Pass the Twinkies, Please

Oh you're American?  Please don't tell us about your diet.

It's a sentiment you'll hear in many places in the world. We're seen as narcissistic and hypochondriacal, and when it comes to diet and health, we're rather evangelistic too. It happens all the time. You'll meet someone and in the first few minutes they'll assault you with how they eat this and not that, which things are filled with this toxin and that, and how this causes cancer and that will make you impotent.  Of course it's pretty safe to say that none of it's true, because nearly everything you read about health and nutrition is produced by scare mongers: diet book doctors, supplement pushers and others with mysterious agendas. Real science: valid conclusions from valid studies? They're often surrounded by as impenetrable a husk of gullibility as  a coconut -- and besides, very, very few of us are trained to derive much from the edited data we're given.  I read "studies show" and I can be sure there wasn't really a study that showed anything conclusive at all, but just a  a stew of anecdote, speculation and salesmanship.

We seem to enjoy bogus information of all sorts and to inflict it on innocent victims ad libitum, without regard to how badly and long ago it's been debunked.  Why else would we persist in our Low fat Vs. Low Carbohydrate, Vs. Low calorie feuds?  Talk calorie consumption to an Atkins Man?  Forget it, even if he weighs 400 pounds, he's sticking to the faith.

A few years ago I went on a severely calorie restricted but balanced diet and lost about 50 pounds in a few months. Many annoying ailments seemed to disappear but wouldn't you know it, I couldn't show up slender at any old haunts without being lectured by one overweight person or another about how I should have gone on their diet instead. What else can it be but religion and you know how well religion and fact go together. Somehow the Atkins devotees annoy me the most with their carbcarbcarb and calories-don't-count cackling. It's pointless to point out the Twinkie diet in which a professor of Human Nutrition at KSU went on a reduced calorie diet of Twinkies and doughnuts and lost a lot of weight.

I ate a bit more sensibly but eating 900 calories a day of anything will produce results and I'm here to tell you. It's not the 5 calories of breadcrumbs on that fried chicken putting the pounds on you and eating the triple bacon chili cheeseburger without a bun isn't going to help much either. But listen to me lecture - it's like I've learned nothing.  It's the calories, dummy. It's not the mysterious properties of grain or gluten or corn syrup or " processed" foods or any of  "the seven foods you should never eat" or anything else on Fox News for that matter.


So says the medical profession and no I'm not talking about Dr. Atkins or Doctor Oz or Doctor Bonker for that matter.  A recent meta-study published in The lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology  says the data indicates that: whether it's  high fat, low fat; high carbohydrate, low carbohydrate: there's no statistically significant difference.  It's the calories, dummy.  Will information like that ever get past the hucksters, the pill pushers, the hustlers wearing Dollar Store lab coats or gyrating in Yoga pants to pounding music?  Hell no.  They love to tell you information is being suppressed by evil giant corporation, but you know the Diet Guru industry is a huge one too and there's nobody holding them to any standards at all.  Pills kill.

Eat half of  what you do now and feel the difference -- and don't worry, be happy,  Eat well but eat less.

On the Road

Headlines on the Bloomberg Web site today include the Blockbuster:

Can Detroit Beat Google to the Self-Driving Car?
Inside GM's fight to get to the future first.

Apparently this isn't the world it used to be. It's definitely a world where millions will wait outside in the snow to buy the latest i-Gadget even when last weeks model is in their pocket, but we're keeping cars far, far longer than once we did. You can drive home in a 700+ horsepower car, in a car that does 230 or more miles per hour and gets mileage equal to my old /68 VW.  In fact we're in a golden age of American performance and engineering and we don't know.   No sir, your 200 HP Nissan isn't a race car.

Some people still like to drive. Some people grew up when the number one aspiration was a car and the number two goal was something cool enough to turn heads at the drive in:  the Drive In everything that was, from theaters to restaurants to, believe it or not, liquor stores. We didn't hang out at WiFi hotspots in malls. It was at Henry's Hot Dogs or Big Daddy's Drive in with car hops and looking to impress the girls and an occasional contest of acceleration.  Real girls that is and in person, not on line. Tinder was still something you started a fire with.

The worst thing anyone could show up in was an "economy car."  Sure, I remember buying and pumping gas at 26.9 and the price of fuel didn't matter but guys like me studied cars the way the nerds did homework and the jocks memorized sports statistics. My friends and I built go-karts with lawnmower parts in 8th grade and went on to customize cars, swap and rebuild engines  and the best thing anyone could wish for was to hear someone who knew say "hey, that guy can drive!"

What kind of people want a car that drives itself, controlled by satellites and computers and government regulations in soulless safety and always in constant contact and a play list?  Sorry, you'll take away the steering wheel, the handlebars, the shift lever from my cold dead fingers  but you'll have to catch me first.

Is this a case of industry spending a fortune on something that won't sell?  Or is this a case of a country that's lost it's soul?  Will my grandchildren read "On The Road" and wonder why Kerouac didn't take the bus or dream about a little electric Japanese cliche on wheels that drives itself while you stare at a little screen texting your "friends?"  Indeed why go on the road at all when there's Google Earth?

Sorry, that's not "the future" to me any more than today is the future once envisioned in generations of Science Fiction.  If it's a country of driverless, cubicle dwelling, commuting urban virtual reality, Facebooking hipsters with "devices" it's not my country and that's a warning, not a prediction. Look for it. Listen for it somewhere off that regulated futureroad road packed with little electric safety bubbles shaped like running shoes or backwards hats whispering along, bumper to bumper at 25 MPH. Do you hear that rumble, way out on the highway?  That long, lonesome highway?

Fantasy Outrage

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.

-Tom O'Bedlam-


America's already tenuous grasp on reality is constantly being tested and we are constantly failing that test while moving ever closer to hysterical fugue.  Hark, hark, the Trump does bark and the outrage peddlers have driven us mad

Modern awareness contains a galaxy of causes: some real, some imaginary and most are struggling for attention over all the others by ginning up outrage and pulling us into one dark circus tent or another.  Reality makes us fear, but the game is in fantasy outrage and a thousand pipers whistle their tune for us all to follow -- and so we do.

The NRA is a very skilled user of outrage, having convinced millions of people that the major objective of ever politician who doesn't march to their piper is a demon out to get your guns.  They have little to do with having created America's traditional love affair with weapons, but they have made firearms into a fetish, a flag, a symbol of all our dreams of liberty.  Some simply can't conceive of being a free country without unlimited access to firearms.  It's a religion of sorts and nothing fires up the imbecile like threatening his religion. It works.

What politician doesn't wish he could enlist the outrage of the masses to make himself  the hero, the Hercules, the Sampson, the Gilgamesh who can lead us to vote for him and protect us from every enemy his imagination can conceive of?

