I know what you're thinking

By Capt. Fogg

My first thought was: I've seen this scenario in some cheesy Tom Cruise infected Sci-Fi movie. Apparently that thought occurred to the Nature.com editorial staff as well. The Department of Homeland Security it would seem, is testing a system to detect malicious thoughts. No really.

They call it Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) because that's what government departments do with their doings, lest clear speech shed clear light. They make up acronyms that disguise the tunnels they dig under the foundations of liberty, but I digress. The technology purports to identify individuals who are planning to blow things up or have "malintent" as they say in the dialect.

Like a more traditional polygraph, FAST measures heart rates, among other things. Heart rates respiration and perspiration go up, after all when you're nervous about the bomb in your shorts or wishing you could throttle some thick-skull TSA twit as he gives you grief over an aspirin in your pants pocket that shows up on a scanner and starts groping you for explosives as you put your hands over your head in abject submission. Hell I'm sure I'd set off all kinds of alarm bells right now just thinking of how I've so often been treated as a felon on his way into the penitentiary instead of a tired traveler trying to get home.

I have no idea about what else this electro-mechanical night club bouncer measures and I'm not sure it invades any privacy that hasn't already been taken away by the cowardly traitors who passed the "Patriot" Act. I'm too lazy and too unwilling to provoke myself into another Lewis Black style tantrum to read the " Privacy Impact Assessment" our bureaucratic brethren at DHS have given us. I'll leave that to you. Besides my loathing of people who seem to exist only for the purpose of inserting that fly-blown and putrid metaphor into every sentence, it was written, most revealingly, by someone any German speaker will recognize as the Devil himself: Hugo Teufel III, Chief Privacy offer at the DHS under George W. Bush.

Does it work any better than the Polygraph does at detecting the evasions of sociopaths? It would have to, since those tend to be the people we're looking to put on no-fly lists and of course we won't have the results interpreted by a seasoned professional, but rather someone who was promoted from K-Mart security officer last week.

No, it's the stuff of B movies or sarcastic Dr. Strangelove sequels or even Orwell novels, but perhaps we've lost the ability even to see what the politics of fear has done to us in our cringing, cowardly new century.

Footloose II? Maybe not.

Over on Brilliant at Breakfast, Jill found this video. Please watch it in it's entirety (well, OK, halfway through, it just switches to alternate camera views of the same thing - I guess you've gotten the picture at that point).

Holy crap, right? This is America? No dancing allowed? Do we live in a police state? Did Reverend Shaw Moore get elected to Congress? What the hell? I thought Cheney and his jackbooted thugs had been disbanded.

That looks like a flash mob that hadn't really set up, getting shut down (and then thrown down) by Park Police. And did you catch that threat implied in the sergeant's statement, that "you might end up in jail for 48 hours"? And then the body slams, and... Oh my god!

But, you know, there's an old saying about every story having two sides. And that's a hell of an expensive camera that keeps showing up in frame: flash mobs don't tend to be using high-end professional video equipment. So I did a little research. First step: the video is branded "Adam vs the Man," and the title gives you the name "Adam Kokesh." So I looked him up.

Turns out that Kokesh is a kind of a media whore. He was a marine, and during his first tour in Iraq, brought back a war souvenir, which is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Now, Wikipedia quotes a story from the Newhouse News Service saying that because of that, he "was demoted to corporal and soon thereafter discharged honorably with a re-enlistment code that basically said, 'you can't re-enlist.'" He then joined the Individual Ready Reserve, which isn't a full-time active duty military slot, but is still in the military. Which means that he was still under the UCMJ.

So he wore his uniform to a rally protesting the Iraq War, which is also a violation of the UCMJ (he's allowed to attend political events, he just isn't allowed to be in uniform - the military doesn't want to appear to support either side of any debate). Got in trouble for that, but they went easy on him.

He started getting publicity for high-profile protests: a squad-sized "occupation patrol" of DC, to give Americans a taste of what it's like; holding up a large sign at the Alberto Gonzalez hearing, saying that Gonzalez had said "I don't know" 74 times; getting arrested for trespassing in Fort Benning; stuff like that. He rode his internet celebrity into a local libertarian radio show here in Albuquerque, which was picked up by the Russia Today television network.

(And, you know, really? Russia Today? I can understand making a living, and I, personally, don't have a problem with RT, but you can see where the image problem kicks in there, right?)

So, that's him.

Now, in 2008, a small libertarian flash mob gathered at the Jefferson Memorial to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson. In breaking them up, one woman was arrested. Her suit was tossed out, with the judge ruling in a 26 page report that:

"The purpose of the memorial is to publicize Thomas Jefferson's legacy, so that critics and supporters alike may contemplate his place in history. The Park Service prohibits all demonstrations in the interior of the memorial, in order to maintain 'an atmosphere of calm, tranquillity, and reverence.' Prohibiting demonstrations is a reasonable means of ensuring a tranquil and contemplative mood at the Jefferson Memorial."

"Plus, an organized protest is required to get a permit," the judge did not add.

And two weeks ago, the US Court of Appeals affirmed that judgement.

(Remember that thing about permits, by the way. And the phrase "organized protests.")



And the five protesters were taken to the police station, charged with demonstrating without a permit, then released a short time later.

Is this a stupid law? I think so. Did the police overreact? Well, hell yes. They didn't need to body-slam anybody - that was over the top. But I've done crowd control: they needed to move fast and shut this down before it escalated: the longer it lasts, the more people join in. And everything can get much worse, very quickly.

And were the Park Police placed in an untenable position? Looks that way to me.

Sunday Scripture Reading For All Lizards, Great and Small

h/t Nameless Cynic

Thought I'd say hi to Bradlee Dean

Since you can only send text in Dean's contact form, he isn't getting all the supporting links. Fortunately, I've got a hotmail account that I don't use for anything else. Because not only am I unlikely to get an answer to this, I suspect I'm about to be buried in religiospam.

Pastor Dean,

You know, it's a funny thing. I read your explanation of the controversy surrounding your prayer on the Minnesota House floor, and I'm a little confused.


I'll be honest. I never heard of you before. Maybe that's because I'm not from Minnesota. So there's that. But you're a man of God and everything, right?

You start the explanation by saying "Today I gave a prayer at the opening of the MN House session. Little did I know that I was going to be giving the prayer on the same day that they were going to have a vote on the marriage amendment." But apparently you had to push through the protestors to get into the building, and they were yelling and everything, and they were even there for two weeks already, protesting an issue that seems to be important to you.

So that doesn't sound like a very good explanation, but maybe you were just trying to say that you didn't know about that vote happening that day. I guess I can accept that. I want to be fair and give you the benefit of the doubt.

But then, your explanation of why you got struck from the record and Zellers denounced you and restarted the session with a different pastor giving a prayer and everything, was "Apparently someone was angry about my prayer because I invoked the name of Jesus." But that's not what anybody said at all.

I mean, if I understand the problem, the big thing was that you went up there and pretty much said that President Obama wasn't a Christian. You know, at the end of the prayer, when you were all like:

"I know this is a non-denominational prayer in this Chamber and it's not about the Baptists... or any other denomination, but rather the head of the denomination and His name is Jesus. As every President up until 2008 has acknowledged."

