This is one of those busy days that somehow dominate what was supposed to be my "golden" years, but scanning the headlines an article about the opening of the Marmoray Link, a railroad tunnel under the Bosphorus, linking Europe and Asia. Turkish projects include more bridges and canals to facilitate transportation and trade. Ours are falling down from neglect. They build seaports and massive flood control projects, we build Wal-Marts to sell their goods and bitch when the government spends money rebuilding after natural disasters. We used to be at the forefront of progress and innovation. Now?
We are the can't do, won't do nation.
In case you're a typical American who has never been abroad or who thinks Epcot Center is the real world, Transportation in America is pathetic. We no longer have the ability to get places without private cars, flying is time consuming and expensive and weather dependent. We don't have the biggest bridges or the best roads and we don't have trains that go anywhere you want to go and the ones we have left are slower than they were in my Father's youth. We don't have 300 mph magnetic levitation trains, nor even the 180 mph trains they have in Europe. You know, Europe, that place we look down on for their educational opportunities, general health, social mobility, low crime rates and lack of John Wayne bellicosity.
It wasn't long ago that our Republican governor in Florida turned down a few billion in Federal funds to build a high speed railroad because it would "cost jobs." That's the same reason my recently pristine part of the State is becoming an open sewer with the full complicity and support of the Republican lead government: hiring people for water projects only a government can do offends industry and Republican principles.
Progress offends Republican principles and indeed they consider it a dirty word.
Civilization began with the necessity to implement irrigation projects, build roads, fortifications and canals. Regulation was needed to control distribution, collect taxes, provide security, enforce laws, decide cases and make civilization possible. We're told none of that matters because government cannot do anything and should not do anything. Where those things failed or were inadequate, civilizations failed. Ours is failing now and perhaps if we weren't so militarily huge, it would have already, because every time something that only a government can do needs to be done, that howling chorus on the right begins to sing the song of private enterprise.
The US isn't capable of building railroads, or intercontinental tunnels. We couldn't build a Panama Canal today. We don't build Golden Gate or Brooklyn bridges today, we don't even maintain what our father's America built and I place our economic catatonia at the feet of the Right, with it's whining about privatization, with its psychotic parsimony, its Paranoid horror of Communism and its worship of corporate entities.
Any country that can't get me to Chicago in under two days without flying cannot hope to endure. Any country that can't repair an earthen dike build 80 years ago and would rather make a huge estuary that was a naturalists delight a few years ago into a sewer so filthy that skin contact with the water is dangerous, is already failing and all the flags waving from all the cars, all the slogans and speeches and denunciations of Law and government and civilization itself are the real poison in the air and water and spirit.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Friday, October 25, 2013
Song of the South
" If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Said North Carolina state GOP executive committee member and precinct chairman Don Yelton, about the new, more restrictive voting laws -- and there you have it, the cornerstone, the key assumption, the basis of Republican philosophy. I can't say, as much as it might seem otherwise, that there's been no progress in the old, old, quest for recognition of people of color as fully human; as real citizens with the same rights and privileges and responsibilities as white, Anglo-Saxon Americans. After all when I was a kid, he wouldn't have said "lazy Blacks."
Barack Obama is of course all about buckets of chicken, watermelons, welfare checks and leering at white women, or at least he is in the imaginations of people like Yelton who is after all, the sad remainder of what was once a political party. All else, all that purports to be principle, philosophy, policy and patriotism is simply camouflage. It's not a coincidence that what others might think of as undeserving categories of white people aren't mentioned, the kind of folks that a previous generation subjected to forced sterilization so that they wouldn't pass on their inferior genes. Undereducated, malnourished, uncivilized, unmotivated, intoxicated made dependent by welfare and ill-suited for informed citizenship, they're nevertheless white and at the very least more nearly all right. In fact so many of them vote Republican they're needed, if for no other reason.
People that may have been Dixiecrats back before the civil rights movement alienated them from the Democratic Party, have been feeling sorry for themselves since before the Civil War, burdened by the requirements of modern civilization which they see in terms of their hard earned money and privilege being taken away by the damn Yankees and given to the "takers."
And now one of "them" has taken the presidency. Ain't gonna let that happen again!
I often think of Republicans like Winnie the Pooh without the charm: as creatures of very little brain, but of course they have their wicked wizards, smart enough to fire people like Yelton who make too much noise from behind the curtain and expose the game.
The County GOP Chairman, in firing Yelton's ass this week said in a statement to a local TV station that Yelton's statements were:
“offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.Except of course in practice.
“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon, This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”
Monday, October 21, 2013
Feeling the Elephant
Ur-Zababa King of Sumer
Ur-Zababa King of Kish
Ur-Zababa had a nightmare
Ur-Zababa had a dream
Sargon in a raft of rushes
Sargon of the floating basket
Pours the wine for Ur-Zababa
One last time.
The parallels between the literature that eventually became the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and other ancient legends in all their versions are inescapable, even for a beginning student of ancient history: the eye for an eye of Hammurabi, the Story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the story of the infant Sargon found floating in a basket on the Tigris, like Moses on the Nile. Such observations are striking at first glance to the untrained eye, but sometimes that untrained eye may also be the unprejudiced eye.
Does anyone not recall the first time they saw a globe, how obvious was the fit between the European and African coast of the Atlantic? Studying Geology ages ago, we were taught that it was only a coincidence and Plate Tectonics was a radical, almost heretical concept. The world, of course was still just as it was made, only cooler and with mountains perhaps thrust up by contraction. Of course, Eppur si muove, as Galileo may or may not have said about the 'stationary' Earth. And still it moves, or at least the continents do. Did that plucked turkey look like a dinosaur? Coincidence. That ape like a man?
Was the Moses Story embellished with older folk tales? There are so many other examples of plots and even phrases in Bible stories that it's tempting to say so and it's hard to say that it isn't so. It's hard, at least for history buffs and students of ancient literature to deny it and yet easy, if perhaps the desperation shows a little, in the always condescending and often irrelevant or fallacious dismissals written by Biblical certainty advocates.
Yes, there are minor differences. Moses' mother was not a princess; he was adopted by one. The Tigris is a fast river, the Nile is a slower one. the Atlantic coasts do not exactly mesh. Jesus is not an exact copy of Mithras or Osiris or Ganesh or any of the many other Biblical or extra Biblical sons of gods or resurrected saviors of nations or souls. Noah and Ut-Napishtim are different. None of the myth makers whose stories appear in the Bible could have read the Popol Vuh with it's resurrection of Hun-Hunahpu -- but as Joseph Campbell said, when you get down to the deepest well of myth you find a deeper one at the bottom. Such stories are archetypes perhaps; rooted in our basic human desire or propensity to concoct explanatory stories about what we cannot know or understand. Each culture creates the same stories in its own image.
Perhaps the Sargon story, in it's obviously mythologized form, comes from the same instinct or from the same primordial urge or instinct we all share that produced the obviously mythologized Moses tale. We do have hard evidence for Sargon of Akkad, conqueror of Sumer, scourge of Elam. We have none whatever for Moses and we have so many contradictions and no evidence whatever in that story. yet look at how fiercely we defend it's inerrant accuracy!
All this is just another stanza in my long lament about the illusion of reason and truth and objectivity in the way we humans see reality. Some of us do so more than others; more often that others do and about more things, but we are what we are. Like the blind men and the elephant we see dimly if at all, but the tragedy is not in our blindness, but in the fact that in gaining sight, we cling to the things we became comfortable with back when we were blind, even as the elephant laughs.
