The Guillotine

Mitt Romney And His "Very Poor" Context

2012-02-01T16:20:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney should just pretend poor people do not exist.

My latest story at examiner.com today is about Mitt's latest muttonheaded blunder into class warfare (in his case without a helmet, a map, or a clue).

While Romney has declared the MSM has treated him badly by taking his "I'm not concerned about the very poor" comment out of context, Romney should rather hope that people leave the context entirely alone.

Indeed, when you really think about Mitt Romney's dreadful record trying to explain his unique ideas about rich people and poor people, his campaign handlers should just tell him to shut up talking about poor people at all.

Mitt Romney should in fact pretend that poor Americans do not exist. Every time he opens his mouth to say something about them he just gets himself into trouble. And it isn't as if he's going to treat poor people any differently by ignoring their existence.

The Times tonight has declared the "in context" statement by Romney as "more benign", but what Romney was really saying was that the "very poor", in other words the people he sees no reason to care about at all because they are so well served by public assistance, are just as secure as the very rich, the other class of people Romney says he sees no reason to be concerned about.

But, rich people are the base of the Republican Party, so Romney is hardly going to firm up that base by being taken seriously on a statement he finds their concerns of no concern. And of course Romney will not be taken seriously on that part of the context, because everyone knows the rich are going to be his first and likely only concern if he should be become POTUS.

That leaves the poor, but as Romney said, they're OK—right? After all, they have all that generous public aid, being slashed and burned at every turn by Republicans who despise the very poor almost as much as they love the very rich.

Speaking of love—the thing you have to love about Mitt Romney is that he is so much a product of his class he really cannot for the political life of him manage to understand how pinheaded he is about issues of class. And that is because, contrary to what he claims, indeed exactly contrary to his calculations, Romney has spent most of his life being utterly unconcerned with the struggles and plights of 99.9% of other Americans.

Yet, he expects those people to think he is a good choice to look after their interests, instead of his own and those of his tiny, super-rich, class.

The SOTU

2012-01-25T16:41:00.000-08:00

Obama promised a bunch of things, just like always, and the great thing is nobody listens to or recalls the promises anyway.

My article on examiner.com this evening looks the promises President Obama made in his 2012 SOTU address last night. One of the things I discuss is how, contrary to what you're hearing from rightwing pundi-critics, Barack Obama actually did not recently co-opt the inequality issue, or the politics of resentment as Mitt Romney resentfully puts it.

In fact, in 2008, Barack Obama was arguing and promising pretty much the same things as he said last night in the 2012 SOTU. So, what that also means, is that not much got accomplished by Obama to fulfill those promises. Or at least that would be one inference from the fact the rhetoric is unchanged.

In fact, so reliable is this populist, inequality sucks, rhetoric is attacking rich pols, that Republicans have adopted it for their own attacks on each other. Newt Gingrich could be channeling Larry Summers, or hell Jesse Jackson circa 1988.

Main thing, you really don't want to be the fantastically rich job-eliminator candidate with the 13.9% effective tax rate. Not in 2012.

Newt's Ethics and the Men of God

2012-01-21T06:14:00.000-08:00

Seriously, you think the Western image of God has any feminine aspect to it at all? It's the image of God as an adolescent boy, tinkering with just the right(eous) way to destroy the world (again). Speaking of adults in the room, this god is not that guy. And that's because this god is the creation of oafish, bigoted, male humans. They use it like a cudgel, or a nuke, to beat out a tattoo of hate across the globe.

Let us start with a simple, basic, proposition:

Putting men in charge of God is always a bad idea.

And that is especially true when God is just a character created by oafish men to more effectively lord it over other idiot men—and especially to better manage their second-class livestock, women.

Men do things for example like imagine, as Newt Gingrich obviously does, that "ethics" is something one makes sure other, lesser, people are beaten with, but it is certainly nothing the beater needs to bother himself with. More to the point, it is nothing Gingrich has bothered to adopt and express in any Christian fashion. Most likely Gingrich has ethics, those of any resolute megalomaniac.

At that link you will find Newt being quoted saying: "I first talked about [saving civilization] in August of 1958." Newt was fifteen, and clearly did not have any problem defining a mission for himself.

While demonizing the poor, minorities, and especially black people, pointing out their shortcoming in ethics, Gingrich has demanded that public benefits for the poor should be tied to forced labor. So enthusiastic is Gingrich for this cost-saving "reform" of welfare, he wants child labor laws modified so poor children can be hired to replace unionized school personnel.

That way, the whole operation of schools for poor kids can be conducted much more cheaply, and what expertise is currently being provided to these most vulnerable children can be eliminated, as they will increasingly be asked by goons like Newt to teach and support themselves.

And goons like Newt come in all shapes and sizes and nationalities and religions.

For example, over in Israel, what are described as "ulta-Orthodox" Jewish men assaulted a young American girl, spitting on her and abusing her with the usual manly address to women that offend their bigoted, psychotic ethics—"WHORE!!"

She is eight years old and didn't wear a fucking burka. Oh wait! She was in Israel, not Afghanistan!

But what difference does that make when idiot men are busy making sure everybody suffers according to their stupid comicbook idea of God as a lunatic child beating the crap out of "his" toys because he didn't make them right.

THE MORAL CHOICE IN 2012

Yeah, I know, Barack Obama doesn't seem like a very good president.

His idea of managing the problem of state has been to plod along carefully, making absolutely sure he has been demonstrably conciliatory to the monsters on the other side, before caving in to them. He has betrayed pretty much every promise he ever made. At the same time—we're out of Iraq, and that's something. And there are other somethings that do add up to a lot more than nothing. That's another thing about Obama. He's been lousy so far at selling his accomplishments to the nation.

So, yeah, he's not the ideal president.

But, I would ask you to consider the alternatives, in this campaign and in this life. Barack Obama believes "adult" means cooperating with evil people to avoid having the roof cave in on the whole government, and presumably the whole world.

The alternative is to toss out the adult compromiser and replace him with one of the puerile evil people. In that way, the horribly right-shifted political burlesque of Washington D.C. would stop its absurd pretense of being democratic or civilized and would don the swastika and shout the Sieg Newt! openly and unashamedly and in unison.

It is a rotten choice, yes. But it is also a very clear choice. You should vote for life. You should vote against the men of God and their immoral ethics.

Romney's Free Enterprise

2012-01-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

You see, if you have the nerve or the concern to criticize Mitt Romney's style of capitalism, then the problem must be, according to the people on the right reacting in horror to Newt Gingrich's turning of his conservative coat, that you just don't love capitalism—which in the GOP's view of things is a word synonymous with "America".

Of course Romney and the Republicans are afraid to use the "c" word—and no, we're not talking about "communism"—but that other "c" word "capitalism".

In some focus group somewhere, Republicans have figured out Americans don't actually feel all that warm and fuzzy about the word "capitalism", nor especially about the idea of a capitalist personified.

A funny thing about being rich and privileged...all the luck seems to come to you and not to the people who really need it. Probably because the rich are good people and the poor are not.

At best, that idea is reducible to a derisive stereotype, like Rich Uncle Pennybags.

Kids in America grow up with a game, Monopoly, that almost everybody plays. It is a zero-sum game, where the idea is to bankrupt all the other players.

Having ALL the money at the end of the game, while the other players have tickets to homelessness is what is counted as an instructional and entertaining kid's game in the USA—where government (or collective) concern for the welfare of ALL the citizens instead of just the rich ones is called "socialism"—as if that's a bad thing.

While kids are supposed to play Monopoly and learn about how things would be if people's worst motives were made the means to success, the rich grow up knowing this backwards way of thinking is just another layer or irony to the American system, which of course is based on the very principles of predatory capitalism Monopoly teaches us.

The rich kids are taught that everyone else (than their class) must be reduced in wealth, or better yet impoverished (relatively speaking anyway). Otherwise, what value is there in having more money than everybody else?

The 1% view the split on the capitalist take pretty much this way: the 1% get everything there is except the trickle-down crumbs.

And you get to have "free enterprise" using those crumbs. And what is free enterprise?

Oh just go read the "Little Match Girl". She is one of the best-known examples of what Romney means when he says there have to be losers in capitalism in order for people such as himself to thrive.

King of Bain—and Pain

2012-01-12T15:34:00.000-08:00

One of the compelling, damning graphics in "King of Bain", talking about large job losses profitably inflicted by a Bain Capital takeover.

As I write about today in examiner.com, the new Gingrich attack ad—really more of a suicide-bomb ad—is called "King of Bain", and it paints a picture of that King, Mitt Romney, as a happy King of Pain too. Pain unleashed profitably against thousands of workers fired by Romney's company, Bain Capital.

While Romney has for almost twenty years now tried to posture himself as a "job creator" in his various political campaigns, the new ad undermines that view, showing Romney almost gleefully talking about how people will suffer (i.e. the losers in capitalism) when a capitalist economy is thriving. Romney of course is one of the people whose privilege and riches have assured him of always being a winner—which often means inflicting losing on thousands of poor people.

The Turnip Truck

2012-01-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

Buried underneath the turnipheads and Perry, Texan culture has devolved into the worship of rednecked imbecility. Once upon a time, when raptors and LBJ walked the land, Texans actually aspired to become civilized.

I have been thinking a lot about the Republican candidates for president. It is extremely depressing to write consistently about such a crew of mediocre minds and visions. That these same jugheads are often peddling the most inane or hateful garbage is not an encouragement either.

The weekend's debates, especially the Sunday debate on Meet the Press, were just awful displays of ignorance, bigotry, class hatred of the most despicable nature—aimed at the alleged vice of being a struggling single mom in America.

STFU is really all David Gregory should have been saying throughout the debate. The applause from the New Hampshire crowd was sparse and muted, and quite a change from earlier Republican venues, stuffed with Tea Party goons booing gay service members or cheering the idea of state executions of death row inmates.

Of course when it comes to the latter feature of the American decline into barbarity, you will necessarily cast your gaze to the state of Texas, and to its prolific killer of alleged bad guys, Rick Perry. The governor Texas just can't get rid of is running for president of the United States, and has performed so ineptly, even for an Aggie, his campaign has been said to be one of the most putrid political brainfarts in the history of the nation.

If it weren't for Herman Cain, whose candidacy was always quite obviously an extremely bad joke, Perry would have been the dumbest guy on the Republican campaign trail. But Rick gave Herman a real run down into the celler of brains.

Indeed, I have to say that Texas, on the basis of its continual reaffirmation of Rick Perry, now looks to the nation like it just fell off the turnip truck. The diminution of presidential candidates from Texas mirrors the general decline of Texan culture, whose only hope is to be reinvigorated by illegal immigration until the point the anglo-idiotic bastions are overrun.

I'm sure that's what Perry had in mind when he complained about his persistance of foolishness being comparable to the Alamo. Given Perry's level of incompetence, the problem with his analogy is that he would never have been able to capture the Alamo in the first place.

Jersey Style

2011-12-31T11:37:00.000-08:00

This is what a lot of people think they see, when Chris Christie starts issuing threats of doing things "Jersey style", as he did yesterday in Iowa.

Today I wrote about an amusing, or maybe chilling (depending on how you want to parse it), incident in Iowa that took place when Mitt Romney let loose Chris Christie at a campaign stop.

Mitt Romney is pretty boring. Nobody seems to dispute that idea, least of all Mitt Romney. So boring and uninspiring is Mitt Romney in fact, that the Republican old school, who have turned to the former Massachusetts governor as their last best hope of keeping the party's leadership out of the hands of Newt Gingrich! or Ron Paul!! or Perry-Bachman-Santorum-Evangelical Overdrive!!! suggested to Romney he enlist a better, more engaging, GOP angel.

Now this is an angel with singed, leathery, wings, who inhabits a place in the national consciousness that is a peculiar blend of Ebenezer Scrooge and Tony Soprano. On the one hand, conservative Americans love New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie because he likes to say NO MORE! to people the conservatives are always accusing of getting charitable handouts posing as fair compensation, like unionized teachers and firefighters. On the other hand, Christie evokes and plays upon a perception of himself as being naturally sinister, because he has sought and obtained the governorship of New Jersey.

New Jersey is traditionally poorly thought of for no other reason than it happens to be sitting next door to one of the most cosmopolitan places in the history of the world. And, since it cannot compete with that, and seemingly has no desire to do so, New Jersey and its style has been thought somewhat comparable to that of Oakland, across the Bay from the (alleged) national treasure of San Francisco.

As for New Jersey's pugnacious, irascible, governor, assuming he really is those things instead of pretending them because it seems to be working, Mitt Romney can use all the personality and edge he can get, even if it belongs to the guy the Republican old school preferred to be the presidential nominee, instead of Romney.

Iraq Crumbling—Republicans Bumbling—What's New?

2011-12-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of stories I wrote today:

1. Iraq is rapidly moving to a very precarious and disturbing place—albeit, a place a LOT of people have predicted it would end up at, but maybe not this quickly.

2. Buried in the House Republican version of the benefits extension bill (the one fixed by the compromise version the House Republicans ignored yesterday) was a reminder of why Democrats find it very difficult to compromise with the rightwing loonies: GOP wanted people to get drug tested when applying for unemployment benefits.

In Case You Didn't Notice—The Iraq War Just Ended

2011-12-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

In truth, this image is unfair to the Devil.

On examiner.com today, I wrote a basic outline of the origin of the Iraq War, i.e. the fantasy of the neocon war pigs to fix George H. W. Bush's Gulf War mistake in not taking out Saddam. Along the way to pushing that fantasy, like war heroin into the veins of an American public anxious to kill somebody, anybody Arabic-sounding, for 9-11, Bush and his disgusting animals like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Colin Powell too, lied repeatedly to the American people.

They lied about Iraq's alleged WMD stockpiles. They lied about Iraq being in on 9/11. They lied about Saddam being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden. They lied about that fake relationship endangering Americans because Saddam might hand over a nuke or bio weapons to Osama.

They lied so endlessly and shamelessly that many American believed those lies even after Bush and his war pigs admitted they were lying.

Bottom line: thousands of people have died because of Bush's lies.

Second bottom line: Bush and his war-pig thugs still walk free, not arrested or prosecuted by war crimes tribunals.

Third bottom line: No American can begin to make amends to the world for the Iraq fiasco until the second bottom line is rectified.

US Academe's Guilt In Promoting Ruling-Class Values And Hegemony

2011-12-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Stupid mutt Academe begs for favors from its evil master. When the Nazis ran things, the German academy sold out to Hitler, just as the American academy has sold out to General Electric, Demonic® brand demagogues, and perpetual war.

We have heard academic professionals claim that the job of professors is to teach their subject area, and not to color their teaching with personal agendas such as politics.

"But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply", wrote Stanley Fish in 2006, concerning the case of Kevin Barrett.

While Barrett's ideas about 9/11 might have been questionable, this apolitical worldview professors are supposed to adopt and maintain in their classrooms is utterly cynical and hypocritical, since the politics academe always professes and supports, even when it may expose that culture to criticism, is that of the ruling class of the USA.

Anyone aspiring to degree recognition in the academic system acknowledges and shows deference to that class and its power, even if the degree-seeker's personal politics allege to critically place him apart from the political goals of the 1%.

Let us be specific:

• The academic class trains the children of the rich to inherit and exploit the spoils of inequality, i.e. those of the class war successfully waged by the rich against the vast majority of Americans.
• The academic class further trains the overseers, the technocrats and the technicians, to manage the wealth-producing—and wealth segregating—industries. Many of these workers are not rich by 1%-standards, but they are comfortably kept for their collaboration with the enemy.
• The academic class participates in the conspiracy to impoverish the working classes, which occurs through academe requiring that poorer Americans take out exorbitant loans to obtain college degrees now needed to be a competitive cog in the job market. As with struggling homeowners, in the current economic environment particularly, many college-educated people have degrees that are "under water", and not likely to surface for air perhaps ever.

If there are members of the academic class who are troubled by this situation, who seek to distinguish themselves as supporters of the people, instead of the rich, they need to do more than speak desultorily of liberal policies and vote for Barack Obama. They need to recognize their own guilt in assisting the economic wreckage and enslavement of the people, and to start working to make amends for this betrayal.

Exceptional Inequality All Around

2011-12-09T14:22:00.001-08:00

The two brands of corporate-owned political party in the USA

My article at examiner.com today looks at the hopelessness of voting—if your idea is that your vote will make any real change in the deplorable levels of inequality in the USA.

Both parties, wholly-owned subsidiaries of US corporations (and no doubt some foreign ones too) do whatever they can get away with for the 1%. For the American people? Oh, you know, wars to fight, depressions to suffer, futures to dwindle. That sort of benefit.

