disorders seem to be a general human failing, albeit one that so often finds a home in Churches, Mosques and Synagogues -- but that doesn't soften the fear that from the frustration believers in old religions feel about the implacable advance of what I like to call enlightenment, a movement will arise like movements in the past to overthrow an age of reason and science and relative freedom.

"any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”


There seems to be nothing in that statement that might hint it did not originate in the 5th century before the Christian era and nothing to suggest that it wasn't a measure introduced by a Republican, but alas, neither is true. Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson is a Democrat and she has introduced an amendment to pending Senate Bill 1433, a typical "life begins at conception" bill, that says that the resulting fetus

“at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Ms. Johnson wants to extend that right to a sperm cell, although apparently she thinks egg cells are exempt -- since otherwise not getting pregnant might also be as murderous as masturbation. Still, the "every sperm is a baby" bill doesn't have a chance, but apparently Rick Santorum does and probably for few other reasons than his own ridiculous positions on interfering with private lives in the name of small government and Big Religion. Santorum has attracted a plurality of Republican loonies in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota.

It's hard to think that Rick has a real shot at the presidency, but you know, I've been looking at Costa Rica lately.

I'm generally very intolerant of the "both sides are equally bad" arguments that depend on fraudulent accounting and false equivalence to forgive the side with the preponderance of guilt, but Geez - what does it say about Oklahoma Democrats that she is allowed to speak for them?

Campaign logic

Argumentum ad ignorentiam: "appeal to ignorance" (where "ignorance" stands for: "lack of evidence to the contrary") Argument from ignorance may be used as a rationalization by a person who realizes that he has no reason for holding the belief that he does.

Argumentum ad Obaminem: special case of above or appeal to ignorance (where "ignorance" stands for: " all evidence to the contrary") May be used as a rationalization for libel or slander or accusation without evidence or most commonly: strongly contrary to all evidence or logic. An argument from authority in the absence of authority. Used frequently by Republican propagandists.

Argumentum ad Republican: A special pleading. It's only radical when Liberals like it or conversely: that argument doesn't apply to Republicans.

________________________

Forget the Superbowl commercials or the half-time show. Forget football. The most entertaining event of Superbowl Sunday was Newt Gingrich trying to convince his audience that Barack Obama is at war with the Catholic Church. Parroting the sentiment that a secular government refusing to bow to ecclesiastical pressure as the secular constitution demands, is a declaration of war, Newt, Gingrich, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sunday, said the decision represented

“a radical Obama administration imposing secular rules on religion.”

Well I hate to bring it up, lest anyone esteem me to be needlessly argumentative, but all religious people and their organizations have always been subject to the secular law of the land and by constitutional law, none of us can be held to any religious restrictions, taboos or responsibilities by the government. You see, that's why we don't have laws about blasphemy and punishment for heretics. That's why we're not held to the Biblical command against eating Cheeseburgers or chitterlings or watching football on Sunday - or divorce which of course Newt knows as well -- just as we know by all evidence that Newt is the consummate opportunist and a veritable prince of duplicity.

Yes, of course people are very protective of their beliefs and rituals and practices and in our country as well as in most of the civilized world, they are allowed to be and protected in that right but that's only because there are no official religious laws and no special protection for church policies that do not comply with our secular laws and our rights and our protection from faith-based tyranny. Newt is following in the muddy footprints of those who continually argue against the religious neutrality and secular nature of our Republic in spite of all evidence and despite the law itself.

Please forgive me for stating the obvious and writing as if for a child, but we're talking about Newt Gingrich here and I may be talking to some who do indeed think the government should indeed take such a dim view of our personal liberty as to allow clergymen to deny us birth control or having music on Sunday or divorce or living where and with whom we please. In many places they did after all get away with that for years.

We're talking about Newt Gingrich here who, after playing with several religions in his effort to bed many women including his own high school teacher, presumes not only to speak for but to dictate Church dogma to Roman Catholics who in very large part do not agree with it.

"Every time you turn around secular government is closing in on and shrinking the rights of religious America,”

Said Newt -- who has turned around about 200 years too late. The right of "Religious America" to be the law of the land by diktat was eliminated by the first Amendment, if the rage against such tyranny by the Founding Fathers wasn't already enough to put a stop to it.

In fact, 98% -- nearly all American Catholic women who have sex have used "forbidden" birth control methods and a solid majority think the Church policy is wrong. I don't think they're going to back this flim-flam Lothario who while indulging in it himself, tried to impeach a president for extra-marital fellatio in any bid to have Washington embargo the local drug store in the name of religious "freedom." Not any more than they would have the government outlaw the kind of bed hopping, marital leapfrogging Gingrich is noted for even if they frown on it. Don't we wonder why Newt thinks Catholics are so damn stupid that they won't notice he's arguing both sides of the question?

Organized religion is about many things, but personal choice and freedom of thought has never been thought of highly, to say the least, by any of them. To have to explain to someone with a Doctorate and a writer of history books, something a slow schoolboy should know, that professed belief or membership in some religious group does not convey legal authority in the US is laughable, but of course Newt knows it. He knows a principle and constitutional law that's been around since our beginning isn't radical and it isn't about Obama. He knows he's a lair even if he doesn't know he's a disgrace. I think the voters know too.

Will the real Jesus please stand up?

“But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,”

Said the President of the United States to a nation fulsomely fond of telling us that not only were our founding fathers fundamentalist Christians, but that our laws are really a re-statement of the Bible and that we are a Nation under God -- whatever that's supposed to mean.

Apparently it doesn't mean that a man with an African father who can't be considered a "real"American or a "real" Christian and most assuredly not a "real" president can presume to have such values in a country in which they have almost always been honored in the breach. Why that boy must think he's not only as good as the rest of us to whom America was given, but he must think he's Jesus himself if he presumes to quote from the book that belongs to us as white people.

"Someone needs to remind the president that there was only one person who walked on water, and he did not occupy the Oval Office.”

said the reprehensible Orrin Hatch (Hypocrite-Utah) at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday.

No Orrin, those Christian values you pretend to aren't any different than Muslim or Jewish values with respect to the love of justice and our fellow humans and mocking anyone for attempting to put them into action doesn't allow one to walk on water, even if one actually is Jesus of Nazareth. Walking on, wading through and bathing oneself in shit however makes you just another lump in the cesspool and whatever magic ceremony you perform or whatever special underwear you put on, you're an enemy of everything any good man stands for whether he be Jesus or Jefferson.

Memory and Irony

The jobless rate has declined to 8.3% according to the latest reports -- well below the Reagan rate and the lowest in three years after adding about a quarter million Jobs this January alone. That's a quarter of a million more in one month than were added under eight years of Republican flim-flam economics. The markets are booming, but we can be sure to hear nothing but sneer, snark, scoff and panicked pessimism from fact-free America and its electronic Svengali, Fox News.