Ur-Zababa King of Kish
Ur-Zababa had a nightmare
Ur-Zababa had a dream
Sargon in a raft of rushes
Sargon of the floating basket
Pours the wine for Ur-Zababa
One last time.
________
The parallels between the literature that eventually became the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and other ancient legends in all their versions are inescapable, even for a beginning student of ancient history: the eye for an eye of Hammurabi, the Story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the story of the infant Sargon found floating in a basket on the Tigris, like Moses on the Nile. Such observations are striking at first glance to the untrained eye, but sometimes that untrained eye may also be the unprejudiced eye.
Does anyone not recall the first time they saw a globe, how obvious was the fit between the European and African coast of the Atlantic? Studying Geology ages ago, we were taught that it was only a coincidence and Plate Tectonics was a radical, almost heretical concept. The world, of course was still just as it was made, only cooler and with mountains perhaps thrust up by contraction. Of course, Eppur si muove, as Galileo may or may not have said about the 'stationary' Earth. And still it moves, or at least the continents do. Did that plucked turkey look like a dinosaur? Coincidence. That ape like a man?
Was the Moses Story embellished with older folk tales? There are so many other examples of plots and even phrases in Bible stories that it's tempting to say so and it's hard to say that it isn't so. It's hard, at least for history buffs and students of ancient literature to deny it and yet easy, if perhaps the desperation shows a little, in the always condescending and often irrelevant or fallacious dismissals written by Biblical certainty advocates.
Yes, there are minor differences. Moses' mother was not a princess; he was adopted by one. The Tigris is a fast river, the Nile is a slower one. the Atlantic coasts do not exactly mesh. Jesus is not an exact copy of Mithras or Osiris or Ganesh or any of the many other Biblical or extra Biblical sons of gods or resurrected saviors of nations or souls. Noah and Ut-Napishtim are different. None of the myth makers whose stories appear in the Bible could have read the Popol Vuh with it's resurrection of Hun-Hunahpu -- but as Joseph Campbell said, when you get down to the deepest well of myth you find a deeper one at the bottom. Such stories are archetypes perhaps; rooted in our basic human desire or propensity to concoct explanatory stories about what we cannot know or understand. Each culture creates the same stories in its own image.
Perhaps the Sargon story, in it's obviously mythologized form, comes from the same instinct or from the same primordial urge or instinct we all share that produced the obviously mythologized Moses tale. We do have hard evidence for Sargon of Akkad, conqueror of Sumer, scourge of Elam. We have none whatever for Moses and we have so many contradictions and no evidence whatever in that story. yet look at how fiercely we defend it's inerrant accuracy!
All this is just another stanza in my long lament about the illusion of reason and truth and objectivity in the way we humans see reality. Some of us do so more than others; more often that others do and about more things, but we are what we are. Like the blind men and the elephant we see dimly if at all, but the tragedy is not in our blindness, but in the fact that in gaining sight, we cling to the things we became comfortable with back when we were blind, even as the elephant laughs.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Facts Lie
So what did we learn here? Oh come on, we're Americans, we already
know everything we need to know and if fact and experience differ from
received wisdom? Facts lie.
What did experience have to say about the shutdown? That we love our National Parks says CNN, but did we learn that Democrats want to shut them down and keep veterans from seeing veterans' memorials? Depends on whether you're a Palinist or not, because veterans weren't actually kept out of such places even if she did the dance of the Sugar Plum Furies at the WW II memorial. If you saw it on Fox you'll do doubt see it that way - a humiliation for Obama.
We believe what we want to, and if you think Obama was "inflexible" in refusing to bend over and let the minority party nullify the law, you still think so. Why should a false equivalence be anything but false? If you still think the failure of years worth of legislative initiatives and court battles and seditious propaganda crusades against the Affordable Health Care Act means the will of the people is not served by Democracy you still think so. If you think a system of providing universal care opportunity at lower cost using private insurers who compete in the free market is Marxism, then you must think the Swiss are Marxists who hate Capitalism and will sleep soundly through the cognitive dissonance.
And you know, people who can support the plan designed by Republicans as long as a Democrat isn't selling it never have a problem with that dissonance, now do they? Losing in the courts, losing in Congress, losing in public estimation isn't a learning experience for people like Rising Star Ted Cruz. He wants to do it all over again, because after all doing something than has never, ever worked needs to be done until it does. If you think that's stupid of him, you probably never supported him in the first place.
No, Instead of acknowledging error, instead of recognizing that the public doesn't share their double-thinking delusion; instead of admitting that the principle of nullification has been rejected by the courts for over 200 years as being unconstitutional, the Republican Berserkers will simply reformulate their views in some new way. A way that still supports their old opinions and makes true their old lies, and with the confidence that comes from blind stupidity we'll see it all again. It's America and November 2014 is a long, long time from now.
What did experience have to say about the shutdown? That we love our National Parks says CNN, but did we learn that Democrats want to shut them down and keep veterans from seeing veterans' memorials? Depends on whether you're a Palinist or not, because veterans weren't actually kept out of such places even if she did the dance of the Sugar Plum Furies at the WW II memorial. If you saw it on Fox you'll do doubt see it that way - a humiliation for Obama.
We believe what we want to, and if you think Obama was "inflexible" in refusing to bend over and let the minority party nullify the law, you still think so. Why should a false equivalence be anything but false? If you still think the failure of years worth of legislative initiatives and court battles and seditious propaganda crusades against the Affordable Health Care Act means the will of the people is not served by Democracy you still think so. If you think a system of providing universal care opportunity at lower cost using private insurers who compete in the free market is Marxism, then you must think the Swiss are Marxists who hate Capitalism and will sleep soundly through the cognitive dissonance.
And you know, people who can support the plan designed by Republicans as long as a Democrat isn't selling it never have a problem with that dissonance, now do they? Losing in the courts, losing in Congress, losing in public estimation isn't a learning experience for people like Rising Star Ted Cruz. He wants to do it all over again, because after all doing something than has never, ever worked needs to be done until it does. If you think that's stupid of him, you probably never supported him in the first place.
No, Instead of acknowledging error, instead of recognizing that the public doesn't share their double-thinking delusion; instead of admitting that the principle of nullification has been rejected by the courts for over 200 years as being unconstitutional, the Republican Berserkers will simply reformulate their views in some new way. A way that still supports their old opinions and makes true their old lies, and with the confidence that comes from blind stupidity we'll see it all again. It's America and November 2014 is a long, long time from now.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
The Crazy Party goes wild!
Feels like Groundhog day, like déjà vu and Kafka too. Pat Buchanan says it's better to destroy America than to "give in" to a health care system we voted for - never mind that or that it's the law. The President should stop being a tyrant and start overriding the law by fiat. Just like the less government more freedom Republicans did when they illegally made it illegal for a Democrat to open his mouth in Congress.
Fox News dredges up a "psychiatrist" to tell us that Obama likes food stamps and accused the Republican Party of hostage taking because his father “abandoned” him as a child and his grandmother “didn’t trust men of color.” and no, there's no "partisan rhetoric" here, they say. Only Democrats do that.
Waiting now for some hint of progress while the insanity escalates beyond hysteria, beyond delusional fugue while visions of Mad Mullah Obama, the Muslim tyrant from Africa forces us to have the health care bill we voted for which as you know, is just like Hitler and worse than anything that's ever happened since the beginning of time - don't ask why, just trust us because after all we're the ones who showed you how to pay for a war by cutting taxes and getting free oil from Iraq.