The illustration (click to get a larger image) shows the differentiating virtues of the two brands of inequality you can vote for.

Isn't having a choice empowering? Don't you pity the poor bastards in countries where they don't have your choices? Oh yeah—American exceptionalism. It's just so fucking exceptionally boring.

Gingrich's Love For White America

2011-12-06T12:35:00.001-08:00

My examiner.com article today looks at Newt Gingrich's latest campaign video.

Here's the video:

I became intrigued with what Gingrich meant by these images. And I wrote a detailed commentary in the article. I think it cannot be a surprise to anybody who has been paying any kind of attention, but the ad is bigoted, exploitive, divisive, stupid—all those American virtues conservatives hold so dear.

Anyway, take a look at the vid and the article and keep in mind the words "revanche" and "irredentism". And understand the "lost territory" can be a mythos of lost virtue and, especially, lost domination and exclusivity.

Gingrich wants America to be blazing white once again—with the dark souls put back to work in hellish factories like the orcs Gingrich and many white Americans believe immigrants and poor people truly are.

Gingrich's Plan To Save The Poor Kids

2011-12-03T09:41:00.001-08:00

Gingrich hopes to instill values of duty, punctuality, discipline, and order into poor kids by eliminating child labor laws and having these children work for the state from the earliest possible moment.

Newt's Jobs Plan—Work Camps For Kids

2011-12-03T06:18:00.001-08:00

Another creepy doctor with heinous ideas about children and other living things. "Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921." Gingrich got his from Tulane in 1971.

As Newt Gingrich sees it, the problem with kids today is all this free edumacation they get from the strapped state. And the solution? Fire the adult school support staff, and have the kids treated like state prisoners (i.e. treated even more like that than they are now), by making them do the clean-up and maintenance jobs in public schools.

Newt explains this will give children, and particularly poor children, a proper Puritan work ethic, and understanding of how things work in capitalist (ruined) America:

Newt: "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works...They have no habit of 'I do this and you give me cash'–unless it's illegal."

So, the main virtue Newt regrets poor kids not learning, and one which he most assuredly has learned, is quid pro quo retailing of one's soul, all legal of course because his class has sanctified all manner of criminal acts (such as graft and influence peddling) which the poor are naturally disabled from committing.

As you may recall, Newt has a Ph.D.. in History, and so any opinion he offers carries the cachet of actual academic expertise—at least for peabrains impressed by bumper-sticker credentials.

Dr. Gingrich is a moral maggot. And he is the best hope the Republican fascists have for getting rid of the Kenyan Marxist.

The Republican Party is a threat to the national security of the USA. Also, and even more importantly, it is an affront to good taste. Obama should declare it so, arrest its leaders, and deport them to Alabama.

The new verb "to pike"—pepper spray the bastards!

2011-11-25T13:25:00.001-08:00

Lt. John Pike's power-spray nourishes the Walmart logo.

Whether you're a nonchalant professional thug, carrying out the brutal commands of the 1% masters by chemically assaulting a bunch of peaceful students, or you're just a regular, psychopathic "competitive shopper", needing to guard her territory from the other Black Friday animals at Walmart—you'll no doubt be looking to "pike" your prey.

"Pike" means to pepper-spray the victims of your rage, your indignation, your sense of entitlement, or your professional employment of the "I was just following orders" offense. It comes from that new international star of sarcastic graphical mashups—Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police. Lt. Pike decided over a week ago to FedX his soul to hell by performing a rather banal and standard police procedure, brutalizing fellow citizens because it's a hell of a lot of fun to spray chemical weapons into the eyes of defenseless kids and oh by the way Pike has a fucking badge and a gun if you have some objection to the SOP.

Pike's descent into his just deserts as a ridiculously versatile meme for dullwitted thuggery has revealed a new tactic of the revolution, one which is so amazingly and profoundly threatening to the powers of the 1%, they will no doubt soon outlaw photographing and distributing images on the internet of police at work crushing the people. The world-wide iconizing of Pike into an object of absurdity and derision should be practiced on all the cop-perps, and the pol-perps and the greed-perps and every stupid animal enabling the fascist regime.

Superman and the Politics Of Men Belting Wives and Kids

2011-11-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

1938—Superman confronts wife-beater.

My story today at examiner.com looks at the connection between Superman and the current debate (such as it is) about the Aransas County Texas judge who appears to have gotten off without any legal consequence, after his daughter posted a video to YouTube of the judge beating her with a belt when she was 16.

A lot of people have of course denounced the judge. But a lot of people have defended him—mainly in anonymous comments on the various places the video was posted. One can argue some of the pro-beating comments are just trolls and malcontents, but we should be aware of how many Americans, to this day, think beating children into "submission", as the judge describes his mission in the video of him beating his daughter, is a good and healthy thing.

The USA is destroying its soul in lots of ways, and of course it may be one of those nations, like Nazi Germany, that ends up eventually functioning without a soul at all—an automaton state puking evil like vomit in all directions. Many would say it has already reached that condition, having worked hard to get there for a very long time now.

But reducing the questions to a personal level, I would argue that the brutalizing of children, which is such a common experience in the USA, is the first step in training American kids to become enthusiastic consumers and perpetrators of violence. That is very useful to a soulless state, which constantly utilizes the nation's collective terror and rage to perpetrate the most destructive domestic and foreign policies.

The Fundamental Paradox

2011-10-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

Those numbers are misleading of course. A substantial number of the 99% support the aims and values of the 1%. Poor people are viewed with similar contempt and fear by the well-kept 1% and their professional servant class.

Poor people know what the score is. If they attempt to rise up, they will be killed by the US military—the rich people's security force. Yet, rising up AGAINST is the only way to rise up at all. Waiting for the trickle-down is waiting to drown.

The deal (or contract) has been broken, burned, trashed. The rich don't need anybody else any longer. The 99% have been dumb enough to enable the 1% to rise to their current mastery of the world. That was a mistake that is not going to get fixed by electing different flavors of suits sucking Wall Street's giant $.

The Mormon Question

2011-10-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

On examiner.com today, I examine Mitt Romney's vulnerability on the Mormon question. Admittedly, it isn't much of a question for most voters, but as is often the case, it is the minority but still significant portion of the voters that Romney has to worry about. If most Republicans show up for him in November 2012, but a sizable minority of Christian right voters do not—because they are put off by what they view as Romney's "non-christian cult" religion—then Barack Obama wins almost by default.

This is the kind of thinking Rick Perry hopes Republican voters in the caucuses and primaries to come will be doing.

Unfortunately, for Republicans, Rick Perry may scare off a larger proportion of all voters with his allegedly legitimate Christian views than would Romney with his Mormonism.

Police and Thieves

2011-10-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

Revolution UK-style, a little more violent than the bourgeois protests of the educated youth of America presently occupying Wall Street. Nevertheless, whether in London, Athens or New York, the police view the protesters as enemies of their rich employers, and so "thieves".

OK, it isn't 1977. It isn't 1789, despite what Creepy Annie says. It isn't any other year than the revolutionary one we're in. And in this year, the people in America are not fighting the police with anything other than frustration of a sea of cameras pointed right at the cops.

But from the point of view of the rich masters and their police protectors, the people protesting the injustice, protesting the lack of jobs, the lack of commitment by government to taking care of the working class and the poor, is that the people are unquestionably thieves.

Why is that? Because in the capitalist model, there are two kinds of human:

1. Capitalists, who take advantage of labor and consumers to make profits.

2. Victims (i.e. idiots, dolts, dumbasses), the vast herd of labor and consumers who get run over by the bus instead of owning it.

Actually, in the capitalist model, there is a third class of human being, sometimes mutated out of the second class of victims. These are the thieves, the people who want to steal the hard-earned property of the capitalists to redistribute it to the victims (from whom the capitalists stole it in the first place).

The capitalists are deeply afraid of the third class of thieves. They know that frequently the thieves will whip up strong emotions in the second class of victims, and the first class of capitalists can end up being swept away in revolutions by those events. Of course, American capitalists, much influenced by halfwits like Ayn Rand, consider that kind of possibility simply the worst thing they can possibly imagine. They equate their freedom to steal profits from the majority the very essence of American liberty. Any other form of liberty—say the liberty of a poor child from hunger via a social commitment of the state—is un-American hatred of (their) liberty to be selfish monsters.

When the capitalists get afraid, and when they see the people doing something like occupying Wall Street, the capitalists call upon the police, the state-supported security force of the rich, to smash the mouths of the protesters, to burn out their eyes with pepper-spray, and to corral them like cattle and put them into jail. THAT kind of freedom, of the people to demand that the system treat the people with equality and justice, is simply not something the capitalists can afford in their economy.

It might be wise then for the people to consider approaching the coming revolution with a different set of economic assumptions than the ones valued and police-perpetrated by the rich.

I Smell Bacon

2011-09-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

Admit it—you LOVE bacon! You desperately need that bacon briefcase, don't you? You wouldn't want America to stand for anything else, would you? BACON=$$$$$

Wall Street protester chant (among others): "I SMELL BACON!"

Yeah, the smell of bacon has been thick down in Wall Street, both inside, where the greedy porkers stuff themselves ever fatter with the Republican-enabled-profits meant to idealize the "American Dream", and outside, where the capitalist hired thugs, the New York Police Department, rough up American kids protesting the disastrous, hi-fat and low-intelligence Western diet.

America was once big enough to stand for a lot of other things than greed and killing poor people, but increasingly the veneer of something civilized has been stripped off the truth of what America is really all about—a giant labor camp to feed and otherwise service the fat disgusting swine of rich creeps who run the USA.

When the leading edge of decent American kids stood up and said to the Wall Streeters "Our streets!" and "Shame!" when the police tried to corral them like they were farm animals ready to be slaughtered (some more), the kids broke free and stood up and said "FUCK YOU!" to the pigs. Actually, they were way politer than that, as today's kids are wont to be, which is peculiar when you think about it, since politeness isn't what they're used to dishing out to each other.

This protester taunted the cops with a symbol of the problem, and a repeated question: "Is this what you're about?". A few seconds later he was down on the street, with a pig's knee in his throat. Free speech that matters isn't free from consequences, and that is all the more reason to employ it in the face of tyranny.

But, we have to recall the world these children have grown up in, the world where hooded, well-armed dragons—both terrorists AND the police—roam the landscape looking for somebody appearing or sounding impolite or impolitic to beat up, blow up, behead, or imprison. While it is true the kids have been served up a myth of the brave police and firemen who died on 9/11, when the kids have responded to this inspiration by using their rights and standing up against the real threat to the USA, the fascist creeps who have been far more damaging to the USA in the last decade than al-Qaeda could have dreamed of being, the protesters have been swatted down, ignored, and told to "grow up".

You know, just like their grandparents were told back in the 1960s. Just "grow up", meaning surrender to the Wicked Witch of the Western Way of Greed and Evil, Dorothy.

Every generation has to decide what they are going to do about the surplus of bacon in the Western diet. Mostly, if they even have brains to see the problem, they complain about it for a few young years and then have babies and do what they are told after that.

It would be good for once if the older Americans took to the streets too, to show support for their kids and grandkids, to show the porky class that their futures might not be so bright as they have depended upon. We shall see.

Will Rogers (1931): Tax the Rich Babies!

2011-09-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

Read this and share. You will learn how wealth redistribution is as American a concept as apple pie—and Will Rogers.

Grizzly Bear Attack—UPDATE!!—Or High Hopes

2011-09-26T06:02:00.000-07:00

The misadventures of two idiots trying to kill somethin' in Nature, unfortunately resulted in the death of a grizzly bear. One of the idiots also managed to gun down his partner. Police are still trying to figure out if this was a "tragedy" or a CSI episode.

Of course—the story of the brave grizzly bear tearing apart the dimwitted hunter who shot the poor animal now has a different ending. It turns out the human "victim", Steve Stevenson, whose death was alleged a tragedy, was actually killed as his equally dimwitted hunting partner, Ty Bell, pumped shot after shot into the naturally upset bear.

While the story has changed a bit, and towards the direction of possibly more lurid implications—investigators now say they are "pretty sure" the human death was an accident, but they are continuing their investigation into other possibilities—the alleged facts still add up to a dead bear and a dead hunter.

The current "probable" narrative is that the grizzly did behave as first reported, grappling and mauling the one of the hunters who tracked the animal after it had been shot, but the man's hunting partner, apparently discounting the danger he might hit his partner instead of or in addition to the bear, delivered a shot that went through the body of the grizzly and into the chest of Stevenson, thus delivering the coup de grace to the maulee.

And all of nature then went—OOPS!!...there goes another rubber tree plant.

Now that is what hunting is really all about, brave men with guns confronting the limits of their high hopes, or the extent of Nature's high hopes. At least Bell now has a story that will top the tall tales of even the most ambitious "I tussled with Nature and whipped her ass" liars. No doubt Stevenson would feel proud to have enabled his partner in this manner—if he weren't dead and all.

The Real Reason The USA Is "Going Down"

2011-09-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

With that premise as the nation's chief virtue, which is the chief virtue of all empires, the twilight of the USA could not be long delayed. Nothing exceptional about that, huh?

Recently, rich Teabagger congressman John Fleming (R-LA) complained he was too strapped for cash—only having $200k to "feed his family"—and he threatened that if being rich in America became viewed as a vice instead of the only virtue that mattered, "this country is going down."

Well, no doubt that is how the rich view the class war that, of course, they started by making the USA a giant capitalist whorehouse in the first place.

But here's the real problem, the real reason that the USA is most definitely going down. For a while, especially for some decades after WWII, it was well understood that giving ALL Americans, no matter their ability to pay, a chance to get a higher education was in the best interest of the nation.

Of course, this never really sat all the well with rich people. After all, if you educate your natural enemies, poor people, you also better enable them to make well-founded arguments against keeping ruthless greed and miserliness the chief virtues of the land. Hell, they might even convince a lot of poor people to become socialists. Next thing you know, being rich while the nation tolerates miserable levels of poverty for millions of its own children, will be seen as a bad thing.

So, in steps George Bush, and the increasingly fascist Republican extremists. They have to be congratulated for completely gaming the system they devised to be gamed. By wrecking the economy (actually of the world, but hey, so they were in criminal overdrive, whatever), they have impoverished state governments, who can no longer (or who anyway claim this) support institutions of higher learning.

And what does this mean? Simple—the educational institutions have to pay the bills somehow, right? And how do you do that in a money crunch, when the state isn't paying as much as they used to? You sell higher education to rich kids, and stop paying for even better-qualified poorer kids.

And how does that work out? Oh you know—the inbred cretins in richland will make sure their simpleton members show up in the office of admissions waving their plentiful cash, and no matter how bad a student the person is likely to be, he'll get the chair a poor, bright, kid would have gotten before.

As the New York Times confirms: "10 percent of the admissions directors at four-year colleges — and almost 20 percent at private liberal-arts schools — said that the full-pay students they were admitting, on average, had lower grades and test scores than other admitted applicants."

The Times points out that the schools defend this by pointing out their unfair admission standards are applied all over the undeserving map: "[The rich] are not the only ones with an edge: the admissions officers said they admitted minority students, athletes, veterans, children of alumni, international students and, for the sake of gender balance, men, with lesser credentials, too."

Oh good, because you know men are just barely hanging onto their grossly-privileged minority status.

In the article, some education expert opines about the problem: “I don’t know whether to blame it on hard times or lack of courage and leadership.”

Hey, why be exclusive? Maybe you can blame it on all that. Certainly courage and leadership aren't qualities being displayed in Washington DC either, so why should we expect to find them in those institutions which turn out these gutless wonders?

Gay Americans win right to die for the rich

2011-09-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

In December, I wrote this article.

I think people should have the right to die for the rich, regardless of who they want to fuck.

I don't think it should be a cause for national celebration.

Reich Versus Wrong

2011-09-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

Dr. Donald Right takes on Dr. Hugo Wrong, actually both played by Dr. Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under President Clinton, in a debate over jobs versus budget deficits.

While Professor Wrong speaks in stupid, Teabagger soundbites—"government is the problem, not the solution"—Professor Right (or Reich) explains why Professor Wrong simply doesn't know what he is talking about.

And yes, sure, it's easy to win a debate against a strawman played by yourself. But the thing is, many rightwing ideologues are no more articulate, and no better informed than Dr. Reich's Dr. Wrong.

Grizzly bear kills human bear hunter—"horrible tragedy" alleged in Montana

2011-09-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

Dumbass Grizzly Adams in patronizing propaganda illustration. The truth is, Adams poked his nose into bear-business once too often, and a grizzly tastefully poked a hole through Adams' skull. Later, after Adams survived Nature's corrective remedy, a curious circus monkey nibbled on Adams' still-exposed brain, and the rest is a lousy 1970s adventure show, starring Sasquatch as Adams.

