Hardwired

By Capt. Fogg

As I've suspected, there's an increasing amount of evidence that one is born on one side of the fence or another; predestined to be what they call conservative these days or Liberal. Yes, I'm very wary of these terms, since they mean what their enemies say they mean and have little to do with conserving anything real, or with the concept of reform, but still, there seem to be two kinds of minds and it's hard to account for it as merely the product of experience or study or intelligence.

Yes, I've joked about the far right not having a sense of humor that differs from meanness and I can think of all kinds of nominally Liberal reformers who would crumble if they ever smiled, but that impression isn't unique to me and I find it compelling. Some people find their view of reality far too serious, too dangerous and threatening to find much to laugh about, unless it's to laugh about the discomfiture and humiliation of an enemy.

That there are indeed two kinds of minds; two predispositions toward political, religious and sociological poles, is compelling, not that I would suggest using any evidence for it to dismiss arguments from either side. Sometimes, Conservative is actually conservative and Liberal is just Liberal and the truth may be neutral.

There may be important evidence for physical differences between those who feel threatened, respond to perceived threats with more aggression, more disgust and less tolerance for uncertainty. A taste for strongly held credos about morality and politics almost defines such people and we usually call them conservatives. A distaste for absolute moral judgments; for saying something is "just wrong" without considering the results defines those we want to call Liberals.

"Liberal Brains" seem more tolerant of uncertainty than conservatives according to a study of brain scans of 90 volunteers at University College London. Brain scans revealed, or so it's claimed, physical differences

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation, our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

says researcher Ryota Kanai.

"People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts"

So is this cause or effect? Are these findings real? Maybe it's too soon to tell and I can certainly identify some traits that would make me more conservative than the stereotypical Liberal. What I am is for others to say, but I certainly find fault in many standard Liberal shibboleths, even if I'm intolerant of certainty and that includes being certain that the study means anything.

"Our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty"

says the report and that feels right, even if many wrong things feel right. I'm just not afraid of the conservative bogeymen like net neutrality, graduated income tax, single payer health programs or Social Security. I am however concerned about the danger of inflexible creeds that seem to need a great deal of misplaced faith to follow and a government that follows such things without regard to the will of the electorate, the lessons of history or even the demands of common decency. I believe in uncertainty.

So is my anterior cingulate cortex bigger or smaller and does size matter? It's not as though I'm free of fear, I just fear the fearful and the things they do.

God Control

By Capt. Fogg


I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it; God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.

So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.

Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?

God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.

Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on who you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious right who I can't tell from the Religious wrong of late.

One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.

Slow Train Coming

By Capt. Fogg

One of the most frequently recurring themes echoing inside the bubble of Obamahate culture is that the President, although handily elected, was somehow thrust upon us by mistake and is an unelected tyrant.

It takes a special kind of person to believe that. It takes a special kind of person to attempt to profit by that belief and it takes a special kind of specialness not to be able to smell the boot polish and Cordite when reading about Wisconsin Governor Walker's plan to take over municipal governments ( duly elected) as part of his plan for prosperity through penury.

Forbes' Rick Ungar calls it Financial Martial Law and the Walker plan:

"would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so,"

I have no doubt that's just what the Tea-Shirts would like and little doubt that they will be able to reconcile that with their flimsy facade of Constitutional reverence.

"Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need."

That's not tyranny, that's not the kind of shredding of the constitution the baggery would love to attribute to the President: at least not to the Tea-drunk masses longing to break free of any remaining bonds of civilization.

It'll never happen? It's Liberal hyperbole? Think a State Government can't simply strip a municipality's elected government of all power by Gubernatorial fiat? You say this isn't possible in America? It's already happened in Michigan. Perhaps it's coming soon, to a state near you.

I'll spare you a rant about Fascism and Mussolini, the perils of "special emergency powers" and Orwell's eternal boot heel, I suspect you've read enough 20th Century history to know what I'm talking about, but I suspect too that the years I have left to me will be years of counting up the mounting victories of barbarism, and the steady descent of our empire. Perhaps it's high time that I got back to studying Chinese.

