Silent running

The weeping and wailing industry is almost as quick to react to certain events as the paramedics are, and this morning's paper has a local runner's group holding a silent run in the attempt to feel relevant or perhaps to express ire that anyone would interfere with one of America's sacred sports.  Yes, I'm sounding cynical here, but it's not because I'm callous with regard to the loss of life and all the injuries, it's just that in recent decades, the public reaction to high profile death has been so orchestrated and so formulaic that it cheapens the moment and distracts us from seeing such things in context. I'm not interested in crying, I don't subscribe to self-pity and I don't need closure or healing. I'm interested in being able to keep the kind of things that have plagued us all at least since Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament from happening, as much as is possible in a free country.

Judging from other events, we'll soon be seeing piles of Teddy Bears on Boston streets and other silent runnings slowly turning our anger and willingness to learn from this event into a  declining series of maudlin and sentimental exhibitions of self-pity and the lachrymose quest for 'healing.'  One might forget just how rare such occurrences are in our country.  One will forget what must be done to keep things that way.  Our record, at least since the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of 2001, to thwart bombing attempts has been pretty good and  the mawkish  mourning and stuffed animal social club hasn't played much of a part.

According to a CNN.com editorial, only one successful bombing in America has been carried out since 9/11/01 -- by a White Supremacist. In the decade before that there were many, not the least of which were the killing of 168 in Oklahoma City, the 1998 Olympic bombing in Atlanta and the 1993 World Trade garage bomb which killed 6.  I don't include the horror of the 'Branch Davidian' holocaust, where David Koresh and his devout men of valor as he called them burned his followers to death.

What can we learn from the recent past?  That such events are pretty rare in America and getting more so as compared with Europe -- that our domestic politics of anger and violence is costly, for another. 380 people have been indicted on terrorism-related charges in the United States between September 11, 2001 and December 31 2012 and of those 207 have been so-called 'jihadists' or Muslim extremists, but non-Muslim perpetrators, 80% of whom have been American "conservatives"  have killed 29 versus 17 by Muslims.  All this and more from a Syracuse University study.  

But we've obviously gotten better.  We're catching nearly all the bombers and poisoners before they can act.  We'll never achieve perfect safety, not even if we achieve a perfect police state, but we'll come closer if we pay more attention to our own potential terrorists all across the political and religious  spectrum and spend less time wallowing in stylized and choreographed sorrow.

Is it time to notice just how much of our grossly exaggerated fear of  mad bombers should be directed  toward the American Right?    How much is fueled by Rush and Fox and Coulter and Bachmann and yes, the holy hellfire Christian Conservatives?

People who hate America

Yes, you're right, The Westboro Wankers are at it again.  Nothing happens you see, that isn't God's wrath against people who do not persecute those people whose romantic and sexual desires don't conform to the wrong Reverend Phelps' ideas of what God demands. God bombed Boston, he assures us in a press release on Twitter and there must be a big grin on his divine visage this morning as he wipes the blood of children off his greasy lips.   What better way does he have to inform us of his hatred and his lust for violence, after all?  

You know I'm sick of hearing that we need to arm ourselves against the government. If there's any group of people who need their guts splattered on the pavement in gory splendor, it's the members, friends and supporters of the Westboro Baptist Church.

You know, some day that worm Phelps is going to die and if there is a God or if there is only us to work justice in the world, there will be ten million picketers at his funeral and his final resting place will be flooded with the urine of ten million more.

We're a little more honest -- honestly.

Emotional reasoning: we all do it.  Liberals and conservatives all have our pet pieties and our ways of protecting them against facts.  I don't need to summarize my posts about right wing hypocrisy and self-contradictory arguments or the tendency to invent scenarios independent of statistics or facts or logic.  You've heard it from me for years. It's not true that half the country pays no taxes and "Obama is giving them all our money," but they'll string you up from a light pole or drag you behind a truck for contradicting their beliefs.  They're delusional.

But, as I said, everyone does it. Liberals will jump all over drone attacks while ignoring the fact that it's the least likely way to produce unwanted casualties, while ignoring the fact that no war does not involve civilian casualties, that we are fighting a war against non-uniformed civilians and we insist that our drone strikes in Pakistan are a violation of their sovereignty even though they gave us permission to do so because many of us are invested in the notion of American imperialism.  We make the evidence fit the conviction even when there is no evidence and a few selected facts are proof.

They on the other hand will tell you condoms don't work, rape doesn't cause pregnancy, vaccination against HPV will make you daughter promiscuous.  They'll insist that advertisements showing a woman in a car with a pig promote bestiality (I'm not joking,) that same sex marriage destroys heterosexual marriage and there is a plot to turn kids gay. America is a Christian Nation, the constitution doesn't separate church and State and the Founders were pious Christians we are told.  Roosevelt caused the Depression.  Obama's 'policies' are bankrupting us. The media are saturated with "creation science" lies and other fictions on a daily basis and worse on Sunday. You know it all too well.

I find it depressing.  I find myself looking for reasons to tell myself that maybe I and the folks I agree with most of the time are human, with all the self delusion and fact twisting that involves, but we're still better than the the people I blame for most of our backwardness and our pursuit of bankruptcy in the name of prosperity: the American Right. I mean, we have to be better, right?

I think encouragement is at hand.  A study described in Salon.com, appearing in in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, claims that

 "when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep-seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument."

But they're much worse.  OK, we knew Trayvon Marton was murdered for being black before we knew the facts. We may still not know them, but we're still certain.  We knew that the "stand your ground" legislation justified it when it certainly did not in any way and we knew Zimmerman was a homicidal racist because it was in line with our deep seated convictions about guns and gun laws and racists. We constructed a scenario that made what we knew fit the puzzle and in a way that justified our Liberal faith.

But Conservatives, says the study, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, they are more uncomfortable with uncertainty and need to hold strong convictions -- to be certain that Liberals.  We can't have some abortions and not others -- it's good or evil and nothing in between. An egg has to be a "baby" else we can't be sure when it becomes fully human.  

This asymmetrical need for certainty despite the facts between Right and Left is of course debatable and is being debated amongst psychologists and yet it seems obvious to me -- because, no doubt, it fits my deep seated convictions about the righteousness of my opinions -- and that's why I'm sticking with it!  We're better than they are.

Stupid.

Remember when talking down the economy was "hating America?"  Remember when Liberals were badmouthing the market because they wanted to destroy America?  Now I don't think I have any special kind of memory or that I'm the most well informed or well read person on Earth but I want to know how the hell we remember only what's convenient or what we're told to remember in order to support our political pieties.  I remember this crap.  I remember 8 years of it because I was predicting a collapse from the beginning of that misbegotten administration and predicting the loss of civil rights and Goddamn it, I was right. They were wrong. They were lying like Limbaugh. Why don't you remember?  Do you even remember Bush?

Yeah, right, Obama's private army and I'm sure they all wear "jack boots" whatever the hell those are.  Remember when George W. Bush decided to use private troops at a huge expense because the American military had too many rules against things like killing civilians and torturing prisoners?  Oh, you don't? Do you remember when it was anti-American even to mention that people were getting killed on the news?  Sure, watch the 'shocking video' while you suck down another Budweiser, you sick, moronic loser.  Feel sorry for yourself because you have to pay for all those sluts to have sex and all those slackers to get foodstamps while the liberals take your guns so that the illegal aliens can rob you and rape our daughters ( unless they're unconscious in which case it's OK)

My mailbox is full every morning with apocalyptic economic predictions that somehow don't seem to provoke the offended responses from "conservatives" who not long ago told us, as it was happening, that the markets were sound and robust and that borrow like there's no tomorrow policies would require some payment to the piper and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were more than we could afford if we didn't raise taxes back to where they were in our most prosperous years.  Oh, but paying off the interest on that bastard's debts is "reckless spending."

Well I guess it's different now and I guess these lying vermin don't hate America, they don't hate freedom -- they don't care as long as they can steal it all from us and from what I hear and overhear every day, they certainly have been successful. America just eats it up like a pig eats it's own shit.  Oh, yes, you think Obama stole everything in Fort Knox and is going to call down an airstrike from flying saucers and take everything from you and give it to the "takers" because I hate to say it, we're not just an ignorant nation, we're fucking crazy pigs and destined to become somebody elses bacon.

We are not alone.