As reports came out of Montana on Friday that a grizzly bear, traditionally excellent judges of human character, had scored one for Nature versus a human bear-hunter, a state park official called the killing "a horrible tragedy"—but did not specify whether he meant by this the killing of the human or the grizzly (killed by the slain hunter's partner).

Similar to the story a couple of weeks ago about a man being devoured by dogs he had kept and starved in his house, the human-dominated news media spun the Montana grizzly attack as some kind of upsetting outcome, instead of a righteous victory over the forces of primate idiocy and arrogance. The only sad part of the tale is that the grizzly did not kill both the gun nuts, and pin their heads to trees as trophies.

And yes, I know, the hunters have families—boo-hoo-hoo. So does the fucking grizzly! You don't want to end up lunch in the woods? Stop committing terrorist acts against the bear community, morons.

The USA Threat To The International Criminal Court

2011-09-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

The USA dismissed Abu Ghraib and most of the myriad war crimes committed by its troops as acts by "a few bad apples". That the real bad apples were in charge of the US war effort and inspired from above led to Bush and his gang getting legislation passed to force the US military to protect the big American bad apples from war crimes tribunals.

As I report today in the Examiner, Human Rights Watch has released a new study reviewing the effectiveness of the International Criminal Court in detaining and prosecuting war criminals and other perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Buried inside the report is a veiled critique of the USA's ongoing efforts to thwart the ability of the court to hold American citizens accountable for a litany of alleged acts, many of which have been committed in the ongoing Terror Wars.

George Bush even went so far as to obtain authorization from Congress to militarily intervene against any nation that successfully detained and held for extradition any American charged under the 2002 Rome Statute.

Thus the reluctance of the ICC to bring charges against Bush and his gang since they left office. In addition to the extraordinary amount of humanity a government would need to possess to send the American perpetrators to face justice in The Hague, its leaders would need to possess a rare courage to face up to American military threats if they did the right thing.

The Investment in Doom

2011-09-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Republican solution to the American problem is apparently to bring down the house on everyone—except the rich.

And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.—Revelation 14:18-20

By this point, after over a decade of an increasingly apparent and enabled declaration of open war by conservatives on American minorities and the poor, one might think that the cities of the USA would be thronged by daily, traffic-blocking, protests.

But no American Spring is to be seen. Why not?

As I have noted in the past, one problem is the intense moral exhaustion being suffered at this point by the leftwing in the USA. Essentially dormant for decades now, the left is a large but definitely minority segment of the American population. Its strong influence on the Democratic Party ceased after Republicans routed the Democrats in 1994, and Bill Clinton, never a leftist figure anyway, shifted to center-right in his negotiations with Congress to dismantle welfare programs.

Briefly, the left rose for one last widespread appearance in the 2003 run-up to Bush's Iraq war. Spontaneous huge demonstrations across the world only served to demonstrate that the international opinion of millions of people, including American citizens and those of many allied states, meant absolutely nothing to the the war-thirsty nincompoops in charge of the USA.

Peaceful, respectful, antiwar protests were meaningless theater—and utterly passé. And that is because the people being protested, the chickenhawk thugs hiding behind other people's children in uniform, were heinous monsters, who were prepared to kidnap, torture, and kill anybody they felt like, while they perpetrated one shock-doctrine crime against humanity after another.

The left was faced with some choices:

• Confrontational civil disobedience—which might be treated in a time of war as treasonous, and if not this then disobeyers would be informally alleged, by various war-mongering yahoos, to be "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". Of course the actual goal of anti-war demonstrators was to give aid and comfort to American soldiers and their families, by bringing the US military home from slaughterpits where they were encouraged to commit war crimes against innocent people. But in 2003, for example, a sincere expression of shame on the part of Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines—one of the few Americans who actually apologized for inflicting George Bush on the world—brought the Dixie Chicks a dumptruck of denunciations as traitors and of course death threats from the country music fan brain trust (of turnipheads).

• Post a bunch of nearly invisible diatribes on the internet—and this was done by a lot of people, even people whose audiences were large enough so that they could claim some respectable visibility for their opinions. But all the electronic mounds of anti-war sentiment posted in all the years of the Terror Wars impacted the war masters not one iota. Even in the face of the most ghastly war crimes, such as those committed by the US thugs at Abu Ghraib, the American people, who were shaking their heads in disgust (once again), were not moved in great numbers to taking those feelings into the street. Everyone knew protests were not going to move Bush. The only thing that could move Bush, would be the boot of voters kicking his ass out of office. And in 2004, that boot came within a few votes in Ohio of connecting. The fact John Kerry couldn't defeat George Bush, easily, shows how strong the conservative, pro-war sentiment still was in the USA in late 2004.

• Blow shit the fuck up—Yes, the left had another choice—the 1970s style employed by radical groups like the Weathermen and the SLA. It was well understood by the left that old-school propaganda by the deed would be counterproductive. It would only serve to frighten and alienate most Americans (a state in which they were being permanently kept by Homeland Security's stupid terror-alert color code), and would achieve no change in policy since the war leaders in fact expected but never got a violent domestic pushback against their increasingly unpopular imperial war policy.

There are moments in history where people are confronted with choices, such as dying for some abstract cause, which seems no less urgent to be lived and died for because it is rooted in abstractions and ideals, instead of rough practical considerations (like submitting to tyranny and staying alive).

The American people as some kind of basic assumption are tearing apart at the seams, while they contemplate tearing each other and the nation asunder. The rich and the poor, natural enemies always, are accelerating away from each other ever faster in terms of their relative wealth and wellbeing. In the richest country in the world, the masters are throwing millions of Americans overboard so the rich won't have to be taxed to help their fellow citizens in an emergency.

As I will soon discuss, the nation should be full of righteous wrath, but it seems instead choked on a daily diet of nincompoop experts telling people essentially to be fearful of taking any stand, or on the right to take the most irrational and questionable stands, designed to pull the nation down as if its very pillars were being separated from each other by Samson.

I doubt, in these late, dark days that continuing to be angry at injustice, at murderous idiocy, at acts which if I still cared a whit about the dying empire would seem treasonous, will make any difference whatsoever.

People have a great deal invested in stupidity (stupid choices, stupid beliefs, the hope for stupid outcomes), and it is likely too much to hope that an appeal to even an average intelligence or concern about humanity will make the masters relent on collecting the full, destructive dividend of their investment in doom.

The Destruction of the USA Took a Decade—Not a Day

2011-09-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

One of the latest (and tallest) attractions in the 4th Circle of Hell.

Sure, only a few buildings were destroyed and a relatively small number of people were killed or injured on 9/11. The terrorists were after all, just a handful of young men wielding boxcutters, not an invading army. And though they captured and used as attacking missiles four commercial jets, what was really striking about what they did was how easy it was after all.

Osama bin Laden understood something essential about the USA on September 11, 2001. He understood that when the underpinnings of its extraordinary sense of invulnerability were destroyed, by a relative pinprick to what the Republican House recently described as America's symbols of "power and success", the USA would react like any other empire. It would, in other words, strike back ruthlessly—thus playing right into the hands of Qaeda's critique of America as a brutal oppressor of Muslims.

From Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia to Gitmo, the USA replaced the Statue of Liberty as its chief symbol to the world during the Terror Wars with images of bloodthirsty hi-tek rage, perpetrated against countless numbers of innocent people all around the world. It was as if the planes flown by the terrorists on 9/11 struck not only buildings, but flew into the very moral center of the nation and burned it to ashes.

The terrorists calculated that what would be left after that holocaust would be an anti-Islamic demon, which they had been preaching was all the USA really was anyway. As it turned out, the Qaeda terrorists faced enemies—Bush, Cheney and their torture crews—who matched the almost comicbook profile of the USA that Qaeda had sold to so many Muslims.

It is hard to recall this now, but in the days following the horrific images of 9/11 broadcast all around the world, the USA had a higher moral position, and enthusiastic sympathy and support in the world, than had been the case since the end of WWII. George Bush went straight to work helping the terrorists, by destroying that good will. Eighteen months after 9/11, as the USA prepared to invade Iraq, the world had completely turned on the American vengeance tour, and cities everywhere saw huge demonstrations opposing the illegal invasion.

Meanwhile, Bush insured that the US Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and any legal documents that might stand in the way of his total conversion of America into a brutal terror state, were declared by his legal henchmen as "quaint" and disposable. What this meant was that while the USA was blithely dropping massive bombs on villages of innocent human beings—seeking to kill a few alleged terrorists—it was also kidnapping and torturing people to shape confessions. Of course, and not that this should matter respecting war crimes by the USA, but no small number of the tortured were innocent of any terrorist connection whatsoever.

What Gore Vidal has called "perpetual war" has done its grisly work on the American psyche and culture, never exactly a civilized enterprise, with greed and hatred becoming the chief default assumptions and attitudes amongst so many of its rage-filled people, and especially amongst the rich and the powerful in the USA.

But now, the chickens on that count have definitely come home to roost. A great deal of the Terror War carnage was perpetrated by the vast and highly destructive arms of rich Americans against some of the poorest people on Earth. The USA actually calculated that blowing poor foreign babies to bits—over and over again—and dismissing it by calling them in ghastly newspeak "collateral casualties", was a proper means to conduct American foreign policy. Of course, the USA assures everyone that the babies weren't to blame. Oh no, it was the "terrorists" who kept hiding amongst them that were the problem.

This mirrors the attitude of the Republican Party, really the traditional attitude of the Republican Party, which demonizes poor people, and especially single mothers, in the USA, and treats their children and babies as collateral casualties in the great war against "socialism", fought by Republicans to insure that rich people remain in charge and untouched by any economic disasters—especially the ones caused by rich people.

Poor people, on the other hand, in the USA, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and all over the world, know who the enemy is, and while Qaeda may be a tiny, bizarre, instrument of that enemy (Osama bin Laden was after all a rich patron of jihad), its main generals and masters sit in the capitals of the economic powers of the world, especially in the West. Whereas for many decades it seemed a kind of social contract existed between the masters and the plebs, it has been burned by the rich once again.

In that sense, no doubt the rich thank Osama bin Laden for 9/11, as it enabled the final nail to be driven into the coffin of the anachronistic American soul. Yes, Abe, it has perished from the earth.

My Books

2011-09-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, a real Da-Vinci-code story.

My books.

It may seem curious to have in addition to the topic of politics, the subject of Tarot cards as an interest, and a focus of my research. But, let us say, that Tarot (and especially the community of Tarot) is a microcosm of the same intellectual and emotional dynamics one encounters in studying and reporting about modern politics.

Much of Tarot and much of modern politics are divided between a majority camp which seeks to find the true faith, and the skeptical camp (in Tarot that is a decidedly minority party) that seeks to find truth (of any sort) buried beneath piles of mangled myths, prejudice and presumptuous nonsense.

The Tarot story is a good historical yarn, and has as well a good or anyway silly (i.e., all too human) modern angle to relate. My book, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, tells Tarot's origin story, which is to say it gives you the blueprint for the modern houses of cards that are Tarot. It is in one respect a very skeptical book, but not one aimed at pulling the rug out from under fortunetellers. Rather, while the facts speak for themselves on that count, I critique a certain academic (slumming in esoteric studies), who sloppily attacked the cartomanciers and their beliefs for what are basically reasons of his own religious bigotry.

The political story, which you can read in the ebook version of the collected articles from the first edition of the Guillotine blog, has many more political camps to ridicule and of course the perpetrations of the various ideologies of politics are much less entertaining (unless you are hopelessly cynical), and are much more harrowing for its countless victims.

The 90% Apocalypse Revisited

2011-09-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

What we got in 2008, unfortunately, was the (allegedly) leftwing flop of the right-wing flip—people were just as stupidly faithful in Barack Obama's power to make it all better, as they were in George W. Bush's power to save them from terrorists—and you know—werewolves or whatever.

Way back in 2005—you might recall that was the year after George Bush somehow got retained in his role as perpetrator-in-chief of the American empire—I was trying to figure out just how it could be that, over and over again, the American people were just sitting there, like a national doe in the headlights of a particularly obvious and dull-witted fascist predator.

Of course, intuitively, I understood it was the traditional reason, the crafty ability of the rich and powerful to keep the poor and powerless perplexed and bovinely obedient. All it takes is a little fear (and after 9/11 there was more than a little of it), mixed with a cynical dose of don't worry your pointed little heads, just keep burying your futures on your credit cards, and the government will kill all the big, bad terrorists (with a bucket of collateral gravy!—yum!).

Add that to America's favorite fastfood ideology (always provided in plentiful amounts by Republicans)—unmitigated bigotry for pretty much any minority that can be captured, segregated and preferably lynched—and you had a good schematic for what we were going through.

I knew that whatever it was that was keeping people so bloody passive had something to do with the above, and a kind of moral exhaustion from seeing right overturned at every turn, but I wanted to get some kind of quantification to explain to me how the dreadfully dim Dubya could still be lording it over the USA, in spite of the fact that he was such a clearly inept dullard.

Well, I had this one bit of alleged data. Turns out George Dubya was not as stupid as he seemed, at least not on paper. Somehow, he had an estimated IQ, based on SAT and military entrance exams, of 125! On paper, he was smarter than his opponent in the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry (OK, not saying that much) and the thing is, Dubya was smarter than the vast majority of Americans.

It was in light of this revelation, or apocalypse, that I wrote the following piece, entitled The 90% Apocalypse. I think it could easily be applied to that Republican lapdog, Barack Obama, and I suspect will apply to just about any president we are likely to get, who isn't hardwired to a bank of supercomputers. Human intelligence has simply run out of gas trying to effectively, much less compassionately, administer the USA, or the manageable components of its empire, or the unmanageable reaches of a 7-billion-person planet. As for the dimmer, dumber, voters? Well, the democratic process continues to affirm the hopelessness of our condition, given the vivid, vain need for flash-evolution to massively boost our meager collective intelligence.

Note that this article was first published on a group whose topic was Tarot cards. My purpose in posting it there was to illustrate how easily faith (for example in things like Tarot cards or politics) could be manipulated to dire ends. You would be right to conclude that such a message was one the faithful were disinclined to engage.

THE 90% APOCALYPSE (October 15, 2005)

According to IQ charts,¹ the IQ corresponding to the 90th percentile is about 120. That means that people whose IQs are 120 or lower make up 90% of all the people tested, and as a rough measure a vast majority of all the people. By comparison, showing that tested IQ is not necessarily any guide to performance, George Bush's IQ is claimed to be 125, which supposedly makes him smarter than 95% of all the people tested. That certainly means he is smarter than the vast majority of you lot. Well, you know that of course, he's STILL the Emperor, and you're reading a Tarot group. Now, I raise this point about intelligence, noting Paul Krugman's analysis of people's general tendency to have faith instead of wits:

"Right now, with the Bush administration in meltdown on multiple issues, we're hearing a lot about President Bush's personal failings. But what happened to the commanding figure of yore, the heroic leader in the war on terror? The answer, of course, is that the commanding figure never existed: Mr. Bush is the same man he always was. All the character flaws that are now fodder for late-night humor were fully visible, for those willing to see them, during the 2000 campaign. And President Bush the great leader is far from the only fictional character, bearing no resemblance to the real man, created by media images."

So many of you thought, deeply believed, or deeply hoped anyway, that Bush was REALLY smart and REALLY smart enough (which is even better). In fact, as some of you may recall, 90% of you² magically transformed Bush into an effective, indeed heroic, leader after 9/11. Of course that 90% has dwindled a little over time, and I suspect not one person reading this group (especially not this group) has the courage to admit you were one of the 90%. But it just figures most of you were part of it. I know some of you were, as I read your pro-war and pro-Bush comments back in the day.

What the last five years have confirmed is something those in the 10% have always suspected, which is that democracy simply does not work. Its premise is and always was absurd, which is that the majority—of stupid people—will tell the minority—of smart people—what to do. For one thing, even IF that was how things worked, it would be tantamount to the horse's ass dictating to the horse's head how to horse around. Indeed, there is a popular—which is to say stupid—myth about how the asshole is the most important part of the body. The thing is, in the body politic of democracy, the asshole is about all there is to the body.

But, in fact, smart people, being smarter than you, ALWAYS dominate stupid people, and the minority who obtain and retain vast wealth and power lord it over the rest of you and the rest of you KNOW, intuitively perhaps, that this is for the best because you're all a bunch of stupid assholes who certainly do not need to be in charge of anything—especially anything with a nuclear warhead attached to it.

