Pat Robertson -- where do I begin? I don't know whether his record speaks worse of American stupidity or of his character.
No, I'm not talking about the soliciting of funds for relief in Rwanda that actually were spent on Diamond mining operations in Zaire with dictator President Mobutu Sese Seko and to benefit other African genocidal madmen. I'm not talking about questionable use of Katrina relief funds or various tax-evasion charges. This Bozo runs a faith-based circus of stupidity and one of his side show acts is to be the grinch who stole Halloween or All Saints Day as it was known for a while.
Robertson's God forsaken parody of a broadcasting network, CBN, has a dire warning on its blog about virtually all Halloween candy having been "prayed over" by witches and carrying curses and spells which will be absorbed by any children eating it. Halloween is dangerous, it warns. Don't buy candy in October! It's a holy day, but if it's not a Christian holy day, it's a SATANIC holy day. Nice insult to the vast majority of humanity that's given up belief that ancient Celtic religious practices had anything to do with the Devil the Christians invented to demonize other religions.
"Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store." Says CBN.com
The colors orange brown and red are dedicated to Satan. Respect for the Earth is Satanic. Bonfires are about Satan, even the harvest is about Satan. Everything he doesn't like is Satan -- everything is Satan and the world is full of evil entities and magic and spells and his followers listen with a straight face.
I could go on, but there's enough raging pathological, libelous insanity and foul ugliness to drive any normal person to projectile vomiting. Read it yourself,** but there's something wrong with a nation that once considered this man for President, something insane about a Nation that still talks about witches and spells and a political party that embraces this ugly medieval madness.
** Since writing this last night, the article about witches, Halloween and demonic tootsie rolls has been removed from the site.View the cached article
That guy in front of you, the one who can't stay in his lane, who takes 20 seconds to respond to the light changing to green, who needs four lanes to make a turn, who slows down for green lights and sails through the red -- who amongst us hasn't made rude anatomical and ancestral references? Perhaps we should be more tolerant.
Steven Cramer, a neurology professor at the University of California Irvine, has published a study in Cerebral Cortex that indicates the presence of a gene variation in about 30% of the population that makes them not only bad drivers, but drivers that don't learn from their mistakes. I've read many studies showing that nearly all accidents are caused by a small percentage of drivers and that that group is not distinguished by high speed driving. They're just bad drivers and maybe we now have some idea why. As to whether this genetic marker occurs more frequently in some population segments? Why yes, I do have a ten foot pole, but it's on my boat and I'm not going there, thank you.
I don't want to put too much faith in one study, but I do like studies that confirm my prejudices and maybe the next time some idiot looks me in the eyes and pulls out onto the highway 5 feet in front of me or stops on the entrance ramp or cruises through the red making a right turn, I'll roll down the window and shout "You miserable, brain-derived neurotrophic factor deprived mutant!" instead of the usual.
Not long ago the Dalai Lama made a stunning statement; “The world will be saved by the western woman.”
This was spoken not as just an observation or opinion but also as a directive to women everywhere. What would prompt this purported holy man of Tibet to make such a decree?
There has been a shift of sorts happening over the last decade or so that is culminating in a redefining of gender roles. Women are bumping into fewer and fewer “glass ceilings”. They are holding positions of power and influence worldwide. Many times men are choosing to take on more domestic roles or are being pushed into such due to job loss.
This role reversal has become pretty mainstream and we are no longer surprised by it but what is different is the manner in which women approach their new role as monetary provider/ position of power.
In the past, women adopted a “masculine” approach to workplace promotions, sacrificing their feminine side in order to be taken seriously in a “man’s world.” Now some very influential women are trying to unite the many groups of women awakening to their potential into a larger, more cohesive group able to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of our time. Maria Shriver has called attention to this shift with her annual Women’s Conference. There is also an online series taking place each week bringing together thousands of women from around the world with extraordinary women visionaries as guest speakers.