“So Shall I Be Saved from Mine Enemies”: Barack Obama’s Diabolical Trap for the Republicans Exposed!

They don’t call him Bush’s Brain for nothing. Karl Rove is quoted in a recent HuffPo article  as saying on some FOX program the following about Donald Trump’s penchant for firing up the birtherites:

This is a mistake. It will marginalize him and he's falling into Barack Obama's trap. Barack Obama wants Republicans to fall into this trap because he knows it discredits us with the vast majority of the American people when they do.

I'm trying to stop laughing long enough to comment. Okay, I think I can do this now. I suppose we might credit Mr. Rove with the good sense to be meaning only that it boosts President Obama’s re-election chances when prospective GOP candidates talk like the arrantest chuckleheads. Got it. But what is this “trap” language? What’s the underlying notion here? That by being born in the US but having two furren-sounding names and non-pinkish skin and not posting an online streaming video of his own birth to the accompaniment of Hawaiian ukulele music, the president has been self-consciously setting a snare all his life for the GOP? Yes, I see it clearly now: that man is diabolically clever! You never know what he might be up to….

But really, this is a "trap" that has been set by the brazen bigotry of a certain element within the GOP. The baser angels of their nature are always plumbing for new lows, and it's nobody's fault but their own. And mark you now, by Jesu, anyone who panders to the worst of them while knowing the aloha kai omega of the matter is “an ass, and a fool, and a prating coxcomb,” as the fervent Captain Fluellen of Shakespeare’s Henry plays would warrant.

Mrs. Brown Gets A Bikini Wax

Time to take a Teahoo break:

World Amateur Radio Day

By Capt. Fogg

I've often said that history could rightly be called The Revenge of the Nerds. After all, who else has relegated the huge brutal guy with the horned helmet to the football field and wrestling match and wrested the control from their hands? Some guy with a tube of Clearasil in his pocket operating from a cubicle in Fort Knox wields more power than all the Vikings, the Hordes of Genghis Khan and the generations of Crusaders added together and more.

Nerds rule and of course nowadays, it's hip to be a nerd. As with all hipdom, however most of what you see is imitation and pose. That "tech-savvy" kid who just walked out of the cell phone store with a new gadget, quacking app, app, app like the AFLAC duck? a real nerd? I don't think so.

I'm increasingly often the recipient of obnoxious snark from people whose fragile egos depend on the complexity of their cell phones, knowledge of the features of the latest Japanese consumer toy and number of things owned with the letter i tacked on to the front. Most couldn't read the schematic for a flashlight much less tell you how semiconductor devices work or how they're made, yet they proudly assume the mantle of nerd. Tell you how a Hartley differs from a Colpitts or how to calculate the resonant point of a tank circuit? That's kid stuff to a real nerd. You can't even get a Technician license without knowing such things. Real nerds were making phone calls from their cars over 30 years ago, sending text messages a hundred years ago and are doing things today you wouldn't understand if I told you about it.

Is it a big deal that I can talk to someone in Australia with a hand held device? Not any more, but doing it for free is still a lot of fun. I got a kick out of contacting a Yuri Gagarin special event station in Kazakhstan the other day and some Mexican guys on an uninhabited volcano in the Pacific and that sort of thing is even more fun when you're doing it with something you designed and built connected to a wire up in the palm trees. But that's just me and it's a me who isn't interested in what the pierced and tattooed kids at the mall are doing at the moment, which of course is how we nerds are.

Anyway, it's April 18th and that's World Amateur Radio Day, which commemorates the founding of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) this year on it's 78th anniversary. There are about 3 million of us in the world; over 600,000 in the US, and we've pioneered and developed nearly every form of electronic communication there is, most of which you're unaware of, thank you very much. We have our own satellites, we bounce signals off the moon and the Northern Lights and the ionized trails of meteors. We can send a photo of the grand kids and text messages to Timbuctu with 20 watts and keep in touch when all else fails, but for the most part we can communicate anywhere and without the fragile and expensive infrastructure you need to send gibberish to the kids at the other end of the hall.

But hey, I gotta go. ZB2FK is CQing from Gibraltar on 10 and that's a new one for the log book.