Waiting by the TV -- waiting and watching that old Republican rag. . .
It's frantic
It's antic
It's Corybantic.
The worst thing since slavery, it is -- oh don't ask why!
Fox News dredges up a "psychiatrist" to tell us that Obama likes food stamps and accused the Republican Party of hostage taking because his father “abandoned” him as a child and his grandmother “didn’t trust men of color.” and no, there's no "partisan rhetoric" here, they say. Only Democrats do that.
Waiting now for some hint of progress while the insanity escalates beyond hysteria, beyond delusional fugue while visions of Mad Mullah Obama, the Muslim tyrant from Africa forces us to have the health care bill we voted for which as you know, is just like Hitler and worse than anything that's ever happened since the beginning of time - don't ask why, just trust us because after all we're the ones who showed you how to pay for a war by cutting taxes and getting free oil from Iraq.
Waiting by the TV -- waiting and watching that old Republican rag. . .
It's frantic
It's antic
It's Corybantic.
The worst thing since slavery, it is -- oh don't ask why!
Monday, October 14, 2013
A darkling plain. . .
So is it desperation making them pull out all the stops and stomp on the loud pedal, or is it just another Tea Hall Putsch; rowdies, thugs and goons colluding to bring down the government and the economy so they can bring on a new and lower world order?
It's become difficult for the Rebel Right to sell the idea that the markets and the economy itself are teetering on the brink of collapse; that there will be a "double-dip" recession, breadlines and trains full of hobos, a degree of health care reform is about to kick in -- one that the public may just find to be a lot better than the apocalyptic predictions from the professional screamers would have us believe. Maybe it's now or never for the Rebels. Apocalypse now as whores and horsemen like Cruz and Palin kick in their stalls and empty their bowels in anticipation.
Said Larry Klaman to a crowd of foam-flecked idiots in Washington, rallied around memorials his band of Bolsheviks as shut down, telling them to demand that the president to
And why? Because not one of their predictions of doom has EVER come true ( or ones of success either) and they don't have the votes to elect one of their incompetent number or the courage to wait until 2016 and risk further recovery? What can they do but make a "hail Mary" or a "Heil Hitler" appeal to racism, bigotry and fake history before real history sweeps the stable clean?
Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since Slavery" said Ben Carson, a Fox Favorite at the "Values Voter Summit" and attributed the Republican designed plan to Vladimir Lenin -- something only someone as devoid of honesty as Klaman could say and only someone either clinically insane or more ignorant than a baboon could believe.
said another verbal terrorist to an audience totally ignorant of the law and what it says, but as always willing to believe anything to support their racist insanity.
I don't worry so much about the ease of assembling an ignorant army at a moment's notice. I think that at any time and in any place enough willing participants to staff a pogrom, man a concentration camp or burn children in a school could be assembled. It's the highly organized heavily financed group of insurgents that now control a major political party hell bent on taking over absolute control of the United States by whatever means they can. It's the domination of our news sources by propaganda organizations and corporations with no commitment to the truth and interested only in profit that scare me, because now, as it was a hundred years ago, our country is a pack of dogs happy to turn on itself, but unlike the days of race riots, labor riots, weekly terrorist bombings, lynchings, deportations and suppression of rights, we have 24 hour insanity, 24 hour hate speech, 24 hour lies and hardly a whisper of opposition.
How do we fight by the rules and beat such a ruthless and unscrupulous army? Is it any wonder that we have a surplus of apocalyptic movies about armies of brainless corpses overwhelming civilization? Unfortunately we don't have the option of chopping off heads. We don't have the ability to debunk an endless quantity of lies to an audience desperate to believe them. We can't outspend them, we can't shut them up. We have to hope that in their stupidity they will overreach and fail, but it's a dim hope and it's getting really dark outside.
It's become difficult for the Rebel Right to sell the idea that the markets and the economy itself are teetering on the brink of collapse; that there will be a "double-dip" recession, breadlines and trains full of hobos, a degree of health care reform is about to kick in -- one that the public may just find to be a lot better than the apocalyptic predictions from the professional screamers would have us believe. Maybe it's now or never for the Rebels. Apocalypse now as whores and horsemen like Cruz and Palin kick in their stalls and empty their bowels in anticipation.
"I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town,”
Said Larry Klaman to a crowd of foam-flecked idiots in Washington, rallied around memorials his band of Bolsheviks as shut down, telling them to demand that the president to
“… get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”
And why? Because not one of their predictions of doom has EVER come true ( or ones of success either) and they don't have the votes to elect one of their incompetent number or the courage to wait until 2016 and risk further recovery? What can they do but make a "hail Mary" or a "Heil Hitler" appeal to racism, bigotry and fake history before real history sweeps the stable clean?
“In 237 years, our country has declined more than Rome took 2000 years to do,” he said. “We are ruled, quote-unquote, by a president that bows down to Allah.”
Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since Slavery" said Ben Carson, a Fox Favorite at the "Values Voter Summit" and attributed the Republican designed plan to Vladimir Lenin -- something only someone as devoid of honesty as Klaman could say and only someone either clinically insane or more ignorant than a baboon could believe.
“one of the most insidious laws ever created by man,”
said another verbal terrorist to an audience totally ignorant of the law and what it says, but as always willing to believe anything to support their racist insanity.
I don't worry so much about the ease of assembling an ignorant army at a moment's notice. I think that at any time and in any place enough willing participants to staff a pogrom, man a concentration camp or burn children in a school could be assembled. It's the highly organized heavily financed group of insurgents that now control a major political party hell bent on taking over absolute control of the United States by whatever means they can. It's the domination of our news sources by propaganda organizations and corporations with no commitment to the truth and interested only in profit that scare me, because now, as it was a hundred years ago, our country is a pack of dogs happy to turn on itself, but unlike the days of race riots, labor riots, weekly terrorist bombings, lynchings, deportations and suppression of rights, we have 24 hour insanity, 24 hour hate speech, 24 hour lies and hardly a whisper of opposition.
How do we fight by the rules and beat such a ruthless and unscrupulous army? Is it any wonder that we have a surplus of apocalyptic movies about armies of brainless corpses overwhelming civilization? Unfortunately we don't have the option of chopping off heads. We don't have the ability to debunk an endless quantity of lies to an audience desperate to believe them. We can't outspend them, we can't shut them up. We have to hope that in their stupidity they will overreach and fail, but it's a dim hope and it's getting really dark outside.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Vidit ergo Lesus. . .
Yes, yes, we've all heard, Pope Francis may be infallible but the guy who mints the medals isn't. Somebody substituted an L for an I (which can look damned similar in certain typefaces) and somebody else didn't notice and so it went out the door as Lesus instead of Iesus. I'm an old man, I can sympathize about reading small print and at least it didn't say Lexus. We have too many of those on the road as it is.Of course growing up in the Galilee, the name was יהושע
or Yehushua but we won't quibble. The sign on the Cross said IHS, not LHS and of course the J is not part of the Roman alphabet.
Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum et quia miserando antque eligendo vidit, ait illi sequre me. says the Gospel of Matthew. If we're going to be talking about alphabets of course, it's really מַתִּתְיָהוּ Matityahu or 'gift of Yahoo' (you see, the Bible predicts the Internet) and it's a story about how Jesus didn't despise the tax collector and so the tax collector became a follower, or so I think. My latin has become a bit like a Toyota after ten winters in Chicago. But anyway, like most Bible stories, there's good advice there: "Don't get too chummy with the man from IRS lest he followeth you around, asking questions.