The series centers around the question, “What is our role as women in creating the future of our world?” The series is called “Women on the Evolutionary Edge.” If you want to register for the series, you can do so HERE. It is never too late and you can join anytime. It has grown in just a few weeks to 15,000 registered participants from around the globe! And they are expecting many more in the coming weeks.
There are several ways to participate; you can call in and listen and then take part in a post discussion via phone or you can listen live and instant message. If you miss it completely as I had to this weekend because of a prior commitment, you have the option to download and listen to the recorded session.
This past week’s guest was Dr Jean Huston. Doesn’t ring a bell? Don’t feel bad, I vaguely recognize only a name or two on the list. But listening to Jean was illuminating. She has lived long enough to have known, Einstein, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead. You can google her to read about her extensive list of accomplishments and experiences.
The focus of this week’s session was on women working together to learn how to wake up to our potential strength and creativity, and then to empower other women by teaching them to do the same. Women have in them the capacity to be a part of the greatest change in world history, consciously choosing to practice joy and share it with others. That means abandoning whining and victimhood. We must come together and stand together in celebration of who we are, confident in the power we have to foster positive changes in our world.
The purpose of this awakening is not to take over the world but rather to work with men in partnership, inviting them to join the conversation and work in unison to create a sustainable future.
If any other women made it to this week’s session and have something to add, email me and I will post it below my observations. And, don’t forget, it’s not too late to participate HERE.
No offense intended to the Buddhists out there, but the middle path is often the road to hell. While I'm as apt to ask why we can't just get along as any other exhausted and beat up person, I'm not about to attempt it with the people who tell me that it's OK to launch into hysterical fugues of hyperbole about leading Democrats and things they never said or did, but insist that reacting to it in any way but submissive whimpering is nastiness or name-calling and a justification for further libel, slander, bigotry and threats.
I'm disgusted enough to dream about my own gun-toting tea party when citing established facts or exposing blatant lies of the previous administration are described as being just as bad as the furious lies about death panels, birth certificates and Presidential Marxism. Citing massive evidence for global warming is just as bad as comparing Democrats to Communists. Detailed studies showing that certain economic policies produce recessions, that markets self-regulate only within certain limits is just as bad as incitement to murder the President's family, as accusing him of murdering his grandmother and planning to murder yours. It seems to escape a great number of trolls that calling a thief a thief is not the same as accusing an honest man of stealing. Truth matters, facts matter and nothing but weeds grow in the space between facts and lies.
Is retaliation really the equivalent of unprovoked aggression, is self-defense? I don't think so. Is there a reasonable middle ground in an unreasonable attack against reason? I don't think so. Where after all can a middle ground exist between lies and truth; between insane accusations of Marxism or Fascism or extending Medicare being just like Pol Pot or Leon Trotsky? And where does the accusation of being the most, far-left radical Liberal ever to sit in the Senate intersect with the actual Obama who so far seems far too conservative for the people who voted for change?
Are we really the "party of hate" for "picking on" poor Rush for engaging in unprovoked and dishonest slander or trying to defend against him? Is there really any relationship between the label Liberal and the attempt to identify it with irrational hate, beyond the wish of an unscrupulous aggressor to distract us from discussing truth and responsibility?
No, the shadow world, the bizarre country between whatever the truth is and the worn out, beat up used car the Republican apologists are trying to sell is down some rabbit hole somewhere. Some twilight zone where all the terrible things we said about Nixon were untrue and just political, but none the less Obama, by beginning to denounce some of the lies told about him is "building an enemies list" just like Nixon. Nixon wasn't a bad guy they say; it was all political, but Obama is a bad guy for being like him -- even when he isn't. I told you this was a strange land.
Old Nixonian Lamar Alexander suggests that the administration might, like Nixon adviser and Watergate felon Chuck Colson, be planning to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." So what advice is Lamar giving here? Obama should, he suggests, stop blaming the banks, should stop chastising the insurance companies, stop taking advice from advisers Congress hasn't approved ( remember when Bush asserted his right to do so and our non-right to know who they were or what they said?) and stop "calling out" members of congress who disagree with his policies. That's like "street brawling." Calling a lie a lie? That's the equivalent of Nixon's plan to use the IRS to "go after the Jews." That's just like burglary, Arson and obstruction of Justice!