Enter Donald Trump, or adventavit Asinus if you prefer.  Obama is going to grab your guns he says - the same thing his party's bilge rats have been squeaking since he first ran for office. Some of us watch aghast as he says  things designed to attract the confused and angry and focus their power with his daily outrages.  In fact he can predict things that never happen, he can demonstrate total ignorance of things that are all important for an American president but none of it matters to those all in a perpetual rage against all those who seek to grab their guns.  It doesn't matter that no one has yet tried, just as it doesn't matter than prophets have warned us of impending apocalypse since the dawn of politics. Every tomorrow is the end of days and any Democrat is the end of your guns and you can certainly fool enough of those good folks all the time.  It doesn't matter than there was no secret hidden in Obama's birth certificate or that any of his claims to secrets have come to nothing.  It's all about the guns. No one ever went broke predicting the Gungrabber Apocalypse.

So are you surprised that that immigrant-bashing grandson son of immigrants is warning us of an imminent executive order by the Devil Obama to grab your guns?  Illegal, can't be done, won't be done, but it's not about reality and never was.  No politician has a good chance of winning anything if he's seen as a gungrabber and any accusation is as good as a death sentence to anyone challenging the Dark Knight, the NRA..

I wonder if Hillary has grown so arrogant as to ignore this, with suggestions of Federal buybacks, the kind of program that's been a waste of time up until now, or a promise to "go after" manufacturers whose legal products are used illegally - something she should know has no legal grounds.

But of course there's that outrage addiction on the other side too and perhaps she thinks she will be seen as a savior for the real phobics and magic thinkers who somehow claim they're liberals and aren't interested in compromise or in restricting legislation to the possible and rational.

So does this last gungrabber plot prediction suggest Trump is running out of  fake outrages and is now at the bottom of the barrell?  Could be, but do we want to bet on it?  Are you feeling lucky?

Of Cops and Kindergarteners

There's a reason we will never have that "discussion" about gun control and other hot topics in America: we're not allowed to.  There are so many entities whose job it is to grab out attention, to sell us on their products, to agitate us into fear and outrage and to enlist our support -- and in that pursuit of power,  truth, fact and objectivity are impediments. Any thoughts, proposals, arguments or  even unadorned facts are going to be drowned out or ignored. Swallow or be swept aside and damned.

Indeed it's often possible that someone who sees a bigger picture might be beyond the reach of the captious arguments and emotional smokescreens that typify American politics.  And of course everything in America is politics -- even the weather. Hardly anyone here is trained or experienced in noticing bad or weak or deceptive arguments.  We see numbers we like and we accept them and we like them only because they flatter our principles -- by which we mean our prejudices.  So what if you, as I did, got this in your in-box?

If you're a "Eeeew guns, get them away, get them away" person, there's little doubt that you'll see a stone tablet given us by Moses calling for immediate elimination of a threat. If  you're an NRA paranoid zonbie, you'll look for a way to debunk it or simply deny it in a frenzy of denunciation and because there are so many disparate and unrelated "gun cultures" there will be as many rationalizations, affirmations and denials as there are "gun cultures" and anti-gun cultures.  So what does the rational man do with yet another outrage bomb?

Perhaps if you've been taking your vitamin Cynic pills, you'll wonder whether those figures, if they are true, apply to more than one year, whether there's a trend, upward or downward or whether an unusual period is being used deceptively to look like a rule.  Can one really look at 2013 and say "each year" without blushing?

 Well a somewhat cursory look at the CDC figures shows that the numbers for age 4 and under  shootings, they've at least been in the same area since 2010 and although we don't yet have a number for this year, let's, for now assume they're true even if it's obvious that the purpose of the NY Times article was to scare you and enlist your support for as yet unspecified measures.  Snopes, one of my go-to sources when someone hands me an emotional argument seems to think the numbers are good enough for the purposes of argument, but points out what most of us won't pay attention to: These are absolute numbers not relative numbers.  Yes, it's not more dangerous to be 4 than to be a cop. There are more than 23 million kids 5 and under.  There are about 760,000 full time sworn officers.

So Mr. Rational will likely say "that's too many shootings" but might just be a little less friendly toward an article trying to make it seem worse, which is how I feel about virtually all I'm subjected to when it comes to many matters of safety and sociology. It's more dangerous to be a cop than a kid. Why would an honest person make the reverse seem true? Does a good cause sanctify a bad argument? Why do you need to do the Twist if the facts are on your side?  Why are you mumbling about unspecified gun controls when someone needs to start teaching people not to leave guns around - loaded or otherwise and do it today!. Now ask yourself who is actually attempting that and who isn't even though they all claim to be all about safety?

I got a "survey" from MoveOn.org with a predictable rant about the NRA and steering me toward the desired answer "Yes I'm a gun owner and I support gun control"  The other possibilities would suggest that I was a lunatic or a monster or worse.  Although I am and I do, I'm not replying since there's no possibility of asking "what do you mean by gun control and how would it be enforced?"   Surveys such as this one, and they're used by opposing sides with much success, allow the big players to claim support they don't actually have.  How many claims to have the majority on some side are based on false-choice questions, false dilemmas and vague language?  Many, I suspect.

It's insulting because it presumes I'm unaware that there is a whole mountain of existing gun law, that I'm in such a state of panic that I'll vote for anything and that all that matters is passing laws and there's no need to look closely at what they say and whether they can be enforced fairly and equally..

No, there's no discussion, no conversation, only a lot of  manipulation and deceit  - and the packaging of selected facts and shady arguments: a lot of dimly lit agendas and lots of statements of broad principle. which liars do I listen to?  I'm left only with the option of  blogging to the four winds or ceasing to give a damn, which is not an option.  You can't be heard over the howling and the hate. You can't hope to inform people whose personalities are anchored to falsehoods because you'll readily be identified as a puppet of the "Liberals" the NRA, the NAACP, the Illuminati, the Zionist conspiracy and the Devil himself.

You have a hard time really knowing whether mass shootings are on the rise or whether there's a pattern for all the groups trying to tailor the data.  More shootings of 4 or more people are family related, but all the energy is being spent proving school shootings are on the rise and have only to do with the ease of buying weapons and the proliferation of them.  Can we ever know what the truth is. Some graphs make mass shootings look sporadic with isolated clusters, others try to make it look like a steady increase.  Like Procrustes' bed, reality gets stretched or trimmed to fit into it.  From all sides we're told to be afraid of the other side: afraid of guns and government and minorities and racists, of Christians and Muslims and Obama and the list is long. Outrage is everywhere and you're only choice is to listen to us!

Outrageous!

