A CEPHALOPOD MYTHIC MOMENT

A mighty discussion we had earlier this week on mythy matters posted by our mighty Bloggingdino: Dinos and Darwinists, a worthy read.

In the interest of cultural exchange between species, your intrepid Octopus wishes to introduce you to the cephalopod pantheon. You didn’t believe me, did you! Well, here they are:

The Great and Mighty Igjarjuk:

The Servant and Adversary Triton:

Now, for some holy words from the Cephalopod Scriptures:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Escargot.

Millions, billions, trillions. . .

I'm pretty new to Twitter, but the place sounds like an aviary today with all the giggling about Sean Hannity's statement that Acorn, the subject of much hilarity this week, is slated to receive eight and a half TRILLION dollars from the government. I'm not sure that Sean is aware that the Census bureau dropped ACORN a week ago as Fox reported. Even so - $8,500,000,000,000.00? Sean, thousands, millions billions trillions -- there's a difference!

So I'm wondering if maybe the next time I call him Insanity Hannity y'all won't say I'm over the top? I mean, I'm just sayin'.

It's about policy

About one out of three New Jersy "conservatives" seem to think that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, says TPM. About half of those think he has the number 666 on his scalp. To me, the idea that that many people can assert that the concept itself is rational is shocking enough, but of course, as Michael Steele assures us, it's certainly not a racial thing. That the same third believes he wasn't born in the US couldn't be other than a valid suspicion independent of his complexion either. Oh no, it's not about his color, it's about his policies and one certainly notices a lot of policy discussion amongst the pistol packing, Kalashnikov carrying crowd carrying signs calling for the murder of his children. It was about his policies quite a bit before anyone know what those policies might be.

"I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American"

said former President Jimmy Carter yesterday. That's a massive understatement in my opinion.

"When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds,"

Indeed they were out of bounds some time ago and the early defensiveness of his attackers about "the race card" long before accusations of racism began to emerge suggests an awareness. At this point, I don't think any doubt remains as I don't think there has been such an irrational series of accusations and threats of violence since the Salem witch trials. Posters of Obama as an African warlord or as a Nazi in "teaparty" posters reek of racism.

It's inevitable that someone will comment that there are deranged Democrats and racist Democrats and stupid Democrats, fallacious defense though it might be. I'd like to ask just how many people showed up in protest of Bush's illegal actions carrying weapons and carrying signs demanding the death of the president, his wife and "stupid children."

Here come the Judge!

Orly Taitz - the name seems designed for mockery, but anyone so inclined hardly needs such a prop. Yes, she's the one who is still filing lawsuits, using our clogged-up courts as a soapbox to give the voices in her head an audience: the voices that say Barack Obama was born In Kenya on a variety of dates both before and after it became a Republic and is ineligible to be president. So far it hasn't been working out well. That may change.

She's been serving as council for US Army Captain Connie Rhodes who volunteered for service in Afghanistan so he and Taitz could file suit for the right to refuse the orders he requested to be given. Other than the fake birth certificate Judge Clay Land of the US District Court in Columbus, Georgia says is inadmissible since she paid to have it made up (the fact that it's dated incorrectly and got the name of the country wrong doesn't help its credibility) she has presented nothing but a series of diatribes and no evidence whatever that could refute the State of Hawaii's certification that Obama was born in Honolulu.

It's not good to try fooling the judge. Clay threw it, and her apparently, out of court saying she:

“has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Instead, she uses her complaint as a platform for spouting political rhetoric, such as her claims that the president is ‘an illegal usurper, an unlawful pretender, an unqualified impostor."

WTVM-TV in Columbus reported, that the judge also stated that Orly Taitz,

“will be subject to counsel sanctions for bringing any future actions in his court which are similarly frivolous.”

Think you can slow down a wingnut that easy? Sorry, the Taitz has inflicted another suit in the US district court in Santa Ana, CA using another, differently dated, bogus certificate she also claims to have obtained by bribery in Kenya and other servicemen who claim they won't go because Obama isn't really president.

Will Judge David O. Carter give her case the same heave ho? Don't be too sure. Judge Carter, a former U.S. Marine, repeated several times that this case is very serious and must be resolved quickly so that the troops know their Commander in Chief is eligible to hold that position and issue lawful orders to our military "in this time of war." He's already refused the Obama team's request for dismissal. The plan, according to Jeff Schwilk, founder, San Diego Minutemen who somehow seems to have a voice in this, is to force Obama to reveal his true birth certificate - right, the one he revealed a long time ago and which was attested to by the governor of Hawaii and their director of vital records.

"Taitz did a great job, winning some huge victories today, she was fearless!”

said Schwilk, to the SonoranNews.com I'm sure she was. A sane person would have been terrified.

Am I mocking the innocent here? I'll leave it to you, but we can be sure that we will be hearing from people who condemn this disrespect for fraudulent, seditious cases and believe every word of these charges. Oh, those Liberals! All they have is mockery!

