Stoning the Orca

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."

-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

It was inevitable, since after all, this incomprehensibly huge and ancient universe exists only to provide a place in which God can test the mindless obedience to a farrago of meaningless and often contradictory rules of the sentient apes whose existence spans an infinitesimal part of the space time continuum -- anything that happens must be seen in the context of peremptory power and abject submission to the words of ancient men who went their whole, ignorant, bug-infested lives without soap. Or so saith the AFA.

A captive 6 ton top predator, by following its possibly God given instincts to grab and kill any smaller animal at water's edge was God's way of testing his demand that an Ox who gores a man must be stoned. That's right, the sad death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau was God's punishment to "the west" for the very concept of animal rights and her death a test to see if we'd follow the commands of ancient, flea bitten, psychotics. By not "stoning" the Orca, it's only going to get worse. God will have his Oxen (and Orcas) stoned even if the hirsute brutes he chose to write down his words never heard of such an animal.

Have I been listening to too many paranoid schizophrenics at Nurse Ratched's cuckoo's nest? No, just the perennial font of psychotic idiocy called the American Family Association.

"Chalk another death up to animal rights insanity and to the ongoing failure of the West to take counsel on practical matters from the Scripture," wrote Bryan Fischer, at the AFA's official blog. “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.”

Do you think that if I stampeded some Oxen through their offices and gored the living shit out of Fischer and his batshit crew of straight-jacket candidates, the AFA would find me liable and sue me? I think so too but I would truly love to try it. After all, I could easily cite the 613 Biblical Commandments, 600 of which they routinely ignore, such as the "abominations" of the cheeseburger or using cotton thread to sew your linen clothes or turning on the lights on Friday night. A good goring and stoning would only be God's work, dontcha think? The work of that smelly, sociopathic little God who lives in some dank invisible basement in some invisible world and tortures animals for fun.

There is no place in a sane and decent society for these sick bastards and the curious selection of perverted bronze age superstitions they'd like to replace our laws with. The Bible, or whatever dubiously assembled antique political documents they'd like to tell us is the backbone of existence and the source of all goodness, is simply not compatible with decency, truth, freedom and the safety of humans beings or their families. Freedom from being ruled by its self appointed priesthood has been the long struggle of our kind and I will not have it snatched from us after two centuries of secular Democracy by these evil men.

"for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man," said Jefferson.

Yes, me too!

Where I've Been

I'm now the southeastern correspondent for The H.O.R.N., the Head On Radio Network. Here's a rant last night by host Bob Kincaid:



Bob doesn't make a pretense of being a journalist, but his live streaming of the Families USA conference in Washington, DC caught an incredibly important and little-known fact about the health care bill:



Mind you, ending Medicaid means testing is no wonky arcanum. In states like Alabama, this is literally the holy grail of reform advocates.

Bob also has interesting guests:



The H.O.R.N. is a listener-supported liberal talk media that has already outlasted the Air America experiment, proving that you cannot support liberal opinion with a right-wing revenue model.

THE REPUBLICAN WAR AGAINST CLIMATE SCIENCE: A BOZONE REPORT

This will be the first of a series of posts, which I will call The Bozone Report. What is a Bozone Report, you ask?  First, a definition:

The Bozone is an aura surrounding exceptionally stupid people for whom no amount of knowledge or intelligence is known to penetrate. Although chemically inert, the Bozone Layer is highly toxic and known to destroy any productive reaction that comes in contact with it.

My first Bozone Report focuses on Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Long known for his global warming denialist propaganda, Senator Inhofe is now using (read: abusing) the resources of a Senate committee to threaten 17 leading climate scientists with criminal prosecution.

You did not misread the previous paragraph. This Minority Report released by Inhofe’s staff contains 83 pages of false and misleading statements, shameful accusations, and a list of federal laws allegedly broken that threatens 17 climate scientists with prosecution. In other words, this is the worst case of political thuggery since Senator Joseph McCarthy first employed these tactics 60 years ago. Here is a list of the accused:

Raymond Bradley - Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Keith Briffa - Deputy Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.

Timothy Carter - Research Professor at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, Finland.

Edward Cook - Senior Scholar at the Tree-Ring Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, New York.

Malcolm Hughes - Regents' Professor in the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Phil Jones - Professor at the University of East Anglia’s CRU.

Thomas Karl - Designated Transitional Director of the NOAA Climate Service.