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

-Daniel Kahneman-

When I stop writing about American culture,  and it will be soon, it will come from being tired of the hot and cold running outrage that passes for discussion and social criticism and news reportage.  No more do we hear rational and dispassionate discussions, everything is outrageous, everything is about how outrageous the actions and inactions of the "enemy" are and there's always an enemy:  the Liberals, the Tea Party, the NRA, the ACLU, the "politically Correct, the Secular Humanist -- there's always an enemy to inspire actions whether or not they're appropriate, effective, moral or legal. Some of the worst outrages never happened yet they inspire wars, riots, lynchings and civil disobedience.

Whether you're Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Bullmoose or Whig, everything our opponents do is an outrage and it's easier to fabricate the appearance of outrage now than it ever has been.  Outrage -- it's what's on the news.  It's how we manipulate opinion and inspire action and suppress thought.

Modern life is the battle among activists and activist organizations, and it's all about winning, about success and not much about reason.  A girl hears a song in a club that makes her feel uncomfortable?  OUTRAGE!  Something must be done! Don't think, ACT NOW! Someone claims to be the victim of racism?  It's an outrage and will be portrayed as such if it requires fiction and libel and lying.  It's about furthering the cause and the cause is just winning.

Hear a story that supports "our side" and you'll believe it, you'll forward it, you'll write a passionate blog entry and you'll blame it on the bogeyman of reference long before you'll check the facts, analyze the plausibility of your response or of the accusation.  Is that radio station in Alaska a plot to change the weather or sniff out underground things on the other side of the planet? Will you bother to ask the experts on radio or the weather or those in the know about ELF communication with submerged submarines? Do you know the D layer from the Nightime F2?  Have you some data on connections btween them and weather?  Hell no, we just know there's a secret agenda despite what we know about the subject and you'll forward the story to everyone and they will pass it along like a virus.  Give me a bogus outrage upon which to stand and I will move the Earth.  


In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger explains how outrage sells, how it inspires people to share it, pass it along, promote it and use it to sell us beliefs.that have little or no factual support while valid information just sits there like leftovers in your refrigerator.

Want to create an outrage?  First pick a "Goliath" says the American Council on Science and Health.  

"If you examine the most popular activist groups, they all operate according to this formula: they pick an enemy they can depict as the arrogant “Goliath”,  a corporation that cares only about profits, then they find an issue or product simple enough to be understood by the people who read sites like Natural Resources Defense Council or Environmental Working Group (ideally something people eat or use daily, so there is first-hand experience with it) and then they ‘reveal’ an outrageous fact about it."

And "fact" of course hardly has to be one to let us play to the popular fancy - food faddists for instance.  You feed their fear that we're eating poison and you blame the bogeyman.  Alar on apples -- they're trying to kill you! -- "studies show!"  only they actually didn't.  Milk causes phlegm, vaccinations don't work, wheat gives you "grain Brain" and gluten is poison only none of it is true. Nearly anything you'll read in the popular press or see on Dr Oz or in those ads that pop up on line is false. Who bothers to question it when it's too damned much fun to be outraged?

As Daniel Kahneman said of  raising false fears: all you need is something plausible to the non-expert and an anecdote. Very few will ever bother to investigate, calculate odds or learn anything about chemistry, biology, statistics or any kind of science. What we believe is what we want to and that's that.  None of us are immune to the power of outrage and all of us, from brilliant to dull are lazy when it comes to what we believe.  Outrage is addictive.  Outrage is fun and if the outrage monger offers a way to "solve" what may not be a problem we will take it.  We'll make noise in the street, sign petitions, burn neighborhoods, write passionate letters of outrage long before we'll look at valid statistics with a keen eye for deception.

Rile them up, feed the righteous indignation and give them the way to the egress and they will do your bidding, whether it's to libel a candidate, see insignificant things or non existent things as outrageous and you will prevail.

And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the emotional tail wagging the rational dog, tired of the outrage and the percieved need for action being confused with a solution. I weary of the same old truth by assertion and repetition, the outrage of the day and the hortatory calls to be afraid.  In fact I fear the fear mongers and outrage shouters far more than anything they warn us of and prophets always lie, even when the prediction comes true.

Nehil Novum Sub Solis

How many times have I said "here we go again"  in the last year?  I suppose everything else said about this latest school shooting will be as predictable, as overused and as useless.  Here we go again.

Will we hear more statistical gymnastics arguing that rampage shooting is on the increase because of this factor or that factor alone and has nothing to do with the successful promotion of the genre as a way to go out in a blaze of "glory?" Is there something about our society that produces a generation of  existentially challenged young males? Is it really all about a fictional increase in gun ownership or a fictional increase in the deadliness of modern guns and ammunition?   Ask at your own risk, you're either a gun-grabbing Communist or  a crazed gun nut to anyone who disagrees.  Here we go again in hopelessly polarized America, demanding that we "have a conversation" where I shout and you shut up.

Will anyone stop to ask why, if violence is exploding, is it so concentrated in the schools? With everyone shouting and yelling has something gone wrong with American culture? Will anyone ask if there are other factors other than that modern guns look more threatening than equally deadly older guns?  Will we look at handguns in general or press the repeat button and replay the "semi-automatic" recording?  Will we do anything different at all?

Why aren't we asking about the apparent increase in drive-by and gang related shootings in certain areas and the apparent decrease in other areas?  Is it that we don't want answers but only a stage on which to act out our our little dramas?  Children are being shot on the streets in West Palm Beach but peace reigns in my nearby community.  Why?

This is horrible, of course but I have to ask whether the response is more about sloganeering, wishful thinking and hysteria than anything helpful.  Everyone wants answers, or so they say, but I suspect they only want answers that support their prejudices and opinions.  I want more questions. I want that conversation many people pretend they want.  I want someone to ask why the flurry of post office shootings started and then stopped rather than continued along the trend line people were drawing.  I want to know why no one is showing us graphic representations which, from what I see argue that over the last century there are many peaks and many troughs in school shootings.  In no case does any extrapolation prove long lived.  Regression to the mean seems to be the law. Can we talk?  Can we look at the numbers?

I'd like to know why we never seem to get past the "something must be done"  and "something must be done by the Federal Government" and rarely ever propose something that's legal and possible and doesn't rest on the fatuous presumption that laws stop lunatics, that bans make a difference? Can we propose that life in Manhattan has different needs than life in Kodiac Station?   Suggest that crime and violence have multiple and complex etiologies demanding  complex and multiple approaches which may take a long time to work and you're a pariah.  "when do we want it - now!"  Some things never change.

Will this story be hijacked by the "War on Christianity?"   Will we have to endure weeks of self-pitying, neo-Babylonian lamentations?, with tired and vague demands?  Of course. There's nothing new.