Anyway, I don't know how many have already been sold in Rome. I don't see any on eBay yet, but I'll bet collectors will bid them up if he faithful can part with them. Will we see money changer's booths in Vatican Square exchanging new medals for old, or will they find their way out the back door and onto the collector market? Inquiring minds and maybe pious minds want to know but if you flip these things for a profit, don't forget that publicanus cognoscere cupit nimis -- the tax man wants to know too.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Consider the source
There is no shortage of polls about the Shutdown, the Affordable Care Act and President Obama, mony of them showing completely opposite results. I got a survey from something called Newsmax.com this morning showing that respondents very strongly blame Obama and the Congressional Democrats for the shutdown and like the Affordable Care Act even less than they like Judas Iscariot. Newsmax of course, although it covers general interest stories, seems to have more inflammatory and paranoid items that Chips Ahoy has bits of chocolate. One has to consider the source. One has to remember that voluntary polls are not scientific.
That's hardly the results one sees in the probably more objective Gallup polls that show America's opinion of the Republican party at a lower ebb than it was during the last Republican forced shutdown in 1999. It was 31% favorable then. Now it's 28%. There has been a precipitous drop in approval since the beginning of 2013. Perhaps it was the end of an era after all.
With so much effort being made to portray Obama and "his policies" as being increasingly rejected, it's interesting to note that at least according to Gallup, unfavorable ratings of the GOP are a bit higher than they were at the end of the Cheney/Bush era and the economy was losing altitude faster than a coyote running off a cliff. 61% when Obama was elected, 62% now and in a country so heavily intransigent it is nothing short of amazing that lifelong Republicans I've talked to of late don't want to be called that any more.
The obvious seems invisible to the entrenched opinion shouters and faux news sources. Glenn Beck all but spits out his tonsils execrating his array of standard demons and everywhere you look are polls and surveys with as much credibility as goat entrails. I suspect we're getting to theoretical low point of public approval for the Tea Twinkies and the corporate backed opinion shouters, given that insanity is not as subject to persuasion as reason is. Many would still listen to Beck and Bachmann and their ilk despite all the spinning heads and green vomit and sulfur smoke the Devil himself could demonstrate. People on that side of the fence tattoo swastikas on their necks after all.
But as the shutdown continues and as the GOP has to rely on publicity stunts like Michelle Bachmanns at the WWII memorial, the bailouts will continue. With each family ruined by lack of health care, with each family ruined by the furlough, with each business bankrupted by Republican spite, the "Base" will shrink. Were an election held today, it would hardly be a tea party for the Tea Party and tomorrow could be worse.
Of course this being the Amnesiac States of America, who knows about 2014?
That's hardly the results one sees in the probably more objective Gallup polls that show America's opinion of the Republican party at a lower ebb than it was during the last Republican forced shutdown in 1999. It was 31% favorable then. Now it's 28%. There has been a precipitous drop in approval since the beginning of 2013. Perhaps it was the end of an era after all.
With so much effort being made to portray Obama and "his policies" as being increasingly rejected, it's interesting to note that at least according to Gallup, unfavorable ratings of the GOP are a bit higher than they were at the end of the Cheney/Bush era and the economy was losing altitude faster than a coyote running off a cliff. 61% when Obama was elected, 62% now and in a country so heavily intransigent it is nothing short of amazing that lifelong Republicans I've talked to of late don't want to be called that any more.
The obvious seems invisible to the entrenched opinion shouters and faux news sources. Glenn Beck all but spits out his tonsils execrating his array of standard demons and everywhere you look are polls and surveys with as much credibility as goat entrails. I suspect we're getting to theoretical low point of public approval for the Tea Twinkies and the corporate backed opinion shouters, given that insanity is not as subject to persuasion as reason is. Many would still listen to Beck and Bachmann and their ilk despite all the spinning heads and green vomit and sulfur smoke the Devil himself could demonstrate. People on that side of the fence tattoo swastikas on their necks after all.
But as the shutdown continues and as the GOP has to rely on publicity stunts like Michelle Bachmanns at the WWII memorial, the bailouts will continue. With each family ruined by lack of health care, with each family ruined by the furlough, with each business bankrupted by Republican spite, the "Base" will shrink. Were an election held today, it would hardly be a tea party for the Tea Party and tomorrow could be worse.
Of course this being the Amnesiac States of America, who knows about 2014?
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Hijacked!
Got another robo call today - the kind you can't hang up on while the recorded voice tells you they can lower your credit card rates if you give them your card numbers -- numbers they promptly use to bleed you dry. It's fraud, it's a felony. It goes on and on uninterrupted because it makes money and money votes.
616-613-2227. It belongs to Lucre, inc in Michigan although the caller ID says Credit Crd Svcs.
I'm on the do not call list and I regularly report robo calls which are illegal in this state and other telemarketing calls that violate the law by calling me and refusing to remove my name from their lists, so, being furious at this umpteenth violation because I'm trying to keep the line free because my father is very ill, I went on line to the FCC. Of course all I've ever got to reward my efforts is a form letter, but logging on to https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/ just now, what I saw was:
Due to the Government shutdown, we are unable to offer this website service at this time. We will resume normal operations when the government is funded.
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
NIH shutdown
Well isn't that special? You know that RomneyObamacare bill forced on us by the people we elected to do just that is a terrible thing, not only because of the Death Panels that it does not include which replace the Insurance company death panels that do exist but because it's going make the US just like those backward countries like - well like most countries actually - that provide health care insurance or at least make it possible to buy it. When something is passed in Congress, by duly elected representatives, signed by a duly elected president and confirmed as to its legality by the Supreme Court -- it's not enough. The Tea Party after all is the only authority and your vote just doesn't mean shit.
Republican doctors, even those who are not doctors tell us that "Obamacare" is just awful because you might have to wait for that ingrown toenail operation so that someone with chest pains or cancer can get immediate assistance. Even those Republicans who thought it was great before Obama are now shouting themselves hoarse
To make sure that doesn't happen, they have decided to sabotage the government and miliary operations and if people who were waiting for clinical trials through the National Institutes of Health, they can just go to Canada, or Sweden or Switzerland or any of those damned Godless Communist hell-holes because overthrowing the US government against the wished of the electorate is the patriotic thing to do. About 200 people register for NIH clinical trials every week, many of them children with cancer who are expendable after all considering the importance of making sure they never get health insurance in their lives even if they survive -- and making sure their parents have to declare bankruptcy - if they can under the Republican sponsored bankruptcy laws, but such things are just collateral damage after all. It's only a small thing compared to the rest of the consequences of the shutdown in terms of the economy and national security and those consequences are exactly what the Republicans hope for, economic collapse, some major attack we could have prevented if we hadn't laid off all those DHS people and civilian employees. Hell, taking food stamps away from military families already unable to survive on their salaries is part of the same effort: the end of the USA as we know it.