I'm hesitant to make too much of it or to extrapolate too far, but unlike every Republican I talk to, I am willing to remember the Bush years when the air was full of nonsense about how Democrats were pessimists and Republicans were optimists and bullish on the economy. Of course it would be fun to mock the Fox News survey that gave "proof" that Liberals were trying to damage the vibrant economy with gloomy reports during the Bush years and of course the prophets of doom were quite right although not one of Fox's friends seems to remember, because after all, this is Obama's recession and Bush had nothing to do with it and the predictably dilatory nature of the trailing indicator -- the unemployment rate -- proves that it's all going to hell any time now.

A sense of irony would make fertile fields for all kinds of sardonic humor, since with the economy steadily improving, having already this year added more jobs than were added during the entire Bush administration (unless you want to count all the government jobs created by bloating the size and expense of our government,) they're still pretending the man who inherited this disaster caused it. But if there's any essence at all to American Conservatism, it must involve total blindness to the most glaring irony. They're still insisting that continuing what brought it on would end it quickly if only we'd have elected an empty headed beauty contest runner up and a doddering old man who couldn't remember his address but was sure the crash wasn't actually happening.

And while we're talking about irony, do we care to speculate about how many would have been lost if General Motors had disappeared and how many are working now that GM is again the worlds largest automaker? No, that investment is spending, while the massive expenses of Bush's prescription drug plan written by and for the drug companies increases as the population ages isn't even to be discussed -- and of course people are only getting older because of "that Obama's policies" hard as they are to discern. If I were a Republican you can damn well bet I'd be blind to the irony too as well as the outright dishonesty.

Things are looking at least a bit better of late and at a rate proportional to the improvement, the apocalyptic predictions increase. The Mayan end times, the Rapture, the death of the Dollar and the Zombie Apocalypse hold fewer horrors than are being predicted daily as the people who insist every time they hold the White House, that the government cannot create jobs and should not try, scream themselves hoarse nonetheless about jobs, jobs, jobs, dangling that elusive carrot in front of the desperate.

It's a hell of a thing to remember well, and that's why I'm sure amnesia, like ironic obtuseness is a necessary component of the conservative mind. It's a hell of a thing to be the only one to remember that "debt doesn't matter" was the keystone of Republican economics since Reagan and right up to the disaster of 2007 because tax breaks for the people who put all their windfalls into real estate, hedge funds and offshore accounts in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and the Caymans would boost the economy so much, the debt would wither away in Marxist style.

Jobs, jobs, jobs and debt, debt debt in the relentless Republican ostinato like drumbeats in some dark jungle night, as though debt did very much matter and matter more than the ability to pay it off -- as though paying Bush's bills and saving the financial structure of our country with a far smaller amount of money than the shill for Goldman Sachs Bush used for a treasury secretary were an invitation to disaster rather than fiscal responsibility -- as though a three trillion dollar war to be payed for by magic; massive bailout packages without accountability and unprecedented spending weren't things the Democrats were howling helplessly about for 8 years.

Increased military spending along with an amazing record of eliminating al Qaeda means Obama is "slashing the military." Allowing increased freedom to carry weapons means he's a "gun grabber." Arresting and deporting more illegal aliens than Bush means he's "pro-illegal." Giving most Americans a tax break means he raised taxes, and although every day I have to listen to some Republican blowhard telling me he hates "Obamas policies" not one has been able to come up with a policy that actually exists -- that glib trope having become nothing more than the password to the club they think every white man belongs to.

No, sure they don't remember nor do they see the irony. Like Janus, they look both forward and back to see the easiest way to slither away from accountability and as and if the economy slowly improves and the spectre of Depression recedes, they'll continue to boom and bellow and snicker and sneer without any memory of how they accused Democrats of "hating America" even though all those dire predictions we made for 8 years came true while none of theirs ever materialized.

New Rules, Old Enemies

Heresy: from Greek αἵρεσις, which originally meant "choice."


Sometimes I think that without their preoccupation with the "sinfulness" of human sexuality, all Western religions and some others as well, would be unrecognizable. For a Secular Humanist like me, it's difficult to understand this because the allegedly universal and inescapable condition of being a 'sinner' from birth is entirely separate from the commission of acts that harm others or their property. Indeed, harming others and their property is often fulsomely praised as something done in service of some rather helpless or lazy deity who would, were he able to act on his own, punish people for their very thoughts and the unhistorical actions of mythological ancestors. To many and perhaps most, even thinking about sex can be a 'sin' almost on a par with having sex without clerical approval. To some, sex and sin are nearly synonymous. God help the government that lets us make our own choices.

Perhaps the action of a number of Roman Catholic bishops last weekend won't be much heeded by the congregations to whom it was directed, but the letter, read aloud from thousands of pulpits last Sunday told the faithful that President Obama has

“cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

Now how has he done that? Well, by asserting that freedom of religion does not include the freedom of religious organizations to illegally deprive others of their freedom: the freedom to plan whether or not and when to procreate, the freedom to choose.

Of course the sentiment isn't exclusively Roman; evangelicals and many others seem to make a lot of noise about the first amendment being a violation of the first amendment and of course again, such cognitive contradiction, to put it politely, is the rock upon which the edifice is built. But obviously the decision of the Administration to stand by the Affordable Care Act which requires virtually all private insurance policies to cover family planning -- including female contraceptives, essentially guaranteeing near universal access to birth control, is being sold as the precise opposite of what it is. To some Bishops at least the first amendment guarantees an infringement of civil rights by religious authority. The anti-establishment clause means the opposite of what it says and it's our God given right to have our lives limited by clergymen.

“People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights"

wrote Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in one of the numerous letters, reeking of dishonesty, illogic and lust for power -- as if freedom of religion meant ecclesiastical tyranny embedded within civil government.

What's at issue is a provision that says that unless a religious organization hires its own members exclusively, those employees: janitors, gardeners, secretaries, are entitled as first class citizens to access to birth control through their health insurers. All other organizations, including non-profits run by religious groups that hire based upon non-discrimination policies, must enact the new rule by August 1, 2013.

Now, I'm sure to be accused of being all sorts of things, including a bigot and an arrogant Humanist, but since virtually all the Roman Catholics I know seem to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the virtuousness and infallibility of Church men, perhaps I shouldn't make too much of this desperate appeal to medieval mores, but there are plenty of people of faith who don't and religious, economic and social fundamentalism -- and the stupidity on which it thrives -- are no less dangerous than when Jefferson and Madison wrote about it.

Jailhouse Rock.

"Well, victims have rights too," is the usual evasion given to the question of why the United States has more people in confinement or under correctional supervision than the Soviet Union under Stalin. Well, of course they do have rights, but it's hard to reach the notion that a victim of a crime, or the state which represents that victim has the right to do anything at all to satisfy the rage we feel when someone harms us or our property from that position. Even the harshest laws of classical antiquity were set in place to hinder the endless cycle of revenge.

Harder it is indeed to get to the level of punishment typical in our land for crimes that in fact harm no one at all: "crimes" that throughout the years include marrying outside the arbitrary dictates of dominant religions, drinking from the wrong faucet, having a beer in private or smoking the herb that makes you feel mellow and sleepy. Most hard to justify is the rage for "Zero Tolerance" that makes judges into clerks and executioners unable to apply reason or a sense of proportion as it relates to crime and punishment.