Not.
Curiouser and curiouser, this path between truth and fiction and somewhere Lewis Carroll is watching this through a looking glass.
This post is long overdue. It is inspired in part from this commentary, Suffer the Little Children, by Southern Beale and this incident, Hate Begets Hate, reported by Southern Female Lawyer, who recalled this conversation with a stranger while shopping:
They have a young child and just couldn’t bear the thought of their child growing up in this sort of cultural environment … But the straw that broke their hearts was when they were at a local flea market … and there was a vendor there selling Klan material. And as it turns out, this woman and her family are of a group that is frequently targeted by the Klan …
Here is Southern Beale’s follow-up commentary:
What is the point of all the battles over de-segregation and all of the ground gained over the past 30 years if we’re going to self-segregate anyway? I certainly can’t fault anyone for doing what they think is best for their children … But the entire conundrum depresses me.
Indeed, one can hardly fault any family for wanting to keep their children safe from bigots. Yet, this tendency to self-segregate runs deeper than we realize. We no longer cluster along ethnic, racial, or economic lines; we self-segregate along political and cultural lines … with potentially dangerous consequences.
This is the thesis of Bob Bishop’s landmark study, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. According to Bishop, the terms “red state” and “blue state” no longer refer to those states that return Republican or Democratic majorities, but to groups of people clustered within communities who self-identify across an array of opinion: liberal versus conservative, urban versus rural, and religious versus non-religious, as examples.
As evidence, Bishop cites major changes in the electoral map over the past 33 years. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the presidency by a razor thin margin; yet 26.8% of the vote came from landslide districts where Carter won or lost by 20% or more. The number of landslide districts had grown to 48% by 2004 … almost double since the Carter era.
Another study compares educational attainment and geographic mobility. In the 1980s and 1990s, 45% of Americans with a college degree moved from state to state within 5 years after graduation, compared with only 19% of the population having a high school education.
It is not difficult to imagine how and why we make conscious decisions that alter the electoral map. When we canvass neighborhoods looking for a place to live, we tend to notice the McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden signs in front yards. We may look for a bookstore or a gun shop, or a fundamentalist or Unitarian church in town. When choosing where to live, our decisions are not necessarily guided by economic considerations, but by cultural and lifestyle choices.
(O)CT(O)PUS is no less guilty. I am a northern transplant living in a southern state. There is a saying where I live: “The further south you go, the more likely you will meet northerners.” I have witnessed racism at both ends. Racism is palpable and visible in the South; racism renders you invisible in the North. In the South, racism is a snake that strikes suddenly; in the north, racism means a slow, agonizing death by venom.
After the hurricane season of 2004, I turned refugee. I sold my beachfront home and moved to Lake County along the central ridge where I learned: Racism is cultural and systemic, not merely historical.
Lake County Florida is infamous for the case of the Groveland Four, an all too familiar story about the alleged rape of a white woman by four men who were beaten and forced to walk barefoot over broken glass until they confessed. It is the story of a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall who appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, about a sheriff who was a Klan member, and the murder of two civil rights activists whose home was bombed on Christmas Eve.
I witnessed weekly acts of racism in the local cafes; the harassment of a black woman at a lunch counter; epithets hurled at a black family by a passing bigot. As I witnessed these encounters, I felt assaulted. When I spoke out, I almost got assaulted.
After a year, I returned to the coast where I bought a condo. My Lake County home along the central ridge, my refuge from coastal storms, remains unsold. Having witnessed racism first hand, I can well understand a family's concerns for the welfare of their children.
Yet, we pay a price for surrender. Over time, according to Bishop, a preference for living with like-minded neighbors in extreme homogeneous communities incubates ever more extremist views. Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members to Congress while moderate candidates shun public office. Among highly polarized lawmakers, debates degenerate into shouting matches as legislators engage in obstruction and gridlock. That is how our most urgent and pressing issues go unresolved.