Unfortunately, the world has gotten SO very complicated and SO very hard to figure and to play, that only the very smartest people are going to be good at doing it, and they are usually not attracted to jobs involving herding cattle and sheep. So, what you get instead is that 120-130 IQ group, who are smarter than the vast majority of you, and who are smart enough to pretend to be stupid (you know, so you'll feel like they are one of you), but who are no longer smart enough. On a Tarotic note, I think we must recognize that what afflicts the world also afflicts Tarot, naturally so since it is a product of the world. Stupid Tarot, which so thoroughly dominates the market and the forums and the public consciousness, is the bloom of the same common credulous asshole that anointed George Bush "heroic leader".

And I do not see a cure coming anytime soon, since the stupid people are not going to like their affliction bred out of the race, and the smarter people are not going to want their advantage diluted or destroyed.³

In any case, that much-hyped American experiment in democracy is dead as Marley's ghost, and just as forlorn.

1—A number of people (no doubt disablingly liberal in their views) were upset with the basic premise of this article, that IQ was any sort of guide to general intelligence, or useful to determining the real root of the problem the nation was facing. I disagree, although I heartily agree that IQ (or intelligence) alone guarantees nothing. No doubt many lower-IQ-rated people, for example, intuitively grasped the shortcomings of Bush, and US Terror War policy, even if they might have had difficulty knowledgeably articulating that accurate sensory sizeup of our national dilemma. I knew one of these people personally at the time, whose heart was always fine-tuned to decency—thus she was doubly disadvantaged in 21st-century USA—being neither intellectually gifted nor sufficiently evil to excel on sheer ruthlessness.

The "Worry" cover of The

Nation, November 2000.

2—Note that Bush's approval numbers eventually reached at least 92%, possible a point or two higher, as even smarter Americans stupidly put their faith in an obviously deficient leader. Only a skeptical 5-6% of Americans expressed early and open doubt in Fearless (for somebody else's kids in uniform) Bush. In fact, doing so was considered openly unpatriotic by a majority of Americans in 2001. I recall, for example, in the fall of 2001, showing some left-of-center neighbors the prophetic Nation cover from November, 2000, depicting Dubya as Alfred E. Neuman, the Mad Magazine simpleton. They looked at it and then me with total disdain, and walked away, without saying anything—ever again. Even "liberals" sucked Dubya's dick, hoping daddy would save them, in those days.

3—In retrospect, maybe less intelligent people would be fine having their affliction bred out of the race. Certainly, I suspect they would be fine with the higher intelligence of their masters actually producing higher and better outcomes for the poor, dumb, plebs—which tends not to be the case. As you may detect, I possess a certain contempt for stupid people, but also a recognition of the widespread and inclusive manner in which stupidity afflicts pretty much every human being. Also, it does seem to me the decent, and obviously the arrogant, thing to do to look out for (as well as one is able) the disadvantaged members of one's community.

Recession Redux Worse Than 2008

2011-08-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

Unemployed, by Ronald Slayton, 1937

How did you like the first helping of the Great Recession? Did it make you all warm and fuzzy? Did it fill you with longing for more economic despair and deprivation?

Well, than you're going to be very happy, because your second helping of whatever you want to call this prolonged economic abyss (for unemployed people and the poor especially), is on its way—at least that is more and more the prediction coming from numerous sources.

And the really great news is that the Recession Redux is going to be even worse than the first time around.

Remember how great 2008 was? Remember how when you would go out Christmas "shopping", Christmas just didn't happen? The stores were dead empty. The few people you did see looked like fucking zombies. People were scared out of their minds that they were going to lose their jobs, and millions of them did.

The ones who clung to employment found they were being ruthlessly treated like a dog's chewtoy by their bosses, squeezing out every last drop of "productivity" from the least possible number of employees. These corporations pocketed all the government tax breaks and stimulus money they could get, but they avoided using it for hiring as if new employees were the plague.

The "new normal" is that we now have the very reverse of the situation in the late 1990s, when a tek bubble generated an employee-friendly environment, where even hamburger-flipper jobs had to pay a lot more to get employees than they ever had before. Ever since the collapse of that bubble, businesses have worked assiduously, aided by pro-business and anti-labor Republicans, to clarify the working relationship between business and employees as open warfare.

The simple fact is that human capital is extremely expensive, compared to a machine or a piece of software. Companies are looking for ways to cut costs. And the first place to do that is to fire people. That's just what happened in the 2008 Great Recession. Millions of Americans thrown out of work in the Great Firing have never found work again.

And it's going to be even worse this time. Except—supposedly—businesses have already cut back as much as they can. Sure. There's always plenty of room to cut back more. They will start firing even more people, reduce the quality of their products and their services and lower prices as we collapse into the deflationary condition typical of economic depression. As more people lose their jobs, and government cuts back more on social safety-net services, more and more American families will be tossed to the street—collateral casualties of the games rich people play with the rest of us.

It's too late to wish it would all get better somehow. The politicians are fools and cowards. They care so little for human beings other than themselves, they have tied up the apparatus of government like Gulliver trapped by the Lilliputians. It is absurd to claim this is the fault only of Republicans. Democrats conspired to create these conditions also. Their performance in the ghastly debt-ceiling massacre (of working government) was pathetic.

And Barack Obama? He just gets grayer and paler every day. It was never going to be an easy job fixing Bush's rape of America. But Obama has acted like some indifferent, bored bureaucrat, just anxious to get his client off the phone and off his mind as quickly as possible. The idea of advocacy, as opposed to docile placating of right-wing extremists, has not occurred to him. Obama likes crafting policies. He doesn't like demanding what is right—which he says is a childish insistence on getting one's way.

As Obama has said, his idea of compromise with his wife is to give her 90% of what she wants. He didn't get such a good deal as that in his surrender of the nation's ass to Republicans.

Meanwhile, just as Republicans have so artfully engineered (and note how much Obama helped them accomplish this), when they ask the American people if they are better off than they were four years ago, most of them will answer "no"—and vote Republican.

And they will seal the fate of the late, decreasingly great or interesting American empire.

Censorship on the rise globally

2011-08-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

His eyebrows need to be a bit thicker,

and he needs the moustache, right?

On Sunday, Facebook made a mass suspension of the posting privileges of various leftwing pages, and posters (including myself).

Whether or not the suspensions were a bug in the FB system, or a plot by rightwing gremlins to disable leftwing commentary, nobody has ascertained as yet.

The extreme risk of placing all our civil and human rights in the hands of for-profit ministers, colluding with for-power governments, to shape "safe" and "positive" environments, where sheeple and their lambs can huddle and graze in sweet ignorance, is becoming more apparent every day.

In the UK, where free speech has a strong and vital tradition, PM Cameron says all that is over. Faced with intense pressure to hold something and somebody accountable for the recent riots, Cameron has laid a lot of the blame on social networks. And he intends to censor them when "emergencies" arise.

His attitude has pleased the Chinese, who of course have been pioneering what they call their "balanced" approach to freedom for a number of years now.

In the USA, we have the First Amendment, but of late that instrument of freedom has been used to protect the rights of corporations (who as you must know, are PEOPLE), to peddle products and influence. While the US government is technically limited in what it can do to shut down free speech, all it really has to do to achieve that end is to put pressure on the companies hosting the free speech to do their censorial job for them.

As the West follows the Chinese model of "regulating" speech, and shaping a common view of what speech should be tolerated, global freedom will diminish.

America's Fascist Salute

2011-08-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

American school children giving the fascist salute, May 1942.

So, you think the USA isn't a fascist nation, huh?

In reviewing some of Mitt Romney's claims about America, one sent me on a little search today. Romney had pointed to the supposedly classic hand over the heart salute Americans are supposed to give during the national anthem, as a demonstration of the love Americans feel for their country. Romney said this salute was suggested by Franklin Roosevelt in WWII, as a memorial salute to the fallen heroes of the war.

But, maybe there was a more pragmatic reason. What do you think?

Yep, turns out the USA already had a national salute, that was suggested by the fellow who had written the pledge of allegiance—a crapulous brainwasher inflicted on schoolkids, mainly to insure immigrant children grew up understanding what nation to goose-step to.

This American salute, which should look pretty familiar to you, was scrapped in 1942—and ONLY in 1942—when it was thought a little embarrassing by the American warlords that the American people, and their kids, would be saluting just like the Nazis they were fighting in WWII.

So, the Americans changed it, like they did sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage", to pretend it wasn't just another fascist salute of a war-loving and brutal empire. Remember that, next time you mindlessly put your hand over your heart, to salute your führer-flag.

Cheesehead Vision Thing Dims Dems' Hopes

2011-08-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Cheesehead vision—the holes do not

apparently make seeing or thinking

clearly any easier.

At least in Wisconsin, nobody can rightly accuse the people of having an inflated opinion of themselves. These are people, after all, who unashamedly wear plastic cheddar-cheese head extensions, and call themselves cheeseheads. It isn't like they're afraid of being made fun of, or thought daft by the people who wear fancy hats with Viking horns, and read hardcover books (in Minnesota).

So, I am not in any way attempting to pick on the voters of Wisconsin, in particular, for affirming the Tea Party hard-on the USA's redlands are still proudly stroking.

Answering a question on Facebook, "what is wrong with the people of Wisconsin", complaining about the Tuesday Dem debacle in the recalls, I replied:

The same that was wrong with them in 2010. People act like the Tea Party invaded Wisconsin from a spaceship or something. Nope, they were always there. And the people LIKED them. They WANTED them.

And they still do.

And this should be a wakeup call for Dems. They have spent a decade capitulating, kowtowing, and basically acting like the slaves of the Republican Party.

Why? Because for a decade now the Republicans, who were in charge on September 11, 2001 (but who never got blamed for being asleep at the stick), told the Dems that if they got uppity, or said something mean about the wars or anything else Republicans perpetrated, the people would KNOW Dems weren't patriotic.

And when the narrative changed to the economy, and the war hammer no longer worked, the Republicans deftly shoved the responsibility for making the global economy suck on to the Democrats. Yeah, the Republicans lost ground in 2008. That lasted until the majority racist USA woke up and realized somebody had let a black guy become president.

That's all the Republicans needed. That and the usual Democratic weak-sister nonsense.

Even Jesus knew what to do with demons. You drive them out of afflicted minds and into the sea. You don't give some lame speech about how we're still a AAA-nation that nobody believes.

___

Read more here.

4 steps to success as a right-wing Christian crusader

2011-08-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

As explained fully here, what every aspiring, right-wing crusader needs to know these days to be successful. It isn't enough any longer to just cut&paste a list of reasons to be pissed from the Unabomber, or Glenn Beck. You've got to get yourself a holy calling, a mission, just like a real Crusader.

Protecting the Children from Literature—and Democracy

2011-08-07T10:27:00.000-07:00

Missouri State professor, Dr. Wesley Scroggins,

whose campaign to ban Kurt Vonnegut's

Slaughterhouse Five, was successful. He also

wishes to ban the teaching of democracy.

Today at examiner.com, I look at yet another manifesto from a Christian right ideologue. This time, the strange ideas are housed in the mind of a college professor, an assistant professor of business at the University of Missouri.

The manifesto is much shorter than that of Anders Behring Breivik, and of course it makes no call for armed conflict or anything of that order, but it does make a case for the need to defend the USA, and particularly America's children, from subversive, anti-Christian, ideas such as evolution, or democracy—yes democracy.

Read the article (linked above). You'll see.

Robbery & Chaos—Harvesting the USA

2011-08-06T05:26:00.000-07:00

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper
While farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn-
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.
—Chapter 53, Tao Te Ching

The USA is severely out of balance. It has lost its way entirely, and cannot see, much less navigate its way back to the center of the Way.

What? You say YOUR religion is Christianity, and this pagan belief does not apply to you?

Do you really think, in your wildest, most ignorant, understanding of Christianity, that anything in those Taoist verses would offend Jesus Christ? Perhaps only in the sense that Jesus would have said it more radically (being the revolutionary he was), that the upper class is ALWAYS extravagant and irresponsible, by definition; and that the poor ALWAYS have nowhere to turn, because the rich employ robbery and chaos as their main weapons of domination and terror.

No, the USA today is not in keeping with the Tao. Nor is it in keeping with Jesus Christ. Nor in keeping with any humane idea of government or economy. It is a pigsty of hatred and inequality.

You want proof?

What do the rich care about today? What are they prattling on about?

Not the unemployed. Not the rapidly rising rates of poverty, of ignorance, of hopelessness.

What they care about is that Standard and Poor's ratings service has downgraded the credit rating of the USA from AAA to AA+ (with a scoop of poop). Suddenly, somebody has said, on top of the fact the USA is a worthless scumbag empire, just like all the others, it also sucks at the thing it claims to be unexcelled at—being the best bet in history.

Nope. And with politics and people split as they are, with the factions tearing the land apart so confidently, so piously, the people of the USA are rightly more and more expectant of doom and depression (of all sorts).

And this is what the Bible was trying to tell you about concerning being careful of the seeds you sow—therefore shall you reap.

The USA was built upon, and thus sowed the seeds of, robbery and chaos.

And the reaper has come.

Crazy is on the Menu

2011-08-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

See, crazy really IS on the menu.

What if Robin Hood—or maybe Jesus Hood—showed up today? Would they send a plane—or a crucifixion team—anyway?

Robin Hood, if he existed today, would be moved to the FBI's most wanted list as a terrorist; he would be denounced by Nancy Grace as a cheap hood glorified by an ignorant public; he would be the subject of Fox News exposés showing he was just a spoled rich boy who liked to terrorize hard-working Americans and delighted that his crimes were exaggerated by the socialist MSM into acts of social justice.

If you want an example of just how it would play, examine the history of the SLA, a leftist terrorist organization of the 1970s that, along with kidnapping Patricia Hearst and turning her into a great iconic poster, also coerced her rich father into giving away a pile of free food to the poor.

Obviously, the USA wasn't going to allow that to go unchallenged, and those of us old enough to maybe have seen this, will recall that the murder by the LA police of the SLA leadership was televised live for the nation's consumption. It was the first time that I can recall that such an event, a police hit, was nationally broadcast.

And the reason they did that, was to remind everybody that it's fine to play little games of wealth redistribution, but if actually manage to do it—the rich people will kill you.

Which brings us to Jesus.

Why was Jesus killed? Technically, sedition against the Roman Empire. Or, here, let's spell it out for everybody—Jesus was counted as a terrorist leader, not any different than Osama bin Laden, by the Roman authorities. When the Bible was written, the narrative of this event was shaped to make it seem as if the Romans were bullied by crazy Jews into executing what they knew to be an innocent man. Well, it makes a good story, especially for Mel Gibson. But the historical context of the narrative suggests the Roman Empire really did find Jesus Christ a deeply threatening figure—as he would be today.

Imagine Jesus Christ addressing the United States Congress today.

"My children, did you not read my words? Have you not considered that I meant them truly? Why do you hold dear what is and has always been the path to perdition? Why do you hold in contempt the very people who should command your love and mercy? I hear you saying Lord, Lord and I see you wearing your crosses—but I do not know you."

And the Congress, commanded by the Teabagger Bunch, would pass the Respect for the Job Creators Bill, which will make speaking ill of the rich a terrorist act, punishable by death.

Sound crazy? Well, look around, crazy is ON THE MENU!
__________________

See the original of this posting at Christian Left.

Camels and Needles

2011-08-02T05:24:00.000-07:00

Jesus noted that it is easier for a camel to pass through the

eye of a needle (the small kind), than for a rich person to

get into heaven. The works and aspirations of the rich, in

other words, are naturally invested and directed away from

the works and will of God—or so Jesus tells us.

A new facebook page devoted to political discussion and promotion of social justice and equality. From my perspective, those ideas are largely ignored in American political discussion, except for lip-service expected from Democrats which is on the order of "Oh yes, the poor, mustn't forget them."

Of course, then Dems go right ahead and forget them.

Why should we care about the horrible inequality in the world, and especially in the USA? And is it even horrible or a bad thing?

Well, as the name of the page indicates, my inspiration about the answer comes from the insights of that world-class troublemaker, Jesus Christ.

In other religions or traditions, inequality is not seen as such a problem, although this is often because openly saying otherwise, in states that were built on the premise of the essential righteousness of inequality, could end the authors up quite dead.

Rich people naturally don't like that sea of envious, outraged, eyes peering at them in the night. And that isn't just their problem, but the world's. Their Congress—which they bought and paid for after all—is set up to protect them from the rest of us. Is there anything we can do about it?