Imagine, as Adam Gopnik suggests in Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in the January 30th issue of New Yorker, "Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience." At least 50,000 men don't have to imagine it at the moment, they simply have to be conscious.

Although it's tapered off some recently, we've been given editorials and articles and TV harangues about how prison life is too "soft" for "Criminals" such as some teen who sent a naked picture on a cellphone to another teen and gets life in a cage -- or another unfortunate caught with marijuana who has to endure 10 or 20 degrading and terrifying years and lose his civil rights in perpetuity, but Prison life in the US is a veritable nightmare in comparison to what it is in places like Europe. 70,000 prisoners are raped in our prisons every year where HIV is widespread. Texas alone has sentenced more than 400 teenagers to life imprisonment.

My own state of Florida, with a governor who somehow escaped incarceration for having been involved in the largest Medicare swindle ever, is as I write this, trying to "privatize" Florida's prison system. Is that another way of washing conservative hands of blood or is it simply that to the conservative mind, being profitable makes it moral: a corporation locking up people and keeping the corporate bottom line healthy by squeezing convicts as well as punishing them?

Of course Florida, as many other states have done, turned to prison labor as a substitute for slavery after Liberals ended their horrific atrocities, locking up "vagrants" and selling their "slave" labor for private gain in much the same way as China is accused of when we try to seem better than they are.

" More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives"

says Gopnik and mass imprisonment has tainted our mass culture with affluent kids in shopping malls imitating prison dress and speech and tattoos. We wear our incarceration culture on the bodies of our children, like the mark of Cain.

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then."

Nor is it tapering off. The rate of incarceration is accelerating; tripling in the last couple of decades and with the tendency toward private slaveholder corporations, the comparison to the anti-bellum south is all the more frightening. We'r e being sold a southern sense of justice, suggests the author, and we sell it, as we sell our wars and our attacks on what we were taught were fundamental rights and even our attacks on reformers with appeals to rage. "If the accused had shot someone in your family, wouldn't you want to kill him?" asks the voice and of course I might, but fortunately for all of us, we have a system of laws, we have a civilization to prevent it. Indeed civilization exists as a brake on our base instincts, which instincts so often destroy it.

Is our current fascination with a withered government that thereby facilitates freedom in some magical way really compatible with a government so concerned with keeping all freedom away from so many people for ever expanding reasons? Or is the subjugation of such a huge number of people only a part of a vast scheme to subjugate most of us, to establish America as a vast plantation for the benefit of a very few slaveholders?

Perhaps not. Perhaps it's simply the fear in which we're all marinating in this safest period in history that's pickled our sense of justice; our fear of terrorists, dope fiends, predators, drunk drivers and heretics, but regardless of where the blame is put, we are, and continue to grow as a nation which more than any others, keeps people in cages and allows other people to profit from it.

Bring out the Bibles, bring out the guns, Jesus is coming to town

The headline in yesterday's paper summarizing the President's State of the Union message is 3/8 of an inch tall. The headline just under it, reading RICK SANTORUM RALLIES IN STUART is in bold face type and is much bigger. Welcome to the monkey house.

Santorum was here on Florida's Treasure Coast Tuesday, holding forth at the Community Christian Academy to parents and grade school students, a horror of which some are particularly proud. It's an "up-close look at politics in action," said school officials.

That live action, these politics, included a prayer by the 'Reverend' Dan Holland, affiliated with the school and the pastor of Community Baptist Church in Stuart, Florida.

"I like what he said in the South Carolina rally, where he said ' I come from a place where they have a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other'"

Rick Santorum doesn't need a script, because he really isn't saying much and with such an audience, it doesn't matter whether he makes sense or mangles facts or makes them up. Rick speaks from the pulpit and anything said Ex Cathedra will not be questioned by this crowd. Besides, it's precisely what they want to hear: Barack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, who hates capitalism, wants to take away what God wants you to keep to yourself and is destroying our natural order of things. Don't forget this is a religion that demands that women be subservient, hints that black people should stay in their place and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would vote for anything that hated Democrats.

Santorum's ever predictable message was about "family Values" "fiscal responsibility" and "ridding the White House of Barack Obama." One can take the last of the three as the real message since my idea of family values does not include veiled calls to armed crusade and lying about the economy.

An all-white group of 350 heard him say:

"we have to have a candidate who stands proudly, consistently, aggressively, forcefully for the values that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world."

Presumably that greatness was attained with Bibles and guns and anyone suggesting that we are in any way sinners, transgressors or less than perfect instruments of God's Christian ambitions, can go straight to Hell along with that apologist Obama.

They heard him howl about That Commie, apologist, freedom hating Obama bailing out Wall Street from the excesses and crimes the Republicans encouraged them in instead of using "free market forces" which would as any legitimate economist would likely tell you have brought that "greatest country in the history of the Universe" down to the level of Haiti. Still, the problem of galloping poverty isn't lack of resources, said Santorum, contradicting himself,

"the problem is in the home, the problem is in the churches, the problem is in the community. The people living in these woods are not the federal government's problem. . ."

Let's use poverty, disease and misery to fill the pews, because a just society is a commie, secular humanist Christ-hating society.

Perhaps he could have explained to me why the Republican's promise to provide jobs instead of food stamps while it's 'not the government's problem' isn't honest or consistent -- or how unlettered country folk with bibles and guns are going to help in the new anarchistic utopia he offers them -- but trying to present Rick Santorum as a rational candidate with any further agenda than dismantling all the rules that keep markets free, creating a new Christian aristocracy and most of all, hanging up that "White's Only" sign over the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a scam and a con and a farrago of flim-flam as great as any in the history of the world.

People like me can wonder how dismantling our entire economic system, refusing to pay the bills, can be called Conservatism, or any of the other radical, ultra-Chauvinistic, denialist and dishonest rhetoric that smells more like Attila's unwashed hordes, but the blue-hair church ladies, their God smitten and brainwashed children and the rest of the angry Community Christian Academics don't seem to care. There's just something wrong out there and they don't know what it is and the sick Mr. Rick and his sanctimonious rabble are at hand to point out the enemies and heretics for the burning.

SOPA Opera

Should the Senate bill called PIPA or the House version called SOPA emerge as the law of the land (and probably a few other lands as well) odds are you won't like it, whether you're a downloader of music or a blogger who may have borrowed a photo you found on Google or elsewhere. Neither bill is there to address the concerns of the public, but rather the (you guessed it) big corporations hell bent on retaining every last crumb, every last cent of potential profit from every word or image or sound they can claim as their own in perpetuity.

In my opinion, it's gone far past any position I could call reasonable. I've given many a guffaw when nearly every image one could call art has to be blurred out when shown on television and although I'm sure an effort will be made to blame yet another corporate triumph on "the Liberals" and of course "that Obama" this "intellectual property" and "artist's rights" crusade is a trend that started twenty years ago or more. There's always a noble purpose, of course -- like protecting the interests of widows and orphans of dead artists and writers and such noble purpose often devolves into huge lawsuits like the squabble between France and Spain as to which one can be the executor of the Salvador Dali estate in the absence of any widows or offspring. I remember the difficulty of using an image of a work of art to sell it because whoever owned the rights to a long dead artist's work might sue you even though your efforts were actually supporting the price of the commodity. It's nearly always about money and lawyers, no matter what it's dressed up as.