We continue and we continue with jibber-jabber about types of ammunition and the devices that hold it, we rattle on about "style" and we continue to frame everything in the most extreme, hyperbolic, inflammatory, fear inspiring and inaccurate  terms.  As with so many emotionally driven and emotionally rationalized themes in America today, no one is interested in working with any one else.  Taxation, public debt, Racism, addiction, disease and vaccination, Secularism versus the Christian State.  Laissez faire Vs regulation -- it's all Hobbes' universal war: me against you, my action committee against yours, it's the struggle for primacy, not for a solution.

" I will not name the shooter,”  

said  Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin and I share his feelings.  We've made folk-anti-heroes of  some deadly and deranged misfits who have problems with schools and students and teachers and can't think of any other way to air their grievances, but to kill themselves and take others with them just like all those sad miscreants around the world who shoot up public places or blow themselves and others up with home-made bombs or fly airplanes into buildings.  Everyone has a straw man to punish - mad bombers, mad shooters, arsonists as well as all those who demand that something be done, but my thing and my way, of course.

Banning booze didn't reduce alcoholism, banning needles and banning drugs made it worse, reducing highway speed limits didn't save lives or slow anyone down nor did the fraudulent "assault weapons" ban have any affect on anything.  I suspect that nothing we'll hear in the coming days about how this or that changes everything will be different.  Ban this, ban that. Take polls with forced choice questions, loaded questions, false dilemmas and  loaded terminology: extrapolate trends and think most magically about gun control.

Showcase this!

Oh great, it's not enough that privacy in America is dead, here's a chance for an even greater level of exposure.  It's called PEEPLE and it allows you to rate and berate people the way you can post ratings of businesses on Yelp.  Of course you have to sign up for the public laughing stock but to my horror it seems someone can do that for you without your knowledge and consent.  If you've looked at Yelp, you may share my opinion that it attracts cranks and trolls and I've read the most outrageously spurious and unfair ratings of places I have first hand knowledge of.  Will these same creeps be rating someone in your family?  If you're on Facebook, ll they need is your cell phone number and judging from the calls I get, everyone knows mine, including Facebook.

How many suicides, how many murders will ensue?  How many mortified teenagers will take dad's gun to school?  How many adults for that matter, will take the notion to hunt down and kill some drooling dirtbag who spends his afternoons posting spurious libel about people he doesn't know. Imagine waking up one morning to find that 4962 posters insist that your mother does Dallas?

And of course as the lawsuits begin to pile up by the millions, won't there be a cry against the assault on "Freedom of speech?"  The founders of this abomination have raised a mountain of cash and apparently are exited that we can all now "showcase your character” online.  Really?  Well here's a good reason to get the hell off Facebook, if that's even possible, to toss the phone overboard and make sure I have plenty of  5.65 X 39 available.

Showcase this!

Good Old Days.

"You know, this usta be a hellova good country"  

Said George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) in the movie Easy Rider shortly before he was bludgeoned to death by the good old boys who didn't want no hippies with no respect for the good old ways and traditions in their county.  It's a very common thing to say in the USA of today. That's not to say we haven't done some good things, but I'm curious to know just when that golden age of America the Great and Magnificent was.  The witch hunts, religious restrictions, the deportations and slaughter of Indians, a horrific civil war --  the Slavery, the Race laws, the lynchings, the unjustified invasions and foreign wars based on lies, the support for inhuman monsters abroad, the abuses of freedom while fighting various enemies, real and imagined. Just when the hell were we so great?

I'd like to know because it seems to be the same voices lamenting the lost paradise that decry efforts to move away from or undo all those Hobbsonian horrors.   Advocates for a system of laws based on selected Christian literature, for enforcing selected taboos of selected Christian sects who advocate for the tyranny of clergymen and against the institutions of secular government:  I'd like to know what the hell they're talking about and so far not one of them has given me a cogent, a valid or even an honest explanation.

'Back to the Future' seems to have been a meme since the first versions of the Garden of Eden Story was cooked up and seeing that not only the name "eden" but the concept of an original pure garden of bliss is described in the earliest writings known ages before there was a Bible, it's puzzling to contemplate how the past could always have been better and the future should be a return.  All those horrors, the floods, the plagues, the genocides the divine retributions in the past -- that's because we weren't pleasing God or the gods and so we need to go back to when we did although obviously we never have?

Sounds demented, doesn't it and that's because it is, but it's also been the tool of tyrants and prophets and preachers and Sunday School Teachers, and it works.  Yep they're all going to restore the greatness, Reagan and Trump with their shining cities and high rises towers and every damn Republican chump with their ethnic bias and religious intolerance..  Bring back the Roman Empire, start a thousand year Reich. A New Jerusalem, a new Zion in Utah a new Eden in Woodstock.  Remember that the First Commandment is religious intolerance and we'll all be happy.

I got into it, earlier this week with some blowhard who insisted that the Pledge of Allegiance was fading away because the Liberals were making us embarrassed to say it.  It was the God part, of course, forced on school children since 1954 thanks to the knights of Columbus having bullied the Eisenhower administration.  The straw man Liberals are against "patriotism' and Patriotism means mandatory theological belief just like the old days when everything was wonderful and Christian Soldiers like Jefferson and Madison and Franklin and Washington fought the unbelievers to establish the Kingdom of Christ in the New World.

Something You Don't Like About Capitalism?

"Because we can get away with it."  is essentially the answer given by Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO to the question of why the company raised the price of  Darapram, a drug that's been around for 62 years  by 5000%.  That's not a typo.

Turing acquired the drug by purchasing the company that made it last month, and greed being good, decided to flaunt it.  One pill now costs 750 bucks, up from $13.50. No really, that's not a typo and it's not unique.  It's not, it seems,  that these things didn't make a profit, the development costs having been payed back long ago. It's just that Medical care in America is about making the rich richer, about Turing paying for the company they bought by screwing  the sick and screwing the Insurance companies who pass the cost  on to you and me - because they can and because the Republicans made a deal while calling objectors Communists.

The cost of  existing medications that some people need to stay alive has gone up by hundreds and hundreds of percentage points and not because they cost more to make. It's because they can get away with it and if you don't have insurance, your option is to decrease the surplus population.
And the idiots like Sarah Palin insist that Obamacare has death panels while "buy or die" has replaced free market competition.  Republicans are for free markets, right?