Rush's tale

A Tale of Two Cities, The Miller's Tale, a tale told by an idiot - it doesn't matter in the great game of Pin the Tale on Obama. Any tale will do. Your host today is Rush Limbaugh and he's here to tell us that a tale of someone getting beat up on a school bus can be pinned on US President Barak Obama. What? You want a reason? Well two black kids beat up on a white kid for some undetermined reason and because nature abhors a reason vacuum, the bell rings and we pin the tale on Obama!

That means of course that this incident, because there doesn't seem to be evidence of it being race-related, instantly goes on to round two where it becomes the model for the future Where Barak Obama individually directs the actions of all high school students ( remember the speech?)

"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering,"

said Rush yesterday. In other words, the fact of a biracial president guarantees that the "darkies" will no longer frolic gaily about the plantation as God and the GOP intends and as Rush proves, have already formed an American Mau Mau movement to invade the inner sanctum of the white race, rape our women and drive the streets of Palm Beach in Escalades with that terrible racist music blaring while Rush is trying to sleep.

That's right - the white kids get beat up - all of them and all of the black kids will cheer and because this has never, ever happened before when the White House was really white, it's Obama's fault, QED.

Tune in tomorrow when Rush will explain to us that all the mockery he gets from those miserable liberals proves that everything he says is correct.

SAYING GOODBYE TO SWAYZE

Patrick Swayze died today at the age of 57 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Swayze always seemed like a stand up guy. He was married to his wife, Lisa Niemi for 34 years and by all accounts they were devoted to each other. Not only handsome and talented he was a passionate conservationist, spending time in Africa to draw attention to the devastation there caused by men’s greed and disregard for nature.

Patrick Swayze will probably be best remembered for the oft repeated line from the movie, Dirty Dancing, “nobody puts Baby in the corner.” Or the tear jerker pottery scene from Ghost, “I love you.” “Ditto.”

But I was more impressed with his performances in the movies, Next of Kin and Roadhouse with Sam Elliot where we were introduced to the musical genius of Jeff Healy, a blind blues and jazz guitarist who also died of cancer at the age of 41.

Swayze’s last gig was the dark drama on A & E, The Beast, but due to his declining health, it had to be cancelled. He maintained a positive outlook throughout his illness, but was ever cognizant that the odds were not with him.

"One thing I'm not gonna do is chase staying alive...You spend so much time chasing staying alive, you won't live."

"Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet Prince.And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." -Horatio

Dinos and Darwinists

Dinosaurs and Darwinists

Capt. Fogg’s post about that Charlie Darwin movie’s travails leads me to offer a post of my own as an extended comment. Yes, I saw the article – the depths of ignorance on this issue are so profound as to invite comparisons to the Kantian sublime. One hears again and again from the fundamentalist crazies that eee-volushun is “only a theory.” Which statement of course proves they have no idea what the word “theory” means in a properly scientific context. They seem to think it means something like “a wild guess,” whereas by the time something sciency gets itself labelled a theory, it’s already been used to make medicines or send rocket ships to the moon. The details may be subject to revision, but in the main the theory will hold true.

What to make of the fact that despite this battle’s having been waged and won decisively by the supporters of science about a century and a half ago in Great Britain, we still see such poll numbers in our own country? Well, for one thing, they invalidate any notion of “progress” whatsoever – if in fact the notion still needed invalidating, which it really doesn’t thanks to a number of cataclysmic human events during the last century. But more interesting is that the continuing refusal to deal with the cosmic “facts of life” may stem from the inflection in uneducated minds of a struggle over one of the great human questions: how to live, or, more particularly, how to abide in this life with some purpose and at least guarded optimism. The question itself is entirely legitimate even if we reject any notions of the inner purposiveness of the cosmos, but its inflection in the minds of the ignorant is most unfortunate and has led to a decades-long pogrom against reason, science, and even sanity.

I put the matter this way because I am not sympathetic to today’s worshipers of reason and all things merely human: they reduce great questions to triviality, and miss altogether the moral eloquence and even beauty with which certain texts in Scripture address human suffering and aspirations. We have met with them before, along with our hopelessly misguided and sometimes vicious religious fanatics – the latter, I think, assisted by a fair number of tortured souls who don’t really believe in talking snakes and six-day ex nihilo creation extravaganzas but whose need to believe leads them to assert (with all the bitterness and ferocity of bad faith) the absolute and literal truth of statements they know, deep down, can’t be literally true. Comparatively few people, I suggest, are now capable of what Alfred Tennyson called the “simple faith” of their agrarian forebears, men and women who lived before the full development of modernity. Refusal to deal with the basic fact of evolution stems from an abnegation of the religious spirit as it has been articulated by intelligent people for many centuries now: was it not the devoutly Protestant John Milton who wrote, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue” and who railed at those who would impose censorship upon the free discussion of ideas? And doesn’t the Catholic Church now profess that it’s by no means impious to accept the scientific evidence in favor of evolution?

To rely solely upon the compulsory ignorance of others as one’s best defense against anything that might threaten faith is to dishonor oneself and one’s religion. If one wants to claim that a God has imbued humanity with some measure, however limited, of the divine intelligence and integrity, the willful stupidity that would ban a science textbook or a film dealing with evolution degrades that claim beyond recognition. Augustine and Aquinas tell us we can know God best by that which he is not – and one of the things we had better hope God is not is bloody stupid.