But my disdain for monster corporations stomping all over Congress screaming "mine, mine, mine" isn't my main concern. I'm more worried about the enforcement, which seems to allow huge fines for downloading some two and a half minutes of some Cramps tune from the early 90's or, God forbid, a little night music by Mozart, but about the next increment of surveillance and the possibility of making the Internet a very, very inhospitable place for non-corporate bloggers and providers of information like Wikipedia. While people of all political persuasions dislike the idea of Big Brother watching us, perhaps too few are watching Big Brother, Inc.

People often learn from mistakes, but it seems corporations do not. Prohibition and the war on drugs and stringent gun control and the war on pornography have hurt far more than they have helped and they haven't helped very much. Draconian penalties don't reduce crime and as a great article at Bloomberg.com today points out this morning, this War on Piracy isn't likely to stop, slow down or to have any effect.

"SOPA and PIPA are just the next steps in this larger enforcement agenda. Whatever happens to them, online enforcement will remain a very slippery slope, with attendant risks of censorship, surveillance, and the loss of due process. Because nothing in SOPA or PIPA is likely to stop piracy, there will be strong pressure to keep sliding."

Individuals will be scapegoated and ruined, lawyers will buy gaudier cars and cuff links and the free flow of information we have learned to rely on will dry up while more and more ordinary citizens will be made into criminals. The inevitable failure of this new, expensive enforcement crusade will only be used as proof that we need more of it, if history is a reliable teacher, and the true danger here is that it will, and I'm certain of it, be another stepping stone to the corporate police state. These are measures the public by in large does not support, but of course the public is distracted at the moment by the Republican freak show and revival meeting -- and of course congress listens to the representatives of industry instead of representing us.

I'm old enough to remember the movie industry's attempts to block cable TV and video recorders. I'm not old enough to remember how the advent of phonograph records and later radio broadcasting would, so they said, demolish the music industry, but I do remember the push to add a tax onto VCRs to reimburse the movie studios God given right to profit. I do remember how the music industry effectively prevented Americans from owning Digital Audio Tape machines and I remember how FedEx and others insisted in adding a tax on Fax machines to stifle competition and I remember how all these things not only failed but also how in the long run some of this technology was a huge boon to industries that were terrified of them.

Face it, the Internet is terrifying to a lot of entities, many of whom don't have anything like the public interest in mind when they propose to bend it to their will or destroy it. This thing of ours has more potential for good than the printing press and the spectacle of corporations crying about too much regulation calling for the garroting of that good in the name of a guaranteed right to a profit is as disgusting as anything prompting my gag reflex these days.

Boo

"With regards to immigration policy, that those that come here illegally should not be given favoritism or a special route to becoming residents or citizens that's not given to those people that stayed in line legally,"

-Willard Mitt Romney-

One would think, if one had the fortitude to spend more than a moment watching what passes for television news, that for the last half decade or so there were nothing of more than momentary interest happening than the American political circus and perpetual campaign. Geological and meteorological calamities do get reported, but the vast bulk of air time is given over to "the candidates" and the unchallenged lies they perpetrate. There are no pauses between campaigns, no half time shows and no seventh inning stretches.

I say circus although circuses are intended to be family entertainment these days and freak shows have gone the way of Times Square peep shows, cock fights and lynchings -- and sadly, the traces of any sense of shame, decency and honesty that ever had the audacity to interrupt or question the ragemongering has disappeared.

At the South Carolina Fox News debate Monday last (and I call it debate with all awareness of the inherent dishonesty of the appellation) Mitt Romney was booed, not because of what discernible policies he may be espousing at the moment, but because his father was born in Mexico. I don't recall any booing in response to John McCain's having been born in Panama, but of course anything done or said more than ten minutes ago is irrelevant in today's Republican world and that hobgoblin called consistency is always foolish.

George Romney, Mitt's father, entered the US illegally from Mexico, which might have given a better, more decent, less ambnitious Mitt pause before making such harsh statements about not tolerating any mercy for illegal Mexican immigrants, but of course it's a racial and ethnic issue, not an immigration one despite assurances to the contrary. The name is Romney after all, not Ramirez -- and this was South Carolina, Glossolalia, Holy Ghost Power and Rebel Flags, just he way God likes it.

But the mood of the South Carolinian Republican Rabble was ugly and when moderator Juan Williams asked if it wasn't a bit insulting to minorities when Newt Gingrich spewed that nonsense about black people needing to demand jobs instead of food stamps, as though the unemployment problem were caused by laziness and a president that encourages it, the ugly mob conservative citizens booed the black moderator just as Republican snake pits at previous "debates" have booed Child Labor laws, booed a serving US soldier and cheered the killing of prisoners in large numbers.

Is it any worse that they insist on being called 'conservatives' and not snarling beasts and that our only sources of news collaborate in that farce? Is it surprising that the state of South Carolina, still unrepentant for having been the first to take up arms against the United States, would once again boo at Ron Paul's suggestion that the 'Golden Rule' so often quoted as a core Christian value be applied in US foreign policy?

" Quit warmongering, stop going to war, and treat other nations like we want to be treated. "

Hell, no! Boo the bastard! Ask not what Jesus would do, ask what Attila the Hun would do, what a tribe of savage head hunters and cannibals would do, what a pack of giggling, stinking hyenas would do while ripping and tearing at the corpse of America.

It's been suggested to me, that I should approach such people with a more polite demeanor -- that the people who have made most of human history a horror story need to be given a chance to discuss things, to debate things and that monsters and the people who promote monsters can be persuaded by kind words and reason to change.

Boooooooo!

Comrade Obama?

I must disagree with Bill Maher that Rick Santorum thinks of gay sex more than a dildo salesman but only because Rick Santorum doesn't actually think, unless one defines that word very loosely. He doesn't remember things too well either and I say that in all generosity since one might interpret the things he says he remembers as outright lies. They aren't even up to date lies or original lies or good lies, yet there are always enough misinformed, low intelligence dung flingers in fatuously faith based America to believe them and make this country seem like the primate house at the world's largest zoo.

Take Santorum's tired repetition of John McCain's 2001 attempt to sell the embarrassingly ridiculous notion that President Obama wants to redistribute the nation's wealth in some Socialistic way, a bit like Jed Clampett arriving at the Royal Wedding in his beat up old truck . Coming from a Republican, whose party has engineered what might be one of the largest upward redistribution of wealth, that's already laughable but Mr. Rick seems to be the last man standing who is still driving that rusty jalopy -- the idea that Our president, beset by critics calling him a corporate whore and a sell-out to Wall Street is a radical socialist and perhaps a communist to boot. What Santorum claims to remember is that Obama supported a constitutional amendment to give your money to the poor ( read black people) when what the president really said in a 2001 interview was that the

"Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. . .”

Essential constraints -- it sounds very little like a man who is deploring those constraints. Indeed when Obama said the court had limited itself to insuring that he could eat at a lunch counter as long as he could afford to pay for his lunch, only a stupid man who thinks other people are even more stupid would interpret, or should I say twist, this as a quote from the Communist Manifesto.