I think that was probably what the problem was. You seem kind of confused about that, so I hope this helps.

I mean, when Zellers, who asked you to come, denounced you, you said that "If Speaker Zellers does not stand for the Constitution, our veterans, the Founding Forefathers, and the Christian God to whom he swears by an oath to uphold these very things, then I would say Mr. Zellers is not fit to be the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Minnesota."

But that isn't what he said. You even wrote it out earlier, where Zellers said "He does not represent my values or the values of this state." He didn't say anything about the Constitution, or the Founding Fathers or God. You did.

But while I was reading that, I saw where you said that after you gave the prayer, "Before I knew it, instead of the media reporting on it as me standing up for our future generations, all of the sudden I became an anti-gay divisive pastor."

I don't think that was it, really. I mean, I watched the video, and then I read the transcript, and you didn't say anything about being gay. And since that couldn't have been why they said that, I had to go to the google.

And I don't think that you "all of the sudden became the anti-gay divisive pastor." What I think happened was that people remembered when you said that gays should be arrested and jailed, or when you said that Muslims were more moral than American Christians because the Muslims say that gays ought to be killed. (I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound very moral to me, saying that somebody ought to be killed.)

And in that same show, where you said about gays "On average, they molest 117 people before they're found out." (Where'd you get that number, anyway?)

Or when your volunteers ask for donations to stop teen suicide and get them off drugs, but all your programs are anti-gay and anti-abortion: nobody seems to mention that part.

Or when you and that Bryan Fischer guy said that gays are like Nazis. Or when you said that a Congressman, who's sworn to uphold the Constitution, is trying to bring it down and put in sharia law, and he's doing this by protecting gays from hate crimes.

See, when you say things like that, maybe you should check out what the media says about you each of those times. Because I'm thinking that maybe it wasn't "all of a sudden." I'm thinking that you've been called anti-gay and divisive way before now. And probably a lot of worse names.

God's own pimp

Most non-Christians are acutely aware of the crusade although it may be invisible or at least unnoticed to others. To many Americans, this is Jesus Christ's own country and it's just natural, rather than sectarian to point this out on every possible occasion; on occasions like Memorial day.

Now, my family has been in this country for 6 generations which should be long enough to consider oneself an American, but particularly here in the South, it isn't -- at least if you're a Hindu, Muslim, Jew or none of the above. If you're one of those, you probably, like me, wish the mood of the country was less of a relentless crusade and more of the attitude: you go to your church, I'll go to mine, but the rest, like a veteran's cemetery, is neutral ground.

This weekend, as expected, I'm getting forwarded messages about "treasuring our war dead" and supporting the troops and how we'd all be shackled slaves if it weren't for the US military bombing all those third world countries and kidnapping people like Noriega and overthrowing any democracy that seemed too socialist. Of course I'm one of those emotional types who is known to get teary-eyed at war memorials, but it's more about the lost youth and the precariousness of life than the glory of war and the glory of Jesus the divine ( or Yahweh, or any of the infinite number of gods we go to war for.) We've lost enough over the glory of some myth, thank you very much. If the flag pin patriots don't mind, I'd rather reflect on history by myself rather than to conform to some ever more sectarian ritual of self congratulatory jingoism.

I don't think I'm alone or out of the mainstream to think that a cornerstone of our country was religious neutrality; a country where the government neither supported or suppressed any religion, any god and in the name of freedom -- but that mainstream seems rather silted up and narrow and unnavigable on occasions like this when people who speak for our government decide their personal gods are superior to those silly, second-rate gods of others and the courts share their smug, condescending crusade.

So when the Rev. Scott Rainey decided to give a Memorial Day invocation, as he's been doing for a couple of years at the Huston National Cemetery and which closed with

"While respecting people of every faith today, it is in the name of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord, that I pray. Amen."

The Veterans Administration said no, you don't and presumably because it's not a Christian cemetery exclusively for Christians and because doing so at least hints at the establishment of a preferred state religion. Apparently Texans are offended that some heathen would dare to sit in the front of America's bus and took it to court. It being Texas, a judge arrogated that the government cannot

"gag citizens. . . in some bureaucrat's notion of cultural homogeneity"

Not even if that bureaucrat wrote the First Amendment. In fact it's the court's notion of homogeneity, that we're all Christians here, that it's a christian universe but we'll allow you lesser folks to sit in the back if you keep quiet, that stinks up the polluted air of Texas.

Thus spake U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, God's own pimp. Did the VA have the right? Was this an unconstitutional integration of church and state? Was this about 'homogeneity' or about respect for the feelings and rights of others including the non-Christian dead? Even if not, it's a slap in the face, whether thoughtless or intentional, to every atheist who died in a foxhole, every Navaho, every Jew, Every Muslim or Buddhist or follower of Shinto who served in our armed forces and the families who honor them and mourn them today. They are ours, not the property of Hughes or Rainey or the State of Texas and not to be used as a sales tool and if there is some special circle for such people, may they reach it soon.

If they're for it, we're against it.

By Capt. Fogg

The natural state of men, before they were joined in society, was a war, and not simply, but a war of all against all.

-Libertas, Thomas Hobbes -


Scanning the Facebook page of my congresscritter, Tom Rooney (R-FL) I find the real interest not to be the simplistic banalities and the strained attempts to generate outrage against Barack Obama. It's not the continuing effort by Rooney to portray the assistance being given NATO's actions in Syria as a constitutional violation; it's more about the truly demented calls for impeachment by the people who post there; calls that remain in view without comment by Mr. Rooney, who claims that he maintains the page to be more "in touch" with the sentiments of his constituents rather than as a tool to promote irrational rage for political purposes.

If he has some constituents other than me who disagree with the "Oh I just hate, hate him" and "Oh he just makes me sick" and the "he uses the constitution to line his bird cage" swamp dwellers, they must indeed like me, be very reluctant to post comments there under their real names. He's created a milieu quite hostile to reason and reasonable people offering constructive criticism.

Yes, of course there are many questions about the legality of George W. Bush's legacy, some of which -- too much of which -- remains in place, but the War on Obama is not really based on his alleged and often misrepresented constitutional infractions, and we know it because they weren't presented as such during the previous administration and indeed were eagerly supported by the reactionary beasts who hang out on the Rooney page to congratulate themselves and outdo each other on the size of their hate. Indeed, that place is a microcosm of our war against ourselves, a war of all against all.

It's not that I like Senator Rand Paul or his familiar pose of principled outrage, but I am indeed on his side when it comes to addressing the real constitutional outrage of the Patriot Act. I have to smile at what may be the end of his naivete because it isn't the Democrats at war with the Leahy-Paul Amendment, designed to allow greater oversight of ever increasing Government warrantless surveillance powers under that cynically named act. It's the Republicans supporting precisely the kind of power they pretend to oppose while posturing as libertarians to the frothy-mouthed and furious rabble.

“Unfortunately, what we’re finding now is that the Democrats have agreed to allow me to have amendments but my own party is refusing to allow me to debate or present my amendments.”