We're going to have to get used to drones.  They're available everywhere and getting better and cheaper as electronic toys do. HD TV cameras can be added that are now tiny and lightweight and cheap and can even see in the dark

I hope we don't have to get used to the constant surveillance they make possible and it's not just the invasion of our private spaces by government agencies I'm alarmed about.  Various people and groups of people with all kinds of ideas about what you're doing, aren't doing and should be doing are now able to watch and record from hundreds of feet above wherever you are.

PETA, one of those well-intentioned groups whose sentimentally extremist views about things like the personhood and civil rights of insects isn't the kind of  organization I want watching me if I'm out in the woods or down at the dock fishing seeing as for them, fish are sensitive and loving and self aware creatures and catching them is murder. But hunters are evil too as are those with leather shoes or eating sushi and PETA intends to   "monitor those who are out in the woods with death on their minds," according to a press release.  Those feral hogs we have here need to be protected against my violating their civil rights as well, and what about the local butcher shops!  Death on their minds! But according to the FAA, as long as you fly your Hammacher Schlemmer drone below 400 feet, there's no problem with areal reconnaissance. For extremists, kooks, voyeurs and fanatics, it's a whole new day.

"The average person has no worries" is the kind of  'reassurance' one expects from advocates of random and warrantless stops and searches.  Steve Hindi, president of yet another animal rights group called Showing Animals Respect and Kindness, or SHARK, assures us we have nothing to fear from him unless you have death on your mind.  He likes to watch bird hunters and post video on line and sending links to law enforcement. Perhaps the average hunter has no worries but what looks like one thing may look like another thing from a TV camera from 40 stories in the air and after all, Steve doesn't want you hunting in the first place you evil carnivore Bambi murderer you.

Of course flying your drone a few hundred feet above people with shotguns has it's hazards. Drones have suffered mysterious failures and there's a lot of giggling going on in the bird shooting community.  Might be some mirth in my back yard as well should there be an unidentified flying object hovering over my swimming pool, but I'm not sure the future doesn't hold endless drones over our heads and perhaps under our feet making sure we don't have aces up our sleeves or that we're not walking on the grass or filling out our golf score cards improperly or actually are playing cards with the guys like we said.  But let he who is without sin not worry, right?

Drones are the future.  Insurance companies are already 'offering' gadgets that record how fast you drive -- to save you money of course, but also to deny claims because you might have been observed at 5 over the limit.  Red light cameras don't seem to reduce collisions at intersections and may actually be causing more, but hey, you have nothing to fear in our brave new world where you have so many big brothers watching our for you.

Sometimes a missile is only a missile

Other times, maybe not.

So North Korea now has two mobile IRBM's standing proudly erect and America's eyes in the sky are watching.  Little Kim, the only fat man in North Korea may be erect too but nobody's watching and nobody cares, the whole thing being so disgustingly Freudian. 

The likelihood that the PRNK is conducting a prank, waving it's mechanical member at us, is pretty high in my opinion as the notion that they have a nuclear weapon that can be fitted to one of these things is pretty low. Can we be sure that it will function and be accurate enough even for nukes? 

Speaking of dicks, the old war criminal himself has made it a point to express his nervousness about the smallest of the Korean Matriushka dolls, the son of the Glorious General who descended from Heaven and totally awesome Commander Kid and his WMD.  Interesting to note as this time there may actually be a WMD even if it's only a clumsy prototype. I'm glad he no longer has the launch codes even as much as I'd like to see the Great Sun of the 21st century vaporized, his little dick and all.

But the opinion of the other Dick, notwithstanding, I'm not really worried about being attacked.  I'm more worried about the Republicans dredging that old Three O'Clock phone call meme to go after Obama The Unprepared from another angle. It's Junk Un who has to be sitting up nights worrying about military coups or the Chinese flyswatter or a war that would be over before he could empty his bladder in his pants. Even if he's firing blanks, he may draw fire on himself and if he just puts it back in his pants, he'll look like the 8 year old in the Superman suit he really is.  Nobody will criticize him at home, not until someone gets up the nerve to assassinate him, but my guess is, that he's already lost this opening gambit and that he can't afford another.

But hey, for those of us tired of the 24/7 wailing, weeping and mourning and trembling in our Nike's that someone will shoot us as we watch a movie, or maybe sneak through our Smart Meters to steal our guns and raise our taxes Sharia Law style, it's almost a relief to contemplate nuclear war, Gangnam style.

Ban it

Well as long as we're advocating that anything that might somehow be deleterious to society or dangerous to school children be banned, let's ban the Bible.  I mean it. I can't think of anything that's been behind more ugly things for more time and we just can't trust people not to use it badly. Oppression, torture, privation, sexual perversion, conquest, slavery issue forth from it like the stink from a sewer and Bible mongers have as James Madison said " been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority."  Even when that dishonest and sordid concretion of legend, lie and political  polemic isn't a direct source of evil, the many malicious memes it's fostered and nurtured have been an endless source of obstruction, bigotry, hatred and dehumanization -- an ever-ready tool for the greedy and nasty of the world to divide us into warring tribes. Ban it!

Take Representative Joe Barton (Republican of course, and Texas unsurprisingly.)  To prove that all the shit we've been belching into the air since the Industrial Revolution and Population explosion began, has had no effect on the very demonstrable warming of the planet, he cites and without apparent shame -- the Bible Flood Story.  Why? For no other reason than that he hopes to profit from an oil pipeline. It's only a tiny example. There are more than anyone can count in a lifetime.  Reasons why I can't live here or eat there. Why I can't serve on a jury, can't run for office. Why this one can't be a citizen, why this one can't marry that one, why this family can't own its children, why that one can't dance on Sunday or read that book or have this job: that obscene bolus of priestly excreta, reeking of blood and death and corruption.

Look, like all the foundational stories of the Bible, the Flood never happened.  It never could have happened, it never will happen and if it had occurred the evidence would be absolutely everywhere. It isn't anywhere. It's a story to scare children and their childish parents and it directly contradicts an endless pile of evidence. As a Judaised plagery of an older Babylonian tale, it even contradicts itself as a combination of two stories with Gods of two different names, two different dialects, two different numbers of animals and different periods of rain interleaved almost line by line. Your Sunday School teacher lied. The entire Bible floats on lies as its tiny universe floats on a primal ocean.  Billions of species on a boat that somehow got from a Turkish mountain to populate the Earth in a few years?  Why are there no Kangaroos in The Middle East?

What kind of good book is the eternal and mortal enemy of math, logic, science, biology, chemistry, genetics, history and human dignity?  You know the answer. You know why it was used to ban telescopes and microscopes and the scientific method - why it was used to ban Democracy, why it was used to murder Jews and Arians and Albigensians and Protestants and Gnostics and Muslims and virtually anyone who would not submit to that accursed thing.

I can't think of one positive development in human history that has not been suppressed or thwarted by Bible wielding barbarians; things like freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom to elect governments, freedom of information -- even the very freedom to exist. We've had nearly an eternity and nearly an infinity of examples showing that mankind can't be trusted to produce or safely use such weapons of mass seduction.  Ban it.

The universe in which the disparate stories from various sources have been set is very tiny to the modern eye.  It's a flat universe which can be observed directly from 'above' and it directly contradicts the real universe to an extent that defies analogy. Stories are made up from things that may have happened at different times and in different places or are fanciful interpretations of random events or fictional accounts -- when they have any relationship to history at all, but as long as this intellectual assault weapon exists it will be used; we will be assaulted with it by people of evil and perverted and tyrannical intent. 

Enough of this.  The Bible may contain some embedded cysts or pockets of wisdom, some moments of rapture that delight when taken out of context but it's purpose is to sell authority, justify authority, promote authority independent of the will of free people and is  not only offensive to anyone with any concern for the history it traduces, it's a weapon that can, has and always will be used in the assault on our freedom and on truth and on all that has raised us up from smelly, lousy, terrified and diseased apes squatting in the dirt eating carrion.

The Doom that Came to America

Or at least they hope it will

Once upon a time, one used to see many examples of what used to be a favorite theme of cartoonists: the man with a "The End is Nigh" sign.  An amusing mid-century metaphor for delusion.

It isn't funny any more because not only has he been cleaned up, not only does he have a blog and a TV show and syndicated radio program, but because we believe him.  Preparing for Armageddon is an American way of life in our brave new century.  Embedded in so many things I see on line, are endless warnings of financial Armageddon:  the Germans want their gold back and we don't have it and ohmygod! The Dollar will be worthless by the end of the year. Obama will confiscate your guns any day now because he wants to confiscate the food you're stockpiling in your bunker because our food supply is going to collapse by the end of the year.  Don't believe what you see, what you read and especially what "the government" tells you because all governments lie, all the time and the only truth is what you read in these endless screeds.  It's the end of the world, or it soon will be -- unless you buy this book or that video and become a survivor. Unless you buy guns, sell gold, buy food, buy gold, hide guns, tune in, turn off and gimme your money, it's all over but the whimper.