Now if you do have insurance that covers prescriptions, the cost is picked up by the premium payers: us, our employers or Medicare thanks to the Idiot Bush who worked out a deal with the drug companies that forbids any bargaining or competition.  It's one of the reasons they can sell drugs in the US at the highest prices in the world. Turing CEO Martin Shkreli said the price increase brings Daraprim more in line with other drugs for rare diseases, not that that stinks of collusion and price fixing, and is a polite way of saying it's OK for Turing to gouge the sick because everyone else is doing it and besides with all that money we could maybe develop some other drugs you might like -- or increase the size of the corporate jet or hand out bonuses, or whatever.  Hey, it's Capitalism. Something you don't like about Capitalism? You're some kind of Commie?

Quacks like a Duck - Affirming the Consequent

We're liberals, aren't we? So we're primed to believe stories that fit a certain mold without question and often with a good deal of desperate enthusiasm.  An "unarmed child" is shot in the back while kneeling and begging for his life,  a kid is arrested for taking a clock to school. We don't bother with the facts, because after all, there is a history of minorities being treated unfairly and therefore we assume that if B follows A, B implies A.  It doesn't and there's a name for the fallacy.

A kid brings an apparatus in a briefcase to school, made out of clock parts and looks to me very much like the bomb timer you see in so many movies that counts down the minutes to the explosion.  If I were a teacher or Principal, I would have called an expert too and I have a background in electronic engineering. It looks very much like something the movies have conditioned us to see as a countdown timer for a bomb. Did he "invent" a clock and put it in a "pencil case" that looks like it came out of a
James Bond movie or did he take apart a clock and stuff it in something chosen to look suspicious?   Your assumptions here mean a lot. The way it's framed means everything.  As many on both sides of the political divide seem to agree:  "It looks like a f*cking bomb!"

But because police have a history of  abusing minorities, any arrest is abuse and because the kid is a Muslim, we, as dependably bigoted and privileged white people are to be presumed to be acting from bigotry.  It must be an act of racism, for are we not white? It must be racism for is he not Muslim?

The thoughts of Liberals seem to be steered by the same sloppy, emotional and instinctive pseudo-reasoning as those of Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists and for all I know, professors of mathematics.  Go ahead, you blue eyed, blond Norwegian  Lutheran - put some clock parts, a battery and a mess of wires in a briefcase and try to get on a plane so you can claim the TSA is profiling Scandinavians.

Hands up!  Don't Shoot!  It was just a clock! The knife was Military Style!   Devious uses of the Framing Effect litter the ground and every thing we read, see and hear are attempts to manipulate opinion, but  even the huge, gilded Rococo monstrosity of this frame seems to escape our notice. Even our experienced knees jerk when tapped by the professionally wielded little hammer.

Are we, as liberals combing the news for examples and when the supply is low, are we so relieved to find yet another juicy one that we suspend disbelief, squint our eyes a little bit and react a little too passionately?

Studies Show

We think we're rational, but we're not.  It's too easy to be optimistically or pessimistically  irrational. It's too much fun and we have plenty of help, particularly if we watch or read or listen to the news, if we watch television or read magazines. If we look at cartoons, if we read editorials. If we are immersed in advertising -- and we are.  If we answer our phones when they ring, if we read blogs like this one, someone is always trying to sell you an opinion, an attitude, a bias.  We're so used to it, they're so good at it that we rarely pay attention.  We enjoy having a credible group of like minded people, we hardly bother to apply what analytical ability we've managed to hold onto after years, after a lifetime of being subjected to advertising, preaching and the endless, relentless and largely dishonest manipulations that our ears are heir to.

We've been trained from birth not to question and trained to accept with a fierce tenacity anything someone dressed to inspire credulity tells us. It makes us feel smart, hip, a cut above others.  Perhaps herd animals, schools of fish and flocks of birds feel wonderful giving in to the same biological imperatives we follow in the same mindless way. I don't know.  Maybe there's a study.

Open the Sunday paper, click on a news website: you'll read about the 7 foods you should never eat, the foods, the beans and berries that will melt away belly fat and exercise programs that will make you live forever and we take it to be science; the result of valid research done to rigorous standards.  It's rarely the case.  It's nearly always the case that someone is selling something.  Tell someone that milk doesn't produce phlegm, Gluten is not bad for you, that vaccinations don't cause Autism and Autism isn't on the increase and they will turn ugly before they will bother to look at real rigorously tested and peer reviewed evidence beyond what the diet doctor or politician or propagandist of choice is saying.  I have a friend whose cousin is autistic.  That's enough.  A follows B and therefore  A causes B. Sole cause, partial cause, a vague non-causal link or irrelevant -- it doesn't matter to someone who doesn't know science or statistics and probability, and that's pretty much everyone.

Do they teach critical thinking in school?  Do they show people the difference between anecdotes, conjecture, Gerrymandered evidence and large, scale, randomized, double blind and repeatable studies?  If they do, does anyone listen?  Does it make anyone suspicious when the research, the study, are published in Sunday Supplements or pose as real in paid advertising on CNN.com?  You know the answer. 1 in a million may be enough to prove causation.  One in a million may prove unacceptable danger or a high degree of safety depending on the motivation of the salesman and the pet phobias of the believing public.

People who sell "Paleo" diets, or low "carb" diets love to tell you that they are based on research, because after all, people like the Inuit eat blubber and fish and raw meat and little else and don't get heart disease or diabetes. Your uncle Ralph went on Atkins and lost weight eating cheeseburgers.  If you noticed that the assumption that this would be true of anyone eating the same diet of course is called "confirming the consequent" which assumes that if B follows A, then B is evidence of A.  It's not. It's a fallacy you'll learn in Logic 101, but you didn't take that course did you?

 Convincing evidence that eating the calorie equivalent in lard or Twinkies or donuts produces similar results,  means nothing to the public and won't get published as an advertising campaign and something that has a tiny correlation can be called a "cause"  or a "link" by someone in a rented lab coat and you'll believe the fraud every time because it gives false hope and hope sells.

The peer reviewed journal Science published a study Thursday. Conducted by the University of California, Berkley. It examined genetic differences between Inuit, Europeans, and ethnic Chinese. and yes, pace hipster science, there are genetic differences, easily observed.  The Inuit and some Chinese have a mutation, perhaps cultivated over the millennia, that enable them to tolerate a diet that would make my cardiologist cry,  Some people lose weight on the Atkins diet.  I'm not one of them.  I don't have the genes for it and that's been confirmed by  testing my DNA.  

Should we by a sales pitch because "studies show" when there are no studies but a few anecdotes or biased conjectures?  Of course not, nor should we accept news reports that insist this or that is worse than before or is rising or falling in significant fashion and is not a brief anomaly soon to revert to the mean.  Is this scary incident really the result of this or that or is it a crafted scenario based on a fear, a phobia, a bias. Do we still believe cutting the upper tax bracket will end a recession?   You know the answer. Facts don't matter and studies always show what they're designed to show and we always believe what we want to believe.