"In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of ‘redistributing’ wealth. Obama’s point — and what he called a tragedy — was that legal victories in the civil rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country."

said Obama spokesman Bill Burton during the 2008 campaign. Certainly no development since then has given credibility to McCain's sad attempt or justification for Santorum's calumnies.

I'm finding it difficult, even without the waves of nausea and loathing, to accept that any candidate could have got as far as Santorum has without being laughed out of town as a cheap, incompetent liar and unscrupulous scoundrel. I can only blame the media ringmasters who continue to provide this charlatan with his own ring in this sad and tawdry circus we call a campaign. Have we forgotten that the purpose of news reporting is to sort truth from rumor, slander and lies? Perhaps we have and it's certainly been a long time since the news was anything but a way for big news corporations and their sponsors to make money. Perhaps we should stop making them richer by occupying Wall Street and start occupying CNN and Fox and the rest instead.

That Vatican Rag

People have argued that Science is just another kind of faith, or at least another but equally valid way of telling truth from fiction; establishing fact from a confusing universe. I suppose that Pope Benedict would be suggesting such a 'fair and balanced' approach by suggesting that same sex marriage would be a "threat to the future of humanity itself."

I would argue that science is the best method we have of keeping our beliefs honest by constant examination of the data -- and that data as concerns the cohabitation of couples, or triples for that matter does not in any way suggest that the Holy Father's predictions are based on what happens in this world when such things are not prohibited by law or even custom.

“This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,”

he said to some 180 diplomats at the Vatican yesterday. The education of children needs proper “settings” and “pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman.” I'm not quite sure that personal pride in being traditional and obedient to dogma constitutes justification for regulating private life in a free society, but then a free society is the definition of a heretical society and it wasn't long ago that Catholics were threatened with excommunication for voting for political leaders. I'm sure the rationalization for that was much the same farrago of gold embroidered, incense scented rubbish as was the persecution of Galileo and the scientists of the Renaissance -- to cite the less egregious examples.

The fact is, that children raised by gay couples can't be shown to have turned out as Benedict predicts and since gay people have been around since the dawn of humanity and a bit before -- and long before the shaman, that oldest of professions, told them they were evil -- we can assume that human dignity hasn't been much affected. The indignities of the Crusades and Inquisitions and centuries of war and tyranny might have done some harm, but I won't go into that here.

As I said, science rejects propositions, predictions and proclamations that do not produce the results claimed. I might suggest Mein Herr, that there's a bit of egg on your face and blood on your robes from trying to stifle that heresy with force of arms, torture and murder, but so far, nothing you or your predecessors have predicted has ever been demonstrated to be the truth. So how long caro padre, will you go on predicting that if we do A, then B will happen, because we've been doing A for a hell of a long time and there's no sign of you being right so far.

Iran and the Phantom Menace

Perhaps I've oversensitive about talk of going to war with Iran. After all, I remember all the talk about Iraq and nuclear/chemical/biological weapons from a government that knew damn well Iraq didn't have them or the facilities to make them. Everyone who doesn't have the excuse of being a Republican or having been trapped in a cave for most of this century remembers the war that broke the bank and destroyed Iraq to make it "free."

Perhaps I'm oversensitive but when I read Dennis Ross, who served two years on Obama’s National Security Council and a year as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s special adviser on Iran telling us that the President is "ready to strike" if Iran begins the nuclear beguine, I have no problem remembering that Leon Panetta, who should know a bit about the subject, told us all yesterday that Iran is not working on developing a bomb. Is Ross just shooting his mouth off or is he just tough talking for the benefit of the President and his campaign? And why is Panetta telling us there is no threat requiring such bellicose bravado or is it just a "slip" like Dick Cheney's slip when he mentioned that al Qaeda had nothing to do with 9/11?

the United States, being what it is, doesn't seem to have tired of tough talk, or at least our candidates don't think so. To me, it's a sign of weakness and perhaps a bit of arrested development and although we have a ways to go in the down direction to get back to the point of having a "War President" parading around in combat gear and calling himself the "Commander Guy" any step in that direction worries me.

A woman's home is her castle too.

I know such arguments often generate a fusillade of fecal material, but I couldn't help noticing this item on ABC Good Morning America. A young mother, home alone is surprised by armed men kicking their way into her home. They weren't there to offer her a good deal on Avon Skin-So-Soft.

She apparently had enough time and a telephone to call 911 and she apparently had a shotgun and she decided to use them in that order. Asking the dispatcher what she should do, she was told to' do what she had to do' to protect her baby and herself -- and she did, shooting a man as he came through her door, knife in hand. What else could she do? Threaten the would-be murder/rapist with a cell phone? Appeal to his better side? Use it to inform the coroner to bring two body bags?

There has been a series of burglaries in my neighborhood with nearly 30 in the last few months. one victim had the bad luck to come home and find one of the gun toting gang members in his living room and since this is Florida which passed a "castle doctrine" law to the dismay of self-styled Liberals about ten years ago, he pulled out a weapon which prompted the perpetrator to flee. Several attempted home invasions have been thwarted locally by armed homeowners and many of the invaders were armed. The current gang has killed several dogs in their pursuit of booty, but so far no people. Dogs can't carry guns.

I talked about this to my friend D. let's call him Deputy D, because that's just who he is.

"I'm not sure I could pull a trigger on a fleeing burglar" I said.

"Don't worry about it, just shoot him."

said the Deppity, which sort of surprised me since according to the anti Castle Doctrine lobby, Law enforcement was supposed to be very much against such things. It isn't any more true than much of the information propaganda we're given and of course the "shoot the Avon Lady" doctrine, as it was called hasn't had any effect on any Avon ladies. It has saved a considerable number of lives however, that would have been lost if the victims had been required as they formerly were, to run away. How fast can one run carrying a baby? How fast can an 89 year old woman make her wheel chair go? How fast can she climb out a mobile home window or climb down a drainpipe from 4 stories up?

So whether or not you believe a fertilized egg is a human being with a right to preserve its life, don't you believe an 18 year old and her baby have that right? Don't you have it?

Iowa Caucus - a Defense of Mediocrity

"Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?"

-Roman Hruska-

So the Iowa caucusoids can't really decide between Stepford Candidate Mitt who will say anything to ingratiate and hopes you have no memory, or Ricky Santorum, the subatomic particle with less mass than a neutrino. As of this morning there is only an 8 vote difference between the two and CNN.com is portraying Santorum's loss as a victory. If there's anything interesting at all, or any inference to be drawn from this contest, it's that relatively moderate Jon Huntsman might have been better off joining another party entirely. Rarely has any contestant gone so unnoticed, lost in the glare of idiocy, mendacity and derangement.

This race seems to have nothing to do with qualifications in terms of character, experience, education or cognitive function: it's more about seducing the stupid, the ignorant and the marginal people, enraged because they are marginal. As a non-Republican, my preference in what is essentially a tie would be Santorum -- and of course any other connoisseur of circus freak shows would look forward with gleeful anticipation to watching that raving idiot contend with his Democratic opponent's measured words.