These are the good times for the end times and if people are still laughing at the seething, howling, end of the world bombast, I'm not seeing it. People are terrified that something's happening here, but they don't know what it is. It's high time for the hucksters and the politics of terror they rode in on.

"In my latest research, I uncovered four shocking signs that a cataclysmic collapse will happen sometime in the next 18 months or less."

 Maybe, but I'm not burying gold and guns in the backyard just yet and I'm not sending this 'entrepreneur' any money.  Hey, if it's gonna be worthless by August, why does he want it?

"a massive economic catastrophe unlike anything ever seen before."

"The resulting chaos is going to crush Americans."

Sure, without a doubt and right before GODzilla returns to stomp all over Tokyo, or whatever he does. Right before the Mother Ship returns and Jesus the Hulk turns green and the 12th Imam shows up on Fox and Friends.

Maybe it's only that the growth of the web has given every greedy idiot, every charlatan the ability to be in everyone's face all the time, but the results are worse than the great milking and bilking of the pissing-in-its-pants public.  Add it to the mighty GOP attempt to destabilize the economy and destroy the evil African horror in the White House that is Fox; the malediction may fulfill itself.

"They're going to collectivize our children."

  "Slaveholders were all Liberal Democrats"

No lie is too big, too ridiculous for the sufficiently fearful to believe.  All that matters is fulfilling the Great American Death Wish.  But you know, it's you they expect to suffer.  It's not you they are trying to help and if there is indeed a catastrophe, if the resulting chaos is going to crush anybody, it isn't them. And if you believe what they're selling, you'll get what you pay for.

Constitution-free zone ahead

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

______________

It's one of those news items that's been out there on the Web since February, In fact the ACLU has been talking about it since 2008,  but I had to hear it from someone in another country.  It's a situation I haven't heard on The Situation Room or even  on the blogs I read and yet it's the sort of thing one would have expected to arouse paranoia and rebellious rhetoric amongst the people who obsess about the Government taking away our freedom and our guns and our privacy.  Actually it seems to entail the government taking away what it damn well pleases for any reason it can think up -- and even for no reason at all.  Worst of all, and unlike your run-of-the-mill Chicken Little fantasies -- it's real.

The DHS has worried me since its inception and when national security became homeland security my innate suspicions were aroused.  I still think I was justified.  Yes, there have been exceptions to the 4th amendment proscriptions against searches and seizures of property since the beginning and many are there to allow customs enforcement, but now it seems our borders have by fiat, been arbitrarily moved 100 miles inland and nearly 200 million Americans -- almost 2/3 of the population can, without probable cause and without a warrant or reasonable suspicion and at the whim of law enforcement be stopped, required to prove citizenship, searched, papers and effects rummaged through and have property seized,  and you sir -- you can't do a damned thing about it.  The majority of the US population now lives in a 4th amendment free zone says the ACLU.

I and everyone else living in Florida for instance, which is all within 100 miles of the border, can have our computers and smartphones confiscated and contents downloaded and examined in the name of  Homeland security. No warrant, no pardon me, no apology.  There's a war on, you know and there always will be. So much for being secure in our papers, effects and persons.

We can be patted down for looking like someone who might possess the wrong kind of cigarettes -- or in other words black or Hispanic -- or just young.  And all your papers, documents, pictures, private correspondence, political opinions, records, music, love letters and secret formulas for barbeque sauce can and will be violated, unreasonably searched, downloaded and seized in the name of  Homeland safety and security. For the most part, it's all based on precedent and as with the run up to the total collapse of  the legitimacy of government we experienced in 1930's Germany, they've always got a good and convincing reason.

The insistence on freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures as a fundamental right gained expression in the Colonies before the Revolution based on experiences such as that of John Wilkes.  We've forgotten it.  We've been so conditioned to fear by polemicists on both sides of the governmental aisle, by think tanks, propagandists, do-gooders, evil doers, fear mongers and greedy, power hungry bastards that authoritarianism and its false promises of safety have taken us full circle.  Yes, there have been great strides made in some aspects of personal liberty with respect to minority rights, women's rights and religious freedom, but perhaps that success has blinded us to the non-monetary costs of our perpetual wars and pseudo-wars.


As George Bush said in 2001, we're going to have to give up some of our civil rights and so we have and little has been done since to reverse that trend. We are not secure in our homes and persons and effects and papers because someone blew up some buildings a dozen years ago.  We are not because we have a war on drugs that defies reason and erodes freedom. We've become a prison state where we can detain, imprison without charge, torture, kidnap and kill without due process, where nearly every quotidian government document is classified and the telling of the truth is treason and as long as they can keep us riled up about taxes and fictitious attacks on religion and trumped up dangers we just don't care because we're cowards and encouraged to be cowards for whom freedom is secondary.

Land of a thousand fears

Bias in the media is a strange thing. You can't depend on it leaning in any particular direction and indeed it can shift its drift like the sea grass in the tide.  Take the Fiscal Times founded by billionaire Peter G. Peterson. A billionaire investment banker, he began publishing it on line in 2010 and as you might suspect, his bias toward reducing social services and what it sells as fiscal conservatism draws complaints from many Liberals.

But when there's a wave to ride, the tidal wave of  hoplophobic hysteria that drives ratings high, for instance, the Fiscal Times might just hop on the surfboard and surprise you with something as hyperbolic and just a little bit dishonest as any fear mongering publication leaning the other way.

10 weapons you won't believe are legal, shouts the headlines and the lurid slideshow describing their attempt at arousing outrage  has all sorts of scary images of  things from sword umbrellas to the rotary barrel Vulcan Cannon used to destroy tanks from the sky.  Just like things you're liable to read in the Bible, it ain't necessarily so.

Things like a short piece of chain or nunchucks -- those things Bruce Lee made popular -- aren't on any ATF list, nor are umbrellas that disguise a blade in the handle. Do we really need a Federal ban? Fishing spears are the kind of thing teens bring to the beach here in Florida. Samurai swords like the ones over my fireplace and crossbows aren't banned either, but here's the thing. You can't take them anywhere you like, particularly if their concealed, like that sword cane.  A piece of bicycle chain is just fine as it, but used as a concealed weapon it isn't and neither is that crossbow millions of people use for hunting and general archery.  Brandish that speargun, use it to threaten someone and it sure as hell will be considered a deadly weapon -- unless that someone is a fish.

And then there's the modern Gatling gun with rotating barrels like the one that gained fame in the Civil War era.  They call it the Minigun probably to distinguish it from the things used on planes as tank busters, and they'd probably like to make you think those are legal and all your neighbors are hiding them under the bed, but sorry, it ain't necessarily so.  You can own one of these powered rotary barrel things, but it'll set you back at least $200,000 bucks and  that's only if you can find one grandfathered in and registered with Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives before 1986.  You won't and needless to say, these things aren't a factor in our gun violence problem.   Are they going to tell you that?  Hell no, but you get a picture of  a gunship with a monster cannon just to keep the teeth chattering and the hysteria going.

What about flamethrowers?  The picture shows a GI in battle dress throwing a fountain of fire -- something else that isn't much of a factor in crime.  It's not available at Wal-Mart or Gander Mountain and widely used in forestry and agriculture to do things like burn off the sugar cane fields in Florida every season.  What did you think they used, a Ronson?  Have there been any flamethrower burglaries or muggings?  Are you really worried about it?

I particularly enjoyed the picture of a WWII howitzer that announced that cannons are legal for private use.  Not the one they show, of course. They are talking about muzzle loading black powder cannons that shoot beer cans or bowling balls and the like.  Live out on a farm and you can probably fire one, but even without Federal bans, don't try that in town without a permit. Maybe you've got a courthouse or VFW with one on the lawn.  I think we can sleep at night folks, but no, you're going to stay up jittering about them shelling your neighborhood, aren't you.  One picture is worth a thousand lies, you know  - and they've got ten of them.