For most of us, facts don't matter, And chances are we don't bother to think critically or verify, but chances are also great that proven wrong, belief persists, hardens and becomes militant.  Is that innocent child really a child or innocent?  Was he shot in the back?  No matter, grab the matchces because all cops are bad.  Did some kid's diagnosis illustrate a trend, was it caused by a vaccine or by his genes.  Is proof that there is no increase, the identification of the genetic component, the statistical analysis showing no increase enough to make anyone admit error or accept proof -- hell no.  

When Donald Trump insisted he had damning evidence about Barack Obama and was proved to be a lying asswipe, did that change any minds about Obama?  When some smoker lives to be 110, do we insist that smoking isn't safe?  No.  Studies always show what isn't true is true  and science nor truth really matter to the human ape.  

Every Way You Look at This

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to the candidates' debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose.
I'm fond of reading books on logic and rhetoric, but it's frustrating and annoying in the extreme to recognize the dishonest and deceptive methods of persuasion that make up nearly all American political discussion.  Some 15 years ago I began writing about such things on Usenet, and Compuserve and I've been blogging on the Web for the last ten.  I've lost any belief or hope in  the idea that clear speech and valid reasoning could compete with the self serving belief, the love of snarky zingers and the tribal chanting.  I really don't know why I do it any more and the ritual political exercises the public takes to be debate,  illustrate the futility of hope.

Candidates lie.  They distort, they embellish, they deny.  They make up statistics, quote dubious authority, they make simplistic generalizations, they manipulate a large deck of fallacy with as much dexterity as any Las Vegas illusionist.  It doesn't matter.  We're not looking for facts, we're looking for confirmation of prejudice, and what's overlooked in our candidate is seen as catastrophic, as egregious, as unforgivable in another.  There's simply no other reason for conducting a campaign or listening to it but to delude or protect our delusion. When I see the same tricks used by proponents I was once sympathetic toward and tricks quite as slippery as the other side uses, I have to question my motivations for continuing.

You simply can't trust the propaganda put out by either side of any serious issue.  Is the problem worse or better or unchanged?  Does the incident or scandal du jour represent anything other than an isolated case?  Is something we are urged to panic about, be angry about, to go out and riot about or even vote in response to only a thing chosen or invented by pressure groups as an example?   We can't trust the statistics or the people who quote them.  "Studies show" too often means there was no study and cited "linkages" have nothing to do with causation, because all that matters in political salesmanship is the Framing Effect.

Our politics are fundamentally dishonest because certain groups take advantage of the technology and the science of dishonesty to manipulate us in ways familiar to Aristotle but invisible to us.  We make no effort to verify despite the technology and instant access to information and we will simply deny facts and elevate fiction as suits our vanity, our pride, our delusion and our affiliation.  Truth doesn't matter, faith does and if we fear vaccinations it doesn't matter that claims and fears are proven utterly false.  We can always come up with a conspiracy, we can always deny, we can always throw dung at the truth and anyone who tells it.

Will this fundamental instability of human nature, our tendency toward hysteria and panic bring down our Republic, or is the question really about how soon?  Will we even notice  with all the howling of all the players?

Mike Huckabee thinks Black People Can't be Citizens.

Is everyone too busy hunting for racists under the bed and accusing every dust bunny they find of racism to ignore someone who would make Satan blush and George Wallace take exception at a candidate telling us Black Americans are, by law, not human nor eligible for citizenship?  The Dred Scott decision, says  the excremental Mr. Huckabee,  a man with no knowledge of history, logic or law, is still  "the law of the land."   Is there no shame any more?

No it isn't the law and hasn't been since the constitution was amended to outlaw slavery and to make everyone born here a citizen.  A lot of people died to make that happen and a lot of people died to prevent that.  Any child knows this.  Any naturalized immigrant and probably most of the undocumented immigrants know that our government denies any origin in Biblical law or ecclesiastical authority and again many people died to make that happen.

Frankly there are no Republican candidates that are not delusional, that are not offering their delusions as a reason to vote for them,  nor do any seem to have any grasp of reality or history.  Whether it's the myth of  "Anchor Babies" or Mexican rapists or any of the other lies, distortions or frauds that constitute the Republican platform, not one of them is honest, trustworthy or smarter than a garden slug. Pretending otherwise, giving them support by pretending to be fair and respectful borders on treason, borders on collaborating with an enemy that seeks the destruction of our institutions and the rule of law.  Is this what they mean by "making America great again?

It's embarrassing, it's humiliating and it's terrifying to see this going on and to listen to people who don't react when hearing that Obama is like Hitler, That universal access to health care is Communism or like the Nazis - take your pick: people who think Jesus is or government, that the law applies differently to "believers."  The world laughs at us, and as screwed up as the world is, I don't blame them.  I mean, you can laugh or you can hide under the bed or you can try to find some remote corner of the planet to drink yourself to death in, but  the Zombie apocalypse is upon us: a brainless evil running wild in the streets, waving crosses and pounding on bibles and hunting witches like it's 1499.

The Voice from the Bunker

In the last election, GOP presidential candidates promised $2.50/gallon gas and an unemployment rate below 6% -- but only if Obama loses,"

says Rachel Maddow.  Yesterday's local newspaper had a cartoon of  Obama standing next to a garbage pile labelled DEBT and saying he'll give it the title of  Prosperity.

Is there any more solid proof that the GOP lives in a world of their own?  A hermetic world, where truth never penetrates, a crumbling tenement of the mind with no fire escapes and no exit.

"Care to guess what happened anyway?"

Deficit spending is way down from the last Republican administration, the corner gas station is selling the cheap stuff at $2.44, unemployment is at 5.1%. She's right, it's hard to guess what they're complaining about, but my guess is that they're talking to a crowd who's cognitive functions and base of knowledge is sclerotic with misdirected anger.  It's sad how big that crowd is. Things have been getting steadily better for 6 years and the 8 years of soaring debt and zero job growth, a credit crunch and market collapse only surpassed by the Great Depression - - all those things have been forgotten while the DJ continues to rap about smaller government and less spending and lower taxes.

Is it a bubble or is it a sealed lead sarcophagus where the corpse of  legitimacy, decency, truth and justice lies rotting in it's own stink?

Yes, I know, she's a lesbian, MSNBC has a scarlet LIBERAL painted on it and Obama is a DISASTER says the voice from the bunker.