Does the Iowa Caucus really mean anything? I think it does. It means, for one thing, that the word Conservative means no more than it did when Senator Hruska tried to sell mediocrity as a virtue to get G. Harrold Carswell appointed to the Supreme Court and get us to overlook his distaste for Women's rights and his support for segregation (and perhaps the aggressive homosexual proclivities that landed him in jail and the hospital on several occasions.)

No, Romney isn't that bad and Santorum may not be either but I have to suspect that somewhere, some wax museum is missing a dummy and some circus side show is missing a freak.

Fear and Loathing in 2012

the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

-Plato-

At a New Year's Day Yacht Club brunch yesterday, I suggested to a newly thin friend worried about overeating at the bulging buffet, that we declare January 1st as a National Who Gives a Shit day. We need a break from all this fear and loathing and self flagellation.

For my part, I'm chronically worried about things far more dire than gaining a few pounds; things like a Napoleonic Republican in the White House again, the deliberate collapse of the world economy for the benefit of a few oligarchs, plutocrats and other assorted brigands -- and of course the coming Zombie Apocalypse, the Mayan Catastrophe and the end of an error prophesied on all those bumper stickers.

Of course there are many other things to be depressed about and most of them, unlike that Zombie thing, can't readily be dealt with by stockpiling ammunition. But we need a break from all the apocalyptic insanity, the hate commercials all over the TV with Mike Huckabee howling last night about how Romney's health care plan was "stuffed down our throats" ( by a large majority of voters) even though Obama was elected largely on the promise of health care reform. We need a break from having our basic fundamental liberties torn from us by small minded big mouth authoritarian radicals like Vaneta Becker, the Republican State Senator from Indiana who wants to make it illegal to sing our National Anthem "inappropriately," the constitution and all that freedom we're told isn't free, be damned -- at least in Indiana.

Oh say can you see, our boot on your face -- would that be inappropriate? Now which third world countries can we invade to protect her freedom to sanctify the trappings and rituals of Chauvinistic self worship while rebelling against any government power other than the power to crush the people?

No, I'm afraid National Who Gives a Shit Day barely made it past those chocolate truffles I couldn't resist last night and all those Happy New Year wishes have already turned to ashes with my first glimpse of today's news. It's the same old madness we had two days ago, the same inconsistent, persistent, self-negating rhetoric, the same greedy, angry, irrational revenge-seeking of the idiot mob. Who can worry about brain eating zombies or rampaging Jesus with a flame thrower or Kenyan Kommunists stuffing civilization down our throats when that great slithering thing we call the media are stuffing insanity into every orifice; howling like some Lovecraftian horror from every high place, importuning us from every telephone, billboard and car bumper that obedience is freedom and civilization is tyranny - that prosperity comes from doing what always leads to catastrophe.


For those of us not about to die, or at least not to die immediately, it's January 2nd and I give a shit. I'm fed up with being told that rational discord with marauding barbarians will lead to understanding and progress, that authoritarians will become tolerant of freedom if only we show them respect and exercise patient restraint and all the ancient evils mankind has perpetuated and treasured and nurtured will somehow wither away if we're polite and sincere.

If it is true that fighting monsters brings the risk of becoming one, it is also true that not fighting them, being quiet and polite and respectful toward mad moralizers and authoritarians and fear mongers and every snark-snarling witless witling posing as a philosopher carries the bigger risk. It's time to stop pretending we're on some fence between one reasonable place and another. We're not.

Christmas lies.

Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

And so it happens every year -- all year actually -- but most appallingly and undisguisedly around the time of Mithra's birthday. You know, Mithra, the son of god by a virgin mother and member of a holy trinity whose cult competed with Christianity for hundreds of years and in large part was the furnished apartment the Christians moved into when they went Roman. So who can be surprised that "Liberal" CNN would trot out another snotty attack on disbelief today, embedded in an interpretation of that mawkish box-office failure It's a Wonderful Life.

The annually erupting movie is a fitting metaphor for a nation absent Christian belief, author Larry Taunton says. Those wanting to do away with the faith should be careful what they wish for. 'Doing away with the faith' of course, means dissuading the faithful from running your life; dictating according to their own set of religious laws and demanding special exemption for their actions. They're sure as hell not equating faith in Indra or Thor with their equally unsupportable beliefs.

No, faith is good when it's Christian faith even when the faithful can't agree with what that is or whether angels are part of it or whether Quakers are heretics or just who it is the god of love hates most. Any other faith is simply satanic, regardless of content, else ol' Larry here would be giving the Zoroastrians with their strict sense of morality a free pass to heaven. And he doesn't.

Of course if there is a nation absent Christian belief, or more repellent, absent that cobbled together self-contradictory chimera they like to call (the Judeo-Christian ethic) it's not the USA and the conclusion that our waning belief is deadly to morality and stability and all other political, economic and tectonic woes including that "general malaise," is part of the same belief package. It's circular. To see that decline, one has first to believe in it, which is to say, if you believe it, it's true. If you're a Christian of the correct sort, it's true; which again is to say, nothing is true but what the Church tells you is true and Après nous le déluge.

Yes, indeed, it would be a sad day for America if people stopped questioning the notion that democracy ( which used to be held as evidence for decline and condemned by nearly every church ) universal suffrage, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the end of slavery and a more modern sense of morality that includes frowning upon child abuse, torture, spousal abuse and the torture of animals -- all things fine and dandy in the heyday of ecclesiastical tyranny -- were signs of the end times that Christians have been awaiting for 2000 years and which will never come. Why, insinuates this obnoxious Nosferatu from his ancient grave -- we might become savages in the moral vacuum departing Christianity leaves behind: wild and murderous barbarians like the French, Danes, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, English . . .

Face it, without faith that everything is going to hell, Christianity would long since have died out or at most be another kind of Judaism, and people like Larry Taunton would be lying to the empty air and raving to the bats in some secluded cave far away. As Nietzsche said: "The Christian determination to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad"

What the movie is trying to say, is that faith in ourselves will save the day and that's hardly what this damnable deceiver in his contempt for sanity is selling. In fact it's the very opposite and they just can't get through a December without spitting in the face of human values, denying their own bloody history and claiming to be the only rightful leaders of the world and insist they're right because they've made everything worse.

Waiting for Gandhi

Those CNN.com Polls are hardly scientific nor do they claim to be, but when I read that 76% of participants think the payroll tax cut extension should be approved, I have to wonder at the Republican pose that insists such 'socialist' things are being stuffed down our throats by tyrannical Democrats who don't represent us as well as billionaires and multinational corporations do. Other things like medicare and Social Security and health care reform have been stuffed down our throats even though three quarters of us support them. Yes, Americans can seem like geese sometimes, but it's mostly the people eating foi gras and hating Democracy who want to run the farm.