Due to clustering, we are less likely to converse with people holding different views and more likely to caricature them. Democrats and Republicans alike are more likely to assume the worst, each regarding the other as “incomprehensible.” Even in the judiciary, Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. As Bishop states:
“ We now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”
This discussion about clustering and the dangers of a “Balkanized” America leads me to an overwhelming question. When I look at our comment policy, we are remarkably efficient at dispatching unwelcome trolls … and rightfully so. When I read the first sentence, the one that states, “We welcome civil discourse from people of all persuasions,” I wonder: How welcoming are we? We tend to treat conservative visitors with suspicion, not always with justification.
Let me elaborate. Recently, we had a visitor who said: “Thanks for not flaming me or deriding me or calling me ridiculous names as has been done on other sites by less than honorable liberals.” Patrick of Sane Political Discourse has always been a civil and respectful guest on our beach. I reserve my highest compliments for Pamela of The Oracular Opinion. There were times when I leveled harsh criticism, but Pamela has never wavered. She treats all bloggers, conservative and liberal alike, with the utmost kindness and respect (even after being miserably mistreated by an overly aggressive cephalopod).
So what do you say, fellow beachcombers? Shall we swim against the tide and give our conservative guests a chance to establish themselves as friends and neighbors before we dismiss them as trolls? I welcome your feedback.
No, that's not some Zen Koan, it's Rush Limbaugh. Caught being fooled by some blog with a fake Obama speech allegedly from his college years, Rush didn't apologize for his total lack of journalisticintegrity but instead called it "satire."
"You can't beat that", said Chris Matthews this evening on Hardball this evening and he's right. Rush did his usual bouncing up and down excoriating Obama for advocating massive redistribution of wealth and using as evidence a speech Obama never made. Typical Rush stuff and typical Limbaughian attempt to weasel out of it.
Humor he said, needs to have a grain of truth in it and this is humor, which of course wasn't identified as such until it became clear Rush was a victim of an amateur hoax, and that truth is provided by our inner knowledge that although Obama never ever said it he somehow has inner knowledge that Obama was thinking it - as has not been demonstrated. Get it? That's right. Rush is a mind reader and therefore can be excused for denouncing someone for something he never said or did. You can't beat that and since we know Rush is a Satan worshipping prophet of the Auntie-Christ who eats cute puppies, has sex with dead goats, is an admirer and homosexual lover of Slobodan Milošević and has a secret collection of Nazi memorabilia in his attic that he wears on Jewish holidays -- since we know it, we can sell it as the absolute truth and claim that it's journalism. That's Rush.
There are a lot of Facebook and web pages and blogs from all kinds of people and organizations and it's nothing all that unusual to find something racist, something disturbing something shameful in all the vastness: the enormity amongst the enormousness, for those of you who still make the distinction. I'm quite old enough to remember segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws and even the outrageous Coon Chicken Inn, something that would shock most of us today, and I remember who supported the civil rights we now take for granted and who opposed it.
We have come a long way, or at least most of us have, otherwise there would be more widespread laughter at the audacity of the RNC Facebook page now showing off Susan B. Anthony and Abe Lincoln as GOP heroes. A few years back they were trying to sell Martin Luther King as a Republican hero and some continue to portray Jesus as a Conservative.
Neither audacious or shameful adequately covers posting racist pictures a short time ago, including this one of the President of the United States eating fried chicken and demanding repeal of Love Vs. Virginia that in 1967 locked the intrusive government and its God fearing Southern Conservative bigots out of deciding which races could marry which. It was only a few years after they were forced to stop telling us where we could eat or sleep or live or ride or swim or picnic or find a bathroom or go to school, based on our race. Obviously some Republicans haven't forgiven us for it. Evidently the GOP has done little to excommunicate or even to censure such people. Indeed many of the Republicans I know think such things are funny.