Republican doctors, even those who are not doctors tell us that "Obamacare" is just awful because you might have to wait for that ingrown toenail operation so that someone with chest pains or cancer can get immediate assistance. Even those Republicans who thought it was great before Obama are now shouting themselves hoarse
To make sure that doesn't happen, they have decided to sabotage the government and miliary operations and if people who were waiting for clinical trials through the National Institutes of Health, they can just go to Canada, or Sweden or Switzerland or any of those damned Godless Communist hell-holes because overthrowing the US government against the wished of the electorate is the patriotic thing to do. About 200 people register for NIH clinical trials every week, many of them children with cancer who are expendable after all considering the importance of making sure they never get health insurance in their lives even if they survive -- and making sure their parents have to declare bankruptcy - if they can under the Republican sponsored bankruptcy laws, but such things are just collateral damage after all. It's only a small thing compared to the rest of the consequences of the shutdown in terms of the economy and national security and those consequences are exactly what the Republicans hope for, economic collapse, some major attack we could have prevented if we hadn't laid off all those DHS people and civilian employees. Hell, taking food stamps away from military families already unable to survive on their salaries is part of the same effort: the end of the USA as we know it.
Declare Martial Law for Jesus
I don't know if you're getting your TV using an antenna, but if you are, it's a different world than the TVland you see on satellite or cable. Docked at a marina, looking for something to watch on the tube with no access to cable, one thing you'll notice is that there are a lot of Christian stations and a lot of boisterous preachers pounding away on the Bible. 6 to 1 on a Sunday afternoon in places like Vero Beach, Florida.
So if your idiot box is fed by an antenna, perhaps you know about Rick Joyner. Perhaps you have watched his internet program. Perhaps you've identified him as as much of a subversive seditionist as Luigi Galleani, as much of a terrorist as any of the bomb throwing anarchists of that day or ours. There was a time when Eugene Debbs was thrown in jail for simply mentioning his distaste for US involvement in a European war and Conservative fear of subversives has continued through the McCarthy era and into the present. Show up at a Quaker prayer vigil for peace in 1965, as I once did and you got yourself on an FBI list. George Bush era government agents were tapping the phones of Quakers not long ago and now, of course they can and they may be tapping yours and mine to make sure nobody is plotting terrorist acts.
But not so for Joyner. He gets to tell us that because Obama's America is so immoral, he's suggesting to God, as his special adviser, that God should use the United States Armed forces to overthrow the government and institute martial law -- to save Democracy.
Says Rick, God's own Dick Cheney. You see Obama isn'twhite moral and Americans who voted for him or support better access to health care are pissing off God. We have to overthrow the US government with violence. We have to put an end to Democracy in order to save it for the coming Kingdom of Joyner God.
So you think Christians are being persecuted in America, by those Liberal hellhounds of religious freedom? Calling for the violent military overthrow of the United States of America by a military junta dedicated to God rather than the lawful Commander in Chief is what the Constitution supports? If Joyner were Muslim, he'd have been deported or jailed by now and if subversives and terrorist supporters and haters of democracy like him are still out there stinking up the air, the argument that there's a war on Christianity and its special prerogatives smells worse than a manure pile in August. These hate mongers are exempt from taxes and exempt from the law as surely as they are exempt from sanity.
It takes a hell of a lot of dishonesty to prattle about external threats to the US when a cabal of criminals dedicate their lives to crippling it, subverting it, overthrowing it and handing it over to corporate and religious warlords, but it takes something else to sit in front of a TV screen, drink beer and ignore it. Am I talking to you here?
So if your idiot box is fed by an antenna, perhaps you know about Rick Joyner. Perhaps you have watched his internet program. Perhaps you've identified him as as much of a subversive seditionist as Luigi Galleani, as much of a terrorist as any of the bomb throwing anarchists of that day or ours. There was a time when Eugene Debbs was thrown in jail for simply mentioning his distaste for US involvement in a European war and Conservative fear of subversives has continued through the McCarthy era and into the present. Show up at a Quaker prayer vigil for peace in 1965, as I once did and you got yourself on an FBI list. George Bush era government agents were tapping the phones of Quakers not long ago and now, of course they can and they may be tapping yours and mine to make sure nobody is plotting terrorist acts.
But not so for Joyner. He gets to tell us that because Obama's America is so immoral, he's suggesting to God, as his special adviser, that God should use the United States Armed forces to overthrow the government and institute martial law -- to save Democracy.
“The people are not always right, it depends on what people they are. And another thing the founders warned about is this thing will only work for a moral and a religious people. You remove morality, you remove the religious influence, and it cannot work.”
Says Rick, God's own Dick Cheney. You see Obama isn't
So you think Christians are being persecuted in America, by those Liberal hellhounds of religious freedom? Calling for the violent military overthrow of the United States of America by a military junta dedicated to God rather than the lawful Commander in Chief is what the Constitution supports? If Joyner were Muslim, he'd have been deported or jailed by now and if subversives and terrorist supporters and haters of democracy like him are still out there stinking up the air, the argument that there's a war on Christianity and its special prerogatives smells worse than a manure pile in August. These hate mongers are exempt from taxes and exempt from the law as surely as they are exempt from sanity.
It takes a hell of a lot of dishonesty to prattle about external threats to the US when a cabal of criminals dedicate their lives to crippling it, subverting it, overthrowing it and handing it over to corporate and religious warlords, but it takes something else to sit in front of a TV screen, drink beer and ignore it. Am I talking to you here?
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
More
In principio erat verbum
That first word; can we imagine it being spoken as something more than infantile balbation, something more like a concept than a name? Names are spoken, but we invented them. We have names because we have want and that want came before the name. Without it there were no names nor those to name them. In any sort of beginning there was a word and we made that word because we want, and what we want is more. In the beginning there was desire and want became word. I want, therefore I am aware. I am aware, therefore I am. In the beginning there was the word and the word was more.
Do we imagine some Lord uttering a command to the emptiness, or do we wonder why something so primordial and infinite embedded in a finite chaos of dirt and water and wind and nothingness would have words? Was there a beginning without a prior want? In whom dwelt the want that became God? Would words arise without anyone to listen? But in any kind of beginning -- of man, of God -- any dawn of any ego, that decision to change what had always been and what is now -- the want that made that decision became the word and the word was more. Let there be more than there is.
A lord of dust and gas and particles and heat; it means little to be lord of nothing. A God who never did anything and never wanted to: a Lord without volition is no more than dead matter and empty space. A lord, to be a lord needs more and so want itself makes the Lord and so he makes the world, orders it, speaks the word to himself and creates his creation so that what he says can be a word. From more, existence proceeds. God said more and there was more.
A lord: meaning us; us being separate from the nothing, separate from oblivion and the chaos and the word that separates is more. The word that defines consciousness is more; we wake, we perceive we want and in that beginning the word becomes flesh, the flesh becomes word: let there be more.
Do we ever progress far beyond the primordial word? We strive we desire we achieve, we preserve, we pile thing upon thing, experience upon experience -- we live and we want more. We want more life and we want more of desire itself because desire is life and life must want more or it dies.
We struggle against entropy and we want more and in the face of ravenous oblivion, in the end, we want more and we invent agencies from which to beg for more as possibility fades. We want new realities where we can have more and there always is more to have -- and we imagine them, we fight to imagine them and we fight to preserve the imagining; the imagining of more and more forever when forever, nonetheless, is only nothing more.
In the beginning we say . . . but that was too long ago to matter. In our beginning was desire and if more comes after us, there will be no words at all.
Desiderium erat in princípio. In finis est solum nihil
That first word; can we imagine it being spoken as something more than infantile balbation, something more like a concept than a name? Names are spoken, but we invented them. We have names because we have want and that want came before the name. Without it there were no names nor those to name them. In any sort of beginning there was a word and we made that word because we want, and what we want is more. In the beginning there was desire and want became word. I want, therefore I am aware. I am aware, therefore I am. In the beginning there was the word and the word was more.