Even my most intransigently Republican friends are risking an eternity in hell by suggesting that the GOP is deliberately sabotaging the government and the economy and the well being of our citizens for political gain and Obama's approval rating is slowly climbing as the flock of candidates chortle about sin and repealing child labor laws. So perhaps the slow shift in mood has to do with the traveling freak show from whom Republicans will be forced to choose as well as the unavoidable recognition that our definition of "smaller government" smells so much of the 19th century British colonial attitude: do nothing, have nothing done and don't allow anyone to do anything. Gandhi was able to turn it back at them. It should be easier for us. We already have the vote.

All you need is love

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
-Colossians 3:18-

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.
-Ephesians 5:22-

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands
-1 Peter 3:1-

women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says.
-1 Corinthians 14:34-

Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior.
-epistle of Paul to Titus-
__________________________

I've lived long enough to be familiar with several reversals in the mission of liberal activists and even with the kind of reversal that coexists with its opposite. Is human behavior the result of genes or is it the result of cultural conditioning? Is it both and can we work both angles at different times to support our doctrines?

Are personality types in humans genetically determined as we see in dogs? I certainly don't know and I'm not going to pretend I do, but those who do pretend seem to have had profound influences on our culture and in ways that seem to defy or deny rigorous examination.

Are men, for instance, more prone to violence because our culture teaches that violence is manly or is it genetics driving that view of what it means to be male? Do men tend to have a certain natural role in society and women have a different one? Recent studies seem to lend weight to the idea that in primates in general, the way we organize our societies has more to do with genetics than with the exigencies of our environment; to suggest that gender roles and group behavior have a biological basis. Yes some continue to insist that more women would seek a career in boiler repair or sewer work if we insist on calling a manhole a "personnel access cover" while denouncing any serious research on the subject of gender difference as anti-Feminist.

Some feminists will be alarmed at any such studies, perceiving with some accuracy that it can be used to justify injustice by confusing it with "nature's way" just as genocide has been justified by confusing it with natural process. In neither case would nature need to have our help and of course even if nature prompts us to seek leadership from males, that's not a justification for excluding women. Nature of course doesn't demand that we wash our hands or cook our food or most of the things that have served our survival.

Dogs are going to seek a pack leader and although there is a chain of command between the females, that leader is going to be male and amongst prospective leaders there will be constant rivalry because male dogs are wired to think they can lead. Is there something similar at work in human societies? Do we see that thing working in the very movements attempting to combat it?

Domesticated dogs look to humans for their leaders, or are easily persuaded to do so in most cases, while wolves generally do not. Canids with human leaders seem to be doing better in the world than those who follow other dogs. Can we learn from this? Are we going to the dogs because of the leaders we choose and ideas we protect?

I know I'm rambling here, but I do have a point in mind. It seems that there are contrary schools, both identifying as 'Feminist' that tell us that our roles in our society are not predetermined but also that our natures are all but scripted by our genes. Males are born bad, to take one school to the extreme -- and all gender identification is entirely learned says the other extreme, so culture is the culprit. Culture, some would say is male dominated and so culture teaches male domination in a vicious circle. As with all such disputes, science is the guardian of honesty and that's why it's been so difficult to pursue or even to discuss the science of gender. Better to protect doctrine because the doctrine protects our feelings.

Of course good and bad are things we make up, or that people who would be pack leaders make up. There is no good and bad in nature, there is only that which is advantageous to the gene pool, or disadvantageous. Primate societies, suggests the study, are the result of what has worked over millions of years and in the social nature of our closest relatives. Change the circumstances and conditions, but the pattern persists.

War and violence seem to be there -- the major difference is that humans recognize wider group identifications than do the chimps. We are better able to feel compassion, allegiance and common cause with others outside our immediate tribes and nations and even species while other primates have smaller range. I think that's where our salvation resides, but more on that later.

I think humans have got by so far by being just barely smart enough to put nature in its place. We haven't all arrived at the point where we will recognize our genetic orientation for what it is and use it to the advantage of all of us -- of life in general. We tend to use it as monkeys do, for the advantage our the tribe, the family group and that's quite true of monkeys like the Vervets who seem to be quite viciously matriarchal. We haven't arrived at all although there are religions that teach universal compassion, they're too often -- most often used to form tribes and gender subgroups within tribes, allowing us to lapse into our primitive tribalist behavior. Looking for and finding enemies: it's a primate thing. Hell no, they're not us and we're not them. They're males, they're females, they're crackers, liberals, yankees, blacks, Mexicans, yuppies and the Bible tells me so and so do my genes.

So the evidence for nature playing a role in our social organization can be used to divide us into gender and lead into gender wars, race wars and nationalism or we can choose to notice that we are genetically capable of being above such things. We can recognize that being above it is in our nature which puts us far, far above the apes in our ability to recognize what's good for all. But of course, religion - the thing we look to for guidance and moral leadership often teaches that this ability was taken from God or the gods illegally and is sinful. Obedience to our pack leader is good, but not to those other heathens and satanists. Which part of our nature do we choose? Look at history, listen to the people who would lead.


Sure it's more emotionally satisfying to band together as victims and claim that since a majority of violent crime is perpetrated by young men, all men are suspect by nature, but it's not only bad logic, since most men are not violent criminals, it's a step back into our animal nature of equal size. It's an admission that we are not capable of knowing right from wrong and acting accordingly - or at least that the other group isn't.

So yes, Chimps are kinder to their own families than to their tribes, and their tribes more compassionate with each other than to others, even though those others contain their own daughters and grandchildren. We're better than that, as some religions have taught. We're better because our compassion is infinitely broad - at least it can be. Can it be that ability to be the other, feel with the other, identify with the other has been part of the obvious survival advantage our species has over other primates - almost as much as our technological prowess has been?

That's what I'm suggesting and that suggestion suggests that many of the political and social movements claiming to be a solution are part of the problem. Religion has largely failed us here as have so many social doctrines. Compassion alone of the virtues will not sponsor the burning of others, crusades, Jihads, stonings, slavery and the subjugation of women even when compassion appears on the letterhead of Allah the merciful or Jesus the God of Love. Religions become tribes and we no longer see ourselves in the members of other religions and we follow the pack leaders with their books and costumes as wolves follow wolves with good hunting instincts and big teeth. Religions become tribes and will attack other tribes whether secular or religious and the doctrines or other tribes become satanic even when they advocate compassion and mercy above all things.

I've seen it happen and so have you whether you've noticed or not. I've seen people bridle at the criticism of religion, taking generalities as a personal insult. I've seen people dismiss an entire gender, race without seeing it as a personal insult to a member of those groups. It's our animal nature to separate ourselves from identification with the other, whether we recognize it or not. Compassion, love, altruism are also in our animal nature, our genetic gift from our ancestors. So is the ability to choose what works rather than what what our inner ape likes -- for are we not human?

______________________

"He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,"— in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me," — in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.
-Dhammapada Verses 3-5 -

Let it be Paul

Ron Paul seems at the moment to be the front runner in Iowa, which to me offers some hope that American Conservative dementia might not progress to the point where that miscreant Gingrich might be selected to run against Barack Obama.