Funniest of all is that this learned lump of laughter is a reprise of something that appeared in Cracked Magazine years ago but without the humor.  At least there you expected a bit of tongue in cheek and a bit of  well,  outright bullshit, but hey -- just try to make an "improvised" machine gun without that somewhat inconvenient ten years and $200,000 speed bump.  None of this crap even shows up in crime statistics and yet, we get this kind of thing every day in idiotic expose's telling us to fear, to tremble, to quake and quiver because the neighbors are coming to get us with their umbrellas, and their swords and bicycle chains, ninja swords and nunchaku and of course their howitzers and A10 Warthog tankbuster jets with rotary cannons.  So little time, so many things to ban!

Perhaps the horse might talk.

A court Jester is said to have made a bet with his king that he could make a horse talk within some length of time. When asked why he would be so reckless as to bet on an impossible thing, he replied:  before the time is up, I might die, the king might die and perhaps the horse might talk.  So it seems to be with the anti-abortion crowd and its attempts to overturn a Supreme Court ruling based on constitutional presumptions.

Easter, which has been around far, far longer than Christianity, is the spring holiday when Western traditions celebrate the Moon and fertility goddess Oestra, from whom the name Easter derives.  She was often depicted with rabbit ears like the Playboy bunnies and for the same reason. Easter, like so much of what Christianity has turned into in this third millennium, is all about sex and procreation.

Funny perhaps that they've picked the season to make another attempt to forbid women to terminate pregnancies; usually for any reason. Arkansas and North Dakota passed laws this month forbidding any abortion after sensitive (and vaginally intrusive) instruments could detect a foetal heartbeat.     Other states seem to be considering this end-run around Roe Vs. Wade.  Of course that landmark decision says that states cannot ban abortion before a fetus is viable outside the womb, but this doomed sort of legislative Hail Mary pass is usually done in the same spirit one buys lottery tickets.  The odds are ridiculous, but you never know. 

It also helps keep the pseudo-religious congressmen visible and thus more likely to get those Bible thumping votes.  Too bad there's really no biblical support for the fuss about personhood for something that doesn't breathe, but when did popular theology require anything resembling logical or factual or even Biblical consistency?  We're dealing with passionate groups who worry that the universe will grow dark or that some God-O-Love will not only kill us, but consign us mercilessly to eternal torture should we prevent an ovum from implanting itself in some uterine wall.

Of course having a few pulsating cells in a proto-heart doesn't meet the test of viability as stipulated by the high court, but as I said, it's not about logic, it's about conviction and it's about harassing the courts and being seen to be harassing the courts and to be in support of the Theocratic insurgents who have no interest whatever in popular sovereignty or any real concept of Democracy.

The Court has repeatedly deemed laws of this sort to be unconstitutional but to a group that not coincidentally asserts that the real constitution is the Christian Bible, there's no obstacle here if we can only get rid of the heretics, atheists and other spawn of Satan. Therein lies the real danger to our future. The Christian Bible fails to denounce and even supports slavery and the subjugation of women along with the notion that political power derives from people who can get away with declaring that God appointed them.

This attack will probably fail but like a Zombie Apocalypse, the attackers keep coming at you even if they're chopped in pieces. With endless and implacable onslaughts, who can tell?  With enough time, who can tell?  Perhaps the horse might talk.

 Far more than an attack on the personal sovereignty, the ownership of  one's body and its functions that seem to underlie the self-evident assumptions of our nation, this religious war, the Crusade against reproductive rights and control of one's body and destiny is a denial of the stated fundamentals of our nation, a struggle against Democracy.  Perhaps it's time to spend less time on the hysterical distractions and diversions in the headlines and take notice.

Survival of the fittest

It's a sad story, a terrible story. It's not all that unique, but to me our reaction to it is important to note.

Imagine.  You're asleep at home in your bedroom late at night.  All of a sudden there's a noise. Someone is coming into your bedroom. You smell alcohol, your adrenaline is pumping. You think of your wife, your family, asleep.  What do you do?  You actions will determine not only the rest of your life, but how we as liberals and conservatives see you.

It happened to Donald West Wilder II of  Sterling, VA, described as “a great neighbor, a helper, someone who spends spare time volunteering to help others.”   I have no reason to believe he wasn't.  He did however have a gun by the bedside and he used it.

Had he grabbed a meat cleaver, a golf club or a candlestick he might have killed the intruder -- he might not have, since it's not easy to engage some assailant in hand-to-hand combat, half awake, in the dark. Fractions of a second determine the outcome. A chuck Norris type, a Bruce Lee, might have been able to overpower an intruder -- in a movie --   But he didn't, he used his gun, he killed a high school student who was so drunk he didn't know where he was.

It's a tragedy, as it is when someone's pit bull kills someone's kid, when the some other drunk driving teenager kills someone's kid, wife, mother.  It's also a tragedy when someone is killed in his bed and that happens, all the time.

I'm not going to debate the wisdom of keeping loaded firearms around,  or rattle about how one should really take time and think when someone crashes through your window, or about dialing 911 in fatuous confidence that it will save your life or your family's.  I don't keep a gun at my bedside.  It's not likely ever to be useful, but Wilder did and if the intruder was who he had every right and expectation to believe he was it would likely have meant that he could go on living. The right to life isn't conditional.

But that's not my thesis. What I see as another tragedy is that we, as Liberals are so often; too often just as small minded, self-righteous and crippled by smug, unquestioned, indefensible  dogma that we're not worth listening to.

It's the reader comments that are tragic:

• He should have taken time to see if he could recognize the kid first.  In the dark. Ridiculous.
• If baffles me that people are stupid enough to think that the answer is "more guns." Non sequitur
• Twas ever thus with the "stand your ground" crowd. Thinking isn't part of their m.o. ad hominem

Yes, of course, you're 86 and in a wheelchair -- you should run away while someone rapes your wife or sets your house on fire or just moves the hell in and takes over.  It's not your ground to stand. Rapists and murderer's rights prevail and if you're not big and strong and young, just suck it up and die because you might hurt someone.

The endless ad hominem continues with fantasies about how any gun owner longs to kill someone and endless irrelevant ramblings about the NRA, the murderous bastard gun - nuts, crooked cops, Obama and the alleged enormity of telling people that they have the right to defend their lives, their families and homes rather than depending on tinkerbell and 911.

Stories that include guns are everyone's favorite grindstone and they attract more drunks, idiots and psychos than Wal-Mart at midnight. None of these people have any idea what's wrong, what needs to be done, what can or can't help. None of them give a shit about truth or even have the ability to think clearly beyond their various catechisms and credos and prejudices and phobias.  Yet when we try to talk sanely about what regulations should cover firearms, about what can and should be done, this is what we get: rabid, raving, hate filled idiots calling themselves liberals.

Look, odds are that someone crashing through your bedroom window at 2 AM means you harm. The assertion that you have a right to fight back in defense of your home and your life is part of common law and probably of every legal code since Hammurabi lost his shoe.  Kids shouldn't be out all night drinking themselves into a stupor and the parents who allowed it should feel as guilty as the man who did what he had to do. 

Foxerwocky

I've been waiting a long time for Fox to sic their gibbering, barking, slobbering and leg humping dogs on Easter and they finally have.  Yep, there's a war on Easter although it's hard to tell who the combatants are and even what Fox New's position is.  Seems some school in Alabama, speaking (according to Foxlogic of course) for all schools in all of the United States, cancelled all Easter and other Christian themed events because they thought it inappropriate. It is.  One classroom could represent as many as six religions.

Consideration for others and respect for the right to teach one's own children one's own religious traditions. That's the sort of things Fox and Fiends like to call "politically correct" since to attack what might otherwise be called tolerance or good will or common decency requires a meaningless epithet that can mean anything you need it to mean. PC.

All this means of course, that someone, somewhere is waging war on Easter even though there's no evidence anywhere that the celebration of the holiday is being suppressed.  It isn't; neither the mythology of  death and resurrection nor the syncretion  of  Jesus with the European fertility Goddess for whom the holiday is named. It's long been a Goddess holiday and students of semitic languages will notice that the Ish in Ishtar, for instance sounds like the Isha -- the woman created for the Ish, Adam.

Yes, one principal in one school in Alabama doth a war make because he decided that his school is not a Sunday School, but a secular school, supported by taxes, whose business is not to give parties, either with eggs and bunnies or ridiculous stories about resurrected first century Jewish revolutionaries as recounted by people who weren't there.

Of course having no factual knowledge or rational basis for argument, having no interest in educating or informing the public, the Fox Coven launched this morning into a typically fatuous farrago of fallacy and peremptorily non-sequitur assertions such as Gretchen the Witch's:

 “Have we just gotten so deep into this political correctness that we now just can’t take the religion as it is, celebrate it and move on?”