Said Paul. Imagine that.

But as the man said, the joining of people into a society serves to prevent the chaos of nature, and I have to ask myself whether the effort to portray anything social or designed for the common good as the unqualified evil of Socialism, did not have the promotion of that very bellum omnium contra omnes; everyone at war with everyone and every man for himself as a purpose. Perhaps when everyone is against everyone, such things as consistent viewpoints are illusory as is anything resembling principle. If you're for it, I'm against it may be as close as we can get.

The Last Hooyah

The next big, impossible debate in the budget boondoggle is defense. The president has called for reducing defense spending by $400 billion over the next twelve years. I'm all for those cuts, but, as usual, where to start? Cue the hue and cry, including mine.

"U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned on Tuesday that policymakers would face tough choices trimming military budgets, weighing cuts in pay and benefits against delays in updating aging ships and jets." (Reuters, May 24, 2011)

[QUOTATION MARKS AND SARCASM ALERT]

The Pentagon has begun a review of priorities and spending to meet the President's budget requirements. And Gates, who retires "in 2011" interviewed spoke yesterday before the conservative "think tank" American Enterprise Institute, arguing for "absolutely critical" new aerial refueling planes and F-35's for the Air Force and new ships and "eventually" new ballistic submarines for the Navy, and a "recapitalization" of the Army's infrastructure spending. And then had the nerve to offer up the following:

Part of this analysis will entail going places that have been avoided by politicians in the past.  Taking on some of these issues could entail:

• Re-examining military compensation levels in light of the fact that – apart from the U.S. Army during the worst years of Iraq – all the services have consistently exceeded their recruiting and retention goals;
•  It could mean taking a look at the rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to retirement, pay and pensions left over from the last century.   A more tiered and targeted system – one that weights compensation towards the most high demand and dangerous specialties – could bring down costs while attracting and retaining the high quality personnel we need;  and
• It will require doing something about spiraling health care costs – and in particular the health insurance benefit for working age retirees whose fees are one-tenth those of federal civil servants, and have not been raised since 1995. (DOD transcript)

As an Air Force wife (ret.) and Navy mother-in-law, I can tell you I don't want our poor pilots left fuel-less over the Atlantic nor our valiant submariners forced to find jobs on land in this economy. Nor do I want our kids in  uniform patroling IED'd roads in vehicles that offer them no protection, but that happened even when our military budget was at its highest. And, full disclosure, I sure as hell don't want the kids who have served multiple combat tours to be threatened by cuts in retiree pay, higher Tricare premiums, or reduced veteran's medical benefits just as we're bringing them home from combat zones. Therefore, I can't even write about this subject without all the marks of emphasis available on the Blogger post composition toolbar to express my sarcasm.

Because it seems to me that Gates is knowingly opening the political argument to sacrifice pay and benefits for both past and future personnel in favor of the continued development of the kinds of weapons that we once used to rattle at Russia. And he's doing it with all the timing and finesse of an Ahmadinejad. He's got his, he's preaching to the well-lobbied choir, and he knows the mood of the country has justifiably, exhaustedly, declared it ain't gonna study war no more. We've been told we won't need so many boots on the ground in wars (we won't even have to fight) in the future, because we'll have all these high-tech robotics that will sniff and snuff troublemakers for us (before they've even decided to think about attacking us) and the rest will be up to an All-Special Ops military. It's another War To End All Wars mindset.

US Navy Seals Website

I confess I couldn't bring myself to read the entire Gates speech as printed on the DOD website, so I supplemented it with the summaries of a few people who actually get paid to do this stuff. I'm afraid I only got more confused. As an example--and, by no means, the most confusing one--there's this from Bloomberg,

Gates also called for a more flexible retirement system to retain military and civilian personnel with critical skills. The current system provides full retirement benefits to those who have served for 20 years or more, giving them “every incentive to leave,” even if the military needs them.

About 70 percent of the military force doesn’t stay for retirement. 'Somebody who serves for 10 years leaves with nothing,' Gates said. 'That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not fair.'

What does that even mean? That we shouldn't let those poor, exhausted careerists go because they want to leave at the end of twenty years of sheer hell for low pay or that we should start paying benefits to anyone who re-ups past their first commitment? I would assume that, if you've survived the US military for a twenty year career, you're chock full of "critical skills," but that doesn't mean we should ask you to stay for thirty, much less that you'd agree after all the rule changes you've suffered in the first twenty. But, if we don't want to pay full benefits for a twenty year stint due to budget cuts, why discuss benefits for a ten year commitment? Gates is right; it doesn't make sense and it wouldn't be fair.

Yes, I'm just a wife and MIL, and I'm obviously missing the Big Picture. So, help me with this, Readers, because I have questions.

If we cut pay and benefits and lengthen the career commitment, who's going to volunteer for this All-Volunteer military? We'll be continuing the trend of pulling from those who, by virtue of minority status or sheer bad luck, have no other job options--only we'll be offering them less to work longer and harder. We already pay our military personnel poorly for their services at every level and rank, promising to make it up to them in future benefits and retirement pensions. If we're going to make further cuts both before and after retirement, we might as well turn the DOD over to the private sector and let them outsource this entire national security gig to developing countries. 

And make no mistake, it'll be about the pay. The last hooyah generation, the last of the kids who wanted to go out and fight for this grand country because it's just so darned grand, are within a few years of military retirement, themselves. And they've seen how this grand country values their well-being. The long, slow decline of taste for the kind of patriotism that spurs volunteers to fight some politician's wars began in the sixties and has picked up speed ever since. In an election cycle where neither party wants to go on record as being in favor of continued presence in Afghanistan, where will we find the psychological underpinnings of the gee-whizz, gung-ho attitude that helped the services meet their recruitment quotas, the attitude that still existed in some parts of the US in 1965? Which little girl's daddy is going to raise her to believe that fighting for her country is honorable work to be proud of after the exposé on the story of Private Jessica Lynch?

For today's Seal Team Six, it's about pride and country, but dick around with their families' benefits, their buddy's benefits, and pride won't be enough for them to recommend the military to their kids. The last hooyah will belong to Future Seal Team Six and the special ops personnel like them...those highly paid, highly skilled, highly educated, unimaginably well-equipped few who unquestionably have lifetime benefits that put congressional benefits to shame because there is national recognition of the Seal's comparative worth. It'll either be that down the road or the draft.

Stop listening to him! Pay attention to me!

OK, let's see if I can use one of these "internet memes" that all the cool kids are into.

Shorter Pam ("I probably am a vampire") Geller (Big Government)
AIPAC Applause-O-Meter

I don't care if you did hear cheering for Obama in the videos from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting. That wasn't cheering, it was just polite applause. And you know those crazy Jews - they'll applaud anything. Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying ears?

Cameron and Obama, Addicts and BFF

Recent op-ed piece in the Guardian by Simon Jenkins is worth a read. Here's an except:

"Obama and Cameron have let themselves become trapped in a lethal military embrace, one that has failed to deliver peace in Iraq or security in Afghanistan. It has destabilised Pakistan and spread al-Qaida's influence. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people to no one's obvious benefit, and cost billions of dollars that would have been better deployed on peace and reconstruction. Today, London and Washington are fortress cities through which their statesmen must travel like frightened rabbits, like Obama during his London visit.