The Nerf President

2011-08-01T17:28:00.000-07:00

There is no question now what brand of president Americans

chose in 2008. Of course, it is a special kind of Nerf, utterly safe

for the rich, the war-mongers, Republicans—highly toxic to all

other Americans.

I will start with this disclosure. I never liked Barack Obama. I thought he was weak, not really up to the job of fighting for truth, justice and the American way. Obama demanded, for example, that Americans believe in the utter nonsense that brutal, nasty, political combat in the USA was just a generational thing. Obama said that his election announced to the nation, and the world, that a new day of bipartisanship, and mutual respect had dawned on the American political landscape.

Hell, the Norwegians were so taken with that idea, they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize just for getting elected. And OK, getting elected was a big deal. I was as happy as any other American that it seemed we had made some progress on the racial and racist front. But, that's about us, the American people, or the perceptions of the world. It isn't about Barack Obama, and what he brought to the job as president.

I suppose the fact that he could articulate better than George W. Bush made him seem "brilliant" to a lot of Americans. It was nice to listen to a fellow who, for a change, wasn't baffled by the contents of Mr. Dictionary. But right away Obama's notion that he was going to redefine the terms of engagement with Republicans came into conflict with a simple reality—the Republicans weren't having any of it. They declared war on him. And before they were through bullying him, marginalizing him, redefining him as the biggest threat to the United States since Osama [jeez—what ironic bad luck on the name, huh?] bin Laden, Obama was pulled—not really dragging and kicking either—deep into the mire of the right.

Of course 99% of what Republicans had to say in criticism of Barack Obama was utter bullshit—much of it rooted in the Republican awareness of how much racism still fuels the passions of their own base. In addition, they and their Tea Party wing of stormtroopers, exploited the looney, conspiratorial nature of these same people, many of whom believe a cult of master-controllers called the Illuminati, the New World Order, or whatever the name is this week, pulls the strings—as Bela Lugosi so nuttily put it years ago.

The Republicans and their talking-point-peddlers worked assiduously to craft the meme and the myth that Barack Obama was not a real American. Seldom did they just say what they implicitly intended—hey, he's BLACK!!, he can't be the POTUS!! Instead, they explicitly attacked the idea that Obama was born in the USA. They claimed Obama was a marxist, a Muslim, born in Kenya, educated in Indonesian madrassas to hate the United States and to want to subvert it through an insidious plan to have him grow up SEEMING like an American, and managing to get himself elected to the highest office in the land—so—so—the Marxist-Muslim worldwide conspiracy can destroy freedom!!

Yep, that's how deeply into psychosis the right-wing in America has sunk. Even its own members ruefully describe the Tea-Party nuts in the Republican Party as "hobbits"—i.e., quixotic simpletons imagining they are on a great quest or crusade to save America from everyone not like them.

It would be funny except for the recent reminder of how it really isn't—i.e., Anders Behring Breivik. And the thing is, there are thousands of Breviks in the USA, just working up the courage to see the mania manifested in the murder and mayhem they demand as the sacrifice to their their brand of liberty.

So, yeah, Barack Obama has had to deal with a lot of crazy nincompoops. No doubt. But that comes with the job. And, while we're feeling sorry for him, let us recall that millions of Americans are suffering terribly in this economic environment, and our sympathies should be reserved for them first, and not some guy whose family is getting to live in a huge, white, mansion, where the amenities aren't too bad either (from what I hear).

As I write this, the House of Representatives has just passed the great, lousy, Obama "compromise" with the Republicans, the Budget Control Act of 2011, which was Obama's capitulation to the right, or maybe his final declaration that the right was right where he always belonged. Now, of course, Barack Obama couldn't get a job washing dishes in the Republican Party kitchen (in spite of everything, I am sure they consider him too uppity). But is his obvious envy over that fact any reason for him to try to outdo Republicans trying to smash the poor and blow the rich?

Obama has told the left-wing of his party, the people who who are ideologically the traditional base of the Democratic Party that they need to grow up, and learn that governing is about compromise, and oh yeah, you can't always get what you want. Thanks Barry, but I learned that from Mick Jagger a long time ago.

Problem is, a Democratic president might not always get what we want, but he's supposed to defend and protect what we need, and especially what the most vulnerable citizens in the USA need—and Barack Obama, the Nerf President, has failed Democrats, and the American people on that count.

I guess he expects Democrats, liberals, the left will support him, figuring they have no choice. But the next few months may deconstruct that premise, and reveal more options than we ever thought we had.

Emerson on the Debt Ceiling Crisis

2011-07-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

OK, Waldo was in need of a makeover, hair-wise anyway. But damn it Jim, he wasn't a fashion plate, he was a philosopher! You know, with one of them thar great minds.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.—Emerson

Often we read Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous quotation trotted out to supply some, usually small and unimportant, rhetorical need. Seldom is it explained—why is consistency a bad thing?—and almost never is it offered in a fuller context of what Emerson was getting at.

After all, Emerson—a guy named WALDO!—was some kind of philosopher. You don't want to read much of that sort of thing. It could give you ideas. And next thing you know, you might start getting one of those on your own. And—want to change something.

Well, admittedly, small minds let loose in the philosophical china-shop can wreak havoc. Poor Nietzsche is maybe the best example of what goes wrong when small hobgoblin minds mash up philosophical metaphors with Wagnerian soundtracks and package it as worthy and necessary Götterdämmerung performance art—or World War II.

But, unfortunately, if you want to move up from the bubblegum wrappers of profundity and punditry, if you want to engage the thinky world with something more reliable than Glenn Beck's chalkboards, you just might have to read more than a soundbite of some guy named Waldo.

Here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson has to say about our nation's debt ceiling crisis, via his comments of long ago on the general problem of small minds and their security-blanket consistencies.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Now, if you wish to test yourself for small-mindedness, if you read that quotation and took from it that Emerson is saying consistency is bullshit, and you should just say anything you feel like, every day a new theory, just to spite the people who might be depending upon you to have a sincere or reliable bone in your soul—you should probably not aspire to run for great person, at least not based on your philosophical apprehension.

Which is to say, if John Boehner were to read Emerson's words about hobgoblins and consistency, he would likely say that Emerson was supporting the rigidly consistent Republican message of no-spend, no-tax, no-government-except-rich-people-bailouts&subsidies. And also, Emerson would undoubtedly favor eliminating all government regulatory obstacles to our energy independence and small-business success. And also, Emerson would probably have been completely overwhelmed with the incomparable greatness of mind presently powering the GOP, especially in the Tea Party faction.

In fact, you might need a microscope to locate Boehner's grasp of Emerson, or his concern about the welfare of the USA.

The Confirmation Of Hell On Earth

2011-07-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

The world we love to see, the people we love to be.

We get these confirmations every day pretty much, especially in the daily sonic and graphic discourse of the ghastly Terror Wars. But, even if you could honestly say that somehow, against every inclination the USA has to be perpetually at war, the nation was mostly at peace, the domestic confirmations of the Sulphuric Regime are bountiful.

Today, we are given a bit of toast and jam to consume at our leisure, stories of crass and gross waste in the imperial stormtroopers, combined with "news" that in Texas, black kids and others insufficiently white people are being targeted for discretionary discipline. Or in other words, Texas teachers, for some reason not specified, just end up deciding to punish black males at a rate more than double that of white females.

In the first story, we learn that over at the DOD, in fact at the Buck Rogers Institute, they have thrown (away) almost 50 billion dollars trying to modernize America's military—which is kind of funny given that nobody was accusing America's military of being behind the modern guys. After all, how modern a military do you need when you constantly go to war against people who are ignorant, illiterate peons—who nevertheless manage to keep from being beaten by the hypermodern USA imperial war machine?

If anything, maybe we should demodernize the nation's military, especially given that the 50 billion dollars resulted in NO improvements. And indeed, the conclusion of a new study is that the USA military is tossing billions of dollars about just standing still, having not made any improvement in its strength or readiness since 2001. Just remember that next time some bozo tells you war is great for technological advancements. Well, maybe we've learned how to torture and confine people in little cages a lot better than we did before. And we've learned how to ignore thousands of dead baby collaterals because—hey—we've got our own problems, dude.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, where so many evil things have brewed and bubbled forth to wreak havoc, a report by a bunch of researchers, who ripped to shreds the school and criminal records of almost 1 million Texas schoolchildren looking for important patterns, shows the unbelievable fact that Texas "disciplines" MOST of its children—meaning more than half of Texas schoolkids get at least one suspension or expulsion during their school careers.

Oh, and here's a real shocker—the most disciplined kids in school by far are Texas black males (83%). The least disciplined? Texas' lily white girls (37%).

Some people, like you know—racists—claim this just means that the vast majority of black males are problems. After all, just look at the incarceration rate for black males in the USA they will say.

Yeah, look at it.

Help Save The Youth Of America

2011-07-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

A message from the 1950s, which has not lost its validity

for millions of white people, in the South and elsewhere

in the red lands of America. Now, instead of Little

Richard, they hate Barack Obama.

Once upon a time, the white fathers and mothers of the South, organized as Citizen's Councils, and fearful that "negro music" was going to rock and roll their daughters' panties down to their ankles—you know, a little faster than those good girls would have dropped them anyway—decided to confront the problem head on.

Their mission—

Help Save The Youth

Of America!

Their message—"If you don't want to serve negroes in your place of business, then do not have negro records on your juke box or listen to negro records on the radio."

And what exactly was the problem with doing those things?

The concerned white citizens explained:

"The screaming, idiotic words, and savage music of these [Negro] records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America."

Little Richard, constantly singing about sex, scared the

crap out of white parents, who wanted his "savage" music

boycotted by white people, to save white kids from the

devil.

In other words, don't let the negro singers—especially not Little Richard—stick his long, black A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom! in your babydoll's sweet 45rpm magnolia.

Note that by "youth of America", these despicable racist monsters (in other words, most all of the white people in the South) did not mean save the negro youth. They after all were not really counted by the racists as being "of America". And if you think that brand of bigotry is something that died out with desegregation, and racism isn't a problem (which is what racists claim), then just recall how the racists have treated Barack Obama. Hell, they even proudly acknowledge their racism, like it's a patriotic character trait.

But, let us not end on this fucking down note, you know, because there is another, salutary and ironic development in the story of saving the youth of America. And that is the chapter told by Bill Bragg, and his 1986 song entitled "Help Save the Youth of America".

The song is great, and the lyrics are greater still, and you can tell this because they are still so relevant, a quarter century after they were intended to be relevant.

Some verses:

Help save the youth of America
Help save them from themselves
Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys
And the Californian girls

A nation with their freezers full
Are dancing in their seats
While outside another nation
Is sleeping in the streets

Listen to the voice of the soldier
Down in the killing zone
Talking about the cost of living
And the price of bringing him home

They're already shipping the body bags
Down below the Rio Grande
But you can fight for democracy at home
And not in some foreign land

Guess the George Bushes never listened to Billy Bragg, huh?

Anyway, while we're domestically pulling the wings off our government, the all but forgotten soldiers down in the killing zone, are supposed to start coming home in large numbers—not all of them, but a lot of them. What do you think the cost of bringing them home will be? And you figure they'll be any money to pay it?

We could have saved a lot of money, and a lot of lives, if we had refused to accept the coup of 2000. But the surfer boys and California girls were having too much fun, fun, fun making money, to risk something bad happening to them by standing up, waving the red flag, and saying America—FUCK NO!

Why should anyone except the rich pay for the financial devastation of the rich?

2011-07-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

A century ago, this was the normal situation for poor kids,

working themselves to death, instead of going to school

and being children. Would Republicans have any problem

bringing back this cheap labor source and other American

traditions (like oh, slavery) to help booming businesses make

even more obscene profits?

That was the subject of my examiner.com article today.

The fanatics, fundamentalists, and other brands of looney, who have taken over (or perfected) the Republican Party, have a simple mantra: cut taxes for the rich, and the poor can drink the last few drops dripping off the end of rich's generosity.

As John Boehner likes to say, small businesses are the jobs engine of the USA. Just make being in business profitable again, and the people who struggle to feed their kids and pay the rent can have a nice, minimum wage, job again. The problem is, business and especially corporate America and their Gringotts goblins on Wall Street, are booming. How much trickle-down has working America gotten out of it?

Oh come on, you know how capitalism works. The capitalists win—the whole economic system is named for the winners after all—and everybody else works their butts off for little or nothing. So, of course corporate America isn't hiring enough people. Why should they? Employees costs a lot of money. In fact, contrary to what John Boehner says, hiring people is the LAST thing a business wants to do.

And that is why, especially in a long-term economic downturn (at least for America's workers), government needs to intervene to encourage more employment. Republicans claim this can happen by bribing businesses with welfare (AKA tax cuts). But what really needs to happen is a longterm commitment by the US federal government to assist the most vulnerable Americans with cash assistance for all kinds of needs—rent, bills, food—and mainly assistance in helping the millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed get retrained to obtain decent-paying jobs.

The 2012 election is shaping up to be perhaps the most important election the USA has had since 1968—THAT was a watershed moment. Of course that election produced a catastrophic outcome, Richard M. Nixon, America's least favorite president—until George W. Bush.

Vote early, vote often, vote contra-Republican at every opportunity.

Bachmann Continues to Explore New Ground

2011-07-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Evil Greeks, like Socrates, who were always orgasming in sheep and

young men, have made God's plan for heterosexual families much harder

to accomplish.

As I note at the Examiner today, Michele Bachmann is ceaselessly inventive when it comes to exploring new, ill-advised, ground for political debate. America certainly needs to discuss a lot of things, a lot of important problem, in this presidential campaign, but perhaps the very last thing America needed to discuss, at least as a relevant political issue, was anal sex.

But Bachmann introduced that topic by signing the infamous Marriage Vow, or Marriage Dependency contract, or whatever you wish to call the document issued by the Christian conservative group, The Family Leader. Bachmann was quickly reviled by the usual mass suspects on the left, because the Marriage Vow includes a comment bemoaning the alleged fact that black children actually had it better (in the sense of having 2-parent families) during slavery than they do now.

Of course, one of the chief features of slavery was its devastating impact on the ability of black slaves to keep their families together. Since every slave was considered a piece of property, no slave was protected from being wrenched from his family by being sold. Historical context and research, and reasonable conclusions about these, are not exactly a strong suit of politicians in general, and certainly not one for the goofy rabble who have seized the reins over at the GOP.

But, what Bachmann stumbled into by signing the Marriage Vow, turned out to be even more ridiculous than she may have imagined—I will do her the courtesy of allowing perhaps she did not read the fine print of the document, although her "people" certainly should have done so.

At one point, the Vow lists all manner of evil behaviors, mostly "gay" practices, which the Christian authors of the Vow claim do nothing good for marriage or public health. Included in the list of questionable practices is one that many heterosexuals may have heard of, and may even practice themselves—anal sex.

Now, why is anal sex bad? Because Christians of the sort who worry greatly the "family" is being assaulted by too many rights for gay people, also worry that too many straight men (particularly) are wasting precious seed in all manner of unhelpful and even sinful ways. Most laws prohibiting "sodomy" were not aimed merely at gay people, but at any people practicing sex (like anal or oral) that was clearly incapable of producing a child.

That is in fact what being focused on the family really means to conservative Christians—being focused not just on promoting and protecting family values, but on outlawing the use of male orgasm for any application save that of producing more Christian-Republican babies.

One might have thought an orgasm was the property of the individual experiencing it, but at least with respect to men—and any woman enabling a man's errant spurts—the orgasm is believed by conservative Christians to belong to God, who naturally issues them only for the purpose of procreation.

So, as we might say, conservative Christians want men to put it in the Jesus hole, not the man-hole.

The Tea Party Flag

2011-07-06T10:40:00.000-07:00

The true Tea Party Flag.

The Tea Party adopted the Gadsen Flag, from the American Revolution,
as its symbol.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party is not really up to the intellectual
standards of the founding guys—who along with owning slaves and drinking
Sam Adams (I mean the beer—never mind), did occasionally have a sentient
idea cross their minds.

Thus, we present the true Tea Party Flag.

The World is Simple

2011-07-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

Despite the myth attesting otherwise, war is not generally an enabler of

liberty, and certainly not any socially just distribution of liberty.

The rich run it.

The poor are too tired, ignorant and powerless to overthrow it.

When a poor person demonstrates otherwise, that he is sufficiently vigorous and knowledgeable to threaten the rich, and to lead a rebellion, the rich either kill him or assimilate him ("turning rebellion into money").

In the few instances where rebellions are successful, by the time the rich have been overthrown, they have usually left the auditorium anyway, opening the door for the new-wave masters, who inevitably subvert revolutionary aims to enable allegedly pragmatic realities of rule. Pragmatism enables the revolutionary masters to occupy the rich niche, and shortly the poor will realize they have been had once again.