 Pardon me?  Are we so stupid that we didn't notice you haven't made a case at all - neither logical or mystical or truthful?  You've just snickered and sneered and flung dung and declared war. Decency is PC so let's do what we will?

The real question of the propriety of making kids perform rituals, ridiculous or otherwise, was not addressed, not discussed, not acknowledged, as the 'discussion' devolved into a bouillabaisse of bullshit.  Easter celebrations can't be offensive because bunnies aren't in the Bible?  Are you the same morons who want to get rid of Halloween because it's pagan?  What's next, they cackle -- can't we say Nor'easter?  Can we still teach about Easter Island in Geography? It's a pagan holiday anyway, or maybe it isn't and why can't we just gyre and gimble in the wabe with The Christrabbit and eat Mithras buns with the Mome raths
?  Right or wrong, we're right because it's just so much fun to mock -- anyone can do it!  Brillig, man, just brillig.

Rompin' Stompin' Jesus

What's in a name?  Apparently that question requires more than most people really are willing or able to apply and when the name has religious significance, those who have the cranial horsepower will usually use it to run like hell. That leaves people like me to comment.

Florida Atlantic University finds itself in hot water on this cold Wednesday morning in South Florida.  Seems there was a classroom exercise in which students were asked to write the name Jesus on a piece of paper and "stomp" on it.  From media sources, it's still unclear what the context was and I can only recall reading about a similar practice in Japan a few hundred years ago where suspected heretics (Christians) were required to pledge their allegiances to traditional values by stepping on a picture of Jesus.  Refuse and you were beheaded.  But anyway, Full time gardener and part time student Ryan Rotelas, who identifies himself as a Mormon still has his head attached, even though he claims he was asked to leave the classroom for making a fuss about it, but he sure is mad and always quick to defend the real and proper faith, Florida Governor Rick Scott is demanding an investigation and an apology from the Boca Raton, Florida University.  I've been demanding that he apologize for ripping off Medicare for a few billion bucks and ask God for forgiveness for quite a while now, but that's a trifle compared with stepping on sacred and holy notebook paper.  I mean that piece of wood pulp is GOD!  Transubstantiation and all that.

But what a horrible offense, to ask college level students to explore religious intolerance particularly when it concerns Christian ideas of what is sacred - like pieces of paper with grossly mistranslated and mispronounced Hebrew names. Helped by Yahweh. After all we're talking about Joshua,  Moses' successor here. 

The school of course promises never to desecrate such a common South American name again.  I don't recall Scotty having said much about the Koran-Burning Christian church in Florida, by the way, but of course that would require him to stomp on Jesus again, at least figuratively.

Too bad someone like Rick didn't get all Ezekiel on a college professor of mine who wrote books about how the Nazis didn't really have death camps or intervene when as a child I had to learn songs about Jesus in elementary school, but that was years ago and we've progressed. It's good to know that Christians, at least have not only God, but Rick Scott on their sides.

Worm Moon

Worm moon.
Yachts all straining at mooring lines.
Sea swollen with the spring tide.
Cold night moon.
Sharp stars.
Frog voices quiet in the dried ponds
and worms,
such as are left by the moles from underneath
and armadillos from above
have no voices.

Those little town blues

Small town newspapers.  When I first moved here over 11 years ago, Little Boots was in the white house and although the fear machine was running on afterburner and everyone was in the process of never forgetting and sending money to Taiwan manufacturers of plastic automobile flag holders, you still had headlines declaring that some local fisherman had caught a record Snook or irate letters about litter in the park.  Now it's outrage.  Every day. Even the fish are angry.

Printed opprobrium grew over the Bush years, at least those quasi-literate, misspelled, cliche-ridden  letters to the editor written in impotent rage at Mexican farm workers, people on food stamps, Liberals, immigrants, ethnic minorities, liberals, Muslims, atheists, Jews, Democrats -- did I mention Liberals?  Yes, sure, I and a few others sometimes wrote ( brilliantly, I must admit) alternate opinons, much to the further wrath of the toothless unwashed, but it's a small town as I said, and word gets around and  I really don't want to carry a gun in my bathing suit or they may think I'm happy to see them.   Discretion, valor and all that.

Of course it's hardly new.  I remember, back in the mid 60's, living in long hair and sandals in the tiny, rural, University town of Hamilton New York.  I remember when the school had an open symposium on Communism, and the good, go-to-church and keep-Christ-in-Christmas locals flooded the opinion page with demands to bomb the bastards back to the stone age - now.  Small town newspapers.  I wish I could believe that they didn't represent America, that they weren't just some boil on the ass of an otherwise great nation.

Take the Lincoln Journal, of Lincoln County, West Virginia.  Seems public sentiment supported the termination of a teacher for fear she would "turn her students gay."  Faced with a reader's  voice mail (I used reader loosely here)  asserting that

 “We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers, The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops.”

they decided to print it.  I don't fault them. Such people should be heard so we know what we're dealing with -- and where they are.  Now my local paper would probably not have, and it doesn't have a voice-mail line for illiterates.  Most of us here after all, come from elsewhere where literacy of a certain minimal level is fairly common, but those sentiments aren't exactly rare with the locals either.

“You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters. We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you. "

You're welcome. White and Right indeed. I hope you do just that and perhaps building a wall will help the local economy for a while.  In fact I hope everyone like you moves to Lincoln County. It would be nice to have all y'all in one place and  I hope there's room. I'd hate to have to use up more than one of our precious nukes, but as for the stone age -- are you sure you're ready for that big an upgrade?

I have seen the enemy

and he is us.

I wonder if Liberals can claim to be united by mostly by principle, by a shared perspicacity or more by the habit of responding to organized provocation with a conditioned reflex. Certainly the kind of strong legislation designed to regulate behavior we often support and support vehemently isn't liberal in nature. Attempting to regulate what we eat and drink is, for instance, more likely to be supported by Democrats than by Republicans or Conservatives -- and yes, there is a difference. Is the spirit of submission, the tendency to find comfort and a feeling of safety under an umbrella of statutes, regulations, authorities and prohibitions really part of any definition of Liberalism or Liberty, for that matter?

It's not that Republicans are not fond, or even passionate about making certain behaviors disappear by banning, prohibiting and regulating them, but I don't really care about Republicans.  It does no good to argue about full citizenship for fertilized egg cells with people who don't believe in questioning such received certainties and in the long term, being firmly and inexorably on the wrong side of history means we only have to wait them out. Besides, they don't listen to me, so why should I bother telling you who are at least reading this, why the hijacked hulk of the GOP is headed for the rocks. I just want to warn us of the same shoals ahead.

Yes, I think Liberals can be just as intransigent and their positions as unassailable by fact or logic, herded together and immovable like cows in a stream.  Are we really the answer or are we just the opposite polarity of the same thing and just as hide-bound and intransigent; just as beholden to political puppeteers as they are?  When we latch onto a proposed 'solution' we can be just as unable to ask if it is indeed a solution, a workable solution, the only solution and if that solution really addresses real situations, or contrived, conjectural scenarios.  Yes, we have a party that really believes that a vaccine for Human Papilloma Virus will make our daughters into whores -- a belief that is independent of data -- and so we laugh at them.  But then some of us nod our heads in agreement at the notion that Americans, or at least New Yorkers are fatter than we think they should be because, and only because vendors are selling very large containers of soft drinks.  Selling what their customers want because they are greedy. Greedy profiteers for wanting not to be put out of business by someone who offers what they want.

It's that simple post hoc ergo propter hoc thing once again and we go after those mean irresponsible business men who should avoid selling what the 'experts' tell us is bad and we slam that old punching bag once again and forget to ask why we should forbid one source of calories and ignore all the others as though they weren't as much or more significant. I've yet to hear anyone propose rationing fried potatoes or cheese or bacon or mom's apple pie.  "Here's the problem and here's the solution" is all we need to hear and by 'we' I mean everyone.  Have we moored the good ship Liberal to a drifting piling, not attached to anything at all?

Sometimes I think it's what we don't ask that defines our political polarity. When we argued for "55 stay alive"  we didn't ask why the death toll was declining faster in Germany. We didn't ask why we were focusing our safety campaign on the very safest portion of American roads. We didn't even stop to notice that the proposed fuel savings weren't materializing because of all the speeding up and slowing down one had to do to get around the little bunches of cars and trucks the speed limit caused and we fooled ourselves into believing that people really were obeying the law and that we weren't making more and more people into cynical scofflaws and spending a fortune doing it. We were so sure that it was cars and cars alone driving up the cost of fuel that we forgot to regulate trucks and gave birth to the SUV.  Did those third brake lights really do a damned thing to reduce collisions? Have we ever asked?  No, the goal was to pass a safety bill and we did. 