"This was the legacy of Bush and Blair and it is the most barren in recent history. Yet it holds those successors in thrall. Neither has shown a capacity to disengage from the drums and trumpets of warin favour of a more subtle and more productive diplomacy. Until they do, any hope that the west's leadership might gain traction in the Muslim world is futile."

For full story go to Addicted to War.

School Superintendent Asks Gov. Snyder to Make His School a Prison

Nathan Bootz, the Superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools in Michigan, wrote a letter to the editor asking Gov. Snyder to make his school a prison:

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It’s the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,

Nathan Bootz
Superintendent
Ithaca Public Schools

I did not fact-check this as to whether Supt. Bootz's assertions on prisoner treatment are correct; I know that here in California we cut most of these services from our prisons years ago. I also know that anytime you make this kind of comparison, there is a risk of public backlash that will have the result it did here, removing program after program leaving our correction system little more than an overcrowded warehouse that makes serious criminals out of even the least violent offender.

Still, it breaks my heart to see this kind of desperation in a school administrator.

H/T to Big Think

Happy 70th

Before the day is out, all the best to Bob, my northern neighbour to the south...

MEET STORM, A CHILD WITHOUT GENDER

An interesting tidbit flittered across my screen that made me smile on a day when not much is going right. I found this story so profoundly wonderful and wacky I just had to share.

At four months old, Storm is the most recent addition to the Witterick/ Stocker household of Toronto, Canada which includes brothers Jazz and Kio. But for now, Storm’s parents aren’t revealing his/her’s gender.

"We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)"

Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher at an alternative school.

HERE is the story.

I found myself being able to identify with some of their ideas and concepts. I remember at the age of 8 wanting desperately to be a boy, mostly because my brother got so much attention from my Dad and a favorite uncle. I thought if I wished really hard and acted like a boy, I’d become one. This quickly passed and I became content to be a girl but many times I was told I couldn’t do something or follow a career path because it was reserved for males only.

One of my sons at the age of four wanted my mother in law to paint his nails with nail polish like hers. He liked the bright, shiny color. My father in law went wild,” You’ll turn him into a sissy!” I had to defend my mother in law’s action and my son’s desire for the innocent interaction it was. Today he is a man who seems quite well adjusted to his gender.

The notion of letting children develop their own personality and perspectives is appealing to me. Think of how much mental illness and or sociopathic behavior might be averted if kids grew up just being whatever they wanted to be.

Forget color, gender, religion and social status…

I’ll let Storm’s, Jazz’s and Kio’s Mom have the last word:

"Everyone keeps asking us, 'When will this end?'" she said. "And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?"

Lemmings

Well, it's a new week. Apparently the world ended on Saturday not with a bang, but with a whimper. If you're reading this, you're apparently a hopeless sinner, doomed to five months or so of torment before being sent to the fiery pits of hell, or perhaps (just maybe) Harold Camping was wrong.

Christianity tends to get a pass in our society. The most outrageous ideas popping out of the mouths of the sincerely religious are allowed to stand unchallenged (although other religions don't get the same respect).

But not this time, really. Most of us heard about Camping and his idiotic ideas, and most of us thought he was an idiot. But there were some poor gullible bastards who were taken in. Many of them were taken in completely.

A man in Nairobi killed himself because of Camping's prediction. A man in California tried to euthanize his pets. People have spent their life savings, families were torn apart.

And a woman in Antelope Valley tried to kill herself and her two daughters, by slitting their throats and wrists.

Fortunately, "murder/suicide" now joins "spotting fraud" as just another thing she sucked at.

Some people suggested that Camping had emailed a suicide note to the Family Radio employees and killed himself. Sadly, that didn't prove to be the case. He showed up the next day, confused that he'd proven to be a lying sack of fuck. As I write this, the Family Radio website hasn't changed their "Judgement Day - May 21, 2011" screen:

But I clicked on that microphone in the upper right, and that vicious, unwavering bastard is holding a press conference claiming that God has now judged the world, and it will still end on October 21st.

This evil fucknozzle has earned over a hundred million dollars with this scam, and he is still trying to keep it going.

The saddest part to all this is, Camping's followers will most likely just become more devout because of this. What needs to happen is that his victims need to sue him for his immoral con game. But it won't happen.

Because the one thing that lasts forever is stupidity.

Damon Fowler vs. Bastrop, LA

Graduating from high school is supposed to be a joyous time in a young person's life. For Damon Fowler, however, the celebration involved being lied to and ostracized by his community, and being booed as he walked across the stage in Bastrop, LA. His parents honored the occasion by throwing Damon's possessions out on the lawn in the rain, locking the house, and going "on vacation." Prior to this, they had cut off Damon's internet access and his contact with his brother in Texas who supported him.

It started about a week ago, when Damon objected to a prayer that was scheduled during his graduation ceremony. In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled against coerced prayer in a strongly worded decision which read, in part:

"As we have observed before, there are heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools. Our decisions in [Engel] and [Abington] recognize, among other things, that prayer exercises in public schools carry a particular risk of indirect coercion. The concern may not be limited to the context of schools, but it is most pronounced there. What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy."

Ironically, the original suit was brought by Christian parents who objected to a rabbi giving the benediction at their child's graduation. In the 18 years since this ruling, Christians have repeatedly and vociferously complained and fought against this ruling, illustrating the 'be careful what you wish for' aspect of any such effort.

When Damon went to the ACLU, the school backed down, and agreed to a moment of silence in place of the prayer. He then posted this on reddit.com, a social media site with a strong atheist community. The top-rated out of the 1,771 comments is a response from Damon's brother, who kept the community in the loop after Damon was cut off from communication by his parents. He conveyed the amazing support to his brother in conference calls through Damon's sister. Meanwhile, Damon's teacher Mitzi Quinn told the local newspaper, "[In the past, non-religious students] respected the majority of their classmates and didn’t say anything. We've never had this come up before. Never…And what’s even more sad is this is a student who really hasn't contributed anything to graduation or to their classmates." The paper reported that Quinn was given an award for her "great service." Damon received death threats, and his brother and sister feared for his safety attending the graduation.

I would dare any apologist to defend the behavior of the so-called Christians in this story. One of my dearest Facebook friends posted the graduation video with a comment that she missed the days we could openly make religious references in school, but what I saw was a student defiantly flouting the Constitution and going back on the school's promise, and the crowd cheering wildly:

But while Damon was cut off from almost every avenue of support, wonderful things were happening across the internet. A Facebook fan page now has 10,115 people who "like" it (though some apparently clicked the like button so they could say hateful things and boast about how the prayer was said anyway, that's to be expected). The FFRF had already awarded Damon a $1,000 scholarship, but an additional scholarship fund was set up on ChipIn with a goal to raise $10,000. The total donations now stand at $14,482.75, thanks to support by prominent atheist bloggers like The Friendly Atheist.

