So, in the upcoming weeks, we'll hopefully learn the facts about the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. I know where I stand on it, based on what I've read, but it's always possible that there are details yet to come out.
But, for the moment, let's ignore the whole "Wild, Wild West," shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later attitude that the "Stand Your Ground" law engenders. Just for now, let's concentrate on the trial.
Let's also ignore the fact that the defense attorney opened with a knock-knock joke. A knock-knock joke that bombed.
"Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying," he explained. "So, let me — at considerable risk — let me say, I would like to tell you a little joke. I know how that may sound a bit weird in this context under these circumstances. But I think you're the perfect audience for it as long as you — if you don't like it or find it funny or appropriate, that you don't hold it against Mr. Zimmerman, you can hold it against me. I have your assurance you won't?"
"Knock, knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who?" West said. "Alright, good, you’re on the jury."
"Nothing?" he added when the jury apparently failed to laugh. "That’s funny. After what you folks have been through the last two or three weeks."
No, really, dude. If you're begging them to laugh, it was a bad joke. Trust me. I should know.
Instead, let's highlight another part of the defense attorney's opening statement. He tried to claim that Trayvon Martin was not unarmed.
"Trayvon Martin armed himself with the concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman's head; it's no different than if he picked up a brick or bashed it against a wall," Mr. West said, "and the law is very specific as to when you can defend yourself if the other person has a deadly weapon."
Really, that is an awe-inspiring defense. In order for it to work, you have to completely redefine the legal definition of the word "unarmed."
Because if Trayvon Martin was "armed," by the prosecutor's definition, then nobody who exists in a three-dimensional environment can ever be defined as "unarmed."
I'd
hate to make anyone think I'm an optimist. I'm not even sure I care too
much about the human race aside from a few individuals, but that's what
pessimism is about -- a cosmic frame of reference that sees no
permanence; that sees everything that is on the way up as inevitably on
the way down.
Perhaps not caring gives a clearer
vision. If it doesn't matter in the end that voting rights are in
peril, or at least under continuing assault, then the failure of the
Texas legislature to pass a bill further restricting abortion rights
despite a ten hour filibuster by Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, is less
likely to be overshadowed. She might have gone on but was ruled to have
drifted off topic amidst a chorus of boos and catcalls, and the bill was
declared dead at 3 AM.
For those of us who still hope for sweeping reformation and the triumph of truth and justice for all, it's a little and perhaps temporary victory
over the animal meanness of human nature and as Dr Moreau learned, you
can dress up the animal and teach it to walk on two legs, you can make it recite pledges and formulae, you can make up stories about divine origins, but the beast is still a beast and evolution is so slow.
In the biggest disaster since Citizens United, the United States Supreme Court has struck down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The majority decision reads in part:
“Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions,” Roberts wrote.
For conservative justices on the Supreme Court, times have changed. For liberal justices, the historical tendency to engage in chicanery and erect new barriers has not changed, according to this dissenting opinion by Ruth Bader Ginsberg:
[The] record for the 2006 reauthorization makes abundantly clear [that] second-generation barriers to minority voting rights have emerged in the covered jurisdictions as attempted substitutes for the first-generation barriers that originally triggered preclearance in those jurisdictions.
Indeed, the Tea Party insurrection against common decency ushered in a new wave of second-generation voting rights restrictions, such as: Voter ID laws, new restrictions on voter registration, new laws that discriminate against student voters, renewed gerrymandering, the elimination of weekend polling and extended polling hours that have resulted in outrageously long waiting lines of up to 8 hours. These newly imposed restrictions have only one goal: To target and suppress turnout among minorities, senior citizens, students, and other key constituencies that can sway the outcome of elections. Even more outrageous than Citizens United, this decision guts one of the most important and effective civil rights laws, according to Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Law, who says:
Minority voters in places with a record of discrimination are now at greater risk of being disenfranchised than they have been in decades. Today's decision is a blow to democracy. Jurisdictions will be able to enact policies which prevent minorities from voting, and the only recourse these citizens will have will be expensive and time-consuming litigation.