An example of this occurred only recently in the United States, where the people in large numbers celebrated a mythological notion of "change" being symbolized and sincerely promised via the election of the nation's first black president. In fact, so expectant were the people of the world that something profound was about to happen to reverse the years of America's continuing descent into fascism, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for looking like change.

Of course, as we now know, Obama had no intention of being even a moderately evolutionary figure, much less a revolutionary one. He adhered to Republican policies of war and domestic policy—his one alleged socialist accomplishment, his health care plan, was a Republican plan. In fact, Barack Obama IS a Republican, and only seems liberal (a codeword for "weak and ineffectual") because the Republican Party has turned over its management to reactionary circus freaks.

Are there exceptions to these "rules"?

Let us examine a few examples of successful rebellions:

The American Revolution—Promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Delivered a system owned by capitalist thugs and landed aristocracy, including a great many slave-owner thugs, and managed by teams of lawyers and other university-trained Eichmanns. For a while, the smarter, braver poor at least did have the opportunity to flee westward across the vast American continent—committing genocide as they went—to obtain their liberty and opportunity (by "developing" the otherwise worthless wastelands of nature). This revolution is certainly the most important in the history of the world, in part because it gave rise to the biggest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in history (in the USA, not Iraq), but mainly because it demonstrated the extent to which liberal-sounding ad slogans (see Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, etc.) could totally flummox a gullible working class.

The French Revolution—Promised Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Delivered Napoleon's murderous French Empire, followed up by the endless authoritarian death-jerks and spasms of a nation realizing that its true glory could only be realized creating complicated philosophical doodles (which French call the world's finest cuisine), or slaughtering British and Germans. The latter is thought by much of the civilized world to be the finest achievement of the French as a race. Whereas the British are lickspittle USA allies, infamously known now as the American Poodle, the French are equally obedient to their New World masters, but their silly Gallic pride makes them publicly posture as if they are still an independent proposition. They are presently pretending to manage, along with their kissing-killer-cousins the Germans, a confusing mess of a war being fought by the giant American-European military alliance—NATO—against one, single, human being in Libya. Haven't killed him yet.

Revolution(s) of 1848—OK. These were mostly not successful, but they were part of a process of fruitless 19th-century leftwing uprisings, that did finally produce the overthrow of one brand of hatefully repressive government, replacing it something even worse. Promised a Europe of kingless democracies—yeah, right. Delivered the usual—piles of dead revolutionaries, and a firmer grip by the reactionary forces on the helms of European governments. This situation would not be changed until that watershed obscenity—World War I—finally convinced the poor people of Europe, en masse, that their rich masters really, truly, only viewed them as meat for grinding into hamburger in their stupid, incestuous, power orgies. It took a long time for the intellectuals of Europe to finally get the point: the working classes LIKE being told what to do by their masters. This is why when the Communists did finally take over, they crafted a system that would make no demands on the non-existent inherent desire for liberty living in the hearts of Russians (especially) and East Europeans.

The American Civil War—Promised respite to Southern white people (the vast majority of whom were poor and not so bright) from listening to the dreary remonstrations of Yankee abolitionists and other do-gooders. Delivered over 600,000 dead Americans; a South that was wrecked economically for a century and spiritually perhaps for all time; and the establishment of the US federal government as the most fearsome personality in the history of the world. The latter achievement was only fully realized when "our Nazi scientists" put nuclear warheads on highly accurate missiles, capable of laying waste to the entire surface of the Earth (many times over). Oh yeah, almost forgot, the American Civil War did also enable a lot of black people to keep picking cotton, but as not-exactly-free citizens of a nation that, at best, wished they would all go back to Africa. This revolution, unlike most in this list, was not "progressive" in its aims; but it has the distinction of being one of the most successful in history; especially given that the Confederacy was able to "play possum" after its supposed defeat in 1865, and has now completely subverted the USA. Unfortunately, since most of the really smart people in the South were killed in the Civil War, the descendants of ignorant crackers have mainly inherited the leadership positions of this American revanchist hydra.

The Taiping Rebellion—A brief note. While Westerners love to pretend to themselves that they matter in world history, all honest (i.e. outer-space alien) researchers know that the center of the world, culturally, and in terms of the sum of human experience, is in Asia, and especially in China. The Chinese have rebellions that are fought on the scale of world wars. Case in point: this incredibly weird and horrible war. Promised a Christian-flavored Chinese People's Republic, a century before the successful communist revolution. Delivered 15 years of theocratic dictatorship, devoted to the annihilation of its imperial Chinese enemies, who had similar designs for the Taiping rebels. Thus, by the time the killing was over, allegedly over 20 million people had died in the Taiping Rebellion. What is particularly telling (for a Western review of the facts), is how the Europeans, and Americans helped modernize, supply and lead the Chinese imperial army to defeat the rebels. However, this aid was only granted to the much-despised Chinese imperials because the prospect of having the rebels overthrow the imperial government seemed too potentially destabilizing to the West. Added to the utterly barbaric Opium Wars, perpetrated by the British Empire to force massive drug addiction on the Chinese people, the 19th-century American and European involvement in China demonstrates that at the very heart of capitalism's motives and effects, is a predatory will to destroy whole nations in the pursuit of creating and exploiting markets.

The Russian (Communist) Revolution—Promised the first major step in the global march of communism to replace all the governments of the world. Delivered, in addition to the usual supply of a lot of dead people of course, a pretty good effort to achieve that end. The only problem was that the Russian-led version of communism was a lot like the Russian imperial system. In the same way, the Chinese-led version of communism was a lot like the Chinese imperial system. People have a hard time being very imaginative or bold in their revolutions, or as we said above, they tend to surrender their nobler aspirations (if they possess any) to achieve stability and pragmatic solutions. The Russians, who were supposed to be internationalists, were of course incapable of resisting dominating their movement as the biggest country in the Soviet Union. Eventually, they succumbed to the fact that, especially compared to glitzy, pleasure-powered, western capitalism, the workers' paradise of communism was bloody BORING! So bored were the Russians and their partners in crime (against being entertained), that they went broke trying to squeeze profits (or whatever they were trying to get) out of masses of poor, hungry, proles. The Chinese are notable in that they made significant alterations in their communist system—basically abandoning its economics entirely for a capitalist system, but keeping the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party (yep, freedom has nothing necessarily to do with success at peddling crap to the market).

If you would like to thoroughly depress yourself, you can continue to read about the thousands of revolutions and rebellions that have occurred in history—and are occurring now of course. I suppose the uplifting thing about it, is that there is a constant expression of the human spirit to be—well—different.

The human spirit cannot ever truly be free so long as it has to endure the spirits and demands of other spirits. The freest a person can be is to exist as the only human being in a particular environment, say on the Moon or Mars or something. That isn't the kind of freedom most human beings aspire to. In fact, most people would make a distinction between freedom in association with others in a collaborative and nurturing society, and abandoning other humans altogether to obtain the pleasure and peace of perfect solitude. There is a way in which the latter freedom is viewed as a kind of resignation unto death.

Or, as Janis Joplin via Kris Kristofferson put it: "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Also, why, if freedom is so wonderful, are people so inept when it comes to obtaining and maintaining it? For thousands of years, people have understood what it means to be free, politically and otherwise. This is not a new concept. It is not a difficult concept. Even people of average intelligence get it, or some workable notion of it anyway. The complexities and pleasurable distractions of our modern world make staying focused on pushing for change much more difficult than it used to be. Whereas in the ancient world, the promise of freedom, no matter the risks in pursuing it, were often infinitely better than staying a literal slave, for example; people are hesitant to risk what they have these days, especially given that, as our survey suggests here, there may be no long or lasting victory over the forces of political repression.

Of course, making that case successfully to the peoples of the world, is what the masters of it chiefly aim to do—and with as little bloodshed as possible for the most part.

That is what advertising is for, after all.

The Congress shall make...no soup for you.

Memorizing Why War Is Worth It

2011-05-30T11:02:00.000-07:00

For some reason, saying these long-dead corpses at Gettysburg,

Pennsylvania, died for something good is supposed to make the

above look like a holy scene, instead of a mass-murder scene.

That is after all why we memorialize the dead on Memorial Day—as I say, pretty much every Memorial Day, the whole point about remembering the dead is so that we anoint in blood the idea that filling up our national graveyards, with even more people sacrificed to the war gods, is a good thing.

In the beginning of this holiday, back when people were faced with the horrific task of trying to mentally process over 600, 000 dead (and over 1 million dead and wounded) Americans in a catastrophic civil war, it became clear that at the least we could say, even if we weren't sure it was true—was they died for something.

That was particularly weird from the Southern view of things, since the something their dead had died for was mainly something pretty awful—slavery. Of course, no Southerner after a while would say that was what their dead died for. And even Northerners, who were trying to heal old wounds with their Southern brothers and sisters, wouldn't mention that the Southern army was a traitorous band, in support of a terrible goal—the continued enslavement of millions of human beings.

That Southern Americans are even still counted in the toll of American dead in the Civil War, instead of enemy dead, is a function of how much Americans wanted to do what they have never been able to do—forget that the Civil War ever happened.

Now, we decorate the dead with a big car race—indeed a lot of people probably think Memorial Day is to memorialize dead race car drivers from the Indy 500. We take off from work, eat and get drunk, and maybe we think about how our troops, always our brave troops, give us our rights, or some such nonsense.

But the thing we are supposed to take from the memorial part of the day is that sure, war is terrible, but a world of peace and no dead war heroes would be even worse! What would kids have to aspire to if that were the case? Peaceful achievement where nobody gets killed, ever? Really, lots of Americans are sickened right to their core at the thought that even one generation of Americans might escape without being drenched in the blood of war. They are that insane.

I close with the usual, my quotation from "The Americanization of Emily":

"It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades ... we shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices."

If it's Saturday it Must Be the End of the World—or Not

2011-05-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Oh no!!! No more days left...to be an idiotic true
believer! Well, you know that's not true. See, you may
wish for Apocalypse to save you, but you're not getting
off that easily.

So, another one of those guaranteed "End of the World" days is upon us—or really it has already been shown to be bullshit, which for the Rational Fringe it always was of course.

For the Lunatic Fringe, it was a case of "you know, maybe it could be true", and so a reason at least to pay attention to what was happening at 6pm in Sydney. Nobody had the poor taste to suggest we keep an eye on whatever bad news might be emanating or shaking today at 6pm from Japan (since it always seems to be rockin' around the clock there, Apocalypse or no).

Of course, as I pointed out in my examiner.com piece today, this whole production was really made for the entertainment and distraction of the vast Muddled Middle Majority, to give them one more thing to amusedly waste time on (along with Birther embers, important developments, and Angry Birds).

As we know, this Middle is much more aligned with the "open-mindedness" (or stupidity) of the Lunatic Fringe, than it is with the rueful sarcasm of the Rational Fringe. The RF party is well aware it is just a passenger on the MMM's Titanic, and that humanity's doom requires no divine intervention—it comes with the territory of natural selection, and life's brief ride.

The Muddled Middle Majority however is no fan of science, though it does love the toys the scientists enable. But when it comes to hard, thinky, things like brutally clamping down on the possibility (that today could be the End of the World), the MMM finds this mean and hurtfully dispiriting. Good people as we know are unlikely to be skeptics, especially openly so of the beliefs of others, because to express doubts, openly, of the ideas of others (while the very essence of the scientific method) is just plain rude.

And the MMM is quite convinced that nothing good could ever come of rudeness, despite the fact that left alone in their stewing cars and trucks, they are not unprepared to floor the rage pedal with great conviction.

Anyway, the world did not end today (well, not for most of us). Another group of stupid Christians is left wondering how the guarantee could have been voided, once again. This has been going on for almost 2000 years now, ever since the first Christians, who were expecting Jesus to come back really soon and kick some Roman ass, started dying off of old age, with unrequited vengeance posting them unhappily in the halls of Purgatory.

Thus was set the standard for impatience and irritability that has marked the unpleasant experience of Christianity ever since.

Ron Paul's Patience Competes With His Weird Ideas

2011-05-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

Ron Paul, Libertarian for President sign on a truck in 1991's Slacker.

"Ron Paul is, above all, patient."—New York Times, October 17, 1988

It seems like Ron Paul has always been running for President of the United States. You can find the evidence even in pop culture icons, like the 1991 Richard Linklater movie, Slacker.

I've been listening to the man speak, and often make an ass out of himself doing it, for a long time. At the same time, he says things which most politicians, who actually get elected and all, don't usually say.

Now, on the one hand, being unusual, and provocatively so, can at least have the benefit of making one stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, it can unquestionably peg one as any number of pretty bad things—a loon, a racist, an insensitive, insufferable dolt—that might be a detriment if you wanted to run for political office someplace other than in the largest small-minded state (do you really have to ask which one?) in the USA.

In the last few days of his just-declared current candidacy for POTUS, Ron Paul has said some pretty remarkable things, for a politician:

1. He would have not ordered the SEALS to assassinate Osama bin Laden. He would have instead asked Pakistan to help out arresting the guy they were ignoring (on purpose) right under the nose of their military. That way, Paul says, legalities and the like, plus of course the all-important property rights, would have been honored and protected. When Noam Chomsky made a similar argument, not based on property rights, but simply on the premise that following some civilized rules of behavior might be a better course for the USA to pursue, he was widely rejected as a senile fool.

2. He would be fine legalizing heroin and prostitution. Now a LOT of people would be fine with one or both of those things being legal, but most Americans think that kind of libertarianism sounds like libertinism, and they don't want it anywhere near them or their precious little monsters—or kids if you're feeling generous. Paul of course always says he himself would want none of the products offered by these businesses, but in the interest of freedom, he feels that Americans should be able to legally choose to get high or get laid as they see it. One imagines the Walmart discount smack aisle, and its curtained relaxation booths for customers taking advantage of the cheapest girls in town.

3. He would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. First off, you should go read what that law was and what it did, just in case you're fuzzy on what Ron Paul calls "ancient history". But basically, and Paul even admits this, the 1964 Civil Rights Act went a long way towards dismantling the pervasive Jim Crow laws, and fundamentally improving (though not eradicating) the racist environment plaguing all Americans—especially black Americans—for far too long. Paul's argument is that the Act was an unconstitutional attack on the property rights of American businessmen, i.e. the businessmen who wanted to keep black people out of their establishments. As a libertarian, Paul thinks it is the right of every American to not only be a racist, but to act discriminatorily against anybody for any reason. He thinks the "market" is the best regulator of such problems, and argues that only an idiot would put up a sign these days saying "No blacks allowed". Thus, Paul says we do not need a law protecting a minority group from a threat that no longer exists, and which plagues the majority, and really all Americans, by restricting their right to be active bigots.

This is a peculiar time for Republicans. It is just possible that a completely unelectable character like Ron Paul could win the Republican nomination to run against Barack Obama. Not very likely of course, but in a race that is actually considering the possibility of somebody like Michelle Bachman being the Republican candidate, Ron Paul might look like the closest thing to mainstream Republicans can nominate. And, as we know, Ron Paul is a very patient man.

gfw

Golden Ratio Proves Confederate Destiny of the USA

2011-05-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge flag. Shows definitive proof of the true spirit
and destiny of the "UCSA", using the Golden Ratio.

NOTE: I was fortunate enough to find this after reading a brief discussion on Facebook, which questioned the relevance of many modern theories employing the Golden Ratio.

Dr. Ebberhardt Schmutzen, professor of Divinity at the University of Texas at Muleshoe (in Bailey County, Texas), offers apparently definitive proof of what he calls the "inherent, Confederate, spirit of the USA".

According to Dr. Schmutzen, the United States flag was originally conceived to eventually and ideally contain exactly 50 stars, and the Republic was crafted to supply these, and in such a way that the flag would be a secret revelation of the Confederate heart at the center of the USA.

Thus, according to Dr. Schmutzen, a renowned authority on the following verse of the revised KJV:

"I cannot stand before the bulk of thy movement, and must flee in the face of thy stench." (2nd Gandalf, 9:3)

—the Civil War, so-called, was actually a secret revolution, which took place under cover of a war between rival portions of the USA, which allowed the masters of the Republic to reform American society from the ashes up, so to speak. Installing themselves in the ruins of the Confederacy, the masters established the basis for all that has captured modern America—the root values of the Confederate States of America.

This is said by experts who have examined Dr. Schmutzen's theory to confirm not only the divine destiny of the UCSA (United Confederate States of America), but also once again demonstrates the incredible predictive and associative power of the Golden Ratio.

What happens if you stop moving, long enough?