I'm not going into the same phenomenon as it applies to our perennial approach to gun violence or drug usage or any of the other issues that not only separate us from them, but separate us from reality.
Ask yourself, does this incident the media is howling about indicate a headlong descent into chaos, or is it random incident someone wants to use to sell an idea?  Are we getting sold hysteria so as not to care whether something is getting better or worse?  Are we out waving signs and chanting for the weakest, most ill conceived solution to a problem that's not as much of a problem as you think?

Does out ability to know about every meteorite, every earthquake, every school bus accident and every epidemic within seconds and hear about it over and over really indicate some apocalypse is coming and we need to do this or that before it's too late?  Or is someone selling something?

Are we Liberals being used as a foil the way Fox used to use their token Liberal Alan Colmes? Are our scapegoats handed to us to distract us or to make us seem silly and ill informed and who created them?  Will our passionately offered solution really work and will we bother to find out if they have worked after we pass them or if they have worked elsewhere or failed?

Or will we do as we have too often done, smile and nod together like Viziers in some Arabian Night and say "we passed a crime bill"  and move smugly on to some other Crusade that needs to be completed  right now, before the bars close?  Wisdom, I think, comes from asking questions and the wise question their every thought. It's not enough to frolic in criticism of them, to feel superior to those loonies and idiots and crooks and liars.  I've seen the enemy, you know, glaring at me from the bathroom mirror. . .

ALEC and the Beast.

I hope I can be forgiven for bringing this up out of phase with fashion, because it's not about a crime wave that isn't happening or Republican intransigence or the psychotic fugue brigade out to prove Obama is Satan's evil twin.

It's about pigs.  Perhaps it's because I enjoyed a piece of bacon for breakfast and shortly before viewing this video.  It's not that I'm against eating meat.  If farm animals are given a better but shorter life, free of the constant fear and the disease and parasites and hunger that define the lives of wild beasts, I can live with it.  What I can't live with is the brutality quite on a par and sometimes worse than what happened at Sobibor or Auschwitz.

I don't want to eat something that was skinned alive or that lived its entire life unable to move or that died in prolonged screaming agony.  Pigs are intelligent as animals go and yet people who get all moon eyed at kittens and puppies which may be less intelligent and aware, are themselves unaware of piglets being tossed around with pitchforks like dead meat or tossed squealing into machines of slaughter. None of that is necessary.  There are ways to slaughter animals without pain or terror and to raise them without extreme misery.  But no, it's not just about pigs, at least not the four-legged kind. It's about the monsters who own these houses of horror, the factory farms, the slaughter houses that not only scoff at the law, but want to put you in jail if you expose the satanic operations that sicken any but the most depraved and inhuman amongst us.

ALEC, a conservative business advocacy group is attempting to criminalize meat industry employees who might neglect to tell an employer how they feel about the illegal torture and abuse of animals on job applications. I'm talking about laws that mandate jail time for filming illegal activities and fulfilling a legal requirement to report them to authorities. Yes, it's already a jail-time crime in some states to expose the crimes of your employer and ALEC seems to want a country where although the government can capriciously carry on surveillance and seizure over individuals, the privacy of meat packers is sacred no matter how many heinous offenses to decency they commit.

There must be something we can do, short of  taking the family Kalashnikov down to the farm and expressing your opinion ballistically.  There are congressmen, senators and others who may under duress be tempted to ignore the blood soaked contributions of  slaughterhouses and factory farms.  Some of them can read.  Some of them do read -- and you can write, can't you?

Shit-kicker conservatives?

If there's anything as loathsome to me as racism, it may be the way that many and perhaps most of us like to use stereotypes to demean a group, arguing ad lapidem or using a stereotype designed merely to unite a disparate group for the purpose of disparagement. It's one of the things Bill Maher does sometimes, that Rush and Hannity and others do all the time. It's a sin few of us are free of.

If he's right in saying that many small groups can, often with the assistance of the fair and balanced media achieve a level of influence that belies their small membership, I'd prefer that he'd do so without the cheap stereotypes. 

"From the NRA to “One Million Moms, powerful conservative lobbies that don’t reflect the values of the American people can somehow dictate what politicians on both sides are willing to stand for." 

Well yes, but so can lobbies in general, that's what they're for -- and so can lobbies that don't "kick shit"  but can and do kick the facts around just a bit. I don't think we can assume for instance, that because the NRA has only four million members  it doesn't reflect something similar to what a great deal more than four million voters believe to an extent -- rightly or wrongly.

I have severe misgivings for instance,  about the facts behind many of the pet straw men of the right and left  and sorry, there's no shit on my boat shoes -- besides, the greater issue is far too non-funny to treat in this way.    There are fewer opportunities for burlesque when describing what may be a larger plurality in America -- the moderates, the centrists, the pragmatic and the analytical.  And so we either ignore them or try to force them into a category we know how to mock, because too often mockery, hyperbole and stereotypes  are all we have.

If there's humor in the street theater we get instead of news, I'd have to bring up the crowds waving angry signs and shouting slogans like "no weapons on airplanes" in response to the TSA's decision to allow golf clubs and tiny knives so small that a diminutive Gerbil could carry an 'arsenal' in one cheek.  One "fact kicker" activist found it worthwhile to wave around a large and lethal  hunting knife for the cameras recently in hope that the sort of liberal Maher characterizes as never having met a regulation they didn't like, would identify one with the other and fail to ask how someone would take command of a jetliner with a putter or lacrosse stick much less a "weapon" hardly big enough to sharpen a pencil.  Are these people a majority or would they all fit into a VW beetle?  They'd like to make you angry enough so that you won't ask.  Does it help to dismiss the right wing faithful as "shit kickers" while we bang on the ban drum about making soft drinks illegal and prosecute parents for photographing their kids in the bathtub?  They don't miss a chance to stereotype us and we make it easy for them.

Will it take some sort of Buddha to remind us that there is a middle path, that Agnew was wrong and extremism is pretty much a vice all the time, that mockery is as much the tool of the bigot and racist and liar and crook as well as of anyone, that cynicism and sarcasm and the throwing of stones are dangerous techniques for those not beyond reproach?  Maybe, maybe not and perhaps that Buddha would risk crucifixion -- it happens.  

Extreme

Extreme is one of the words that defines our time. Extreme sports, for instance -- ordinary sports just aren't enough, but it's not just popular entertainment that needs to be as wild and crazy.  The safer things get, the more we seem to need the excitement of battling danger with passion and with that passion come extreme precautions, and extreme laws -- and extreme stupidity.

Take the danger of child abuse -- it's real, but really, do we need to define the normal and harmless so that it can't be told from the abnormal and harmful?  Of course we do because so much depends, in our totally politicized nation, on hysteria, on showing everyone that we're "proactive" and that any grotesque manifestation of our crusading nature is justifiable "if only one ____ is saved."

It's hard to know what was saved when 7 year old Josh Welch of Baltimore was suspended from school for having chewed his Pop-Tart into something that looked to a teacher like a gun, but it's not unique.  Kids get into trouble for things that seem to someone of my age as if teachers are simply looking for any bizarre excuse to define a nail clipper as a "weapon" or a cough drop is "drugs."  As with so many indefensible things, it's usually defined as "protecting the children."

Again it's hard to know who was protected when an Arizona couple had their children taken from them and their lives arguably ruined for taking bath time pictures of their three toddlers on a towel, hugging each other.  Some Wal-Mart watchdog saw the photos and called the cops. Although a judge eventually determined that the parents weren't thinking about sex when they took the pictures (that's apparently all that's needed) the kids were traumatically  "protected" by being put in foster care and the parents on one of those "sexual offender" lists that essentially render one an outlaw and unable to live near civilization for the rest of their lives. 

So do we wonder that some people think it's not really silly to think that in some ways we have an intrusive government?  Can some be excused for speculating about having lost some essential  freedom because extremism in defense of some thing or another is no vice?  The hell it isn't!  Those who argue that the ends sanctify the means and never mind who gets hurt, can't rightly be called Liberals or Conservatives.  I call them cowards when I'm trying to be gentle and understanding, but I've pretty much run out of those two things these days.