Dr. Michael Mann - Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer - Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School, and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.

Dr. Jonathan Overpeck - Co-Director of the Institute of the Environment, and Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona.

Dr. Benjamin Santer - Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Gavin Schmidt - NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Dr. Stephen Schneider - Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University.

Dr. Susan Solomon - Senior Scientist at the Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), NOAA.

Peter Stott - Climate Monitoring Expert and Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, Hadley Centre.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth - Senior Scientist and Head of the Climate Analysis Section, the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Dr. Thomas Wigley - Senior Scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

The Minority Report accuses the Climate 17 (listed above) of unlawful use of federal funds and ethical misconduct. Specifically, it calls for an investigation to determine if any of the following Federal laws were violated:

Freedom of Information Act – accuses the Climate 17 of deliberately withholding information to prevent FOIA release.

Shelby Amendment – accuses them of failing to comply with an Agency request for raw data produced with federal funds.

OSTP Policy Directive – accuses them of “misconduct in research,” which is punishable with “criminal liability” and debarment.

Federal False Statements Act – accuses them of falsifying, concealing, or covering up: of making materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements; of making or using documents known to contain false, fictitious, or fraudulent entries; punishable by fines, or imprisonment up to 5 years, or both.

The False Claims Act (Criminal) – accuses them of creating a “tampered database” and making claims for payment from Federal funds (note: this statue requires no proof of specific intent to defraud).

Obstruction of Justice: Interference with Congressional Proceedings – accuses them of providing false or misleading testimony (although the Climate 17 never appeared before Congress).

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for these scientists to be blacklisted.

Thus, Congressional Republicans are employing every possible means to suppress research data. Furthermore, Congressional Republicans, in refusing to allow a fair hearing of evidence on climate disruptions and its implications, are trying to withhold these data from the public.

In an interview with the Guardian, Michael Mann noted a sharp rise in hostile email since November:

"Some of the emails make thinly veiled threats of violence against me and even my family, and law enforcement authorities have been made aware of the matter," he told the Guardian. He said the attacks appeared to be a coordinated effort: "Some of them look cut-and-paste."

Gavin Schmidt has seen an increase in Freedom of Information Act requests:

"In my previous six years I dealt with one FoIA request. In the last three months, we have had to deal with I think eight," he said. "These FoIAs are fishing expeditions for potentially embarrassing content but they are not FoIA requests for scientific information … The idea very clearly is to let it be known that should you be a scientist who speaks out in public then you will be intimidated, you will be harassed, and you will be threatened … The idea very clearly is to put a chilling effect on scientists speaking out in public and to tell others to keep their heads down."

The Minority Report is pure McCarthyism. This is not just an attempt to politicize science but to criminalize it; not just a threat to prosecute but to persecute. The Republicans are at war against academic freedom; at war against science; at war against the free exchange of knowledge and ideas … in short, the Republicans are at war against humanity.

The Minority Report is affront to my most cherished beliefs and values. The tactics employed by Congressional Republicans are as oppressive and dastardly as any employed by a totalitarian regime in recent memory. As much as I regret having to say this: The Republicans are also at war against me, and I intend to fight them with any and all means necessary.

Also sprach der Krakken.

IT’S DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN

Someone recently reminded me of this Yogi Berra-ism, one of the many he is famous for and when I saw a picture of the recent campus protests in California, the quote immediately came to mind.

Young people on several college campuses reacted to recent ugly events with racial overtones happening in and around their campuses. At UC San Diego a KKK styled pillowcase was placed on the statue of Dr Suess creator, Theodor Geisel which stands outside the main campus library. This was the third incident in three weeks. The other two involved a cookout that mocked Black History Month (sound familiar?) and a noose being found on a library shelf.

"What kind of campus promotes an environment that allows people to think it's acceptable to target people for their ethnicity, gender or sexuality?" said Corey Matthews, one of about 200 mostly minority UCLA students who held a lunchtime rally. "It's something about the tone of the environment that allows this."

Indeed, the tone of the environment is not confined to just the San Diego area. UC Davis also had an incident which targeted a Jewish student with a swastika carved on her door. At UC Santa Cruz, officials found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door.


Several campuses participated in the protest as a sign of solidarity and UCLA demonstrators called on administrators to institute a required ethnic studies course that would teach students about other cultures.