2011-05-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Note the almost happy and hungry-looking face in the chair.

Well, you're gonna die for one thing, but before that, as you just sit and sit and eat and eat, to keep sitting and eating, you're going to experience a curious thing.

Essentially, your human body will change you into a house plant. Your skin will wrap around anything it can get ahold of, and it will fuse you to it.

This has happened a few times that have made it into the news, for example this case from a few months ago. The man's own skin fused him to his chair, so even if he had wanted to get up, he couldn't do so.

Now, you might ask, how did he keep eating? That's easy. He had a roommate, and that man and his girlfriend made meals for the chairbound guy. It never occurred to them call anybody until one day they found their "friend" unconscious in his chair.

After the police cut the fellow out of his chair, which was covered in his own shit and hungry maggots galore, the man died—just like an uprooted houseplant.

And that was life…for that guy. For the roommate and the girlfriend, for some mysterious reason, life continues. What is their contribution? Their purpose? Why, to aid in your lurid entertainment of course.

Most of us don't like to hear such stories for lots of reasons. But chiefly, we don't like to hear that with ALL the glorious distractions to be had from living this glorified garbage-dump existence, some people just don't see any point to even getting up from their chairs any longer.

The moral? Who knows? We're all going to end up there, still and stupid-looking, lying on a slab, with the survivors gloating, warming the air around our icy corpses, and sucking out some hope for themselves (since they are still alive), while looking full-on into the fat or thin flesh of their hopeless future.

In the end, does it matter that you stood for righteous things, or ever opened your mouth to object to perfidious idiocy, or just gave some homeless guy some money (about which you didn't interrogate your brief brush with charity with concerns over how he or she would spend it)?

I don't know. Neither does anyone. We can only operate on the basis of very incomplete knowledge. But I do think there are such things as fashionable stances in this universe. There are lots of ways to go out, sitting in a chair. For example. But don't get the idea or the distracting passion, that one way is better than the other—except from the perspective of the cosmic catwalk.

Those Kindly Commandos

2011-05-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Solomon's Judgment, seeking the moral good

through wise understanding of human nature.

Solomon couldn't get elected to dog catcher

in the USA.

When I got up this morning, I came upon an op-ed by Maureen Dowd, at the Times. I usually do not read Maureen's stuff any longer, as I think the wars have ground down her wit, and it seems the years have made her less inclined to even do her own work. I do not know if she was a victim of somebody else's arguments in this latest piece, but whoever was doing the thinking, it was misguided, or just plain dumb on some points.

Dowd's main argument was that Americans should not concern themselves over the morality of last Sunday's commando raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. She wrapped it up in her succinct title: "Killing Evil Doesn't Make Us Evil‎".

Dowd concludes about the Osama assassination

"Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest."

However, in spite of arguing, and not convincingly (but that in a second), that no evil was done in the raid, Dowd never argues the opposite side of her title: that killing evil makes us good. In fact, the word "good" does not appear in her piece at all. What she does say is that the killing must not be evil, nor the celebrations of it thought barbaric, because the target of the US mission was himself—EVIL. And not just mundane evil, but Dowd says "one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time".

Well, certainly most people would have difficulty seeing why we should be worrying about the killing of "one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time".

As Dowd points out, the "finest" operation went out of its way to do no deserving harm:

"Unlike Osama, the Navy Seals took great care not to harm civilians—they shot Bin Laden’s youngest wife in the leg and carried two young girls out of harm’s way before killing Osama."

Well, that was nice of them, huh? It was at this point in Dowd's apology, or really assault on the advisability of thinking much, that I realized Maureen was writing this on moral cruise-control, or if not then her brain seemed to have lost any capacity whatsoever for moral reflection, which may actually have been the point of her article—that we should all hope for such an incapacity.

What do I mean?

Well, please, I know it's Sunday, and you have probably all had your fill of thinking about the Osama assassination, but let's go back in time a week OK. Now consider this. The mission as it was designed was obviously a "hit", not a capture. Obama had clearly decided to personalize the vengeance. THAT is why, along with hoping to get a certain ID of Osama's corpse, Obama decided to not to just blow Osama's Abbottabad neighborhood to kingdom come with 2000-lb bombs.

Dowd argues President Obama took the riskier course of a commando raid because this allowed him to spare "nearly all the women and children at the compound, and anyone in the vicinity."

From this she says the doing of any harm to "civilians" was just not part of the plan. And that, she concludes, is what makes the US commando raid different from the kinds of killing that Osama bin Laden did.

While it is true the US commandos did not, so far we know, shoot any of the children in the compound (they did shoot two of the women, killing one), it is, as I have written today on examiner.com, obscenely obtuse to suggest, as Dowd does, that no harm was done to these children. They were forced to endure 38 minutes of the worst terror imaginable, with a score or more of the most ruthless killers on the face of the planet invading their home to kill their parents.

When I posted this observation on Daily Kos, I was told, among other criticisms, that I should not care about the suffering of these mere collaterals, and instead I should think back to the lost children of 9/11.

I pointed out that this view is precisely what I am talking about—the liberation by Osama bin Laden of the most repellent aspect of the American personality—obscene obtuseness. The notion that if "they" have killed 100 of our children, we should be able to kill 100 of theirs and not suffer the indignity of being thought to be as evil as they, would only be mundanely obtuse, if it were not children we were discussing, and worse—thousands upon thousands of them killed, maimed, and made orphans by the bullets and bombs of the USA in the Terror Wars.

Of course that houseful of kids last Sunday night seemed a trifling thing to everyone, especially at first, because the USA is now in the well-practiced habit of terrorizing children—and adults too. It is one of the accurate insights of Osama bin Laden that the US natural aggression would be brought to the fore, and would wipe out all its pretensions of civilized behavior, in its lust for vengeance against his actions on 9/11.

I am raising a question here about the ease with which people overlook what seems to be a moral equivalency in the manner of seeking to do "good" through the use of terroristic violence. As I wrote on examiner.com, the hatred now flowing freely all over the world on all sides, is backed by a shared vision that is "a simplistic, morally vapid, justification to get "them", the bad guys, no matter who gets hurt in the process."

I should be clear on this point, that I think choosing NOT to kill Osama bin Laden, especially given the choice (and he was unarmed), would have certainly been the civilized thing to do. Also, the US military no doubt has plenty of tools to non-violently subdue rather than kill targets. It is amazing to me, that if fighting the "War on Terror" was the primary point, so to speak, of Operation Neptune Spear, that nobody thought, or Obama didn't think, having the chief of al-Qaeda alive and available for interrogation, even secretly for a bit, would be the wise move.

But wisdom was not the point of the operation.

Satisfying a deep and long-held American lust for a particular man's blood was the point of the operation.

gfw

Flourishing in the Marketplace of Dullards

2011-05-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

Why did I include this video? You'll see.

"Dullard" was my mother's favorite word.

This is understandable, given that she was from Mississippi, and that is not a state full of brilliant minds (though the few it produces seem to us to stand out mainly from our astonishment that anything shiny could be found in that sad sack of coals).*

*No, I am not talking about black people, you hopeless racetards. Black people had brains enough to survive or move to Chicago (where the weather and the hate were colder).

The governor of the Magnolia state, a bulbous turnip named Haley Barbour, has recently displayed what passes for brilliance in Mississippi, as he rightly determined it would be unseemly for the current de facto president of the occupied Confederate States of America, to run for president of the enemy country, and against somebody who, not so long ago, Barbour would have thought had to come to the back door to get permission to shit.

Barbour, should he have run for big cheese of the USA, would have looked to most people like a complete and utter dullard, as well as a racist of course.

And that brings me to the discussion of today's prima dulla—David Brooks.

Brooks is one of those creatures that liberals are supposed to respect. He is a conservative who can contemplatively savor the opinions of his enemies, before reasonably pointing out, using way more words than his less reasonable colleagues on the right, that the liberal opinions are crap.

Brooks is SO reasonable, it is alleged, he even voted for Barack Obama, and continues to defend that choice, especially when Obama does something truly great and popular, like order the assassination of America's favorite terrorist.

But Brooks is also, still, a conservative, who defends conservative values, and conservative virtues (yes, they have those, really). He is doing so today in a piece for the New York Times, wherein he explains to us that because most all of us are dullards, we need the brilliance of the rich and hateful to guide us through the succession of Herculean pillars that life is all about. Most especially, Brooks declares, we should value the fact that our republic was made by (rich lawyers and landowners) to protect us all from each other.

Of course, that isn't quite it, is it? I mean, the republican form of government, the checks and balances, were really put in place to protect the rich lawyers and landowners, the class of educated and entitled elites, from everybody else. If "the people", who are endlessly and blithely moody and susceptible to being bought off, make a bad decision, the "checks" are in place to moderate the downside for the well-to-do folks.

Indeed, let us be specific: the checks and balances are in place to protect the ruling class from those of its own members who might be led to whipping up the democratic or revolutionary passions of the masses to overthrow some essential privilege of the masters. The "balance" of government is a barrier against the distrust the masters had in the lack of nobility residing in the nobility.

So obviously insidious was this setup, that some of the more rebellious delegates to the Constitutional Convention demanded there be a Bill of Rights, to insure certain key liberties were salvaged from governmental abuse, for ALL citizens (well, in principle anyway), and not merely the masters who made the rules. It is well to note that this move to attach an enumerated list of rights, was held in considerable contempt by many of the lawyers, who claimed, as a subtle counter, that if you listed a small number of chief freedoms, the Congress would then use them as a way of denying that any others existed.

Of course, what has happened is that not only have the general freedoms been assailed and devalued as threats to the monstrous state, but the list on the Bill of particulars has been diminished as well, to the point where many Americans consider them subversive and due a regulatory diminishment or abolition.

Anyway, Brooks is arguing for the virtues of republic versus the chaos of democracy. He claims that was how our founders, our rich white men, understood things, and set things up. Of course they also set things up to deny freedom to most of the people in the country—and we have been engaged in a conflict to correct that huge deficiency in virtue and courage ever since.

The meager successes in obtaining corrections, i.e. obtaining greater rights for all, are viewed by conservatives, even the allegedly moderate ones like Brooks, as a dangerous development.

He says: "The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests."

Really, it has nothing to do with the Republican campaign of 40 years to run up huge debts by cutting taxes to an absurd degree, irresponsibly doing so while expanding government spending. It has nothing to do with the Republican encouragement, via this example, for private Americans to obtain as much credit and debt as possible to the point so many of them have gone Icelandically down the tubes financially. It has nothing to do with the Republican devotion to cultivating the most dangerous, racist, divisions amongst the people of the USA, to wreck any "balance between competing interests" as a means of holding onto power.

Nope, it's just because that nasty old democracy stuff got out of hand. If only you had stayed British, with a nation who understood colonial management, and the rights of kings and nobles, none of this would have happened to you.

I could close by saying David Brooks is a dullard, one who is flourishing in the marketplace of dullards, but you know, if you have to be told that, especially after reading him, it would be a waste of words. Also, the sky is blue and the water radioactive—yes, it should be that level of self-evident.

gfw

A bit of sarcasm and realism

2011-05-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

Your tax dollars at work, one more dead guy in the

Terror Wars (this was one of Osama's personal buddies

at his Abbottabad compound. Feel proud? Feel like

at least there's ONE government program that works?

Sure you do.

As we noted yesterday, it is always a little disturbing to see the process of politics at work.

However, to claim, as many Republicans have this week, that it is alarming or somehow disrespectful for Democrats to attempt to politicize Sunday's whacking of Osama bin Laden, is just silly. Of course the Dems will politicize it. The assassination of the al-Qaeda chief by the law professor (or by his Team America commandos) is precisely the sort of just desert Republicans are due for peddling their jingoistic idiocy to the nation for decades now.

That's one thing—that there was, for a moment or two, a sweetness in knowing that George Bush's moronic, barbaric, bluster produced no Osama, no expired wanted poster, no head on the spike. Obama's willingness to pursue Osama even into the backyard of the obviously blind or treacherous Pakistani military establishment, and his willingness to shoot the Saudi SOB dead on sight, produced the desired outcome.

But then, as always seems to happen, the White House (pretty much all of them do this) decided to gussy up the event with the false claim that the brave SEAL Team 6 had shot it out for 40 minutes with Osama's defenders, and that when they finally reached OBL, he was hiding behind his wife, while poking his AK around her to get off a few rounds before some American hero put a bullet through Osama's noggin.

Wow, that sounds kind of thrilling, huh?

Too bad it was kind of bullshit. What actually happened, according to the latest version, is that when the American attack team set down, Osama's courier, who was the guy who inadvertently brought the house down on his leader, stepped up and shot off a few rounds at the Americans. They quickly dispatched him and a woman companion. After that, the US team did not face fire for the rest of the 40-minute operation on the ground.

What that means, and what I speculated yesterday seemed to be the case, judging from the first pictures of the dead "others" at the Abbottabad compound, was that there wasn't any violent or drawn-out last stand made by Osama and his people. The US kill team did what it came to do. They executed Osama bin Laden (who was unarmed), along with several other unarmed victims the Americans viewed as getting in their way.

As I noted today, most Americans will probably say to that—so fucking what?—but there is more to the context than that some bad guys got their violent comeuppance. The house the SEALs attacked was full of children. And those children witnessed the whole thing, the executions of Osama and the several other victims of the raid.

Some monstrous idiots I am sure will say so fucking what to that too. But there is a problem, becoming a little clearer with each passing day of reflection on what the USA has done. And the problem is that while Americans are obviously very happy that OBL is dead and turned into shark-shit, how it was done is just a reminder of how hideously ugly the process of fighting this long, disgusting, war has been.

You may have danced a jig when you heard Osama was dead, but America has been slogging through a funeral dirge for a long time now for many of its freedoms and principles which were sacrificed to get a relatively small number of dangerous criminals. There is no suggestion by anything we have seen or heard of late that there is any chance for a resurrection of these relics, or any redemption on the horizon.

Part of the reason for this is that so deep is the moral hole into which the USA has fallen, and which hole was largely prepared for us by Osama bin Laden, that a mere politician like Barack Obama has no clue nor it seems much sincere intention, to bring the nation back towards decency.

The "hit" on OBL, in its real, bloodily cathartic terms, is just one more reminder that we are now an imperial state, with imperial morality—as ready to apply power in an unrestrainedly brutal fashion when it is deemed necessary as any of the ancient states we claim to think less civilized than ourselves.

The people who came out to chant "USA! USA! USA!" the other night know this, and are happy with it. The intellectuals (mainly on the left) who are troubled by the thirst for blood displayed by the vengeful celebrants, are vainly hoping that somehow the soul of America can be pulled back from the moral abyss. But to do this, the soul would have to be located, and the only fair conclusion to make after a decade of the beating of the heart of darkness, is that the American soul was lost long ago.

gfw

Hockey and Assassination

2011-05-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time beating the Russians at hockey was

enough to make people feel good about being Americans.

Now they need to kill somebody. Maybe it's just that back

in the day, you really couldn't pull the trigger, or the world

would have roasted. Maybe.

The first time I can recall people chanting USA...USA...USA!! was at the 1980 Winter Olympics, when the USA hockey team beat the USSR (remember those guys?).

In that instance, the pride people felt was because basically the USA hockey team were a real pack of amateurs, and the Russians were a professional hockey team, who pretty much never lost to anybody. The pride came in knowing that you were seeing an exceptional level of achievement on our side, and we just forgot about how maybe the Russians didn't play their best game that day.

When American young people moved into the streets Sunday night chanting USA...USA...USA!!, it wasn't because American underdogs had found a way to win the big hockey game. It was because American elite killers had finally found the one guy in the world they (and most Americans) wanted to waste. And they wasted him, along with several other human beings, and then dumped the body of the wastee-in-chief into the drink, where the sharks are no doubt shitting out his remains right now.

Pride in amateur sports has transmuted to pride in professional assassination.

So it goes as the republic fades utterly into the empire.

gfw

If it's Sunday, in Austin it's Time to Kick the Homeless

2011-05-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

Austin, Texas—getting hotter, and more awful every day.

Austin, Texas, which is my hometown, and a place I am increasingly glad not to live in any longer, has shown an increasing hardening of its heart towards the very people that once gave the city at least a little bit of distinction and character.

Instead of being just another 21st-century conglomeration of concrete, steel, and young unisex alphatards, for a while Austin held itself out as a place which welcomed what it called the "weird". In fact, part of the marketing of the city was a project called "Keep Austin Weird".

Of course the problem of marketing yourself as being tolerant of weirdness, or of unusual, often socially and financially challenged people, is that these folks might think you are telling the truth in your advertising, and actually come to your city, you know, to be weird for you.

