How the Dark Side of Supply Side Unleashed the Zombie Apocalypse

The giant sucking sound came without warning, the sound of 1,400 jobs moving from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Mexico. “We recognize the impact on employees, their families, and the community,” announced the president of Carrier Corporation, the HVAC Division of United Technologies.

“Yeah, [expletive deleted],” an angry voice shot across the room.  Following three consecutive years of record earnings, plus a $12 billion stock buyback, the layoff was a shock, an act of betrayal. The giant sucking sound hardly made the evening news; but we hear it everyday in communities across America:

“Monday, Monday, so good to me;

Monday morning, it was all I hoped it would be.”

The kids, the car, the home, how will you pay bills without a job and keep your family afloat?  Desperate to find work, any work, part-time or full time, neighbors put off weekend chores to Monday.  Why Monday but no other day of the week, you ask?  Sometimes it just turns out that way.

Job or no job, good lawn mowers make good neighbors.  Cutting grass keeps up appearances and keeps peace in the neighborhood. Witness this exchange of greetings when neighbor meets neighbor at the mailbox:

“Good morning, Mr. Briggs. How are you today?”

“Mighty fine, Mr. Stratton. And yourself?”

How and when our fortunes changed is a tale of greed and deception run amuck. It started years ago when corporations and their political slush funds, also known as PACs, won the right to be treated as real people with full rights of personhood.

Suddenly, Lampposts, Manholes, and Utility Poles United sprang to life with special powers and privileges. Little did we know what was to be.

In short order, Manholes lobbied for tax cuts. As job creators, they claimed, tax cuts for Manholes would promote investment, economic growth, and jobs for everyone. No doubt, those tax cuts made Manholes rich; but no job falling into an open manhole has ever been seen again.

Tax cuts for Manholes have meant less revenue for our town.  To cover years of shortfalls and deficits, Lampposts in league with Utility Poles told the town council to cut services, slash payroll, and raise property taxes (which forced Mr. Briggs to sell his beloved home).

Years ago, when a Lamppost burned out, a service truck came to the neighborhood and replaced a bulb. This year, they say: “Buy your own bulb and replace it yourself.” Last year, Lampposts traded in their service truck for a Lexus. This year, they’re driving a Rolls Royce (and still demand a raise, a bonus, and more tax cuts).

Zombies United turned neighbor against neighbor. Manholes and Utility Poles persuaded the homeowners on Magnolia to scorn the homeowners on Dogwood — especially those who don’t look like, talk like, or vote like "their kind of people.”  Our once tranquil community, now divided in acrimony, no longer finds common ground to unite in common cause.

Legal but non-living persons now rule the neighborhood.  They failed to create a single job but reserve the right to shine flashlights in our bedroom windows at night.  These days, Lampposts wield more power and influence than real citizens whose votes no longer count.

Meanwhile, weeds have grown taller than utility poles, and ’for sale’ signs litter the neighborhood.  Enough, we say!  Forget the Lampposts, Manholes, and Utility Poles.  Forget those broken-down, trickle-down blues.  How I yearn for the smell of fresh cut grass, E Pluribus Unum, and friendly neighbors exchanging friendly greetings at the mailbox again.

“Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be.

Oh, Monday, Monday, how could you leave and not take me?”

This ends our tale of how the American Dream left the station, leaving our middle class behind.  Reminder: Tuesday is the day we bring our trash to the curb … and head to the polls.

Good is Bad, but Badder is Better

Imagine a world without one single fail, epic or otherwise, where you gave presents instead of gifting them.  Wasn't it just yesterday when there wasn't a genius toaster or tennis shoe in the world? Seems like that world never existed to most Americans, their Business or Journalism diplomas framed upon the wall.

So listen here kids, I'm going to tell you about a time - a time not so long ago when a macchiado would have sounded like something you'd get from a woman in black leather, and a barista was that floozie who was always still sitting  there at closing time. No, I'm not gonna tell you it was the good old days because those days were no better than these days, just different. Back then we laughed at out-of-date hipsters  who still started sentences with saaaay and ended them with seeee. We giggled at people who thought things might be swell instead of cool or maybe even neat. We laughed at people who still wore fedora hats or worse those little porkpie hats like Norton from the Honeymooners and we laughed all the harder when they turned the brim up like a total loser. Wear your hat indoors?  Hahahaha!  Not one science fiction writer ever imagined that there would be passionate arguments about whether your backwards hat should have a flat or curved brim or should be over-sized enough to cover your ears.

Once upon a time, not everything was awesome, you see.   Gilgamesh was epic, your lunch probably wasn't.