Perhaps the time is long overdue to take to the streets. Mass demonstrations. Civil disobedience. And a brick thrown through the window of every Republican headquarters in every city and town from coast to coast! Am I angry?
There is a constant drumbeat from the right comparing Obama to Hitler. I mean, let's ignore the fact that Obama's signature legislation is a method to ensure that everybody can go to a hospital when they're sick without ending up living out of their car. Because that's exactly the same as slaughtering six million Jews and attempting to take over Europe in a bloody campaign of destruction.
Yeah, let's ignore that. Instead, let's ask ourselves why every single time that somebody disagrees with a politician, it's become de rigueur to compare them to Hitler? Why is the litmus test for political arguments the ability to reduce your enemy to the level of the worst dictator in history? Last week, I pointed out an unintentional violation of Godwin's Law, but let's consider the issue a little, shall we?
Following World War One, Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty included Article 231, which is commonly called "the guilt clause":
The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
Using this as a legal basis, Germany was forced to pay reparations to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, Germany didn't think they'd lost the war - the German High Command told their citizens that the Army had never been beaten in the field, and the defeat was actually due to actions by civilians, particularly Jews, Socialists and Communists (the Dolchstosslegende, or "Stabbed-in-the-Back Legend").
That's right - Hitler didn't start the rumor that Jews were destroying the economy. Antisemitism was well-established in the German culture long before he was born.
So the Weimar Republic resisted the reparations, and defaulted on payments quite frequently. The French and Belgians, realizing that the Germans were able to pay and simply weren't, eventually invaded and occupied the Ruhr valley, which was the center of coal, iron and steel production in Germany.
Take this reduction in raw materials for the Germans and the resulting reduction in cash-flow, and add to it the fact that the German government funded a passive resistance movement among the citizens of the Ruhr by simply printing more money. This led to the famed hyper-inflation of post-WWI Germany.
Technically, the inflation started when the Kaiser decided to fund WWI by borrowing money instead of taxing his people and using his own fortune: the value of the German mark fell from 4 to 9 per US dollar. But the war ended in 1919; by November 1923, the American dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. Or in more concrete terms, in 1919 a loaf of bread cost 1 mark; by 1923, a loaf of bread cost 100 billion marks.
This was the situation when Adolph Hitler rose into power. During the course of his leadership, he brought his people back from the brink of ruin and ensured they could eat.
People want for life to be simple. They want their enemies to wholly evil, so that there's no question that "destroying them" is a bad thing. The reductive power of the human mind wants those we disagree with to have no redeeming features. Homophobes want gays to practice pedophilia and beastiality. Radical conservatives want liberals to be fascists and totalitarian dictators. Radical liberals want conservatives to be inhuman monsters who laugh as children starve in the streets.
The reality is that people are more complex than that. But to see that, to understand the forces that drive someone, is to understand that perhaps evil is not something simple. Perhaps evil and good are in all of us. That bad things are done by good people, and good things are done by bad people, and the world isn't the simple place we want it to be.
Would you like to see the most frightening picture of Adolph Hitler ever taken?
Hitler, holding hands with a little girl and walking in a park. Hitler loved children. He loved animals: he was a confirmed vegetarian and was opposed to vivisection.
Were you aware that Eva Braun took home movies?
Hitler was a human being. It challenges your worldview: he should be a monster, pounding on desks and ordering people to their deaths. But he lived, he loved, he laughed, he played with children.
He also destroyed much of Europe, threw the world into war, and established concentration camps where 11 million people were killed.
Perhaps "good" and "evil" aren't the simple concepts that some people want them to be.