For those who insist that racism is not an issue in this country and that every American has equal opportunity and equal treatment all I can say is, “Try selling that bag of dog crap on one of these campuses.”

Young people coming out to protest and demand social justice reminded me of my own youth and the protests of our time and “it’s déjà vu all over again.”

And when these young people speak of the “tone of the environment” I can’t help but think of the angry rhetoric that has been spewed by the hate mongers against immigrants, blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims and liberals and how the continuous repetition of this garbage is affecting not just the California campus environment but the environment across America.

But here is hope and I bow to the next generation of activists.

Luis Meléndez, Spanish Still Life Painter

Luis Meléndez (1715–1780) is now recognized as the premier still-life painter in 18th-century Spain, indeed one of the greatest in all of Europe.

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts is hosting an exhibit of this great painter's works--an artist who was not appreciated in his time. He died a pauper.

After taking in all the beauty of his artistry as I passed through the galleries, I wanted to sit down and have a feast of all the gorgeous, sensual food depicted in these incredible oils. After consistently being rejected as a portrait painter for the royals in Spain, Meléndez was commissioned, in the late 1700s, by the Prince of Asturias, later King Charles IV of Spain to do a series of paintings representing the abundance of foods that was the basis of Spain's cuisine.

Meléndez painted these foods uncooked--fish, hams, beef, and every sort of vegetable and fruit--so that when one looked at the paintings, one had to use her imagination to think of how the various foods would be used to make an elaborate and memorable meal.



One thing that impressed me was that the fruits and vegetables Meléndez painted had not been sprayed with any sort of chemical, so when one observes his paintings, one sees the little worm holes and bruises that are natural to the fruits and vegetables. We consumers are accustomed to seeing the perfect flesh of fruits and vegetable--which would not be natural without chemical sprays and contaminants--but that perfection is not real, and we pay a dear price with our health and in the contamination of the soil and the skins of the fruits and vegetable for this unnatural perfection.

I left the exhibit with hunger pangs--not just for the voluptuous foods on exhibit, but for a time when people were able to consume them without worrying about the toxins that accumulate in our fatty tissues because we demand unnatural perfection and unnatural color in our fruits and vegetables.

The meaning of is

It's funny how the things that characterized the United States in it's best and most prosperous years are being characterized as bad for the country and a one way valve in the sewer pipe that leads to Marxism, while the days before we had things like unemployment insurance saw poverty, hopelessness, homelessness, broken families, social unrest and egregious injustice far beyond anything we've had in generations.

Why for instance are unemployment benefits bad for America? because they encourage people to stay jobless said smiling Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) Yes, I've noticed that the families living in old cars, scrounging in dumpsters and sleeping in the woods or in shelters are really living the life of Riley in increasing numbers these days, taking vacations in the sun while hard working Republican Senators who have free health care have to support them. I mean that we were once the most productive people on earth even with social security, unemployment and disability benefits doesn't really tell us anything, does it?

Of course being of the same party, Republican Senate Whip Kyl would likely have defended most anything fellow Republican Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) said that was an attack on one of those things that makes us a nation rather than a bunch of individuals looking out for themselves alone. Unemployment benefits are one of those things: things that make us a society with common goals and values rather than serfs doing without to support the lifestyles of corporate barons -- and Senators.

Of course to a Republican, a hypothetical reason for something to be bad is more to be believed and waved about as a tribal emblem than any mere empirical observation to the contrary. Unemployment insurance makes people lazy and unwilling to work, just like life insurance makes them want to die, health insurance makes them want to have surgery and liability insurance makes them suicidal drivers -- and insurance itself, being a system for pooling risk, taking a small amount from each participant so that no individual has a catastrophic loss, must therefore be Communism. The true Randian Monad will never accept any cost that might benefit anyone else as well as himself -- right? Of course the idea of insurance is saved from Communism only if instead of a 3% administration fee, someone makes 30 or 40% from it: the more money, the more justified by the grace of profit, amen. Unemployment insurance

"doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

says the Senator, but of course that depends on what the definition if is is. If is denotes observable reality, the statement is shaky for want of evidence. If is denotes adherence to ad hoc dogma nailed together as an obstructive barricade, then perhaps Kyl makes sense. I'll leave it up to you as to whether you believe his peremptory proclamation or your lying eyes.

