From Rome to Rubio, the Last Crusade

Lets be clear, when politicians like Marco Rubio talk about a danger to the survival of Christianity, they're not talking about survival or about Christianity, they're talking about a danger to the power and authority of a certain definition of Christianity that many Christians would call by a different name. Whether or not he seriously thinks Christianity will die out, that nobody will or could be a Christian if the US allows people of the same sex to be party to a civil marriage contract, Rubio, as most politicians do, is using words in a consciously deceptive way.

How do we define, or more importantly how does the government define Christianity?  In fact the constitution forbids it to do so . There are and have been many such claimants to the robe and sandals and the reins of government, so Marco is surely being less than honest to refer to Christianity when he means his Church and its rules. He's being a damned liar by offering us fables about the origins of our laws or arguing from tradition.

Some people simply don't define Christianity as a secular authority primarily established to restrict the private sexual thought and behavior of all people. Certainly not since they never legitimately had such power, nor does the American Constitution state or imply that any legitimate power be given such authority, nor is or government empowered or obliged to "save" any religion, tradition or religious practice.

There is no unified, undisputed definition of  Christianity or of any religion or the doctrines thereof and to say anything else is prevarication. If the legalization of an inherent right of Man is a blow to Christianity I would suggest that a weakening of Christian authority must have preceded it as is the case in Ireland where years of censorship, control of education, marriage rights, reproductive rights and lastly the widespread abuse of women and children, turned Christian power into a thing of public loathing and anger. Indeed Democracy and the right to elect a government only succeeded after the Church lost the power to prevent it.

Rubio, like many of his Evangelical allies are consciously taking the risky position of posing what people approve or see as a right to be protected, as being the enemy of their tribal authority.  He needs to remember how all the other shibboleths have fallen, interracial marriage, blue laws, censorship, the inferiority of women and indeed slavery -- and fallen despite claims that Christianity was in jeopardy and God would punish us all for allowing it.  Sooner or later the prophet has to deliver or be swept away. It's not a good thing to be in power when the argument from tradition, the argument from authority is stretched so far that it snaps.

No, Christianity in some form or another will survive. Perhaps a kinder, gentler more respectful form. It's Marco Rubio and the various crusaders against the right of the people to decide their own rights who are at risk.  I truly doubt that Rubio isn't aware of the truth of that, or that he is unaware of  the kind of  State toward which the manifest destiny of free people inexorably  trends.  It's a shortsighted lust for power and with all his dishonest nonsense about Christian tradition, that tradition has never been about freedom of conscience or any kind of liberty.

As with his mumblings about how our Cuba policies have not failed after 50 years, it's a defense of blind, intransigent, self justifying power and authority and an attack on objectivity and the liberty of the citizen. Make no mistake, Rubio is against the idea that the government is of the people, by the people and for the people and legitimized only by the people and not by gods or politicians who pretend to speak for them.

One gets the idea that Pope Benedict is well aware of all this and is concerned that Rubio's way of thinking is making the Church not only irrelevant, but unsustainable in the modern world, but as the Chinese were wont to say from ancient times, "Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away.". The Vatican has one policy, the parish priest and the pandering politician have another. Down at the level where the rhetoric hits the road it's still the old beast.

Christianity has survived a great deal  as it always has -- and it will change a great deal as it always has.  If anything is in danger, it's the guy staking everything on holding back the tide.

Signs and portents

I see them everywhere and if the inmates haven't taken over the asylum, no one has told them yet. Picking up some dog food at the Winn Dixie last night, I spied a tabloid proclaiming that "Hillary" murdered Vince foster with whom she'd been having an affair.  The evidence?  Who needs evidence, who needs even to assess the probability. There wasn't any when it was her husband they were calling his murderer, why ask for it now enough people will believe anything to accomplish the objective and the objective is to smear anyone Republicans fear.