The most striking element of this story, to me, is the terrible behavior exhibited by the Christians in contrast with the outpouring of support from the atheists. I'm sure my own cognitive biases are hard at work here, but I just spent the last few hours reading through a huge amount of commentary on this subject and I have yet to find one redeeming comment from a religious individual, even among my own friends. I had intended for my first post to be more of an uplifting story, but the more I read about this, the more I despair for the prospect of coexistence. Yes, this one had a happy ending, but my mind keeps going back to the thought of one kid, alone and scared, publicly shamed and cut off from support. How an entire community, including that child's parents, could come together to do that is beyond me.

The First Cephalopod in Space

The space shuttle Endeavor is carrying the first cephalopod in space. Called Euprymna scolope or bobtail squid, the onboard passenger will be the subject of experiments to test the Transpermia Hypothesis, also known as exogenesis or panspermia.

We are talking about space aliens in the form of microorganisms imbedded in meteorites that came to Earth billions of years ago and seeded our planet. If life came to Earth aboard primitive rock ships, then linguists are likely to build big words from Latin building blocks: Hence the term lithopanspermia.

Yes, our ancestors may have come from Mars or Venus or other corner in space, found a hospitable home on Earth, and evolved into the flora and fauna we know today. Sound far-fetched? Not according recent analyses of space borne particles.

In 1996, a meteorite originating from Mars was shown to contain microscopic structures resembling earthly nanobacteria. Although debunked and ignored for years, David McKay of the Johnson Space Center reexamined the sample in 2009, using an electron microphotography technique not available in 1996, and found “strong evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars" (source).

In 2001, researchers from the University of Naples claim to have found live extraterrestrial bacteria inside a meteorite estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old. The scientists resurrected the organisms when they immersed their rock samples in growth medium. Similar to modern day Bacillus subtilis, they say, the DNA is unlike any found on Earth (source – bilingual English/Italian).

Earlier this year (March 2011), Richard Hoover of the NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center published this paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites.

Our stalwart cephalo-astronaut is not the only non-human inhabitant aboard the space shuttle Endeavor. Five strains of bacteria will be used to test the exogenesis theory, specifically whether or not Earth borne microbes can withstand extremes of temperature, zero gravity, and high levels of radiation in deep space.

For our high-flying squid, this experiment is about the beneficial bacteria that live inside the sea creature's body. Called Vibrio fischeri, these bioluminescent organisms generate light which give our squid the ability to outshine its own shadow and mask itself in water.

Previous experiments with microbes in space have shown that some bacteria turn nastier when subjected to extremes of temperatures and radiation. In 2007, for example, a Salmonella sample was three times more likely to kill their hosts after returning from a shuttle mission. Nasa wants to observe what happens to mutually beneficial microbes when altered in space. Will these bioluminescent bugs transform themselves from dim to high intensity?

Watch Octopus ink the aquarium and then turn supernova.

Fizzle ...

Water sports and frozen treats

So, what we have here is a semi-major blogger, Debbie Schlussel, leaping to a blatantly ignorant conclusion... No, wait, I'm sorry. Please replace the end of that sentence with "openly lying."

And then put a period after it. That should pretty much cover everything.

See, Debbie's not as famous as, say, Pammycakes over at Atlas Snores, but she's just as Islamophobic. Debbie, after all, is the one who thought it was great that reporter Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo during the riots (it "warmed (her) heart" that people could see what savages these heathen be), or who calls for full-on genocide against all Muslims everywhere ("Rot In Hell, Osama Bin Laden. One down, 1.8 billion to go... many of ‘em inside U.S. borders") despite proudly proclaiming herself "granddaughter of immigrant Holocaust survivors" (Cognitive dissonance is her stock in trade, after all).

But she's willing to go to the mat for her fantasy causes. Case in point:

Philly Muslim Ice Cream Truck Driver Had Urine Popsicles to Sell

Was Muslim ice cream truck driver Yasser Hassan planning to serve “urine popsicles” to non-Muslim Philadelphia area kids? It’s not clear, but Hussein was drunk driving his ice cream truck in the area and police found at least one bottle of frozen urine in the refrigerator that was used to store ice cream sold to children. They also determined that the condition of the entire truck and the ice cream was unsanitary. But, no worries, as the Koran and the Hadiths would say it’s okay to sell this to infidel kids. Oh, and like all the good Muslims who preach to us not to do this and not to do that, he had quite a bit of alcohol in his system and in his truck, despite the fact that this is haram (forbidden) in Islam.

At the moment, there are 54 responses, ranging from "Damn those Islamic types!" to "OMG!! we should Sind all theese terrerist ragheads back to irak where They cum from!!1!"

There could be 55 responses, but there aren't. See, I've done long-haul driving, most often in nuclear convoys. Here's the one response that Debbie decided didn't make the cut editorially.

OK, y’all can feel free to be stupid about this if you want, but people who spend all day in their truck often pee in bottles. And I’m thinking that with an ice-cream van, that’s even more true: it’s harder to lock up. (From experience: if he was smart he was using a gatorade bottle – wider mouth.)

The problem is especially bad with long-distance truckers. The problem is so widespread that some lawmakers have had to take action.

You can google “urine bomb” or “pee bomb” on your own, if you try.

It's not pretty, but it's the truth. But they don't care about "facts" over there in Spittle-Flecked City.

Apocalypse tomorrow

What you gonna do
When Death come creepin' in your room?
O my Lord what shall I do?
Gonna run, gonna hide,
Gonna fall on bended knee
O my Lord what shall I do?

Mance Lipscomb -Run sinner, run-

_______________

The clock is ticking folks. What are you going to do? Duct tape and plastic sheeting? I don't think so. You need to be prepared for anything. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control thinks you're remiss if you haven't prepared for the Zombies who may well be roaming the streets after Saturday evening's apocalypse, looking for brains. (It you're a Teabagger, you can stop reading now. You won't have a problem there.) The CDC link will take you to a list of recommended supplies:

"So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored). . . . for a full list visit the CDC Emergency page."

In addition, I would certainly include firearms, at least one of which should be a shotgun ( and lots of shells) and always remember to aim for the head.

For those of you who are sure you're actually going to be raptured, I'd suggest you wear sky blue clothing since many of us will be down here with shotguns and itchy trigger fingers and not only Ted Nugent. Don't be an easy target. Don't dress like a duck or a zombie.

Here are a few tips:

1) Refrain from drinking liquids after 3:00 PM, there are no rest stops along the way
and God doesn't like to pull over.

2) Say goodbye to us sinners before leaving the atmosphere. In Space, no one can
hear you scream.

3) Bring a firearm. There will lots of traffic and that means road rage.

4) And behave yourself -- don't make God stop the car and come back there!

UPDATE:  Your Weekend Weather Forecast:

T minus 48 hours and raving

Dies iræ ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla !


Well the End is neigh and a Day neigher than it was yesterday, but the proof is certain, says Harold Camping, even though he formerly had 'proof' 1994 was the big one; the Dies Irae, the End time.