Fear, Fear Everywhere and Never a Stop to Think

Waiting my turn at the barber shop, looking at the magazines: Field and Stream, Coastal Angler and things like that. Hot Rod, American Iron: all manly things that live in barber shops.   Like half the customers, I'm wearing shorts and a fishing shirt with my boat's name on it -- Sperry Topsiders that have been around the deck a few times.  It's that sort of a town, a small town very close to rural Florida which here is more cattle than citrus -- and fish, of course, whether it's west in Lake Okeechobee, in the middle in the St. Lucie River  or East in the Atlantic and the Intra-coastal waterway -- whether it's off the many bridges or from a boat, people fish and people hunt. People gig frogs in the wetlands.  Wild hog, it's what's for dinner.

Bob's Barber Shop is festooned with Western memorabilia and some very old guns.  You don't see Bob much any more.,  Like me he's mostly retired and I don't see the signs for his homemade Venison jerky on the wall, but time seems to move slowly at Bob's and I like it that way.  It's a country for old men.

I have a wait and so I pick up a copy of American Rifleman  with it's mailing cover still on it, proclaiming the dire need for the reader to buy an NRA raffle ticket to win a variety of guns and so to "protect our freedom in Obama's last desperate years."

Obama and his "rogue agenda to destroy our unique American freedoms."  It may be evocative of old times, but it's not. Those faces, those people I used to think I got along with so well in my love of the outdoors, the land and waters, fields and streams: there's something behind the mask that feels like a door I shouldn't open. Something new in degree if not in content.  " And that Hillary!" I read in another article.  Indeed it is.

Should I be grateful to be informed of this mad desperation, this frenzied and howling  lust to "take our ammo" Hillary represents?  Strange that I never noticed it because ammo is available everywhere, including WalMart and the gun store just across the street from Bob's. Have I been kept in the dark?
"Buy all you can, bury it in the back yard -- the Obamocalypse is upon us and if it's not, there's the Hillary Horror and blood in the streets."

Everyone who reads the NRA publications: American Rifleman, American Hunter, Amrica's First Freedom, Shooting Illustrated, Shooting Sports USA, American Family Insights, Armed Citizen, Standing Guard and others knows it's a desperate struggle, a fight every day to keep the government away from our freedom and yes, freedom means guns. Yes these are Obama's last desperate days and yes that sounds rather ominous, rather threatening coming from people who are promoting imminent and necessary rebellion. There is desperation of course and it's at the NRA and they do a stupendous job of promoting that fear of losing our Freedom (guns) even when there seems to be little, if any motivation on the part of  the Executive branch.  Mass confiscation, like the Second Coming is always imminent and contributions to the NRA always necessary and it sells well to the "south will rise again" crowd and the closet anarchists and paranoids and revolutionaries.  Obama,s gonna lock you up, he's gonna take your guns just like Clinton did and ohmagawd, here comes another Clinton!

Of course it's not just Bobs or at the fish camp bar out on the lake I'm fond of.  It's not just at those parties at the Harley dealer or the biker bars.  You hear it at the Yacht Club. You hear how "Obama has been just a disaster" from people who still have those "2012, the end of an error" stickers on their Bentlys.  If I dare to break the club rules and ask why that is, the answer is always a shrug or something that isn't true.

But things are changing rather quickly today, what with changing demographics and age and the spread of civil rights,  although one side will tell you it's too much and the other denies any change but for the worse.  Maybe we're in may respects at another George Wallace turning point.  No matter how firm he acted, no matter how much rabid support, Segregation was over.  The old ways are on the defensive.

"There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin’"

Let's hope.

But will it be for the better?  Will we have to fight the civil war all over again?  I'm seeing Confederate flags everywhere now and people are taking idiotic pride in pretending to be rebels, renegades and sovereign citizens and their symbol is a rifle.  Nothing matters in the new Utopia  as much or more than guns, more guns, unlimited guns so we'll never have to worry about being rounded up by 'librals' and sold as slaves and the South shall rise again. So says Fox, so say the NRA.

Are the many people outside the paranoid, conspiracy theorist, anarchist, White Christian Nation circle helping it die?  Hell no, of course the anti-NRA fear-of-guns crowd doesn't help spread truth and objectivity by all the ill-informed and equally obsessive hyperbole.  Nobody seems to speak for the middle, for the people who are not afraid of Swiss Army knives and Gluten, Cell Phones and mysterious toxins and can't understand why a Montana rancher or resident of Alakanuk, Alaska needs guns.  If this is to be a turning point rather than a breaking point we're going to have to hear from and to listen to these people, normal people, rational and informed people.  They are out there aren't they?

 

All Lives Matter

24 Law Enforcement officers killed so far this year and it doesn't look better at all for the rest of 2015 or for the rest of us. Innocent people who were not racist were shot down in cold blood because white people are irredeemably racists, or so the rhetoric has been flapping in the breeze like a rebel flag.

Maybe the ugly dream people like Dylann Roof have of starting a race war isn't as hopeless as you might think. Maybe it just takes enough wild-eyed activists and sensationalists in the media to to boil the kettle over. Maybe the people like Julius Jones insisting that only racists say "all lives matter" should think twice, because racism isn't a black or white problem, it's a human problem and has existed everywhere humans have existed. If white people are murdered because some nut job thinks "he's in the field" is a racist comment, shot by a  black man who thinks "swinging by" is a reference to lynching and if people of all kinds are murdered for wearing a uniform, then the narrow and narrow minded rhetoric about race and racism needs to be rethought.

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" 

Asks Shylock and perhaps that's just what the intention is.  No one who hopes to benefit by a race war, hot or cold or guerilla style is the friend of justice, liberty, equality or the brotherhood of man. To take the phrase from people who don't want to talk but to preach: we need to have a conversation and it's not about guns, "military style" or otherwise.  I don't care about the agenda of any activist group or about the terminology they'd like to force on all of us. I care about stopping the hate, the vendettas, the violence the hate speech and calls for violence.  There will be no conversation without shutting them up, drowning them out or ignoring them -- without dignifying vicious angry people, praising them, elevating them with damnation so faint I can't hear it at all.  There's no conversation if one side dictates what you can say and with which words. There's no conversation when one party can demand revenge.

No man is an island, nor any race or religion or characteristic. People who make up stories about ir being open season on black children don't get to hunt policemen or anyone else because of some equally insane premise about universal white racism.

We can make this about guns, but doing so isn't going to counter the urge to go out and get one this race war engenders -- and it's not about guns, it's about hate.  We need to have a conversation. We need to make it a real one.

Jawbone of an Ass

Sampson was supposed to have killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.  I'm not sure that's enough to qualify one as a Republican candidate.  Candidate Jeb may have been trying to outdo Candidate Donald with reference to "Anchor Babies"  a pejorative slur intended to make you believe illegal immigrants could anchor themselves in the White Man's Land by taking advantage of the 14th amendment.  Sneak across the border, have a baby in an American hospital and not only will the overtaxed millions have to foot the bill, but you get to stay here because your baby anchors you.