Saw a pickup truck just a little while ago.  It had a bumper sticker telling me that somewhere in Kenya a village is missing an idiot.  Ha ha ha. Ya see Obama was born, despite proof to the contrary in Kenya and don't all those idiots have doctorates from Harvard? Power to the people! With the internet anything can be true, including your sick dreams and septic fantasies. You can even claim to be smart. Born in Kenya, ha ha ha.

I could go on, but you see the same crap I see and to what can we attribute it but motivated dementia: a country living in a dream world of its own invention, a world that has no connection to reality.  Isn't it time we listed this right wing virtual reality as an illness, a disorder, a cognitive disability?  It's a world where stupid is smart, where one can by guilty and innocent at the same time where one born abroad can run for office claiming the one born here wasn't -- and get away with it.  A world where proof means nothing and lies are believed without question. Oh yes and then there's the bumper sticker claiming that "Liberalism" is a mental illness.

So it's memorial day, we used to call it decoration day and perhaps we should bring that back because memorial requires memory and we don't remember the past or see the present. We don't remember decades of dire predictions that never came true. We don't remember how the Iraqis would welcome us, the war would cost nothing, that peace would break out and democracy prosper and there would be no more hard times if we cut taxes and  all the other fairy tales and maledictions.  We don't remember because we can wash it all away with a bumper sticker and a speech. We don't remember people who died defending a country with no regard for truth and decency, a country that lies and laughs and makes up stories, A country that brags and babbles and brags some more.

That's right, Obama is an IDIOT and you Billy Bob and you Senator and you in the big house with the yacht parked out back and a Bible up your butt?  Welcome to Dumfuckistan.

De Brevitate Vitae -- A Sermon

Whether or not John Nash's mind was beautiful, it is too far beyond my mathematical  ability to judge, but I'll take Hollywood's  word for it -- and the Nobel committee's as well.

Nash and his wife were killed yesterday when the taxi they were riding in hit a guard rail on the Jersey Turnpike.  They weren't wearing seat belts and were thrown from the car.  Even the best and the most beautiful minds can be as foolish as anyone else and particularly when it comes to the assessment of risk.

I always wear them.  I was in a multiple roll-over 50 years ago.  I wasn't hurt.  Who's the wisest of us all?  But of course he was 16 years older than I and there will be time I tell myself. Time before I have to think of such things.
And time for all the works and days of hands.
That lift and drop a question on your plate.

One event happeneth to us all, as the Bible says.  As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth to me; and why then was I then more wise?

I raced home yesterday afternoon, fleeing a thunderstorm on my motorcycle, passing cars like they were standing still, relishing the blast of wind on a 90 degree day.  I'll shortly be driving my car south on the Turnpike where the traffic moves at 90.  Fear isn't a factor.  I love driving and on such a beautiful morning as this in my shiny automobile I feel  like a kid on Christmas morning, but as the amazing J.L Gates said: Death may be your Santa Claus.

But there's time, I tell myself.

And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

And how dieth the wise man?
As the fool.

Sacred or Senseless

Religion, does it do more harm than good?  Is that even a question that anyone can address without letting their biases overwhelm objectivity?

Watching a program titled The Third Rail on Aljazeera America this morning did little to dispel my suspicions.  Larry Taunton, an Evangelical spokesman, asserted that not all religions are equal in that respect, but Christianity "brings benevolence to the table." Perhaps it does, but it's hard for me to accept that it brings much benevolence to the world,  as the influence, at least in the US on public life is to restrict the rights and political power of certain people while putting a holy gloss on the supercilious condemnations and malevolence.  Democracy and human rights are usually only apparent relative to the rights of the faithful but even then, the rights of women, of unbelievers and the members of antagonistic religions would be rigorously suppressed given their ability to do so. Their god does not compromise or relent and neither do they.  His evidence of course is that Evangelicals give more, or so he says, although again, that they certainly don't give more than Muslims and Jews, but with faith, with arrogance and with dishonesty all things are possible.