Defending the Faith

I hesitate to write about this, since everyone and his horse will undoubtedly pick up on the latest Republican hilarity.  It's an easy target, but it says so much about what the Republican party has been party to: the degradation of truth, logic, decency and freedom.  Yes, we have another Republican telling us that women probably can't get pregnant from being raped.

Denial, as I've been saying ad nauseam, is the flip side of belief and every belief requires a denial.  Denial of what you know to be true, is hypocrisy and to avoid hypocrisy, too many Republicans will defend what they know to be false and tell themselves it's heroic; tell themselves that lies are not lies if they're useful in defending the faith. Some of what one needs to defend in order to gain party support is immoral, indecent, mean-spirited and nasty too. Much of it is just a series of damned lies, but that's another story.

There's just no truth to the idea that God or biology protect a rape victim from pregnancy but the creed demands that one oppose terminating a pregnancy, whether unwanted or repellant or dangerous, so you -- forgive my technical jargon -- have to make shit up in order to defend the belief and deny the truth, be it incontrovertible truth about evolution, cosmology, geology, economics, law, mathematics or history. In many cases, being a Republican requires that you park not only your brains, but your honesty, your decency in the alley behind the GOP bar next to the dumpster, lest any of the clergy see it.

I won't deny that I take a certain satisfaction in presenting this one small, relatively unimportant demonstration of the mental processes that produce and direct the American Opera Buffo.  I delight in airing their dirty laundry, not because I like the rancid smell of batshit, but because it's time to burn it and bury the ashes.  It has been time forever.  

TSA backs off on knife control

So you think the TSA has finally come to its senses and smartened up its ban on deadly weapons like nail clippers and pool cues?  Most people, if they bother to think about it, aren't all that terrified that some 12 year old carrying his Little League bat or hockey stick is going to commandeer a 747, nor is the woman with that tiny Swiss Army knife on her keychain.  The TSA has at least recognized that the hijackings of  9/11/01 were facilitated by cabin doors without locks, thanks to the refusal of our  regulatory agencies to force that level of security on private business. Box cutters were secondary.


Your tiny knife with tweezers and nail file isn't really going to allow a terrorist incident or some adolescent to take over an airplane with a plastic hockey stick and so the TSA is going to acknowledge the laughter and relent -- in some cases.  In customary ban-it writing style however, the descriptions of the newly permitted items seem to have been written by people being forced to relent at gunpoint or people from Mars who have never seen and are terrified of sharp objects.

So what can you take on the plane that you couldn't last week?  Cigarette lighters, although you can't smoke,  up to two golf clubs,  ( three would somehow be too dangerous) toy bats or other sports sticks and small pocket knives with blades up to (wait for this) 2.36 inches.  2.37 is too scary to allow and a fixed blade is out for some reason known only to Martians and most mysteriously, if the handle has any curve to it, it's still a terrorist assault weapon and prohibited.  My tiny mustache scissors?  Sorry Osama, you and your beard don't get on the plane.

Box cutters?  Even though the evidence from 9/11 really doesn't support the newspaper story, a 1" box cutter blade, half the length of  Uncle Fogg's Victorinox is just too al Qaeda for the TSA.

You'll suspect that I'm going somewhere with this, but I don't need to, you already guessed that I think people who write and most passionately defend regulatory descriptions  tend to be fond of tin foil haberdashery, or at least that's my opinion -- and I'm sticking with it.

Suffer the children?

Want to know what ticks me off?  Of course you do -- it's that so many of us who think we're out of the woods because the Republicans lost the last two presidential elections   have resumed the idiotic posturing and bickering, hyperbolizing, fear mongering and in-fighting about our often worn out  liberal issues.  Does anyone really think that right wing extremism has slunk away like the loser in a dog fight?

Is the Democratic party going back to being the ban-it party, the baby-on-board ' can't trust anybody party that can't agree with each other enough to get anything done? Are we back to 'ban-the-bomb' naïveté while real evil marches on? Of course, that's what we do, but guess what bucky, Limbaugh still draws ratings and the Fox is still alive -- or at least undead.

Remember when Obama's little talk about patriotism to schoolchildren was "just like Pol Pot?"  Well when Obama cancelled some White House tours, it was only so that he could "maximize the pain" for children says grimacing Gretchen the witch of Fox News.  "Can we be adults about this?" she asked while meanwhile back at the fortress of evil, a Republican (Texas of course) Rep was proposing that Obama can't play golf again until the Republicans say so. Is Louie Gohmert old enough to remember when Eisenhower was accused of playing golf while the Russkies missle-gapped us?

Meanwhile, while Carlson and the Doocebag are trying to Fox Block Obama, inquiring minds are asking whether the Evil Empire will discuss the effect the sequestration gambit will have on American Children.  That's right, children.  They're such useful tools and they're great for breakfast too.  Just ask the Fox.

Duelling with the dummies.

I've become rather tired of railing on and on about how idiotic and venal one Republican politician and pundit after another are.  After all, if another guy is stupid and  crooked it doesn't mean I'm a genius and free from error, nor those with whom I agree. I'd like to say I stay calm and rational and analytical or I stay quiet.  But sometimes. . . sometimes the things you hear them say just take your breath away like a sudden blast of 25 below Chicago wind and you've just got to say something and call an idiot an idiot.

Washington State Rep. Ed Orcutt (R), who would like to tax bicycles (what, you really thought they don't like to tax things?) would like to justify it by telling constituents that bicycles, or at least people who ride them, give off more carbon dioxide than they would driving a car.  OK, so you passed middle school science and I don't have to tell you that even Honest Lance in his prime wasn't sucking in 400 CFM of air and oxidizing several gallons of gasoline an hour moving a couple tons down the road, but Eddy boy here either is grossly uneducated, dumb as a doorknob, a damn liar  -- or all of the above. Am I repeating myself here?  I guess so, I already mentioned that he was a Republican politician.

He doesn't need to be otherwise. He doesn't need to be truthful or make any kind of sense when flatulating to the fold. Republicans will believe anything as long as it's part of the creed or think it will save them or their owners a buck, which is pretty much the same thing.  No, as you might suspect, and like the bulk of the things Republicans rant and rave about, it's not true.

In a way, you and I can smile and act dismissive of such idiotic antics but there's a danger in it. Fighting with idiots can make us lazy and it can make us smug and sometimes we get caught with our pants down and our dunce caps on.  The Nietzsche thing about fighting with monsters applies to arguing with idiots. We still have to be as careful as ever to be sure of our facts, not to sound like idiots ourselves and sometimes when you look into the abyss of stupidity, the abyss looks into you.

Drivin' Miss Mambo

(with a nod to AC/DC)

Ten over, Sunday night, tryin'a get home.
ToyotaporschehondaKia
18wheeler,
clapped out beater,
all of Broward heading north.
Texas Lexus, Mommyvan,
mountain man in jacked up truck.
Pickemup.

Heavy metal Hummer,
BMdubya runya
off the road.
look at me.
She's a fast machine but it don't matter,
you're always in their way.

She shook me all night long.

Runnin side by side and three lanes wide,
doin' 80,
can't pass me
in my beemeraudiSUV
I'm in a Scion, don't even try mon -
look at me.

She shook me all night long.

Only two miles more, before -
and there's the break I'm waiting for,
double clutching down to four.
Road is shaking, Earth is quaking
listen to that intake roar.
And hit it NOW.

Sixty five hundred
Go for broke
Watch my red ass twitch,
you sonovabitch
and watch my tires smoke.

Hundred, 20, 30, 40
Hunderdanfifty, mister swifty,
Can you even see me now?
watch that tach jack and reach
for the Georgia peach
and drop it in my lap,
eight hundred miles away.

She shook me all night long.

Down the ramp and don't let up,
long straight and hard right,
gonna get back home tonight.
Don't brake till you see Jeez
and don't turn in till he says please.

Point 6, point 7, point 8 and NOW. 
And feel that surge.
That screaming urge
HID light
dark Florida night
drivin' Miss Mambo

Oh really?

I parked next to a new Lexus at the bank yesterday and my car being as low slung as it is,  a magnetic sign on its door was right in my face.  I had to think for a while, wondering if the state of American education was really that defective or if the owner simply wished it were.

Now I'm assuming the Lexus driver, an elderly women was referring to Roman Catholicism and not to some abstract universality of taste -- an assumption aided by the iconography -- and if that assumption is correct, she must assume that Jewish followers of Jesus as the Messiah became a universal church based in Rome in the year of Jesus' crucifixion.

I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Catholics, after all a good portion of this fine Southern Community are convinced and would argue a little too heatedly that the entire universe was established in 4004 BC, or at least our infinitesimal mote.