But he has proof that God is allowing us to have gay pride parades and same sex marriage as a set up for the fall and the proof is in something called the Book of Jude, which I'd never heard of, my Bible ending somewhere around the book of Daniel or so and being in various Semitic dialects, not Greek. Anyway Camping says God all gaybashing mighty explains it in Jude 7 which is funny because although the Bible has at least two names for God ( and two versions of the stories to go with them) Jude isn't one of them. The real Tanach doesn't tell us that the elder Yahweh or the somewhat later Elohim wrote it either. That was Moses, it supposes -- nor did the prophets claim to actually be God, but that's a long road I won't go down today, you'll be pleased to hear.

But seriously -- it's important now in these last days before John the Revelator's ( also not God) psychotic episodes come true, to be familiar with the words of God, speaking through Jude and Camping (the least godlike of all) of course, so I looked it up to see just who this fellow was, but although I did find a site that explains it all, I had to stop reading the explanation when the writer accused Theologians ( as to be distinguished from believers) of incompetence.

" This subject is under constant dispute by many theologians. The trouble with them is they can't read English."

Stunning and in the interest of brevity I could quit right here -- but I won't.

I certainly can read English, but I can't claim to be an authority on this questionable early second century book, since I can't read Greek, so score one for The Bible Study Page. I'll even overlook the gaseous certainty that whoever the author claimed to be, he must then be, and the ubiquitous practice of naming anonymous religious texts for long dead prophets. I'm just not in an argumentative mood.

So I'll have to believe them when they say that God himself guarantees that Jude, like James, the Upright, was the brother of Jesus, but as the English language was more than a thousand years away in the future and out of respect for Mrs. Christ, or Miriam as poor old impotent Joseph ( who none the less made other kids with her) called her, let's call them Jehudi and Jacov just like their mother did. Not nice to contradict Jewish mothers, I can tell you -- I mean you want to talk about days of wrath?

So then -- just what does Jude 7 give us as the WORD OF GOD that can't be attributed to Jehudi son of Miriam or some other writer in another country?

"In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire."

Well I guess Jehudi would know, being the half brother of the son of God or maybe the full brother - who the hell knows, but it's funny that neither of the real Gods, Yahweh and the Elohim mentioned this a thousand years and a half earlier and what they did mention didn't need some adopted son to relay the message. I thought it mentioned something about inhospitable treatment of strangers, and condoned tossing your virgin daughter to a crowd to be gang raped, but as the book was likely written quite a long time after these cities disappeared, who the hell could possibly know?

Anyway, since neither Lot nor his daughters were blasted to hell for incest, I think we can dismiss the sex thing entirely, OK? If Mrs. Lot was fossilized for looking over her shoulder, but Lot gets off for free (yes, that's a double entendre - aren't I wicked?) the whole God-hates-perverts thing came right out of Jude's ass and into Camping's mouth.

As far as I can gather from Bereshit, or Genesis, Gay Pride wasn't the problem with the cities of the plain at all, and as far as we know, ancient Greece wasn't blown to hell by a firestorm like Gomorrah, nor was Egypt whose kings made Oedipus look like a prude, but who am I to argue and point out contradictions?

Like the Wrong Reverend Phelps, Camping believes "God hates fags" and is going to kill most of us for allowing them to live in peace like other people, just like he killed the Sodomites and Gomorrans for their gay pride parades and same sex marriages. And he'll find proof somewhere whether it makes sense or not, and since none of his followers are really quite sane, it doesn't matter.

The real proof of Camping's high fecal content will come at the International Date Line ( no, not the phone sex number) on 6:00 PM Saturday when nothing at all happens and the Repo men will begin to pick up all those vans, The leases on the billboards will expire, his followers will stand around like fools looking at them and wonder how they're going to get their property back and the 18 million dollars Camping has raised will likely disappear into various "good works." Perhaps he'll rapture himself to Marbella or Monte Carlo.

Anyway, Even though there are two sets of commandments given in two slightly different settings by Gods with two different names in the Bible, it's obvious to me that God doesn't like having words put in his mouth and for those who believe Jesus was Divine ( no, not the Drag Queen) I think Jesus didn't think much of you putting hate speech or damnation in there either. Of course in my personal religion, God not only speaks through our mouths, he speaks only through our mouths and thus nobody can be certain of what he's all about. Certainly for those like me who escaped out the back door during those weekend religious study classes and actually read it in its entirety, Psalm 77:19 comes to mind.

"Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. "

Like the Poet said: nobody knows where God is going or where he has been and his wake is long lost in the waves, so stop pretending you know.

Newtie!

OK, let's be clear here. We want there to be no misunderstanding.



Are we clear on that? He misspoke. It wasn't what he meant to say. He was frazzled. That wasn't a planned speech; he just went off the cuff, and dropped the ball. He went out there, and just flubbed it. It was a mistake, now let it go.

Of course, context is important, right? So let's take a look at these impromptu, unrehearsed remarks that he regrets having said now.

("But," I hear you wailing, "that'll take forever! That fucker starts talking and just won't stop! I don't have that kind of time! Plus, his voice gives me the shingles!" Ah, but I wouldn't do that to you: this is just the money shot. Three minutes and two seconds (plus a 15 second ad, because MSNBC has to pay the bills).

.
See that? Off his game. No way he could have rehearsed that, right? All that stammering and stuttering. He was winging it. Never would have said something like that. He was taken completely off-guard. Anybody who could say that was a prepared argument is just blind.

So let's repeat this for you. It's very important that you understand.



You got that? This has nothing to do with Newtie spending 15 hours on the phone with every Republican in Congress. The Koch brothers didn't say a word to him. It was a complete misunderstanding. He was tired, and had to squint to see through the glare off David Gregory's platinum helmet of hair. He opened his mouth, and some truth just fell out. That's so unlike him! It landed in a big pile of bullshit, but there it was, naked. For everybody to see. It was embarrassing, but that's our Newt. Big enough to look the camera in the eye and lie his ass off about it.

And by the way, don't make fun of Callista.


She can't help it. It's fucked up you're even talking about it.


Bitch ain't crazy.


It's congenital.

Apocalypse fer sure

By Capt. Fogg


Well folks, here it is again. The doomsday circus is back in town and guess what's happening in the big top in less than three days - that's right, it's the rapture and we're all gonna die screaming! OK, maybe some of y'all are actually Holy Smoke Church members and won't have to sit here through the tectonic shimmy, the lakes of fire and all the other rides while Jesus, like some Mexican wrestler with a gruesome mask is gonna kick some infidel ass, but not yours, Mr. camo pants. You get to go to the magic kingdom. You'll have to leave the truck behind, of course.

Yes, May 21, 2011 is right around the corner and Doomsday, as it has been countless times before, is almost here. For perhaps the first time however, these prophets have recognized that there are a dozen time zones and so Saturday at 6:00 PM, starting at the International Date Line out in the pacific, the apocalypse will march across the planet at a thousand miles per hour - boy can those horses move! That means we'll get to watch it all on TV as that Titanium robot, or whatever Jesus comes dressed as these days. kicks hell out of Asia and moves on toward Europe. That will give a lot of people her in God's own US of A enough time to convert and yes, you can do it on line through Paypal.