Do we imagine some Lord uttering a command to the emptiness, or do we wonder why something so primordial and infinite embedded in a finite chaos of dirt and water and wind and nothingness would have words? Was there a beginning without a prior want? In whom dwelt the want that became God? Would words arise without anyone to listen? But in any kind of beginning -- of man, of God -- any dawn of any ego, that decision to change what had always been and what is now -- the want that made that decision became the word and the word was more. Let there be more than there is.
A lord of dust and gas and particles and heat; it means little to be lord of nothing. A God who never did anything and never wanted to: a Lord without volition is no more than dead matter and empty space. A lord, to be a lord needs more and so want itself makes the Lord and so he makes the world, orders it, speaks the word to himself and creates his creation so that what he says can be a word. From more, existence proceeds. God said more and there was more.
A lord: meaning us; us being separate from the nothing, separate from oblivion and the chaos and the word that separates is more. The word that defines consciousness is more; we wake, we perceive we want and in that beginning the word becomes flesh, the flesh becomes word: let there be more.
Do we ever progress far beyond the primordial word? We strive we desire we achieve, we preserve, we pile thing upon thing, experience upon experience -- we live and we want more. We want more life and we want more of desire itself because desire is life and life must want more or it dies.
We struggle against entropy and we want more and in the face of ravenous oblivion, in the end, we want more and we invent agencies from which to beg for more as possibility fades. We want new realities where we can have more and there always is more to have -- and we imagine them, we fight to imagine them and we fight to preserve the imagining; the imagining of more and more forever when forever, nonetheless, is only nothing more.
In the beginning we say . . . but that was too long ago to matter. In our beginning was desire and if more comes after us, there will be no words at all.
Desiderium erat in princípio. In finis est solum nihil
Sunday, September 29, 2013
The sky is falling
Candy Crowley's State of the Union this morning with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). It seems the Republican line is that Congress needs to have a debate on health care because the public is panicked, confused -- because health care is being denied because of it, because hospitals aren't buying new technology because of it -- because they're making it all up as it goes along. The desperation alone gives them away. At what time were they ever so animated at any question affecting the security of the United States?
Polls seem to show the public does not want this "debate," does not want ACA defunded or delayed.
Congress already had the debate. It passed, it was signed into law, it survived a challenge in the Supreme court.
Health insurance premiums will soar says Sen. John Barrasso M.D. (R-WY). People ae going to die in the streets, chaos will ensue.
They've gone down 40% in his state says Howard Dean M.D. , Doctors won't see patients. You won't be able to find a doctor says the Wyoming dude. The sky is falling, just like it was going to with Social Security, with Medicare, with female suffrage, with integration. . . .
My prayer for this Sunday morning?
God damn the Republican party.
Polls seem to show the public does not want this "debate," does not want ACA defunded or delayed.
Congress already had the debate. It passed, it was signed into law, it survived a challenge in the Supreme court.
Health insurance premiums will soar says Sen. John Barrasso M.D. (R-WY). People ae going to die in the streets, chaos will ensue.
They've gone down 40% in his state says Howard Dean M.D. , Doctors won't see patients. You won't be able to find a doctor says the Wyoming dude. The sky is falling, just like it was going to with Social Security, with Medicare, with female suffrage, with integration. . . .
My prayer for this Sunday morning?
God damn the Republican party.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Deny, Deny, DeMint
If 2012 was the end of an era, I haven't noticed. The era of denialism is still rolling along, thank you very much and the ridiculous Right is getting better with practice. The 2012 Election you see, didn't accurately reflect public sentiment at least the sentiment as viewed through ruby red glasses.
Jim DeMint seems to think the Right didn't get a fair hearing, even though the echo of their primal scream still is as detectible as the Cosmic Background Radiation. And besides it's just not fair. In a fair and balanced world elections don't count, you know, because the true voice of the people is only communicated in Gnostic fashion by a mystical connection, not by those lying ballots. In a Fair and Balanced world people wouldn't notice that Jim strongly endorsed Romneycare in 2007: they wouldn't notice that the voters elected someone who promised health care reform and re-elected him over the guy who couldn't stop inventing reasons why it was no longer good now that the Democrats endorsed it. They wouldn't notice that the Supreme Court endorsed the legality.
Of course Jim and all the GOP DeMintos hope you don't remember the era of "the silent majority" whose silence was the result of their not actually being there because he seems to be offering the same pathetic Nixonian explanation for the rejection of his own imaginary majority. But of course we do remember, we do notice and even the Sultan of Slime, Karl Rove himself seems bewildered by the insanity he's nourished into full monsterhood, shuffling toward Fort Sumpter to be born.
No, October first won't be the end of an era either, since some eras go on as if in a parallel universe, close to but separate from ours. It may be the beginning of one however; an era in which the burden of illness and the cost of healthcare won't be a drag on upward mobility and entrepreneurship, but the old one will continue like some antique and grotesque paganism and people will continue to profit from the hysteria. More appeals to stock up on emergency supplies, special vaults in which to hide your guns and ammunition (stock up now before Obama takes them away) for the coming apocalypse and the horrible hordes of marauding minorities. . .
Jim DeMint seems to think the Right didn't get a fair hearing, even though the echo of their primal scream still is as detectible as the Cosmic Background Radiation. And besides it's just not fair. In a fair and balanced world elections don't count, you know, because the true voice of the people is only communicated in Gnostic fashion by a mystical connection, not by those lying ballots. In a Fair and Balanced world people wouldn't notice that Jim strongly endorsed Romneycare in 2007: they wouldn't notice that the voters elected someone who promised health care reform and re-elected him over the guy who couldn't stop inventing reasons why it was no longer good now that the Democrats endorsed it. They wouldn't notice that the Supreme Court endorsed the legality.
Of course Jim and all the GOP DeMintos hope you don't remember the era of "the silent majority" whose silence was the result of their not actually being there because he seems to be offering the same pathetic Nixonian explanation for the rejection of his own imaginary majority. But of course we do remember, we do notice and even the Sultan of Slime, Karl Rove himself seems bewildered by the insanity he's nourished into full monsterhood, shuffling toward Fort Sumpter to be born.
No, October first won't be the end of an era either, since some eras go on as if in a parallel universe, close to but separate from ours. It may be the beginning of one however; an era in which the burden of illness and the cost of healthcare won't be a drag on upward mobility and entrepreneurship, but the old one will continue like some antique and grotesque paganism and people will continue to profit from the hysteria. More appeals to stock up on emergency supplies, special vaults in which to hide your guns and ammunition (stock up now before Obama takes them away) for the coming apocalypse and the horrible hordes of marauding minorities. . .
Friday, September 27, 2013
The Voice of the People
Tom Paine advocating the adoption of an American Constitution, urged cool and deliberate heads to prevail, lest some rabble rouser
He was thinking of a 17th century uprising in Naples, a populist and tax revolt that ended badly because of the failure to control the mob and left Naples under the control of the Spanish Crown. It's not a unique story. It's easy to think of more before and after that one. Can I help but to think of the mad remnants of the former Conservative party now spending endless millions on endless lies -- infuriating, frightening and focusing the anger of Americans against our constitutional and duly elected government, for the benefit of it's would-be overlords? Can I help it when listening to Ted Cruz begging Americans to go back to Industrial Revolution era health care practices now when it costs far more than it did then? A hundred years ago, if a worker had to miss a few weeks because of an injury incurred on the job, in a job that demanded 12 hour days and 6 day weeks and that demanded the worker live in filthy tenements, he was evicted and his family dumped out on the street, forced into crime or prostitution, disease and untimely death. Today, we have frustrated overlords spending millions and millions to dress that up as "traditional Values" "Family" Values and telling us we can't afford health unless we have wealth. It's too expensive. We can't afford to have "takers." 100 years ago when what passed for middle class meant squalor, a time when most people died in poverty and disease, it was enough that a tiny few made a fortune often using business practices that would make us wince -- unless we're Republicans.