And that, combined with the fact Austin has a climate that at least offers homeless people, for example, the chance not to freeze to death most of the year, has increased the population of the weird to the point where the "normal" people have had enough. In truth, they have always had enough, for just beneath the thin skin of fake affection for weirdness Austin promotes about itself, is an intense, seething disgust for that very same human quality.

An increasing number of Austinites, particularly in the largely Republican suburbs that ring Austin on the west and southwest, absolutely despise weirdness, and especially the homeless version of it, that they claim diminishes the quality of the lives of people who have homes. Recently, to illustrate that point, they charged a homeless man with arson, for allegedly starting a wildfire that burned and damaged 18 homes in Oak Hill, a southwest Austin suburb.

Even the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, a man who seems offensively weird to most of the rest of the USA, chimed in to say that the lesson to be learned from the incident was not that more attention needed to be given to the plight of the homeless, but rather that the arson laws in Texas (currently only offering a 20-year maximum for unintentionally burning people's homes) needed to be given real teeth.

Perry, voicing the opinions of many, Republican Texans, said: "I don't care if they are homeless."

And that is the increasing view of many people in Austin, who have voiced the most extreme hatred of the homeless. Comments at the statesman.com website have focused on the need, in the commenters' view, to provide a "final solution" to the homeless problem:

"Hope you feel good about buying their liquor while families homes are now destroyed. Great job. If you wouldn't give them hand outs... they wouldn't be there begging. It's like feeding deer."

"The homeless and the poor are worse than Democrats. They should all be rounded up and put in camps in Utah or someplace where we don't have to look at them."

"Get those bums out of Austin. Not only do they start fires they urinate on the street."

"I think we have proven that homeless individuals camping out can be quite dangerous and threatening."

"Their [the homeless's] anti-social behavior permeates everything they do, is a direct cause of a great deal of crime, and degrades the social fabric of the entire city."

Now, an incredibly despicable rule requiring the homeless to stand up at all times when they are out on the street (no sitting or lying down allowed), has been changed to allow people that are disabled (physically or mentally) to do so. Critics fear this leniency is a step back to the bad old days when weirdness was valued, and the most vulnerable people in the society were less hated by the residents of Austin.

As those stone-hearted residents become more openly and basely hateful, the city becomes more wretched, housing as it does more and more stupefyingly stupid Republicans every day.

The Eye of the Needle

2011-04-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

Only by the grace of God, i.e. only because God is a nice
person do the rich get into heaven. Otherwise, they deserve to
rot in hell.

Jesus made it clear that rich people needed all the help they could get to get into heaven. It wasn't merely a case of people with money being obviously evil, but it was that they were attempting to buy a ticket into a place made inaccessible by their Satanic choices in this life.

It is a simple calculation. If God praises and blesses the poor, and the vulnerable, and the rich treat them like dirt, how shall God behave when it comes time to judge the rich? Of course the rich behave as if their judgment has already been made, and that by being rich they are demonstrating their divinely-favored position in life.

But Jesus tells us, any rich person who imagines this to be the case is sadly deluded. In fact, the recipe for communion with the divine that Jesus prescribes is so alien to any allegedly true American way, it is a wonder any American claims to be a Christian.

Jesus says: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor."

And then, just in case you're still unclear: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

Got it?

But you'd rather not be perfect, would you? You'd rather be rich, and let the poor get their reward in the afterlife, while you'll be content to hang out with Satan, roasting away for eternity.

Right?

Or is it the case that you just didn't know Jesus plainly told you what to do with your riches? Well, read the Bible sometime. You might learn something.

Anyway, my real point in today's sermon is simply to note my article at examiner.com today acknowledges the emotionally unfit nature of rich people, which is being continually confirmed not merely by any observation of their wretched behavior, but by science as well.

"Quid Est Veritas?"

2011-04-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

"Behold, the Man!", said Pilate, hoping the beaten Jesus

would satisfy the mob, but it was Friday, and they wanted

their show, so Pilate sent Jesus to Golgotha, proclaiming

he did so under duress from the Jews, and without the

innocent blood of Jesus on his hands.

It would be nice if it were true, perhaps, that we only have to believe that long ago some dead Jewish criminal, executed for sedition against the Roman Empire, and thus having paid the price for all human transgression, rose from his tomb after 40 hours in Hades.

And now, if we proclaim Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior of the world, we do not have to die, but can live forever with God in heaven.

Jesus said he came into the world to proclaim this good news, and that his truth is open to any person who has the eyes and ears to see and hear the truth.

And yet, a skeptical heart, which must be the heart of any reasonable person, is drawn to that question allegedly asked by Pilate on Good Friday:

Quid est veritas?—What is truth?

Jesus does not answer Pilate of course. Quid est veritas? is a philosophical question, not a religious one. For a religious person, there is only one answer, without any basis in a tangible, demonstrable fact: God is truth. This is, for a person truly open to the Light of the Holy Spirit, as obvious as saying the sky is blue or that they love their children. It does not, and really cannot be explained to anybody else. It is a matter of deep, and unavoidable, faith in the divine.

But, is this evasion of Pilate's question an honest engagement? If it were a question about anything else, and we answered as Jesus—those who are open to truth will believe me, and otherwise not—we would detect a rhetorical rat. Jesus is implying of course that he possesses and expresses the truth, and the proof of it is that those who believe in him are capable of seeing and hearing the truth. And that is a circular argument.

Now, to be fair, Jesus spends a lot of time explaining what he means by truth, or by a Christian view of it. Basically, he says look to one's actions, in accord with Christian principles, and this reveals the truth of one's heart and convictions, and further is an exemplar of the greater, divine truth at work.

This is very appealing, but it again asks us to assume without evidence that there is a divine truth at work, and that a human being (especially one who claims it) is its holy agent. Why would God, necessarily, have any truth at all, or any purpose or plan to be working out in the Universe? It is fair to say that if he did, he might not see any reason to tell humans about it, or to reveal it in its fulness; but to entertain that point, we have to allow for the possibility of something never demonstrated in the entire history of the world (at least in the part humans have been around to document): that there is any God in the first place.

Let us skeptically demand to be shown, before we start arguing about the nature of God's plan, or how we may or may not fit into it, if there is any God to be making this plan. And what is this extraordinary evidence?

For most Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the answer is: the Bible (and Koran) is the Word of God, and it tells us He is real, and further that he cares about us each and every one.

But if I told you Winnie the Pooh was a documentary of a real animated stuffed bear, you would smile and know I was either exaggerating or suffering from a naive level of literalness.

Am I being insulting comparing the monotheistic holy books to a story meant to enchant children? Perhaps insult is the inevitable result of suggesting that people begin the often excruciating process of growing up.

Recall what Jesus says: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."

Now, generally, this is interpreted to mean: "Become trusting, unquestioningly faithful, children of God."

However, if you think about it, one of the key characteristics of being a child, even a little child, is that one asks questions. And given that the answers will necessarily be expected by adults to be taken as true without experience or demonstration, a child necessarily takes a lot of his received knowledge of the world on faith alone.

The good little children, presumably, accept what they are told, like what Jesus seems to be saying.

The bad little children, the intelligent ones in other words, knowing they have no personal experience of the myriad alleged facts and truths of the world, make a distinction between what they are expected to regurgitate or affirm to please their masters, and what they actually know. And they will not be able to keep from doing the right thing, to keep asking "Quid est veritas?", or simply "Quid est?"—what is it?

We should recall that Jesus does not say what kind of little child we should be. It is implied that all shall enter the kingdom of heaven, faithful and skeptical alike.

Yet Jesus does tell us that "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed".

But naturally these, like the poor and the meek, would need to be blessed (divinely favored), for they believe unquestioningly, and are at a disadvantage in a world of sharp, unforgiving duplicity. Jesus would tell us however that it is no disadvantage when one naively believes the truth.

That takes us back to Pilate's question, which again Jesus never answered.

As I said in the beginning, it would be nice if it were true, but in light of the lack of any evidence to think it is so, the Christian myth has to be rejected without hope of reasonable resurrection.

Happy Easter.

Sanctity of Life

2011-04-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Criminal executed according to the law.

No doubt Mary Fallin would have happily

signed the execution order.

Today on examiner.com, I covered a couple of governing topics:

1. How Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey imagines himself a bigger threat in 2012 than he appears to be, even in his own state.

2. How Governor Mary Fallin of Oklahoma imagines herself a better Christian than she appears to be, even in her own state.

I am particularly struck by Fallin's blither-blather about the "sanctity of life", meaning the burden poor women in her state have to birth a baby—whose life then magically becomes despised as a drain on state resources. Meanwhile, Fallin just signed a bill to make killing adult human beings on death row in Oklahoma a little easier. Now the executioners won't have to wait around to get "quick-acting" drugs to poison their victims. Any old drug will do—the kindly killers were running in short supply.

What would Jesus do? Probably not be very happy with these anti-Christian Christians he's supposed to count as his own.

Rick Perry and Austin's Homeless

2011-04-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

Irresponsible yahoo, i.e., the governor of Texas.

As noted here, Rick Perry entered the volatile debate about the real cause of Austin's wildfire on Sunday.

The fire, allegedly started by a homeless man who left his campfire smoldering while he went to get a beer, destroyed or damaged 18 homes in Oak Hill, a southwest Austin suburb.

Once the news was reported that it was a homeless man who started the blaze, the hate crew in Austin began plastering the much-despised (supposedly liberal) Austin American-Statesman with anonymous illustrations of the dearth of wits on the right side in the Texas capital.

One of the most honest expressions of the conservative point of view, and a posting the Statesman deleted from its comments pages, I suppose just because it was pure hate speech, is the following:

"The homeless and the poor are worse than Democrats. They should all be rounded up and put in camps in Utah or somewhere where we don't have to look at them. Then the world would be a much nicer, safer place to live."

Now sure, you can claim that's just some stupid troll, trying to get a rise out of silly rabbits that have a problem with fascist final solutions. But I think you all know that the majority of conservatives actually harbor those very views, even if they tell themselves it is a sign of their repression by "socialists" that they cannot openly express their opinions without being called stupid, monstrous, fuckheads.

Republican plan—deliver plenty of low-paying jobs to American "coolies"

2011-04-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Today's examination of the Republican master plan for most of you. Yes, there really has been a conspiracy at work, designed to wreck the meager balance between the power of employers and the employed. Shouldn't be a surprise. Capitalists ALWAYS do this, unless the people vigorously, regularly, stand up to them.

Follow me at Twitter

2011-04-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

Glenn Wright at Twitter.

Ronald Reagan, father of budget-breaking national debt

2011-04-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

When you get down to it, and not even that
far down, Ronald Reagan's assumptions and
style are a lot like the ancient child-gobbler,
Molech.

As I discussed here back on Reagan's centennial (which ironically came only a couple of months before the centennial of the Triangle Fire), the godfather of the postmodern conservative movement was the pioneer of running huge federal government deficits and building a giant national debt.

The reason Reagan did it was coldly cynical. His plan was that by cutting taxes, and getting huge increases in military spending, the resultant deficit-spending would outrage Americans so much that they would demand social programs (which Republicans derisively call "welfare") be slashed or eliminated. Obviously, one assumption of such a plan is that Americans are dumb as stones, which it would seem based upon history since Reagan, the former GE spokesperson was quite correct in assuming.

But one thing this chart makes pretty clear, to people who can read charts anyway, is that Democrats reduce debt, and Republicans increase it. This is because Democrats, until fairly recently, tended to raise taxes to pay for spending, whereas Republicans cut taxes on the premise that decreasing individual taxes (and especially taxes for wealthy people and businesses) would stimulate the economy enough to make up the difference in revenue.

That Republican assumption has proven disastrously wrong.

Here is what Reagan's chief economic guru, David Stockman, recently said about the Republican mantra that lowering taxes produces increased tax revenue:
"So we're spending $3.8 trillion in defense, non-defense, entitlements, everything else, and we're taking in only 2.2 trillion. So we got a massive gap. You have to pay your bills; you can't keep borrowing from the rest of the world at that magnitude, year after year after year. So in light of all of those facts, I say we can't afford the Bush tax cuts."

Stockman says it is quite clear the American people want their government programs, but they have been convinced by Republicans that they don't have to pay for them. In the same way Republicans convinced the majority of Americans, including very poor ones, that going into back-breaking personal debt was the best way to "have stuff" (identity is synonymous with obsessive consumption in the USA) and also keep everybody employed at their beloved jobs. That worked, via various precarious bubbles, until the debts, in ridiculously gamed mortgage securities, sent us into a worldwide Great Recession.

Now, in spite of what Stockman says is an American addiction to government assistance programs, another way of looking at the debt problem is that you could of course cut spending, as Paul Ryan argues in his "kill-the-poor" budget proposal. This Republican plan rewards the rich with over a trillion dollars of tax cuts (again, on the disproven notion that this will pay for itself someday), while slashing every social program to the bone. If that proposal is accepted, the short-term result of it will be to enhance the wealth and power of the richest Americans, while increasing immeasurably the suffering of lower classes.

The long-term result of it can only be conjectured, but even Ryan admits that for a LONG time, decades, the supposed debt-reducing benefit of his scheme will not be experienced. It is a long-shot gamble, and really an example of depending upon a conservative oracle, to turn the country (completely) into a poor-gobbling Molech.

Titanic Myths of Class Warfare

2011-04-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

Yep, just breaks your heart, doesn't it? Twelve millionaires.

And 1500 other people whose names didn't and don't matter

a damn.

As you will see here, back in the day, the MSM press crafted a myth of the noble millionaire, who stayed on Titanic and died, to give up a rich-guy's seat to women and children (most of whom were also rich or well off anyway).

A miner's union publication, picking up on this fact, two weeks into the myth-making, launched a critique of this elitist hogwash. Of course any criticism of rich people would pretty much guarantee you would be classified a "radical" or "anarchist", and shipped off to—well, they didn't have Gitmo yet, so often they just shot you and saved the time, you know.

Worship of the US military must end

2011-04-12T05:01:00.000-07:00

America's alleged "finest" holds up his latest trophy,
an Afghan kid the stupid American thug had just

murdered. A LOT of Americans think the thug
should have gotten a medal for showing "them"
what happens if you fuck with America—FUCK YEAH!!

This article, published back on August 31 last year, discusses one of the greatest problems the USA now faces, the elevation of the US military to the role of inerrant warrior nobility. It is an insane, self-destructive attitude, crafted by conservatives, who hated how the USA finally and utterly lost a big war in Vietnam.

The people's disgust with the Vietnam fiasco, and with learning about how awful the US government really had become—lying to the people to get the war going and keep it going—offended the simple-minded patriotism of peabrains who learned civics watching John Wayne movies.

Eventually those B-movie sentiments got Ronald Reagan elected, and he went about reinvigorating the military—by giving it a LOT of money—and turning it back into a killing machine the nation could root for (see "Top Gun" for an example of how Hollywood collaborated on that).

Be sure and read the comments from "anonymous". He's quite upset that the First Amendment gives me the right to say mean things about thugs with guns—you know without them shooting me for it.

gfw

The Republican Ethic—racist, hateful, murderous

2011-04-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

John Thompson, yet another black

man treated like shit by the USA.

Today at examiner.com we mentioned the recent Supreme Court decision, decided by the 5-4 Republican majority, to overturn a $14 million jury award to John Thompson, a man wrongly convicted by the state of Louisiana and sent to rot for years on death row.

Thompson wasn't just the victim of an inept defense, or the tendency of people to believe everybody charged is guilty. The prosecutors in Thompson's case actually withheld exculpatory evidence, with the intention of seeing him convicted and murdered by the state.

Even the Republicans on the Supreme Court called this "injustice". They just didn't feel like holding anybody accountable for it, just as they never feel like holding anybody (who is hurting poor people) accountable for anything.

Their ethic is "Do unto others viciously and profitably, and if you're caught plead national emergency or the special exemptions of the rich and powerful from being bothered by the little gnats of moral conscience."

Guillotine Blog Redux

2011-04-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

La Mort Du Roi Louis XVI

For a number of years, I wrote, under a nom de guerre, a blog called the The Guillotine. You can read the accumulated output of that blog, by getting the Guillotine collection—that is the posts from the first Guillotine.

This is the second round or effort at writing mean critiques, and will in part be aimed at giving me a place to expand upon issues I am reporting and commenting about on examiner.com.

Here, I will not be limited by considerations of taste and avoiding offending everyone on the face of the earth. I hope to offend you. All of you. Often. Somebody needs to.

As for a first topic, I am sure I will have something to say about the government shutdown, should it occur, but I have said some things about this already here and here.