If you do side with Mister Jingles from Arizona, I'd like to ask you why, if we can't afford to temporarily keep the unemployed from starvation without running the risk of irreversible Communism and the irretrievable loss of precious bodily fluids, why then can we can bail out millionaires and give them special tax relief without similar concerns? After all, experience dismisses the argument that they will create jobs with the extra millions and shows that they will buy unregulated derivatives, invest in hedge funds and pump up the market until it crashes. Kyl? Are you listening? Kyl?

Some kind of savior

Pray for America: do all you can to block Obama's agenda says a letter from a local reader in yesterday's paper. The online edition has 165 comments, mostly favorable. I can't bear to read things like this any more -- and it's everywhere.

The agenda, of course is a hysterically hypothetical fabrication and without much resembling factual support from anything the administration has done, said aloud or published: "grabbing" our guns, raising taxes on working people and the middle class, giving massive handouts to the indigent, encouraging terrorist attacks, putting privilege in peril and deliberately raising the debt -- and of course sabotaging the messianic mission of Saint Sarah D'Arc in a most egregiously unfair way. Most of all, his agenda is dangerous to the divine right to make huge and ever increasing profits through collusion and dubious restraints of trade with no regard for the suffering of Americans who have to watch their children die so that some corporation can make 40% profits year after year.

"Americans need to stop sleeping and stand up before this becomes a third world nation" said the voice at the other end of the table this past weekend. "They saw this guy as some kind of savior and someone who would give them something for nothing."

The table, of course was in a room full of millionaires observing the change of watch at our yacht club, which as one expects, has a policy against discussing politics at club functions. Such angry lapses are more frequent of late however, as the propaganda and lies percolates up from the sewers of Fox, the Corporate funded think tanks and policy centers with deceptive, patriotic names.

Of course this voter remembers the posters, the paintings, the rhetoric announcing George W. Bush as being part of the second coming, sitting at the feet of and being anointed by Christ, and this writer certainly doesn't see either man in a religious context. Obama was the lesser risk of more of the same and vastly more intelligent of the two candidates but never mind, the meme is abroad and pandemic and there seems to be no way to stop it. With all indications that this administration and the current court has no interest in additional gun control legislation much less in disarming the country, the rage against Obama, the gun grabber grows. Obama, the clownish, dishonest watermelon-eating political devil from Birth of a Nation. Although over 90% of America has got a tax break, the conviction that Obama is going to squeeze them persists, driving otherwise sane people into public displays of ignorant rage.

Extending jobless benefits is now "communism" and it costs too much. The unemployed are going to have to suffer because the millionaires at yacht clubs all over America need the lowest tax rates in the civilized world to stave off Communism and can't be expected to pay down that debt incurred by Bush and Obama in order to bail them out.

Yes, America needs to stand up and continue howling as though Count Barackula had risen from the grave to suck us all dry and bark the louder so that nothing true, reasonable, factual or sane can intrude on the festival of tea soaked madness.

Obama's agenda, if you believe your eyes, seems to be about pacifying corporate (Republican) interests. It seems to be more of the same as concerns our two forever wars, the "Patriot Act" and weakness about standing up to the health care and drug cartel. His supporters weren't looking for someone who heard God's voice, but to get rid of a President who heard voices but not American voices. They were looking for a fixer and not a savior and if fixing the mess Republicans created takes more than an eighth of the time it took to ruin the economy, some are still willing to wait, just as we're still waiting for the "surge" to "win" the war we were called traitors for opposing. ( Remember when we were America-haters for suggesting it might take longer than 6 weeks?)

Third world country? Isn't that one where all the wealth is owned by a tiny percentage of the people? Is that Obama's fault or is that the result of the deliberate and consistent tax policies of the Republicans? Isn't that one where the police and military answer to the rulers and not the people and have a frightening amount of power? Who wrote the patriot act, ended Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus, built secret prisons off-shore so as to bypass not only the constitution but the fundamental and natural rights of man upon which it is based?

No, have another martini, go sleep it off on your yacht and tomorrow get up all refreshed and cry about Obama's agenda all over again because you'll never really get over that sense of entitlement, you'll never be as free of responsibility to your country as you'd like or as wealthy as you deserve to be.

A Christian argues against teaching the Bible in schools

Before becoming a journalist, Betty Winston Baye spent 20 years working for national denominations and faith-based civil rights and community organizations. She is “unabashedly and unashamedly Christian.”

But she does not believe the Bible should be taught in taxpayer-funded schools.