"For we have been saved by grace through faith and this is not your own doing it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."(Ephesians 2:8-9)

Yet boast of it they do and most fulsomely. Wars, slavery, tyranny, executions and torture: that some justify them and others do not seems to have little to do with religiosity and more to do with some independent viewpoint that often runs afoul of doctrine and dogma and ecclesiastical authority. One has to ask what their is in Christian benevolence that is absent in Humanist benevolence, Muslim benevolence, Marxist benevolence and most of all, benevolence itself. The answer of course is that religion, at least Western religion, offers exceptions to everything but obedience.

Yes, some people benefit from Christianity says Atheist Dan Dennett, but what bothers him is what bothers me:  the "systematic hypocrisy that almost obliges them to lie."  Indeed it does as we see when Taunton claims that Evangelicals give more to charity that atheists.  The problem is that atheists are not a group and have nothing in common but the lack of credulity to a certain myth. Any statement that puts Karl Marx, Ayn Rand and John Lennon in the same envelope can't be taken to be honest.  And of course that "statistic" confuses donations to institutions that spend the contribution on airplanes for ministers and invest in African gold mines using slave labor with "charity."  Faith requires dishonesty, demands fallacy and ultimately is vanity.   The only one in this conversation acknowledging legitimacy to anyone else is the atheist. If God can't compromise, how can his followers?

 Did Christianity motivate Abolition and has Christianity been at the root of  civil rights reform? Well it certainly allows Christian booster Taunton to claim so and not to be embarrassed when forced to admit that he didn't consider gay marriage to be a civil right because of his Christianity.  Many Christians of course didn't and still don't consider slaves to have civil rights and there is much in the "scriptures" to back them up. His statement is only tautological: Christians support only the rights we support as Christians and no others.  And here's where the argument fails. Christian benevolence is offered to Christians as long as they don't offend Christian authority.  A poor sort of benevolence in my mind and of Daniel Dennett's.who points out the centuries of vicious persecution of those people who see benevolence as innately human and not god given.  We want to be your sole source of morality, say the religion vendors and damn you if you roll your own or buy another brand.

Since the religiously motivated horrors of history are hard to deny (not that people don't try) I have to ask whether religion isn't like nuclear power, gunpowder and sharp objects in general, things that can help us but contain no internal protection against misuse?  Is blind faith of any kind inherently dangerous and does that danger too often outweigh any benefit that is just as inherent in safer things?  One can believe in any god you can imagine, good or ugly, merciful or monstrous, and we always have, but gods are never dangerous.  They have no power, no characteristics not assigned by their believers and being human we create gods in our image, according to our own needs for self justification.  By faith we are oppressed. It's belief that creates gods and only doubt, only disbelief, only reason and honesty can save us from ourselves.

 

Freedom Fries?

Rand Paul, would I vote for him?  Probably not, but I can't help supporting him this time and enthusiastically.  Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, said he will do "everything humanly possible" to keep the Senate from reauthorizing the Patriot Act.  "Anything" includes a filibuster. 

Is the rest of Congress simply afraid to bring up that notoriously unpatriotic act, which in most cases nullifies the 4th amendment and other civil liberties once bragged about as our birthright.
Perhaps they are, and indeed they should be ashamed of the way it passed through both houses like Montezuma's revenge.   Train wrecks and Texas gun play get far more public attention. Are we being deliberately distracted?  Have we forgotten the words of our forgotten president telling us we now have to give up some of our civil liberties?  Now that the hourly "terror" reports and the force fed panic have subsided, now after 14 years of dong nothing to prevent attacks on our country, 14 years of undermining our former right to be secure in our homes and papers and communications, isn't it time to re-examine the need to allow searches and seizures, confiscations without court order or probable cause? Shouldn't we pay attention to how the PA has allowed the FBI to cover up illegal acts with impunity?  Is it that we always approve of anything with "freedom" or "patriot" stenciled on it? 

The passage of  the "Freedom Act" last week by the House doesn't really address the whole problem and I will support any effort to block the renewal of this truly shameful and cowardly act and no congressman or Senator who gets in the way will have my support.