Claims of fetal masturbation, advanced by Congressman Michael Burgess (R-TX) in support of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (HR 1797), remind me of Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnag, Glubbdubdrig, and Japan (Part III). As you may recall …
His ship attacked by pirates, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself marooned near India, where he is rescued by the kingdom of Laputa, a flying island known for raining down rocks on rebellious cities – the original “Shock and Awe.” Gulliver tours the Grand Academy of Lagado and discovers the great scientific undertakings of the realm: Reverse Photosynthesis (extracting sunlight from vegetables), Reverse Alimentation (turning feces into canapés and crudités), and Doo Doo Mining for Data (sniffing the excrement of suspicious persons for evidence of partisan conspiracies – see Darrell Issa).
According to Congressman Burgess, the Republican Uterus Emeritus and throbbingcurrent member of the House Subcommittee on Health:
You watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. They feel pleasure, why is it so hard to think that they could feel pain?
What gives here? Is Burgess talking about fetuses or babies? How is a 15-week fetus developmentally equivalent to a 15-week baby? Perhaps his sentimental attachment to babies accounts for the semantic legerdemain of Lagado men who swap words to bend science: If a baby is cute, and a fetus is cuter, then a male fetus spanking the monkey is cutest of all – and especially venerated by male legislators who flog the log.
The key threshold set by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion on the basis of viability, i.e. that abortions cannot be banned until a fetus reaches viability at 24 weeks. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act moves this threshold to 20 weeks – with no exemptions for rape or incest or complications of pregnancy that threaten the health or life of the mother.
Are fetuses capable of feeling pain? Not according to this report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
In reviewing the neuroanatomical and physiological evidence in the fetus, it was apparent that connections from the periphery to the cortex are not intact before 24 weeks of gestation and, as most neuroscientists believe that the cortex is necessary for pain perception, it can be concluded that the fetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation.
How will the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act apply to fraternal twins in utero? In the annals of the Grand Academy of Lagado, a male fetus in utero masturbates and impregnates his fraternal sister in utero. Shall we consider this an act of rape or incest or both? How will the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act impact on babushka pregnancies? Shall the newborn male be handcuffed in afterbirth and put on trial as an unborn sex predator? No doubt, Congressman Burgess will ride to the rescue of fetal masturbators with riders nested inside riders until he goes blind.
My friend Tai posted a video to my
facebook page and asked, “For my friends around the world, please
support our fight for a better Brazil!” This was just a few days
ago when there was no US news coverage of the protests going on in
Brazil. I was surprised to see all that was going on and the number
of people taking it to the streets.
Tonight the network coverage began as
the world became aware of a very serious citizenry fighting back
against a corrupt government filled with greedy politicians. What
started as a lament against a proposed bus fare hike turned into a
revolution as people took up the call and focused on serious issues
in their country.
The people of Brazil say they pay high
taxes and see nothing in return. Their schools are inadequate, health
care is abysmal and yet the government will spend billions (I think
they are called real) hosting the World Cup and the Olympics.
Many Brazilians believe this money
would be better spent improving schools, revamping hospitals and
helping their people climb out of poverty.
My friend tells me that in her smaller
city about 20,000 people started making their way to the local
stadium but were met by police firing off tear gas and rubber
bullets. But the government of Brazil is fighting a losing battle at
trying to keep the protests quelled. Over 1 million people are
expected to take to the streets of Rio de Janeiro this evening and it
does not seem that the people of Brazil intend to give up their fight
any time soon.
Of course, nothing is ever a simple
matter, nor are all people in a country of one mind as we can attest
to. Another Brazilian friend, Rafa, joined the conversation and his
take is that while he supports many of the changes, he thinks the
whole movement has gotten out of control and he is in favor a more
peaceful, gradual change. He thinks there are those who are simply
drawn to the chaos and anarchy. Which I think is probably true.
Another Brazilian friend, May is part
of a student union – some of you will remember those from the 60s!
She is also part of the protests and even though she voted for the
current president, she says she should be able to demand the
politicians serve the people and not themselves. Sound familiar?