HOW SOUND IS FRACKING?

Hydraulic fracturing is a drilling process that blasts large amounts of water deep into the earth to fracture dense shale and allow natural gas to escape. Some of the water used in this process which is in the hundreds of thousands of gallons becomes contaminated with toxic and often potentially carcinogenic materials.

Most states where fracking is allowed require the contaminated liquid to be disposed of in deep injection wells. But in some states, primarily PA, the liquid is routinely partially treated and then dumped into rivers and streams.

Fracking was one of those under the radar type activities that didn’t draw much attention unless you live in close proximity to the sites. But it has been in the news lately and a few choice articles caught my attention.

Lots of folks are getting rich off of releasing the huge gas reserves underground, especially since natural gas is in high demand due to the increasing cost of oil products. While the process of fracking and capturing natural gas has it’s advocates, there are some disturbing aspects of the practice coming to light.

A Democratic study of the contaminated water produced is raising the alarm over how sound a practice it really is. There have been incidents of spills, contaminated drinking water and the EPA is finally pushing PA officials to test the water being released into waterways after treatment.

Fracking has also served to divide communities and pit neighbor against neighbor. Land owners getting rich off selling the gas rights on their property are being subjected to acrimonious acts of others in their community. While the land owners defend their right to sell the gas on their property, others argue that the potential for toxic spills and environmental damage, not to mention the increase in noise and traffic related to the gas production will affect their living standards and drive down real estate values.

And while there is no definitive answers yet, there are studies suggesting that deep injection wells may trigger seismic activity especially in earthquake prone areas.

Without government regulation and oversight and further studies of fracking and all related activities, the impact on our environment and the people living in gas rich areas could end up being devastating.

TEA PARTYING WITH RACISM

Tea Party member and virulent birther, Marilyn Davenport of Orange County, California, had no idea that emailing a photo shopped picture depicting President Obama as an ape to her fellow Tea Partiers was racist. Noooooooo. The thought never crossed what passes as her mind. This woman is apparently so bereft of any common sense that she is clueless about the insulting dehumanization that African Americans have endured throughout our sorry racial history, and that one of the ways to humiliate this group was to compare them to subhumans.



Pointing out that George W. Bush was referred to as "Chimpy" isn't in any way, shape or form an equivalency. George W. Bush's race was never demonized and dehumanized to the point where people felt torturning and lynching a white citizen was justified because he dared speak to or look at a black woman. Members of George Bush's race never were told to sit at the back of the bus, or drink from separate fountains, nor were white children of tax-paying parents denied entrance into a tax supported state college because their skin was lily white. Referring to Dubya as Chimpy had nothing to do with his race, and everything to do with his incompetence. If Tea Party members don't understand the difference, then they need to read up on the history of racism in this country, pull their heads out of their collective anuses, and face their bigotry head on.

But back to this Orange County woman who defended her stupid email:

"This afternoon, Marilyn Davenport sent an email to fellow Orange County Republican elected officials, apologizing if anyone was offended by her depicting President Barack Obama as an ape--while also blasting the "liberal media" for reporting the story."

Notice that this contemptible woman didn't really apologize. Nowhere does she say she's sorry for acting like a foul-hearted asshat. No. she apologizes IF anyone was offended by her depiction of President Obama as an ape--an image that white racists have used to demean and demoralize African Americans through our history. She's too lamebrained to understand this simple fact. And then, like all cowards, she blames the messenger for her atrocious idiocy.


"I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth," Davenport wrote. "In no way did I even consider the fact he's half black when I sent out the email. In fact, the thought never entered my mind until one or two other people [Scott Baugh, Orange County GOP boss, and this writer] tried to make this about race. . . . I received plenty of emails about George Bush that I didn't particularly like yet there was no 'cry' in the media about them."

 She never considered the fact that President Obama is an African American when she sent out her humiliating email. This is because she is a stupid woman, too ignorant of this country's history to know when she is committing an egregious insult to a group of people who have had to endure the likes of her for centuries.