Mock around the clock

Obama is a man of parts, more parts than I can keep track of and the number of parts grows every day - every hour if you inhabit the Republican loonysphere or have friends that love to put you on wingnut mailing lists.

He's a terrorist, a pied piper leading our children to Maoism and Sharia Law, a guy who murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours. He was born in Indonesia and Kenya and went to a terrorist indoctrination school.

He's listed in the Book of Revelation by name as the Anti-Christ.

He's a Marxist and he's a Nazi who nonetheless wants to disband or weaken the army to the point where the communists take over - or maybe the "Muslins" as a sign waver tells us. He's a child molester who parties with homosexual child molesters on the White House lawn. He hates white people. He wants to remake the country in the mold of "European Socialism." He wants to confiscate your guns and declare martial law and send Republicans off to "camps." He murdered and raped a young girl in 1990. He hates "white culture." He's a man in the mold of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and perhaps Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

He wants to ban all religious broadcasting in the US. He hates Christians, he was raised by a racist Christian minister. He had Chrysler dealerships owned by Republicans closed. The "Obama Tribe" was behind the recent political unrest in Kenya. He plans to bring his Kenyan family here illegally. He wants to give illegal aliens free medical care at taxpayer expense. He wants to make Capitalism illegal. He refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He supports infanticide for unwanted newborns.

He lies. He lies about everything. He's gay too, but this only a taste of the vast shit salad being offered up at the loonyville diner. I'm sure you can find more if you try, but if you do, don't tell me. With all this mindless, immoral mockery, I'm starting to think that maybe the guy really is the Messiah.

Censorship in America

Anyone still clinging to the excuse that religion is a source, or the source of morality should examine the foetid depths of moral emptiness to which religious authorities will descend in defense of something demonstrably false and viciously idiotic. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish informs us that:

"A celebrated new movie about one the world's greatest scientists cannot find a distributor in the US."

Although Darwinism thoroughly proves the idea that complexity and organization do arise and evolve over time as a result of mindless algorithms, most Americans, with the help and censorship of the Christian establishment, not only are totally ignorant of the evidence, ignorant of the principle, but are unaware of just how much Darwin's dangerous idea has revolutionized such diverse things as the development of the digital computer and epidemiology.

The Christian establishment has of course tried to satanize everything from the telescope to the ratio Pi to the barometer over the centuries and of course has punished science and scientists heavily, but such things now go on mostly in the United States. Contrary to George W. Bush's assertions, the jury is not out on Evolution any more than it's out on the Pythagorean Theorem, the Speed of Light or the age of the universe. But far worse than the pathological denials of fact are the immoral, dishonest and dangerous attacks on Darwinian science as a source of extremism. A "Christian" website thatpre -judges movies for the believers has launched into an attack on Creation so viciously dishonest that it has succeeded in censoring it so that cannot be shown in the US.

It's easy for someone with little education and a superstitious mind to buy the slander that the philosophy of science founded by Charles Darwin leads to eugenics and that Darwin himself was

"a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering."

But of course we're not told how little the real Darwinism has to do with the "survival of the fittest" interpretation cooked up by others. One might as well blame Louis Pasteur for biological warfare. One might as well blame Nietzsche's hatred of anti-Semitism for Hitler. One might as well blame Jesus for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the dangerous lies of the American religious right. That less than 40% of Americans "believe" in evolution shows the cultivated and stultifying ignorance that lubricates our downward slide, that produces the enthusiastic gullibility that produces sign waving mobs and demented political displays.

Of course the Christian jihad against science and scientific method and scientific epistemology is part of a larger Church led war against Democracy. The concept of heresy, the freedom of opinion, is a grave offense but the backbone of autocracy and the greatest impediment to Democracy in history has been religious orthodoxy. So far they've kept that movie out of our country and our survival depends on their failure to maintain our ignorance.

THE BUSH ECONOMIC LEGACY

(Double-click on the image to enlarge for readability)

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

- Shelley -

The U.S. Census Bureau just released this report on income, poverty, and access to health care. The report is a damning indictment of the Bush/Cheney years. Not just one Bush presidency, but the unholy trinity of the father, the son, and the ghost of Reagan … a veritable one-two-three-punch right in the economic gut of Middle America. On every major measurement, the report shows the country losing ground: Median household income declined, poverty increased, and the number of Americans without health insurance skyrocketing.

Compare the economic performance of the Bush years with those of Bill Clinton: The condition of the country improved on all indices during the Clinton years, often considerably. In fact, the Bush economic record wipes out 20 years of economic progress. Indeed, I look upon these mighty Bush works and find myself in deep, deep despair.

UPDATE: This article by Dylan Ratigan, Americans Have Been Taken Hostage, deserves a mention within the context of this post:

The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system. It is a system that remains in place to this day. A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.

A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.

It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.

A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.

And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.

Like health care, this is a referendum on our government's ability to function on behalf of the American people. Ask yourself how long you are willing to be held hostage? How long will you let our elected officials be the agents of those whose business it is to exploit our government and the American people at any cost?

SECOND UPDATE: James' Muse has a lively discussion on supply-side economics here.