The age of Bull

Some of the lab-coat bozos who dream up fake "studies" to convince you to eat or not to eat and to spend a lot of your money on buying books related to fake health and nutrition scams would like you to believe that wheat is your enemy.  Unless you have celiac disease, it isn't, but  if you're like most Americans, you don't know science from Shinola, don't know a study from a Studebaker or glutin from glockenspiels and the same goes for history and biology, but that's not what this is about.

A popular fiction is that "studies show" that the advent of  agricultural civilization (is there any other kind?) made people smaller and so you should avoid agricultural products. Of course it's hokum designed to sell product and is popular with inflated airheads from Hollywood, but it's not a study, a scientific, randomized large double blind study, it's motivated speculation -- like all those e-mails I get telling me that some new scandal is going to get Obama impeached any day now. 

Agriculture allowed cities to form.  Cities allowed greater communication and closer association between more and more people and that fostered diseases and epidemics previously unknown or previously restricted in range. Such things had a strong effect on health and disease can easily explain what the diet "doctors" would like to blame, for their own gain, on grain.   Even in modern times, AIDS, which may have been around for a very long time, was spread around the world by airplanes.  Communication has a dark side, just look at what the spread of Europeans and their diseases did to the Americas.  Still we live longer than ever, ae more disease free, are larger than ever and remain active longer, Pizza and TV dinners notwithstanding

Of course if you like to give names to the "ages" of Man, you'd have to consider the title The Information Age.  Could it be however that pernicious, malicious, malignant and dangerous ideas, memes, lies, stereotypes, maledictions and political doctrines are the deadly side effect of  the electronic media, just as cities, ships and Camel trains spread death along with culture and commerce?

Obama is going to declare martial law, going to take your guns, send you to death camps, murder your grandmother. Apollo 11 never went to the moon, that German plane, that Malaysian plane never crashed, that bomb never went off.  Obama is a Muslim, Clinton tried to have the UN invade the US.  Cell phones will kill you, wheat will damage your brain, cooking your food is bad, The Koch Brothers and Woody Harrelson know what's best for us and Subarus are made with love. Sure, it's the information age, but who can deny, looking at the vast majority of that information, that it's the bullshit age.  Mythology has gone metastatic. It's mass produced for entertainment and profit, for greed and power and even though much of it is benign, much of it is deadly.  It's not only deadly to your health, but to your cognitive, your critical faculties and whether or not it all ends with bangs or whimpers, the cenotaph, the tombstone of our species will be inscribed with these words  STUDIES SHOW.

His name was NOT Steve

 "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross"

I wish I could say that was Sinclair Lewis, and perhaps he does too, but it seems he never did. Perhaps someone needs to say it however, because there is something coming; something already here dressed in red, white and blue, blowing hard about Christian values and lying, slandering, maligning, dripping with hate and evil and blood and grasping for power enough to make the devil blush.

You can't talk to some people about Allen West if you are objective about him.  To many ex-military people, it seems as though he is some sort of a hero or, perhaps it's more about some sad kind of solidarity than about sympathy.  I saw a lot of that during the Vietnam war:  the way people looked at me when I talked about the My Lai 4 massacre or when others suggested that indeed Lt. Cally was a war criminal who disgraced his country as much as anyone ever had. Perhaps you've read accounts of how he ordered a small boy who had just escaped the bullets, running screaming from the pit of murdered women and children to be shot. The order was carried out. It was outrageous that he was held accountable said my war supporting, true American coworkers -- just outrageous.

We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

 I never did quite understand the attitude, but as I wanted to keep my job, I just kept quiet.  By the time  Allan West 'retired' from the US Army to avoid a Court Marshal for abusing an Iraqi prisoner, I no longer was a working man and loudly protested his attempt to become my Congressman.  For many here, the attitude was strangely the same.  He ran as a hero and of course we can't criticize anyone who was "fighting for our freedom" as such things are so grotesquely described.  In fact such people who thought differently then he or John Wayne or the people from Muskogee did, said West, should be deported.