I hope they can bring about the change
they desire and that their lives will be better for it. I hope we
Americans will be able to take a page or two out of their playbook
and affect some change of our own. Brazil’s problems sound
amazingly like our problems and goodness knows we could use to shake
things up here.
Of course, when
thinking of what is happening in Brazil one can't help but think
about all the other protests and civil unrest taking place around the
globe. Is this a symptom of the global economic depression and the
systematic greed and corruption of our governments? Has the world
reached the breaking point? And what does this mean for not only our
future but the future of our world?
You know, the GOP keeps trying to claim that they don't have a "War on Women." They claim that they respect women (even though the womenfolk can't be trusted to make decisions regarding their own bodies). But then they'll stumble, and somebody like GOP candidate Todd Akin will try to claim that rape is not a reason that abortion should be kept legal, because, after all, nobody gets pregnant that way.
"First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare," Akin told KTVI-TV in a clip posted to YouTube by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."
Or you get somebody like, say, Trent Franks (R-AZ), who, after ten years in the House of Representatives, should know better.
Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), whose measure banning abortions after 20 weeks was being considered in the House Judiciary Committee, argued against a Democratic amendment to make exceptions for rape and incest by suggesting that pregnancy from rape is rare.
"Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject — because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low," Franks said.
Franks continued: "But when you make that exception, there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that's what completely negates and vitiates the purpose for such an amendment."
Now, let's ignore the fact that The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who make it their business to know such things, report that ten to fifteen thousand abortions due to rape occur each year, which makes statements like that "medically inaccurate, offensive, and dangerous." And we can ignore that particular piece of data because, after all, facts don't matter to this crowd.
Instead, let's all try and remember a wonderful little bit of information dug up by Tim Townsend and Blythe Bernhard for the St Louis Post-Dispatch following Akin's comments.
While U.S. Rep. Todd Akin cited only "doctors" as his source of information about the rarity of pregnancy resulting from rape, it is two pages, from Mecklenburg's 1972 article, "The Indications for Induced Abortion: A Physician's Perspective," that have influenced two generations of anti-abortion activists hoping to build a medical case to ban all abortions without exception...
In supporting his claim about trauma and ovulation, Mecklenburg cited experiments conducted in Nazi death camps.
The Nazis tested this hypothesis "by selecting women who were about to ovulate and sending them to the gas chambers, only to bring them back after their realistic mock-killing, to see what the effect this had on their ovulatory patterns. An extremely high percentage of these women did not ovulate."
Finally, Mecklenburg said it was likely that the rapists — because of "frequent masturbation" — were unlikely to be fertile themselves.
(I just threw in that last line as a bonus.)
So, are we clear on this? The GOP is trying to claim that there is no such thing as rape-babies, because the Nazis said there weren't. They are now basing their arguments on unscientific and inhumane experiments performed by Nazi doctors in death camps
Do you know how happy that one little fact makes me? I don't have to call the GOP racist, fascist, or Nazis! They're doing it to themselves!
It is the best of times, it's the worst of times and if you're like Glen Beck; if you're like nearly every blathering godsmitten idiot in the last few thousand years, it is always the end of times. There are always signs, always comets, always wars and rumors thereof -- earthquakes, storms, floods and droughts. There are always famines and pestilences, always cause to go to the mountaintop to await or dress in purple and take poison for the magic trip to the mother ship. If Jesus said the end times would be during the lives of his followers, it's no contradiction. There are always plenty of editors, redactors and other verbal shell-game operators to redefine and revise the prophecy to suit the game.
Someone smart once said that if we live only in the moment, there is no difference between falling and flying and if we've read Einstein we know that truth is a matter of the frame of reference you occupy. If your idea of "the world" is the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, the end of it means one thing. If you mean the Universe, a mid 20th century concept of something incomprehensibly larger, the importance of things like coveting your neighbors' ass or eating a Philly cheese steak becomes hard to see or justify as is the importance of anything that concerns a peculiar, transitory trick of chemistry on an infinitesimal dust mote we call life.