Not me though, It's going to be months before the planet is cleansed of disbelief and animal life and since the righteous will no longer be here, I get to grab their trailers and second hand pickup trucks and ATV's and firearms and stuff and me and the other heretics can shoot guns and barbeque like Ted Nugent. It's gonna be a hell of a party - as long as the beer don't run out before that lake of fire thing.

Anyway, the Rapture should hit the fan at my house at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight time according to God's infallible plan. That's about the time pious Jews will be ending the Sabbath and I'll be watching it all unfold from poolside and I'll have plenty of ice on hand. Perhaps I'll live blog the whole thing. Stay tuned.

Cornel West and the Blackness Patrol

I'm not a fan of Cornel West nor his buddy in the "Obama isn't black enough" club, Tavis Smiley. West identifies himself as a part of the black intellectual elite and as such, fully expected that he would play a pivotal role in Obama's campaign and be an often consulted advisor of the nation's first black president. His issues with Obama began when Senator Obama was running for office. The commitment that West, Smiley and others demand from Obama is to support black interests at the costs of all others.

Yesterday, columnist Chris Hedges' graced us with an article entitle The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic. In the first line of the article, Hedges dubs Cornel West a moral philosopher and a voice of moral conscience if Obama's ascent to power was a morality play. Funny, I don't recall any meeting of black folks to elect West as our moral compass. If any of y'all took part in this vote, drop me a line and tell me when and where the election was held.

A telling story on West is that he was livid that he did not receive tickets to the inauguration. I have to wonder how much of his criticism of the President is motivated by his hurt feelings that he has not been included in the President's inner circle. The point of West's diatribe against Obama that he shared with Hedges appears to center on West's belief that Obama is a sellout who is a white man in a black skin. West pontificates at length on this topic:

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable."

Dr. West, you're full of crap. West is a professor at Princeton, not exactly in the hood. What credentials does West posses that qualify him to define blackness and exclude those whom he feels don't do "being black" right? It's a rhetorical question; he has none. It's difficult enough being marginalized based on skin color without the further complication of having members of your own group decide that you don't measure up to some arbitrary standard of membership in the group. West also takes issue with Michelle Obama, questioning why she doesn't visit a prison or "spend some time in the hood." 

West and Rev. Al Sharpton engaged in heated debate at Smiley's recent annual State of Black America conference. Sharpton insisted (rightly I believe) that Obama is the president of all the people and that promoting policies that benefit all Americans will benefit black Americans. West insisted that Obama has become the soul of darkness itself, betraying the poor, particularly poor black people. However, I don't think that West's ire comes from any real belief that Obama is the anti-Christ; he's upset because Obama stopped calling him on the phone.

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people."

West does deal with some substance as to his issues with Obama. He feels that Obama has betrayed his populist promises, adopting a centrist agenda instead of the progressive populist agenda that Obama promised during his campaign. I give West some credit on this point. I think that on many issues Obama has chosen to be centrist or as West puts it, an advocate of a neo-liberal centrist policy in the same mold as Bill Clinton. I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm a pragmatist and I never believed that Obama would be able to implement a purely progressive agenda in less than a single term. Change is always incremental unless it's done through revolution, which seldom works out well as the lofty goals of the revolutionaries are soon corrupted.  West never fully fleshes out the specifics of his issues with Obama's presidential policies and decisions; instead he goes off on another rant declaring that the President "...feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want...”

West does raise concerns about the have-nots in America, the people who have been marginalized and haven't fared well under any administration, including the current one. I could get behind a push to urge Obama to take more aggressive steps in addressing eroding poverty in America but I don't buy into West's vision of himself as a prophet shouting the truth in the wilderness nor his vision of Obama as Darth Vader embracing his dark side. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done but the President has given no indication that he is unaware that the journey has only just begun.

Hedges is late to the party. West's rants against the president are nothing new in black media.  He and Smiley had a hissy fit when candidate Obama declined to attend Smiley's annual State of Black America conference. Smiley has declared himself the voice of black America over the last decade and West has bestowed his blessing on Smiley. The other third of this triumvirate of blackness is Michael Eric Dyson, who joins Smiley and West in measuring the President's blackness and finding it insufficient. If you are truly interested in keeping up with what a lot of black people are talking about, add Black America Web to your bookmarks.

For another perspective on West and Hedges' article, please check out this article by Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University and a colleague of West,  Cornel West v. Barack Obama.

Clearly, I don't believe that the President is immune from criticism; neither does the author of the article that I recommended above. I think that he has made missteps and errors in judgment. However, Hedges' article isn't about those errors and missteps as much as it is about Cornel West, a man with a self-inflated ego who is peeved that his "greatness" is not fully recognized by the President.

Cities of the plain

By Capt. Fogg

There are people who give Free Speech a bad name; people who use any freedom the government protects to undermine and destabilize and overthrow that government and exploit the population -- and all for personal ( and corporate) gain.

Such are the shadowy, entities behind the multi-headed beast pumped into a frenzy by unaccountable and uncountable millions they get for the purpose: entities like SOCYBERTY.COM whose recent post was sent to me by a breathless Republican eager to impart the secret knowledge that no, President Obama did not give the order to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan because he is a dithering, indecisive coward and the reins of government have been pried from his trembling, black hands. You see, Leon Panetta had to "override" Obama with the help of cabinet members and that eye-rolling Minstrel Show clown is too afraid now to tell the truth. Holdouts like Valerie Jarett aren't telling us either because of the "investigation back in Chicago" but there was a silent coup and Obama is no longer in control.

"What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound."

Of course no news agency; not ABC or NBC or FOX or CNN or BBC or Deutsche Welle or al freakin' Jazeera knows about this, only SOCYBERTY.COM and all the other PAC funded heads of the same hydra who are cutting and pasting and posting these stories. Google it and you'll see. They have secret sources in the cabinet, you know, who will commit treason only for them.

Sure, we can see it as the desperate death throes of a humiliated racist party, a wicked witch melting and hissing on the floor, but I can't forgive it and I can't forgive the people who e-mail it around the country like some titillating photo of some stoned starlet getting out of a limousine in a short skirt. I can't forgive, I can't forget and while old Yahweh was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of ten good citizens, no God worth his scriptures would forgive a country that contained ten such unpunished liars as these.

COMMON RAPS, OREILLY FLAPS

And Jon Stewart enters the fray…

Last week, President Obama hosted the rapper, Common at the White House. Since he isn’t white and espousing poetry with Biblical overtones, the talking heads at Fox have jumped right on the kool-aide wagon over this latest action that proves Obama is a facist/Marxist/commie sympathizer who is not an American citizen.

Seems Common has joined others in criticizing the handling of the cases of two people convicted of killing cops. As with many cases from the 70s and early 80s, procedural errors and other questionable tactics in cases involving persons of color perpetrating crimes against whites and authority figures were often ignored and/or covered up.

The two individuals involved, Mumia Abu Jamal and Assata Shakur were not exactly pillars of society and both were once members of the Black Panthers and other activist groups. Both were put at the scene of the crimes they were convicted of but both cases also raise lots of questions about the fairness of the justice system.