And no, I haven't become a Republican, but I'd far rather see Dr. Paul, whose ideas I sometimes agree with and sometimes don't in a debate than be forced to listen to Newt advocate a nation of "believers" where no one can be trusted who doesn't follow a Gingrich approved God, or God forbid, live in a nation with a president who insists he would arrest a judge whose decisions don't fit the doctrines of Newtonian Theocracy and plutocracy. For someone who makes such a fuss about the constitution's limitations on government power, you'd think he could show us the part advocating for a priest-king or a definition of a separation of powers that is subject to suspension at the whim of the President.

Of course one has to wonder whether the inner Gingrich is connected in any way to the outer, all too visible Gingrich, with strings attached to all sorts of crepuscular but malignant entities. Perhaps his outrageous anti-Americanism is simply bait to attract the creepy-crawly political vermin squirming in the anti-American mud and perhaps he's not really an enemy of democracy, Liberty and the rule of law and the other things most of us wish were core values in civilized countries.

So I have to think that at best, he's a fraud who fully intends to betray anyone foolish enough to think he means what he says, but I have to fear, at worst, that he means it. So yes, I'll take the candidate who I think goes a bit overboard with limiting the power of the Government to the man who would be king.

The world is the Battlefield

I find it remarkable that the proposed provision of the Defense Authorization act enabling a President to detain anyone suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization indefinitely and without trial, can be presented as one of those bits of "evidence" that Barack Obama is trashing the constitution. Obama's Indefinite Detention Powers is the title of more than one article. Remarkable indeed since he's threatening to veto the abomination if it passes.

I do recognize that since the Authorization for Use of Military forces (AUMF) that Congress approved after the September 11 terrorist attacks was used to bolster somewhat unfair arguments that Bush was trashing the revered document, an equal and more ridiculous counter charge has to be leveled against his Democratic successor. That is a principle we had beat into our consciousness when Bill Clinton had to face charges, some contrived and some with marginal merit that were so like unto those Nixon was glaringly guilty of.

But I digress. I'm not surprised to hear such things slithering in the murky Senatorial cistern, but I'm surprised at the bipartisan support of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) bill and the astonishing lack of debate over this shocking redaction of the Bill of Rights. I was however surprised and pleased to hear Rand Paul declare opposition is heatedly as I would do, given the chance.

I was nauseated and enraged to hear our former Presidential contender, John McCain rail about how dangerous "these people" were without regard to how we determine fairly whether or not the accusations are true. I have been raised to think that justice demanded a fair trial and no decent civilization has failed to provide a process to determine the truth of an accusation, sometimes made under duress or torture or out of jealousy or greed or worse. A less stuffy writer might simply ask: how the hell do we know the charges are true without a trial?

Senator McCain doesn't seem to care, although with his history, he might just give the opposite position tomorrow and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) seems proud of his shiny new black boots, claiming that now we can jail any American citizen because "it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland." Did he mean to say Vaterland?

"The FBI publishes characteristics of people you should report as possible terrorists. The list includes the possession of “Meals Ready to Eat,” weatherproofed ammunition, and high-capacity magazines; missing fingers; brightly colored stains on clothing; paying for products in cash; and changes in hair color. I fear that such suspicions might one day be used to imprison a U.S. citizen indefinitely without trial. Just this year, the vice president referred to the Tea Party as a bunch of terrorists. So, I think we should be cautious in granting the power to detain without trial."

writes Senator Paul in the National Review.

Yes, I think our legislators have earned their 8% approval rating and can only wonder why it isn't lower. John McCain, you're a goddamn terrorist yourself, attempting to make Americans afraid for political purposes. Rand Paul: you may be far right, but you're right none the less.

Save the Fed

Doomed to repeat history? Of course we are, but the fate I fear isn't the sort of doom that descends upon us from above unless you consider the cesspit of "Conservative" rhetoric to be a higher plane of thought. No, I'm not talking about the market bubble of the late 1920's that was brought about by slashing the top marginal tax rate or the deregulation of the markets that gave us the 1929 crash; I'm talking about where we were fourscore years ago in 1931 when the European banks began to fail and nobody was able or willing to do anything about it. Then as now, we had "Conservative" rhetoric attempting to blame the mess on the usual suspects, like lazy American workers and in Europe: the Jews. We had calls around the world for even more austerity, as if the world could save itself by saving money.

" Instead of easing monetary policy by cutting interest rates and buying bonds, the Fed tightened. The result was a catastrophic chain reaction of bank failures, which caused the money supply to contract by approximately a third, and economic output with it"

writes Niall Ferguson at the Daily Beast, lamenting the gross lack of knowledge of bankers, investors, fund managers, regulators, policymakers, and economists. Ferguson cites Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States, which argues that

"the stock-market panic of 1929 turned into a depression because of avoidable errors by the Fed. Instead of easing monetary policy by cutting interest rates and buying bonds, the Fed tightened. The result was a catastrophic chain reaction of bank failures, which caused the money supply to contract by approximately a third, and economic output with it."

The Gold Standard, the massive debt from The Great War, the partisan inability to compromise brought on the disaster we know as the Great Depression and only those countries that dropped that standard and began hiring while gearing up for war, began to recover. Germany led the way and the US followed.

With some Republican spokesmen demanding the return of the gold standard, demanding an end to the Fed, demanding more austerity, demanding that more capital be tied up in the hands of a tiny minority, the money supply diminished and the demand for goods and services curtailed, the few who understand what needs to be done are being shouted down by politicians who insist that the only solution is a bigger cut in the marginal rate, and the angry mob they feed.

"We are indeed fortunate that at least the world’s leading central bankers have studied this history: not only Ben Bernanke but also the heads of the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and the European Central Bank. The bad news is that so few politicians and voters understand what they are trying to do, or why. The even worse news is that central bankers by themselves may not be able to stop our depression from turning great."

Worse news even than that, is the fact that people like Dr. Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, a senior research fellow at Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University do not inform the Cains, Bachmanns, Palins or Gingrichs or the rabble who support them, nor would the public trust any "elitist" "Libtard" "pinhead" over the kind of small minded moral abomination now stumbling toward Washington.

Show me your papers!

" People are trying to use this to make the law look bad"

said the mayor of Leeds, Alabama, responding to the arrests of a Mercedes Benz director and a Honda manager for having only international drivers licenses rather than their German or Japanese cards in their pockets.


Well people won't have to try very hard, because Alabama looks bad enough without any help. The demand that anyone looking or sounding 'foreign' carry proof of citizenship at all times looks to me too much like those "racial origin" cards the Third Reich made people carry, but even if you disagree or think I'm being hyperbolic, it still looks paranoid, it looks stupid, it stinks of a very ugly past and it surely isn't going to help the state of Alabama attract the kind of foreign investment and employment opportunities it needs.

"We are the Show Me State, not the Show Me Your Papers State," writes the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

"You've got two choices. Either ask your executives to carry their immigration papers at all times, or move to a state that understands gemütlichkeit."

" We’re going to enforce the laws of state of Alabama”

says the mayor of Leeds, like a character from a Victor Hugo novel. Well you go ahead Javert. Crops are already rotting in the fields of Alabama because if you're of a racial or ethnic minority, it just ain't worth it and the construction industry is falling apart too. Other states would be happy to have those billions of dollars and thousands of jobs pack up and move elsewhere in Free America.