But West's campaign failed and he promptly pulled up his tent stakes and went somewhere else to live and to prosper as the head of something called the National Center for Policy Analysis.  Of course as another failed far-right politician and criminal, he followed in the footsteps of Oliver North and became a Fox News contributor.  

West's current Bogeyman, as is that of his owners at Newscorp seems to be the alleged emergence of Sharia Law under the Muslim alien Obama.  Sadly people listen to him and because there never is a hint of rational cognitive function supporting the claims of the Far Right and the Fox Right you hear it discussed all the time.  Sharia law is taking over, even though it isn't -- not at all, not in Muskogee, not at Wal-Mart.

It's a strange proposition for people who strive with flapping tongues and logic all curled up like a pig's tail to push Christian Values as a substitute for the body of laws we've had since the beginning.  They want Christian law, even though there is no such thing, and they fear Muslim Religious courts that don't exist.  Hell, they think Wal-mart is part of the legal system and they get rich from this stupidity.  But Allen West has announced "Proof" that even without any courts or any mechanism to impose it, even such all-American importers of  foreign goods as Wal-Mart is trying to impose it on its customers.  Yes, that's right and as he observes with ungrammatical and folksy charm:

There was a young man doing the checkout and another Walmart employee came over and put up a sign, “No alcohol products in this lane.” So being the inquisitive fella I am, I used my additional set of eyes – glasses – to see the young checkout man’s name. Let me just say it was NOT “Steve.”

 

I pointed the sign out to Aubrey and her response was a simple question, how is it that this Muslim employee could refuse service to customers based on his religious beliefs, but Christians are being forced to participate in specific events contrary to their religious beliefs? Boy howdy, that is one astute young lady.

 

Imagine that, this employee at Walmart refused to just scan a bottle or container of an alcoholic beverage – and that is acceptable. A Christian business owner declines to participate or provide service to a specific event – a gay wedding – which contradicts their faith, and the State crushes them.

Seems the nonSteve checkout boy was a minor.  There was a law, an American, Christian Values law forbidding  a minor to serve or sell alcohol.  As usual the devil is in the details and as the devil speaks through Allen West and his Tea Party hooligans, liars, traitors, schemers, thieves, torturers and war criminals are lying about those details.  His screed was titled, Sharia law comes to Walmart? but he later changed it to More ominous signs of Christian persecution. (Did he mean to say persecution of Christians ?) What does it matter?  Lies have their own grammar, it seems and to the people who are looking to put a rational face on their bigotry, racism and hatred West's face will do fine.   See, we're not racists.

In a way, it's liberating to be old and not to have to give a shit about what the tinhorn patriots and liars for God have to say or what they threaten to do, and there's no reason to refrain from saying that the My Lai murderers and the unnamed perpetrators of similar massacres are no better than the Nazi Criminals we executed years ago, and that Allen West is their brother in dishonor.   They dishonor our country, they dishonor all things honest and true and decent, they dishonor our species .

All against all

I was going to begin this by asking whether you've noticed the sharp increase in shootings of policemen against the background of hysteria about shootings by policemen, but trying to answer that question myself, I had to admit that all we can know is derived from the sensationalist coverage designed to outrage that plays out in the media.  The first news item appearing on my smart phone this morning was about the shooting of two policemen, there was another about the shooting of an FBI agent.  I was going to base this morning's post on the observation that unscrupulous entities may be trying to create a war or the appearance of a war that can only end in the degradation of the justice system and increase tolerance of mob violence and mob justice.  It's a clumsy attempt because when there is a questionable action by police and those policemen are arrested and charged with a crime, it would appear to show that the system has functioned properly but such is the need to demonize that it makes little difference.  The witch hunt proceeds with the public perception that everyone involved with the police and prosecution and defense is corrupt and murderously racist.  Everyone is stretched and trimmed into the Procrustean bed the media provide for us.