I'm sick of it all, but most assuredly sick of the jackasses--people like Davenport--who populate the Tea Party. I'm sick of them denying that this racism is a part of who they are and what they believe. It's part of what the Tea Party is, and it's blatant.

Finally, I'm sick of those who become indignant when they are confronted with the reality that the Tea Party has a HUGE streak of racism running down its spine.

It's wide, it's yellow, and it stinks.

Dear Mr. President,

Only 2500 characters allowed, so I had to drop most adjectives, and big chunks of the first and second paragraphs. And, obviously, the video.

Dear President Obama,

Interesting speech this week. You made some very good points, and you're going back to one of your strengths - oration. (To be honest, I didn't actually watch it live, but I've seen clips, and I read the transcript. But hey, what do you want out of me? I don't have that kind of attention span. I have publicly admitted to listening to pop music, so it's probably something of a miracle that I know how to read, much less write.)

On top of which, there are only so many hours in the day, after all, and Cartoon Network is replaying episodes of Robot Chicken that I was too drunk to remember the first time.

I'm not going to go into all the points in your speech: I'll admit, however, that it's somewhat refreshing to hear someone in power point out that the Defense budget could use some trimming. You're going to take some hits from the GOP on that, but stand firm. It's got to happen.

Now, here's the thing, though. I voted for you - hell, I even volunteered for your campaign. But I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Although you came out and told people you were a centrist, you made a lot of promises, and, while you've come through on a lot of them, there's also a bunch of things you haven't done.

Does "Guantanamo" ring a bell?

And, frankly, you've already said that you'd stand firm on not renewing the Bush tax cuts. That was about three months before you renewed them again.

Well, it's only been five months since the last switch, and here you are, saying "I refuse to renew them again."

So, you know, funny thing: it's kind of difficult to believe you, when you've already lied about something once.

But I'll tell you what. Let's set up a plan now, for what to do at some unnamed point in the future when you decide to cave in compromise again (as, admittedly, you have on a lot of things that are fairly important to those of us on the left side of the aisle: single-payer health care or the Public Option; war-crimes charges for... well, anybody who committed war-crimes, really; and - not to keep harping on this - Guantanamo).

Let's put it up to a vote. Not Congress, but the American people. If you decide that some subject is too much of a hot potato politically, even if the majority of the American people are for it, how about if, instead of just abandoning those liberal, all-American principles that give Rupert Murdoch heart palpitations, how about if you just put it up to the American voter? Stick a simple, unslanted question onto the ballot: "Should the Bush-era tax cuts be extended?" See what the answer is. I think you'll be surprised.

And maybe you can lead up to this with a few more speeches like this last one. Let's be real - you're never going to be popular with Republicans. They don't like you for a number of reasons (and the fact that you're black may not even be at the top of the list). Point out simple logic, like "if tax breaks for the rich created jobs, shouldn't George W. Bush have left office with no unemployment in the country at all?"

You can't make everybody happy. In fact, you can't make the GOP happy at all. Can you please just ignore Limbaugh and Hannity shrieking, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that you're the "most liberal president ever!" for just a minute, and do what's right? Please?

If you don't get the joke, you might be a Republican

By Capt. Fogg

Well no wonder they don't think The Daily Show is funny and don't notice when Colbert rips them to pieces.

Some scientific folks at UC San Francisco have completed a study indicating that people in the early stages of dementia have lost the snark detection system most of us were born with and can't tell when you're lying or being facetious. It explains a lot of things, actually, from why people send their life savings to Nigeria to why they can support a candidate who changes his entire philosophy from hour to hour to negate whatever his opponent says.

"Divergent Neuroanatomic Correlates of Sarcasm and Lie Comprehension in Neurodegenerative Disease," a paper presented Thursday at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Hawaii, suggests that dementia can be detected earlier by noting this telltale disability. Fans of Blade Runner will smile and those of us baffled by the thought processes of Sarah Palin disciples will say "AHAH!" Perhaps we can now begin to understand why there are no really funny conservative comedians and how John McCain can flip and flop faster than a Cray supercomputer without fostering the slightest cynicism from the right.

After all, what has been eroded by disease in some people may simply not exist in others.