It remained up on the RNC site until those pesky and humorless liberals complained. Disgusting, but typical, and all the sniping from the snarky, snickering anonymous trolls won't change that fact.
I'm constantly accused of making gratuitous and unfair fun of religion. Whether or not that's fair to say, I couldn't begin to approach the creativity of some pious people who having no sense of humor, much less the knowledge or ability to see their creations in the context of history, in giving us their truly American and truly hilarious concept of the holy.
I'm indebted to Libby at The Impolitic and Gymo at The Spork for pointing out the work of Merritt Ministries of Tracy, California who found a unique, reverent and authentic way to represent the love and compassion of Jesus as he descends from the clouds on his apocalyptic mission, (which includes the horrific immolation of Jews and other infidels) with "compassion and love."
And what better way to do it than to flip the bird at the Second Commandment by making a likeness of the heavenly Jewish offspring, with Northern European features and straight, chestnut brown hair, wearing purple and gold robes like a the Roman Emperor under whose auspices Jesus was tortured to death? And what better likeness than a huge hot air balloon to provide that reverent touch? After all, if you're going to create God in your own image, isn't hot air the perfect filler for this flying apocalyptic cream-puff?
Just as the secular right finds all they need to know of the Constitution in the Second Amendment, all a large segment of the Religious Right requires to serve the needs of 'authenticity and reverence' is the Book of Revelation, written far away and in another country and selected for the cannon almost a quarter of a millennium later by the high priest of Sol Invictus.
I'd love to see this catch on though. I'd love to see the sky filled with lighter-than-air deities of all sorts, from YHWH blimps to Buddha balloons; soaring Shivas and zooming Zoroasters and gas-bag Ganeshas. Launch them all and let the real God sort them out!
I like pawnshops. I've been a fan of the recent History Channel series Pawn Stars featuring a 24 hour pawn shop in Las Vegas and of course I like to hunt for treasure at flea markets. The local B&A flea market isn't so great and is only open on weekends, but since the economy tanked, every day is like a bad day at the crap tables and cool things do turn up at pawnshops. So yesterday I happened to be passing one on US1 in a shabby strip mall between CW's Barbeque and a vacant storefront and having little else to do, eased the Red Rocket into a parking spot right by the door next to a badly repainted yellow 50's pick-up truck and stopped in.
Yes, they sure did have more stuff than last time, which was a few years ago. The walls were festooned with T-shirts comparing Obama to Mao Zedong and a whole pandemonium of tyrants. One showed some Greek columns and read "Obama -- molon labe" a reference to the words the Spartans supposedly said to the Persians when asked to turn over their weapons: "come and get them." Tools, motorcycles, construction equipment, raggedy stereos, drum sets, guitar amplifiers and shelves full of stuff to the point where I could hardly walk -- and guns: lots of them.
A large plasma TV had Fox news blaring out the hysterics of the day and the friendly pistol packin' proprietor oversaw a forest of racked long guns and glass cases of overpriced handguns.
"You can't trust the government to do anything" he was saying to a couple of camo hatted compatriots. "Except maybe to run an army"
"Not even that!" replied one. "They should just tell the generals what they want done and then let them run it the way they want."
I feigned interest in an 1851 Colt Navy revolver with all the original finish gone (I'm quite sure it was a fake) while the conversation shifted to why they weren't racists for hating "that SOB" it's just that he's such a far-left radical and why any competent president would have restored the economy to it's former glory under George Bush - he's had months, after all.
I grew up on science fiction and I'm used to stories that begin with someone walking though holes in space-time into other universes. I thought maybe I'd just walked into the fantasy universe of the Republicans but I'm not too sure what I walked back into is real either. In the "real" world, there's a new video game out, I read today. It's another alternate reality where "patriots" can compete to capture Obama before he can:
"toss out the Constitution, ban guns and merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico into a 'North American Union.' "
As with science fiction, the stuff I liked best had some degree of possibility attached to it. This thing only stinks of stale sweat, damp basements, fear and industrial disinfectant -- like a madhouse: like America.