And so I can't answer my own question.  When one incident or two or three incidents in a vast ocean of possibilities is all that's needed and no statistics are provided or referenced, we just can't know.  We're made to believe that real justice comes from the mob and so when the system works, the system is still somehow at fault and more rioting is needed, more public marching and chanting.  Perhaps it would be productive to inquire after the people who benefit most and it's tempting to see a small group of disruptionists, anger mongers and distortionists making a living and making names for themselves by making sure that nothing changes, making sure that improvements are seen as failures, that progress is seen as lack of progress and that everyone is at war with everyone else.

If we somehow managed to get along, if the policeman's lot became a happy one, if petty crime and serious crime stopped being a cultural norm and violence became a faded dream, who would suffer? That's not hard to answer. What's hard to answer is the question of why we get all our information and opinions from them.

Wal-Mart will take your guns

And Obama will whistle at the white girls if we don't act now.

Conspiracies certainly occur.  The assassination of Lincoln involved a conspiracy as did the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Babington Plot amongst countless others.  The selling of something as a conspiracy however has been refined to a formula and indeed the absence of evidence seems to make it all simpler.  An observation out of context, a partially true statement or a totally untrue statement loudly asserted is all one really needs to get the theory rolling and momentum creates enthusiasm which creates more observations and assertions the preposterousness of which are enthusiastically overlooked.  The Internet can produce more than enough "experts" to verify or deny anything and hide facts behind a labyrnth of web links.  I remember a certain white coated "doctor" touting a diet pill that proved not only useless but ineffective and dangerous.  How many people bothered to use the Information Superhighway to discover that the man in the medical costume was a Doctor of Marketing from some college you never heard of?

Of course certain observations can assist the necessary triage.  Might the theory have merit or not? Should we bother to investigate or can we reject it out of hand -- or is it obviously true?  One helpful process is of course, to consider the source.  Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Ted Cruz?  No, that sound isn't a truck backing up, it's the bullshit alarm. So far not one of the dire predictions have come true, from the "death panels" to the "double Dip' recession to the Communist Agenda.  Is doesn't seem to matter. "Change you can step in" read the bumper sticker I saw yesterday.  Never mind the recovery, the market highs, the unemployment lows, Obams is a "disaster." He went over there and apologized to them and if you can't see that, you're part of the conspiracy.

Consider the "Jade Helm 15" conspiracy theory.  Do we need to read all the web posts, the YouTube clips to reject it?  Do we need to follow the "arguments," look at the pictures, examine the witnesses? Do seriously think Obama is going to use the military to invade the South?  Is he conspiring with Wal-Mart to grab our guns, swarming up out of underground tunnels pushing Wal-Mart shopping carts?  Ted Cruz seems to doubt it, but as the government is "untrustworthy," we have to give it some credence. Of course when Bush suspended Posse Comitatus and made it legal to use the Army to invade the US, we didn't hear a peep or a whimper, but that's different.  It's OBAMA who is untrustworthy and we know that because Ted Cruz tells us, because the Texas Governor tells us the invasion is imminent The wolf is coming, never mind those ten thousand mistaken cries and when this passes away and nothing comes of it and when the whole thing is denied, there will be no shame and you will believe the next one.

One might consider that since this latest is so similar to the propaganda that reached a crescendo during the Clinton years and has yet to diminish, it has no more merit than the Vince Foster Murder or Clinton's plan to turn the armed forces over  to the UN and furnish them with nuclear weapons stored in tunnels and bunkers under Philadelphia.  I can't list them all but suffice it to say it was all hokum.  Too bad we don't remember and like an old man with advanced dementia, every morning in America is a new day.  You can be wrong every day for 25 years but we will believe you again and again.  Every Democrat is all about inviting the foreigners to take over, to bankrupt us by supporting the "takers" and grabbing our god given guns.  Have we been wading through the bullshit so long we can't smell it any more or is it just so much fun to suspend disbelief?