Funny how organizations that use history as a justification, have to tailor it to fit -- with an occasional taking in or letting out of the seams.  Somewhere along the line Constantine and perhaps Athanasius of Alexandria were patched over or removed as you might eliminate a pocket or a buttonhole, but who's going to argue with the old lady Lexus driver.  It's Florida and she's probably armed.

Can we talk?

We don't talk much about "going postal" any more.  The preferred venue for demented folk who want to die in a blaze of glory and/or be the talk of the town for a week or so as payback for having been ignored or misunderstood or reviled is no longer the United States Post Office.  Schools are now the place, or at least a popular place. Shock value is about as high as it gets and apparently killing kids is as easy as taking candy from them.

But it's certainly not exclusive to the US or the direct consequence of the 2nd amendment or the NRA. Norway, Great Britain and even Switzerland have recently been host to wild and often suicidal shooting sprees by demented individuals not connected to terrorist groups and as far as I know, none of those countries have guarantees of any right to keep and bear arms.  Does the alleged "ease" of obtaining firearms or the right to obtain them play a part in the frequency of such insane actions?  Has it more to do with the rates of fire of available firearms, the type of ammunition, the appearance of a gun, the materials it's made of?  A great number of words have been spoken, shouted, screamed and written down about such questions and some of those words and related opinions have been false or deliberately misleading and the result of organized groups using public outrage as a political tool.

The Sandy Hook school shooting had, as it seems, something to do with some miserable tortured soul wanting to emulate Anders Breivik, the Norwegian nut who used explosives and firearms to kill 77 hapless young people and perhaps other similar killers. Perhaps Adam Lanza, had he not killed himself as well, would have been interested in today's workplace shooting near Luzern, Switzerland leaving, at last count, three dead and seven wounded. At least it would have been easier to top. Lanza never came close to Breivik's "score."  I use the word score by the way, not because I'm cold and without feeling, but because I believe such monsters are that way and see all this as part of a gruesome game.  It's game and a game played on TV screens as much as those ever popular "first person shooter" games played on X-boxes and computers.

Run Amok shootings are much more rare in Switzerland, a country with its own gun culture and high level of recreational shooters and low crime rates -- but still they happen and some obviously happen as some sort of grotesque competition, some sort of rage to go out as a part of some sort of bloody horror that I can't understand, nor do I have any qualifications as or the vocabulary of a psychologist.  I think I can however, talk about the differences in the ways other countries react. Switzerland's liberal voters recently rejected tighter gun controls while American Liberals, for the most part have been so eager for more of any type that the inconsistencies and inaccuracies and falsehoods used to argue for them go unnoticed. Their political opposites are in a similar state of panic. Any legislation is the end of all freedom.

Great Britain banned handgun ownership in 1997 along with other firearms with short barrels -- and even some BB guns -- after only two rampage killings since WWII. Yet there was another in 2010 with thirteen dead and eleven injured.   Firearms fatalities continued to increase until 2008 after which they began to decline as they have in the US. Anti-gun sentiment there exists to the degree that few police officers are permitted to carry guns.  Yes, they have a lower gun homicide rate but then it always was lower and it seems hard to prove at this point that all that restrictive legislation has achieved more than to force the Olympic pistol shooting team to practice abroad.  It remains a very popular sport in Switzerland.

Attributing different rates of  gun crime to cultural and social conditions or to availability of  mental health services in different countries isn't a popular or well tolerated subject in the Liberal community, at least in my  experience. Far too much energy goes into the inflation of fear and we have for too many arguments for gun control that depend on calling Grandpa's Remington 700 deer rifle a "sniper rifle," a Ruger Mini 14 Ranch Rifle an "assault rifle" if you put a plastic stock on it -- full metal jacket bullets are "armor piercing" if they will penetrate body armor and hollow points for hunting become "cop killer ammunition."  For years, the line of Glock pistols used by most police departments were described by anti-gun writers as plastic guns designed to be smuggled onto airplanes and those aren't the only lies and distortions that drove me away from their side. 

Are we all at a higher risk of mad, rampaging lunatics mostly because we allow certain 100 year old technology or because we allow lunatics the same freedom as the sane and responsible?  Would movie theaters, post offices and schools still be scenes of slaughter if we banned 10 round magazines, autoloading rifles, etc? Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in US history says even full auto weapons, already banned, aren't the weapon of choice if you want to kill a lot of people.  It's hard, unfortunately,  to question the dogmas of either side in our emotional climate and with wildly polarized propagandists shouting down discussion -- while blaming the other side for stifling discussion..

Is it really ever more dangerous to live in America?  It's hard to substantiate the assertion that it is, as heinous as some spectacular crimes may be and as relentlessly as they are exploited by our ravenous for ratings day and night media.  Mass killings by religious leaders, like David Koresh and Reverend Jones don't seem to generate talk of banning anything and many seek to explain them as the result of religious persecution by the government, yet anything pertaining to guns seems to bring out stock rhetoric that often seems canned and unrelated to facts. That sort of thing seems as American as a love of weapons. As American as sweeping problems under a legislative rug. As American as witch hunts, cover ups and made up minds.  Can we talk?  Sorry, this is America.

Handling the Truth

One of those movie quotes that may well long outlive not only the actor who spoke the lines but those who saw the movie when it was first released, is Jack Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth."  As a general statement about Americans, it may well be true and we don't really need to in many cases since media corporations from Hollywood to Newscorp are there to give us tuned up, revised, redacted and sanitized version with beautifully produced happy endings. Take Argo, for instance.  Will history reflect tendentious interpretations of what happened during the Iran Hostage crisis the way Happy Days or those Austin Powers flicks reflected the 50's and 60's -- in a fun house mirror? People who remember the times clearly and as adults may not think those days were so happy and the buck toothed Powers dressed up as Friedrich Schiller may seem bewilderingly irrelevant.

It's hard -- hell it's impossible to imagine how the early years of our new century will be portrayed whether in thriller or sit-com form in 20 or 30 years.  I'm almost glad I won't be around to see it for fear of some George Bush as the Fonz with his flight suit and aircraft carrier musical.  Heyyyyy.  Or perhaps George and Cheney and their adventures in saving the world from Liberals and terrorists.  But if my worst fears come true, if we descend into what I hope is only a nightmare from which one awakes to the smell of coffee and the morning paper,  how will today's crazies look on tomorrow's TV?  Will we even acknowledge the Survivalists and Preppers stockpiling weapons for an apocalypse that still hasn't happened, the revolution they still dream of. The Tea Party, the Homophobes, the Fundamentalists, the immigrant haters, the white supremacists. . . 

 Will we watch Springtime for Limbaugh on Broadway or will he just fade away like Father Coughlin? Will Osama have been caught through the use of torture and by George Bush while the Recession was caused by the president who inherited it?   Ask some scriptwriter and director yet unborn.

Who knows, but I doubt we'll have ceased to be a war worshiping nation of swaggering Chauvinists and self styled saviors of "freedom,"  So maybe we will have saved freedom at least in the movies and won't notice that we have a government that knows every breath you've taken and every thought you've had and doesn't trust you with cash or nail clippers of liquids in more than 3 Oz containers and tracks you with GPS and micro-drones and will arrest you for having bad thoughts.

I hate to sound like one of those "everything is getting worse," wolf crying, Chicken Little types you find on the Right and the Left.  I'm not, but I think it's always been bad and we just hide it and explain it away and paint it over with murals.  It's human nature and it's the nature of nations and creeds.  The only truth we can handle is the stuff we make up.

Vacating the Vatican

Now that the annual movie industry festival of self adulation and fulsome self promotion is over, a world that likes to speculate can't help but turn its attention to the scheduled departure of Pope Benedict XVI this Thursday -- and the reasons behind it.  Yes, of course he's 85 and it's quite possible his heart is failing in the metaphorical and medical sense, but with the apparently never ending story of child molestation and cover-ups and lawsuits and more cover-ups, one can't help entertaining  the suspicion that what we have is a Ratzinger leaving a sinking ship.  Is the resignation of Scotland's Archbishop  Keith O'Brien now embroiled in another sex scandal and the moving up of his scheduled departure from March 17 a hint that there is something going on below the surface, like the base of a huge iceberg?  We'll have to wait.

"The Lord is calling me to go on top of the hill, to dedicate myself once more to prayer and meditation," 

said the Pope at his final public prayer yesterday.  As with all such calls, nobody but he can tell us about it and nobody but God can tell us why. I don't think he will tell me.