Direct Democracies have usually succumbed to those desperate and discontented elements no matter how well off they may be, often led by cooler heads of the greedy and hungry for power. Perhaps the kind of tactics now practiced by those who spend massive monies appealing to the public to take direct action against things that will benefit them and harm the aristocracy are simply following an ancient script. That's why we were supposed to be a Republic, to have educated, enlightened professionals of our choice to make choices for us. Now the men who would be kings encourage Joe the Plumber - a man of the people who like so many men of the people just aren't smart enough, educated enough and are easy to rile up, delude, enrage and control. That's just what Congress was not supposed to be about; spokesmen for self justifying power.
Wrote Joseph Conrad, back when we were starting to move toward the modern era, perhaps thinking that would ever change.
". . . may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge."
He was thinking of a 17th century uprising in Naples, a populist and tax revolt that ended badly because of the failure to control the mob and left Naples under the control of the Spanish Crown. It's not a unique story. It's easy to think of more before and after that one. Can I help but to think of the mad remnants of the former Conservative party now spending endless millions on endless lies -- infuriating, frightening and focusing the anger of Americans against our constitutional and duly elected government, for the benefit of it's would-be overlords? Can I help it when listening to Ted Cruz begging Americans to go back to Industrial Revolution era health care practices now when it costs far more than it did then? A hundred years ago, if a worker had to miss a few weeks because of an injury incurred on the job, in a job that demanded 12 hour days and 6 day weeks and that demanded the worker live in filthy tenements, he was evicted and his family dumped out on the street, forced into crime or prostitution, disease and untimely death. Today, we have frustrated overlords spending millions and millions to dress that up as "traditional Values" "Family" Values and telling us we can't afford health unless we have wealth. It's too expensive. We can't afford to have "takers." 100 years ago when what passed for middle class meant squalor, a time when most people died in poverty and disease, it was enough that a tiny few made a fortune often using business practices that would make us wince -- unless we're Republicans.
Direct Democracies have usually succumbed to those desperate and discontented elements no matter how well off they may be, often led by cooler heads of the greedy and hungry for power. Perhaps the kind of tactics now practiced by those who spend massive monies appealing to the public to take direct action against things that will benefit them and harm the aristocracy are simply following an ancient script. That's why we were supposed to be a Republic, to have educated, enlightened professionals of our choice to make choices for us. Now the men who would be kings encourage Joe the Plumber - a man of the people who like so many men of the people just aren't smart enough, educated enough and are easy to rile up, delude, enrage and control. That's just what Congress was not supposed to be about; spokesmen for self justifying power.
"The Imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches"
Wrote Joseph Conrad, back when we were starting to move toward the modern era, perhaps thinking that would ever change.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Mr. Cruz goes to Washington
My nonagenarian father has been having problems keeping his blood pressure up. I suggested watching Ted Cruz reading Dr. Suess. Perhaps I should have titled this Green Eggs and Spam, but all in all, it really isn't funny. No attempt by a bought and paid for, zealot for hire to block the democratic process with endless impassioned idiocy is really funny. Unfortunately it isn't rare or unique any more.
But if you're feeling calm or tranquil and even happy with life
If the day is fair and sky is blue
And that bothers you
I've just the thing you'll want to view:
But if you're feeling calm or tranquil and even happy with life
If the day is fair and sky is blue
And that bothers you
I've just the thing you'll want to view:
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The sides we take
If I were looking to illustrate the mistake in thinking you know something about someone because of his race, religion or ethnicity, I'd mention Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow for the Family Research Council, who sees cutting the Food Stamp program as the 'Christian' thing to do. Opposing government assistance with health care as well. Blackwell is of African ancestry and a Christian. In my opinion any Christian message ( or the equally as supported Islamic or Jewish or Buddhist message for that matter) concerning feeding the poor is lost on Blackwell, but that's just me.
Feeding the poor, or at least helping them afford something decent to eat, he explained to the Christian Post, impedes their sense of self worth and other laudable attributes I'm too disgusted to enumerate. So much for the stereotype some people would have applied to race and religion.
Rev. Gary Cook, the Director of Church Relations at Christian anti-hunger advocacy group Bread.org seems of European ancestry. He looks a great deal like me, in fact, and like me, he disagrees. One of the Biblicaly supported provisions for the poor, Cook mentions is ". . . the tithe, which was literally a tax, because the government was the same as the religious order, and allowed widows and orphans to eat."
Tax? You want to be barring the door at this point because the Tealoonies will be stampeding, but can't we at this point stop thinking we know something about someone who calls himself a Christian?
Is it Christian to support taxing the employed to feed and clothe and house the poor and helpless?
Sure, but you don't have to work hard to find something to support anything including infanticide in the "good book"
Which one do I think is right? Well, it's true that finding a man a job that can support him and perhaps a family is better than food stamps, but any Republican would assure that the government can't and shouldn't if it could do that. History shows we always have unemployment and indeed that to avoid inflation we must tolerate some of it, so whose responsibility is it to prevent starvation as a necessary part of Capitalism? Are we being Christian (of Muslim or Jewish) by teaching a man to fish or are we simply letting him and her and their kids die while telling them to go fish?
But just as you are liable to find in the Bible, something to support both carnage and neglect and heartlessness as to find something to support compassion and helpfulness, you're going to find everything in everyone no matter what label you put on him and that includes Liberal and Conservative, Christian and Jew and Hindu.
No one owns decency or compassion and all the names we think up to avoid addressing our common problems seem more sinful than any apricot eaten in any garden anywhere.
Feeding the poor, or at least helping them afford something decent to eat, he explained to the Christian Post, impedes their sense of self worth and other laudable attributes I'm too disgusted to enumerate. So much for the stereotype some people would have applied to race and religion.
Rev. Gary Cook, the Director of Church Relations at Christian anti-hunger advocacy group Bread.org seems of European ancestry. He looks a great deal like me, in fact, and like me, he disagrees. One of the Biblicaly supported provisions for the poor, Cook mentions is ". . . the tithe, which was literally a tax, because the government was the same as the religious order, and allowed widows and orphans to eat."
Tax? You want to be barring the door at this point because the Tealoonies will be stampeding, but can't we at this point stop thinking we know something about someone who calls himself a Christian?
Is it Christian to support taxing the employed to feed and clothe and house the poor and helpless?
Sure, but you don't have to work hard to find something to support anything including infanticide in the "good book"
Which one do I think is right? Well, it's true that finding a man a job that can support him and perhaps a family is better than food stamps, but any Republican would assure that the government can't and shouldn't if it could do that. History shows we always have unemployment and indeed that to avoid inflation we must tolerate some of it, so whose responsibility is it to prevent starvation as a necessary part of Capitalism? Are we being Christian (of Muslim or Jewish) by teaching a man to fish or are we simply letting him and her and their kids die while telling them to go fish?
But just as you are liable to find in the Bible, something to support both carnage and neglect and heartlessness as to find something to support compassion and helpfulness, you're going to find everything in everyone no matter what label you put on him and that includes Liberal and Conservative, Christian and Jew and Hindu.