Your day will come

Being of a certain age, I take offense at being called a "senior."  Since I'm a half century away from being enrolled in a school, I find it to be inappropriate, but of course the real offense is the carefully crafted image of anyone over 65 as a doddering, inept, technophobic imbecile.  For years, Mammon, in full knowledge of my age (and everything else about me) has been sending me advertisements for burial insurance, walk in bathtubs, old age homes and most annoyingly, special idiot phones designed for people held to be less able to make phone calls than those "tech savvy" younger people who rarely can tell a NAND gate from a flip-flop, a J-FET from a Unijunction or a beam tetrode from a tea caddy.

In my experience most of those TS people couldn't tell you how any of their prized electronics work, but that's another matter. Yes, of course more people of my age are in poor health and some have passed away, but the 70 and 80 year old folks in my circle of friends hardly fit the image designed to make the young and inept feel as superior as apparently they need to do.  Not only do few of us have problems with our smart phones, many have had careers designing complex equipment. Friend Walter helped design and launch the first communications satellites, Friend Will helped design the Lunar lander and other fellow codgers of my acquaintance are building a private wireless network using old WiFi routers so that we can phone each other outside the apparatus of the phone companies. All of us of course enjoy being talked down to by 15 year olds who assume we're unable to comprehend the miracle of text messaging.  PSK, RTTY, PACTOR?  Huh? Wazzat?

Sometimes I think I'm of the last generation that knows how things work, but wait, there's more.  Yes, I design and build electronic equipment for fun. Yes, I still ride a heavyweight motorcycle, I still navigate a yacht crammed with electronic equipment and I know people in their 90's who do as well: who build and race cars  and fly planes. Of course some don't, but who the newborns choose as a comical stereotype has more to do with ego boosting than reality -- and age being the last socially acceptable characteristic to mock.

So if you will forgive my digression, I have to turn my ire toward those that corporation named so aptly for a fruit, for making "special" iPads for "seniors."    Your day will come. Some kid now stinking up his diapers will in a few years time, joke about you wearing diapers, call you a Senior and ask in a loud voice if you know how to use something you invented.

To Every Thing, there is a Season

Well maybe not to everything, but to some things there is a season.  The Flu comes around in the Autumn, at least in South Florida when the tourists arrive with their runny noses. Hurricanes come around in the Summer.  For other things, like bigotry and propaganda however, like ignorance and intellectual laziness it's constant.  Other things come and go but the bullshit never stops.

Got an e-mail today with a massive address list.  It began HOORAY and told the recipients that we had narrowly escaped a fatal attack on the sacred second amendment when the Senate voted down a UN treaty that would demand confiscation of guns.  Of course the Evil Black Man was behind it but we should remember all those Democratic Senators who voted against our divine right to run guns to terrorists and vote them out of office. 

Strange to say, that vote was in May of 2013 and unfortunately many of those Senators now have to work for a living.  Did this fabricated charge  help the GOP hijacking of the Senate?  And of course the treaty in question would have no effect on domestic gun laws or rights whatever. It was aimed at restricting international arms trade -- and remember the US is a major player -- to prevent sales to terrorists, insurgents and to countries violating human rights treaties. HOORAY!  Hooray for the liars and Hooray for the damned fools who support them at their own expense because there is nothing too stupid, too dishonest, too ridiculous for the moon motivated morons of America to believe. No conspiracy too unlikely, no slander too foul to attribute to the gun-grabbing, big spending and N**** loving Democrats

You have to wonder who supports arming ISIS or Boko Haram or any such groups, but of course the answer is right in front of us:  the NRA and the GOP and all the ignorant, hate-filled and demented Americans who spread this crap like special sauce on a shitburger in the hope of poisoning Democracy and ousting the Dreaded Black Man in the White House.

Remember when Clinton secretly turned over the command of our armed forces to the UN?  Of course not, because, like all the other lies, slander and libel it wasn't true and so far all the predictions, accusations and "revelations" about Obama have not and likely will not materialize, but when this country finally fails, and the Bible-quoting, weapon-waving big buck barbarians pick over the corpse of American liberty and prosperity who will remember that they supported it?