Sorry, it doesn't work that way, not for those scary, disease infested, drug carrying rapists Trump talks about and not for the Chinese women who booked hotel rooms in California so their babies would be born here as Jeb insists he's talking about.  It's true that any children would automatically be eligible for citizenship, but hey can't petition for residency on their parent's behalf until they are 21 years old.  So while you may be giving him a nice coming of age present, you'll have to go home, all of you.

And when you do decide in 2036 or so to claim your citizenship, you may run afoul of the FATCA act which could make you liable for back taxes on anything you earned back in Guadalajara or Shanghai plus penalties for not filing and filing late and of course if  it says "born in the USA" on your passport, you can't open a bank account at home, even if you're a dual citizen. Personally I would keep it quiet and stay home.

But you didn't actually think you'd get the facts from a Republican, did you -- jawbone of an ass and all that?

Amaya Guardado died for your sins

There have been times of late that I've gone as far as to write a farewell letter, but so far I'm still here, and so long as I'm being called a racist for insisting that all lives matter, I may remain.

All lives do matter and although Julius Jones sort of agreed on Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show the other day that in fact they might, it gets in the way of their campaign and he tells us never hears from anyone that all lives matter unless the source is a racist.

Kiss my racist ass and I guess you can add me to the racist list along with  Jesus, the Buddha, Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King.  The secular credos of the Enlightenment and of our founding American documents must be racist as well.

"What president has ever done anything for Black People?" 

asks Jones.  Jesus weeps and sure as hell, so do I.

Call me racist and  I'm proud to be one because I think the life of a young Guatemalan boy matters -- or mattered that is -- because some other teenagers, whose lives mattered more because of their color, murdered him and then went off to have sex. Being shy and foreign, and guilty of being the wrong race, it seemed appropriate to cut him to ribbons with a machete, bash his face in and bury him alive in a shallow grave they made him dig in some remote place near Miami.

I just can't tell you how much the lives of these innocent, unarmed "children" matter to me. "Hands up - don't shoot!"  Will we see pictures of these honor students in mortarboards and gowns?  Will we hear "leaders" insist that now it's open season on Guatemalan children too?  Hell no, Al Sharpton is nowhere to be seen and Black Lives Matter.

Who will march in Miami for Amaya Guardado?  Who will carry signs in St Louis, New York, Baltimore?  Who will insist his life matters?  Who will confront politicians and candidates and demand they recite the formula or be called racists? Who will demand we suspend the rules of evidence, that we try people in the street?  Who will start fires and stop traffic?

Is it time to point out once again, that being against wrong doesn't make you right?  Shall I suggest the tendency of movements toward arrogance, self-importance and absolutism is independent of  the validity of the cause?

 Of course as cowardly Liberals we rush to confirm any claim to being against racism. We rarely stop to verify facts, to think about what we're doing when we undermine the justice system to get at people we just know are guilty.  We Liberals -- of course we're not racists and we'll prove it every time by following the noise in the street. "Black lives matter," is the chant and who the hell said anything about Hispanics, Native Americans, Chinese, Pakistani and of course we're not racists when we march.

God's House

"It's God's House, says the newspaper serving Florida's Treasure Coast with its varied population of retired billionaires and the working poor, with 15,000 square foot mansions, private water parks and private golf courses in spitting distance of trailer parks and people living in the woods in tents and boxes. As with everything here, location, location, location. God must have his reasons, but then God always does what he's told and the Folks at Christ Fellowship told him to build in Port Saint Lucie and they told him to build it big and to make sure it didn't play second fiddle to Orlando even if the land here is a whole lot cheaper.

It's God's house and like Wal Mart, the place where God shops, it has a greeter. He's dressed like Captain America and as it is in Disney World, so shall it be at Christ Fellowship with anatomically inaccurate featherless dinosaurs growling from cages as though to take a slap at the real world -- that place where God could hardly be expected to dwell and people can't be enthusiastic about, in our entertainment culture, to show up. Who the hell wants to hear about hell, much less have to put on shoes and a shirt and shed the camouflage hat?

“Most people in our culture today have very little church experience and, if they do, they’ve seen church to be something that doesn’t really connect to their everyday life,”

Says Pastor Todd Mullins and so starting soon, after the 8 million dollar renovations on God's house, the Former Digital Domain building in a recent development on reclaimed swamp land ironically called "Tradition" are complete -- starting soon it will be God's house. Watch out Disney! Watch out McDonalds, watch out Wal Mart. Here comes Captain America and here comes McJesus and it's a fake world after all!

Of course so much of what they've turned this natural wonder called Florida into is just plain phony. The Digital Domain building was built with taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks and on false projections. The company soon went broke and Port St. Lucie was left holding the bag, so they had to be happy to sell it at a loss even though it still won't pay any taxes. The taxpayers will have to be satisfied with plastic dinosaurs, Captain America and an amusement park having nothing whatever to do with Christianity, its history or anything else that's occurred on this planet in the last 4 1/2 billion years. Amen.

Watch out, because if God's job description no longer suits what people see as the real world, science and technology can supply the robots, the cartoon characters, the booming musical entertainment to create a new heaven and Earth on the former wetlands of the old ones, a world where the vision no longer clashes so ludicrously with reality, where those pet Velociraptors and dancing blond Sonsagods and jivin' Jehovas get their batteries recharged every night after Pastor Mullins goes home and that 4 billion year old moon shines bright on the ravaged landscape as it did before anything walked or crawled or grew on it and tired children sleep the peaceful sleep of the ignorant.

Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015)

I've been a fan of Julian Bond for a great many years. I remember applauding when it was suggested at the 1968 Democratic Convention that he run for President.  Neither of us was old enough.

There are and have been many practitioners of Civil Rights leadership but he was different in so many ways from the rest. I admired his unassailable dignity, his rhetorical ability and it never hurt that he could have been the twin brother of  my best friend.

I joined and started contributing to the NAACP when George W. went to war with him even though I have no African heritage other than what comes through American culture to all of us in music, art, letters and popular culture.

I will miss him and that leadership has passed to many lesser men is doubly sad.  Listening to what passes for moral direction these days: hearing that my life doesn't matter, the equal justice for all isn't the goal, that justice comes from the mob and evidence doesn't count -- that no one can be trusted as an ally, and worst of all that nothing has been accomplished and everyone is a racist at heart, I despair.

Julian Bond and I are of an age, of a generation that is passing, our advice ignored or ridiculed or even called ugly names.  I fear it's giving way to a generation of jihadists, opportunists and professional zealots and as it is with so many such, it's all about power. the dream we shared is gone.