No one owns decency or compassion and all the names we think up to avoid addressing our common problems seem more sinful than any apricot eaten in any garden anywhere.
Monday, September 23, 2013
There'll be a hot time in Stockholm tonight
And wouldst thou think how at each tremulous motion Trembles within a mirror your own image: That which seems hard would mellow seem to thee
-Dante- PurgatorioEveryone knows there are two sides to every story and so things generate their own opposites if only to fulfill the expectations, and so light creates dark, even if dark is nothing at all.
It's a trivial notion, of course, but the practice of using the shadow of a thing to discredit or obliterate that thing has consequences that are far from trivial, because the nothing we give a name to can, at least in the emotional logic the public loves and public passion feeds on, cancel out something. Every assertion that must be blunted or countered or denounced can be reversed in sign, so to speak and used to cancel the assertion. At least it can in a world, in an inner universe of the mind where people don't think too much or too well and can be convinced that one's image in a mirror can cancel itself out if we don't like what we see. There must be two sides if we're to reduce a question of fact to a matter of opinion and that's just what the game is.
There must be two sides, even if all the data is on one of them. Each side has it's adherents and even if the question "is it raining" can be answered more reliably by those standing outside, those inside an inner room with no windows have to be given equal credibility if the 'two sides' hypothesis is valid. So when we look at the question: is the average temperature of the Earth getting higher or the question are human activities contributing substantially, the advantage to the side with the data; the side the atmospheric paleontologists, the geologists, the paleo-climatologists are on, is minimized, if not cancelled out by the side that has the money and political connections. We have the side with massive pertinent information and we have the Republicans, the Coal, Oil and Gas cartels who own them and a handful of people with dubious scientific credentials crying hoax.
This is not a scientific problem, there is no scientific controversy it's class warfare, and the success will depend on things other than data and there's a battle in Stockholm today. There's a battle here in America too, where there are always two sides and thus equal credibility independent of evidence and where questions of chemistry and physics are questions of which party you belong to, where motivated reasoning passes for objective analysis. The goal of the argument is to minimize risks to the international cartels and to the party they own. It's not about science, it's about allegiance.
Opponents don't take these things to the laboratory, to the peer reviewed publications, they look only at selected data and cast stones at the rest. They take it to Joe the Plumber. They take it to the Republicans. They take it to Congress. They purchase opinions. They take it to the huddled masses yearning to sound knowledgeable by crying hoax at every bit of truth they can find and in a way there are two sides to the climate question. The one with the trillions and the side with the data.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Sunday Afternoon and Old dogs
Waiting for someday.
The beam moves across the floor.
Look how the time goes.
No one can nap like an old dog, sprawled in the sunshine, dozing as I sip lemonade, reading poetry by the pool or curled up on the Persian rug in the library; me writing at my desk with a black fountain pen, my sanctuary of sorts. Things about me; old books and photographs. Things of science, things of art; mementos, the treasured baggage of a life slowly fading in the sun
The dog enjoys his life, his snacks, his meals always on time - his naps. Relieving himself by the curb in the morning, sniffing the summer breeze for hours, sitting in the shade of the porch as I sigh and lament with black ink on lined paper.
Who's the happier? Our futures are uncertain in length, mine more uncertain in content, his certainly shorter. It doesn't bother his sleep. Our knowledge is pain, our mortality cuts like a choke collar, pulled too tightly and oh, that leash! We suffer into truth and sometimes into beauty, sometimes into joy but always it passes and we sigh and lament. He sleeps unworried on the soft rug, woven by women's hands, smoothed by long fingers in distant places, his lost youth unmourned, mine displayed, formulated on the wall, while I listen to the brass clock tick, the gold nib scribbling on paper.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Do not attempt.
I just saw it again in a movie - our protagonists frantically one step ahead of a superhuman pursuer jump on to a motorcycle in desperation, but pause to put on a helmet. I say again because it's certainly not the first time. Panicked fugitives stop to put on seat belts leaving any of the audience who had been carried along by the plot behind if all the phone numbers beginning with 555 haven't already.
A car rolls slowly down a beautiful leaf strewn autumn road, while the massage crawls across the bottom, admonishing us not to to do this yourself and that there is a trained professional at the wheel and the road is closed. Of course that's less ridiculous when the same warning is presented when the car drives out the back of an airplane, or off a bridge. But who are we warning and would a warning have any effect on the guy who thinks his Toyota can fly?
Watching a show about asset recovery agents - repo men - who specialize in stealing helicopters and jets and even megayachts from people who have stopped making payments, I of course see the same warning. "Don't do this yourself." Damn, and I had my leather helmet and goggles on already.
Funny thing that we don't see these "trained professionals" things with movies about criminals or people who invade foreign countries - people who land on the moon, but hey.
I've already complained about instruction manuals for everything from q-tips to digital cameras that have 10 pages of warnings for every paragraph explaining how to use it. Don't use a hammer to clean your ears, don't stand on a wet floor and stick your tongue in a light socket while using this camera.
The stuff that's actually dangerous? Not so much. Yes, I think one of the ceramic knives I bought for my wife said something like "don't cut yourself" but that's mild in today's America and of course it doesn't tell you to hire a chef and leave the cutting to her. No warning that "contents may be fattening" on my fridge or "don't use in the shower" on the toaster but then I didn't read the manuals. My cars' instruction books didn't suggest getting a chauffeur and there's no sign on my lawn relative to not cutting it myself. I'm willing to bet more people are hurt by power mowers than by cameras but none of this is about objective reality, is it? But I could be wrong.
Maybe I'm just reckless and irresponsible. Maybe I should be more cautious about life in general. I'm considering putting up a sign over the front door - facing inwards. How does "Don't go out by yourself. It's a jungle out there, for trained professionals only."
A car rolls slowly down a beautiful leaf strewn autumn road, while the massage crawls across the bottom, admonishing us not to to do this yourself and that there is a trained professional at the wheel and the road is closed. Of course that's less ridiculous when the same warning is presented when the car drives out the back of an airplane, or off a bridge. But who are we warning and would a warning have any effect on the guy who thinks his Toyota can fly?
Watching a show about asset recovery agents - repo men - who specialize in stealing helicopters and jets and even megayachts from people who have stopped making payments, I of course see the same warning. "Don't do this yourself." Damn, and I had my leather helmet and goggles on already.
Funny thing that we don't see these "trained professionals" things with movies about criminals or people who invade foreign countries - people who land on the moon, but hey.
I've already complained about instruction manuals for everything from q-tips to digital cameras that have 10 pages of warnings for every paragraph explaining how to use it. Don't use a hammer to clean your ears, don't stand on a wet floor and stick your tongue in a light socket while using this camera.
The stuff that's actually dangerous? Not so much. Yes, I think one of the ceramic knives I bought for my wife said something like "don't cut yourself" but that's mild in today's America and of course it doesn't tell you to hire a chef and leave the cutting to her. No warning that "contents may be fattening" on my fridge or "don't use in the shower" on the toaster but then I didn't read the manuals. My cars' instruction books didn't suggest getting a chauffeur and there's no sign on my lawn relative to not cutting it myself. I'm willing to bet more people are hurt by power mowers than by cameras but none of this is about objective reality, is it? But I could be wrong.
Maybe I'm just reckless and irresponsible. Maybe I should be more cautious about life in general. I'm considering putting up a sign over the front door - facing inwards. How does "Don't go out by yourself. It's a jungle out there, for trained professionals only."
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