But the Grand Wazir of Beckistan said yesterday on his radio show that the Book of Mormon is "really a calendar" and perhaps like the Mayan Calendar, accurately predicts the end of all things. It's a level of rank stupidity that, like the size of the universe itself, utterly defies any attempt at analogy. He told his staff a long time ago, he said yesterday, that if he mentioned that book, it meant "we are at the end." It's the "Story of America" he said, but a story of things that never happened, cities that never were and people who aren't who it says they are and a story written by a charlatan with a demonstrated history of fraud.
But of course although each Plank length of time (tP) the smallest possible interval according to quantum mechanics, is the end of something, it's not likely the end of anything we would notice -- like the end of Glen Beck. It's not likely the end of the US government nor either political party, nor is it yet the moment of the "within 24 hour" predicted whistleblower he talked about earlier this week to an audience whose memory of world begins anew every morning
In a frame of reference where such a length is significant, not only are falling and flying indistinguishable, beginnings and ends are a bit meaningless in a frame that includes weeks and days and hours and indeed, human events. In the frame of reference where the stupid dwell, where anyone would credit anything Beck might utter, a report of cannibalism, although at least as old as the Neanderthalers, is so unique as to mean impending cosmic calamity. The Book of Mormon, like the Bible (only harder to read with a straight face) and many other religious texts inhabit a frame of reference so at odds with the physical universe and its properties and dimensions that talking animals magic fruit and other things and events that never existed abound, can be and always are used to frighten us to the profit of prophets.
"We are living in Biblical Times" Beck tells us; a statement hard to decipher since the last ravings of the Christian versions end sometime in the late first century, but of course there we have another blurry, woozy, foggy and crepuscular magic frame of reference where nothing really has much to do with anything outside of it; where nothing is true and all things are true and words have power. No offense intended to individual Mormons, but the book in question is hardly a calendar unless it be for a universe that never existed, inconsistent with the observable universe and inconsistent internally -- just like the Bible and Quir'an and others which speak of imminent calamities and events and places that are pure fiction.
Pure fiction, just like Becks mysterious 'whistle-blower.' Predictions of the impossible based on things with no significance selected for the purpose. Concepts like the end of time are far beyond science at the moment. We don't know when life will end, but the end of stupidity might just be as far off. There are signs.
"We are going to be greatly divided as a nation in the next ten days
and you are going to witness things in American history that have never
been witnessed before" Said Glenn Beck yesterday
despite his recent claim that his vocal cords no longer worked. I was
hoping that might have been the one true thing ever to escape his mouth.
It's
true -- you're going to witness the last half of June, 2013 -- a
historical first. I'm pretty sure you're going to witness another spell
of embarrassment for Glenn Beck too, not that he'll necessarily notice
or acknowledge it. There's a document, he says, that will "take down
pretty much the whole power structure, pretty much everything" and he's
going to announce it sometime today.
Those who remember
back to last April, a set which obviously doesn't include his fans,
might speculate that this new revelation will be as spurious and idiotic
as his earthshaking revelation
of a connection between Saudi Arabia and the Boston Marathon bombing.
Is anyone still waiting for an admission of error or a hint of humble
retraction?
Of course to those folks who follow Beck
in the way people used to mock dancing bears or court jesters, this is
nothing new. Students of buffoonery and the charlatans who move their
card tables and shells from one corner to the next in search of fresh
idiots may not even notice this latest tantrum, but the clock is ticking
Mr. Beck and there's not much time before the waitress brings you
another plate of crow. Do us a favor -- take a bite.
UPDATE:
Well days have gone by now and no whistles have been blowing and Beck has only some mumbling about immigration which is hardly the stuff of unprecedented division much less something to "take down the power structure."
Do his faithful listeners remember as far back as a day or two or are they just so choked up on each new day's revelation that they don't care about yesterday?
So, want so fries with that crow Glenn? Can I supersize it?