OReilly threw down the debate gauntlet in front of Jon Stewart who eagerly accepted the challenge. The video of their exchange can be seen HERE.
While I think both of them are publicity sluts, whoring for ratings, I did find the exchange of some merit.

For one thing, OReily tips his hand to his true objections when he questions why this rapper who is not identified as a poet should have been invited to the White House at all. Apparently Bill is now an artistic aficionado and all artists invited to the White House need his seal of approval. He adds weight to his remarks (in his mind anyway) by asking the rhetorical, “Do you know how many poets would have loved to be invited to the White House?” Jon showed class and restraint in NOT answering, “I don’t know, Bill – how many?”

I am sick and tired of angry, old white men, born of privilege and entrenched in their own racist, bigoted beliefs continually trying to regress society to a prehistoric social system. STFU!!!!!!!

I am heartened by Stewart’s reasoned responses as well as Obama’s recent smack down of the birther debate led by that cotton-haired loonie, Trump. Obama weathered the scrutiny of his (non)relationship with Bill Ayers and I think this latest pseudo-outrage will also become Common.

In the meantime, we have quite a few groups in this country working to review cases and bring true justice to victims by ensuring that not only is justice served fairly but that it is served on the actual perpetrator of the crime. The fact that these groups exist and are finding errors and wrongful convictions does not speak highly of how our justice system has operated thus far. This SHOULD be the topic of discussion.

The knock on the door

By Capt. Fogg

We've got a hard core Socialist Radical in the White House if you listen to people like the Koch Brothers -- and make no mistake, we do listen to them whether we want to or not and whether the slander comes from their mouths or the thousand mouths that speak their words. Yet the slide toward the right, the slide toward authoritarianism, the slide toward the business of America being war, continues without much popular resistance. Unless you mean the resistance of the voters of course but the voters don't matter since they're drawn along like hyena puppies following their mother, snarling about Socialism and Taxes.

Can we blame Obama, who hasn't done much to stop the wars, close the torture chambers and offshore prisons, end the DADT charade, temper the growing power of the Executive Branch or give us the kind of transparency in government we were promised? Sure we can, but if every naive campaign promise had been acted upon, we'd still have a long way to go to stop that slide.

Even while the Republicans, including my own Representative Tom Rooney, (R-FL) are howling about Obama exceeding his powers by authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya, his party has proposed giving the president even more war powers. The House Armed Services Committee's National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the United States to use military force anywhere there are terrorism suspects, including within the U.S. itself, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, yes, I know, you hate the ACLU Libtards, but I don't suppose you like the idea of a president sending the marines to your neighborhood or invading any country the president suspects may be harboring "terrorists" either. As it stands there was little opposition in the house save for one member of the House Armed Services Committee: Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) who was the sole dissenter. Now let's all raise our right arms and shout "Libtard."

The President didn't ask for this awesome power boost. He didn't suggest that he needed it. He didn't ask for the extra billions in military spending or another extension of the Afghanistan War. It was the smaller government folks. It was the Republican House hissing with a forked tongue from both sides of their smirking mouths.

Yes, we're sliding and it's not toward Socialism but toward a military/police surveillance state. It's the courts, like the Indiana Supreme Court that has handed us a ruling suggesting that Indiana Police no longer need warrants nor to be in hot pursuit nor need they have probable cause to enter and search your home for any reason - and may beat hell out of you with impunity if you "resist."

“A right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,"reads the decision.

And we're babbling about Planned Parenthood and NPR and the ACLU Commies and against right of the government to flood some fields to save millions of people or take poison of the store shelves in violation of sacred property rights. We're fantasizing about being economic secessionists free or restriction or responsibility. We're oozing lofty proclamations about property rights and the government of no government like medieval monks talking about angels and pinheads and hunting for witches and heretics.

Obama can't fix this and all the Republicans can do is offer people like Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann. Maybe we can't fix it either and if you want to know who's to blame, you need look no farther than your bathroom mirror.

Why we need Ron Paul

by Capt. Fogg

I rather hope Ron Paul becomes the Republican presidential candidate in the next election. It's true that I agree with some of what he says, some of it quite strongly and it's true that I disagree as well and just as passionately, but if he is Barack Obama's challenger, the nature and tone of the debates and the wider campaign will have to address some fundamental assumptions that always are ignored. One of the many fundamentals that separate the left from the new right is the ranking of rights in our society. Paul asserts what most of his party would rather hide beneath heaps of polemical hyperbole: Property rights are the basis of freedom and being thus fundamental, must not be abridged for the common good.

I'm one of those people, you see, who thinks all ethics, or at least all ethical judgements are situational and that what we like to call fundamentals is an abstract construct, a bit like Euclidean geometry, which is immune from other, perhaps decisive factors. Parallel lines do indeed intersect in a universe with curvature and morally clear decisions become less clear when they have to cope with the purpose of morality and ethics.

Speaking to Chris Matthews last week, Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) declared that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- not because he's a racist, and to be sure he says he would have desegregated government institutions like schools, but because the rights of property owners are fundamental to our basic freedoms; freedoms that our constitution implies, are rights inherently and independently fundamental as they stand. Is he insisting that those with no property have fewer or no rights? That's up to him to clarify and I expect he would like the oportunity.

“I believe that property rights should be protected,”

says the man from Texas. Who would disagree when that's presented in the abstract? But life isn't an abstract thing and may I defend building a nuclear waste dump next to Manhattan because of that declared axiom? Are property rights part of a constellation of rights all designed by humans to make human life free of certain abuses? Are rights, like Newton's laws, fundamental or descriptive? If they are things invented by the people and for the people, to what purpose were they invented; to protect the one against the many or the many against the one or both? Do they apply equally at all points on the long curve or are only around the middle where we experience things?

I'm sure Paul would have to admit with liberals, that there are limits to "fundamental" rights, but just what those are and for what reason those limits are put there needs to be dragged out of the cave and into the light. Do rights exist for the benefit of people and if so does the right of one man always trump the right of every man? Are we here for the law or is the law here for us? Do the rights of all really flow from the rights of an individual or are individual rights sometimes an impediment? If there is an impediment to that road to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, must 300 million of us endure it so that the abstract right of one may be protected? Yes, that's extreme, but as with Newton's laws, it's the extremes that absolutes are shown not to be so. In short, can Libertarian theory produce a country that any of us will want to live in - in whole or in part?

(Of course if I were to debate him, I would, in my quasi-deconstructionist way ask him what he means by property and whether that question isn't more fundamental because without asking that, defending property rights can defend slavery or rape and some slightly worse things.)

We need to talk about it. We've been stuck at this point for too long. These concerns aren't new and they aren't going away and we all need to rethink our opinions at a fundamental level as a regular practice. I think Paul and Obama are both well qualified to do it and will do it -- and if we have to endure another hysterical fugue about flag pins and death panels and birth certificates and Communism aimed at the stupidest elements of the population; lies and slander and tactical statements of opinion that a moment may reverse - - well let's just say that the civil war doesn't need to be fought this way again.