Baye rightfully argues that the United States is not a theocracy and that to claim that God has been taken out of the schools runs counter to a very basic Christian premise that God is never absent. He’s everywhere.

A bill is moving through the Kentucky Senate that would require the state Board of Education to establish guidelines for an elective course in Bible literacy.

The course “shall follow applicable law and all federal and state guidelines in maintaining and accommodating the diverse religious views, traditions and perspective of students in the school. A course under this section shall not endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective.”

But the Bible is not religiously neutral. Moreover, here in Kentucky, religious neutrality and tolerance for diverse religious views are often viewed as controversial, weak-minded, “liberal,” even un-American. . . . Young people are not only highly susceptible to being proselytized, but may lack the tools to react to a teacher who teaches the Bible from a perspective that hardly can be considered neutral.


There were good reasons why America's founders, after fleeing religious persecution, pointedly sought a separation between church and state. Mixing the two, history shows, is a potion for disaster and conflict.

Brian Willis, who focused his doctorial studies on church and society, is vice president for academic affairs at Simmons College in Kentucky.

If the purpose of the bill, he said, “is to educate students from a social science perspective on biblical texts, then the five major world religions' sacred writings (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) should be incorporated into the curriculum.”

Wells' broader view, however, is that “religious communities and private faith-based institutions are better equipped to teach courses like these without violating religious freedom rights.”

On a more practical level Baye suggests that “when so many Kentucky public schools are performing poorly in the basics and are being beaten down by the state's budget crisis, it doesn't make sense to spend time and money developing guidelines for “elective” Bible literacy courses. These are readily available in private institutions — churches, mosques, temples and schools of theology — that have the history, the experts, the expertise and the desire to teach a knowledge-thirsty public.”


Betty Winston Baye is a Louisville Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist.

The enemy within the gates

Imagine that you have an enemy who wants to defeat you. (For many of us, this is true in one sense or another -- and lately the Republicans frankly seem hell-bent on playing that role!) That enemy may or may not be able to overpower you. But sometimes it can find a powerful ally against you, an ally inside your own psyche, in fact.

This enemy within the gates is the tendency, which we all have, to dwell on the negative, to wallow in gloom and doom. Everyone's situation includes both good and bad. Even if you were the most fortunate person on Earth, you could easily make yourself utterly miserable if you insisted on contemplating only the unpleasant aspects of your situation (for there would still be some) while dismissing or ignoring the positive.

It's startling how often one sees people do this. All is lost. We can't win. The good guys are no better than the bad guys. What we've accomplished counts for nothing -- only the things we've (so far) failed to do really matter.

The reason this matters is that the way we perceive our situation can affect how we deal with our situation. Wallowing in doom and gloom leads to pessimism. Pessimism leads to despair. Despair leads to paralysis. And paralysis leads to defeat even when defeat was not inevitable. If you convince yourself that everything is hopeless, you will not take action, because you will have trapped yourself in a state of mind where you believe that taking action is futile or will even be counterproductive, regardless of the actual track record of such action in the real world. This is why the enemy within the mental gates is so dangerous.

This may be part of the appeal -- defeatism legitimizes laziness and inaction. If the game is rigged against you and you can't win, why do anything? Might as well take the easy way out -- sit on the sidelines and carp at the people who are trying to accomplish something. If those people point out that some things have, in fact, been accomplished and therefore the defeatist passivity is unwarranted, just call them names or ignore them.

Who gains from this kind of thinking? Only those who want to defeat us.

If you fight for what you want, you might not get it. If you don't fight for it, you definitely won't get it.

Live Dino-Blogging the Health-Care Summit

Health-care summit held -- check.

Today's Lesson? Right-wingers invariably treat kindness as weakness, and willingness to talk things over as a billboard-sized "Roll Me" sticker on your suit lapel. God Almighty could step out of his magnificent chariot (the same one Christ uses in Paradise Lost to scatter the rebel angels down to bottomless perdition) and command the Republicans in Congress to do something fine, generous, and noble for the country, and they still wouldn't do it.

Seriously, though, enough soliciting opinions from people with the soul of a stone -- let's pass meaningful health-care reform promptly through reconciliation, and stop pretending that the cynical or deluded supporters of some mythical version of "the free market" in access to health care will ever be willing to stop complaining about "socialism" long enough to sign on to significant improvements on the status quo.