I heard some period drama recently in which a Victorian character says "the disease impacted her brain" and it was like an alarm going off.  We just don't remember how different our language was, or is it that directors are afraid of confusing the tattooed multitudes by saying it affected her mind?  and then there was the CNN News item about concussions impacting brains -- and said without a smile to indicate the news parrot recognizing that impacting the brain causes concussions.

No, really there was a time when people distinguished between because of and due to: a time when we waited for things and waiters waited on us. If my high school chum had talked about his selfie going viral or that his tweet was trending on Twitter, he would have been sent to the school nurse, but it couldn't have negatively impacted on his record since that convoluted and pompous metaphor hadn't yet graduated from business school and shuffled toward CNN to be aired..

Sure, life has changed and so have the requirements of language.  Who needed to call his Timex an analog watch back when John Cameron Swayze showed us how rugged they were and digital meant something entirely different, particularly in the doctor's office, But do we have to confuse meaning with metaphor?  Do we have to accept manipulative marketing blather so eagerly? Do we have to make fools of ourselves trying to sound adolescent, to sound educated or just to sound hip?  Are all of those motivations internal or are they implanted to direct and misdirect thought, stifle perspective and make us pay ten bucks for a cup of coffee?  a Senator wants to refuse to do his job but keep his pay and benefits? A deserter wants to be commander in chief?  All things are possible when  we twist the language.

I remember a decade of hearing how history wasn't as important as "what's happening now baby" and the results of that is a population full of fake and distorted history.  Are we doing the same thing to English by stressing the primacy of slang and jargon and needless complexity posing as erudition?  Listen to a presidential "debate" and tell me why the barking of dogs is less meaningful. Could it be that Orwell's Newspeak is becoming a reality?  Is language being stripped of precision, are words being identified with their opposites and is the function of language to sell, to indoctrinate to simplify past the point of  incisive or trenchant protest?

Why do I keep hearing patriotism used as a synonym for gun ownership? Why does Liberal mean totalitarian and Conservative mean radical revolutionary and why do Family values mean intrusive Theocracy?  Why is a blastula a Baby? What does Organic mean? What does Processed mean? Why is universal healthcare Fascist and Communist at the same time?  Why is any war about fighting for our freedom?  Why is bad good and badder better? Is it for the same reason that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance strength?

I suspect something of the sort and the fact that every English teacher I know thinks there should be no dictionaries and all that is required of them is to teach spelling and the proper use of possessive apostrophes, makes me wonder, and by "wonder" I mean I'm certain.

In Memoriam

I've talked about it. I've mentioned that even though I'm now in my 72nd year I don't know anyone who has been shot, or has been a victim of any crime involving guns although I did know a couple of murder victims.  Perhaps, as with most things in life, what you know is  about who you know.  There are, after all at least two Americas, often almost congruent, like parallel universes.

Living in Florida and living with trees on your property means you need someone to trim large hedges, palm trees and oak trees and assorted vegetation too big for the lawn mowing service to handle. It's especially true in hurricane season and I made the acquaintance of  a couple of local men in 2004 and 2005 after a series of hurricanes came roaring through my neighborhood.   Over the years it became a regular thing.  I got to know them both after a fashion.  Some years ago I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I remember they seemed happy for me when it turned out to be a bad diagnosis. I can't say that about a lot of people I know.

I was shocked and saddened to hear that Mr. H  had been found dead on the street a mile from here, shot multiple times just before sunrise. People who knew him stressed that he was a well-loved guy and was helping look after an invalid.   The other fellow, I found out had been arrested having been found to have some drugs at home and because he lived within a thousand feet of a school, the mandatory sentence would be very long.  Both these guys had a history of minor drug arrests.  Hard working men, working since their teens at hard things in the hard Florida heat.  Both are dead now.

I didn't mention that they were both black men.

We read these statistics and we make "common sense" judgments about what will help and what needs to be done, but how often do those ideas we put so much faith in, mention the fact that we have two Americas, two cultures.  Life is different for black men.  Things that might get lawyered away, things involving a warning or some order of tolerance sometimes turn out differently depending on what you look like and if you've been caught doing what so many white, European looking young men do will turn out differently for you.  I wonder what kind of gun control would have made their lives different.  I wonder what kind of drug policies might have resulted in both of them being outside right now trimming those 18 foot sea grape hedges.

Federal background checks, gun registration, ballistic "fingerprinting," gun owner registration, waiting periods, banning guns with plastic stocks.  I don't think so and I get shouted at for suggesting that things that repeatedly and often dramatically fail need to be re-examined, that we need to look at whole pictures and not arguments in gold frames.  Is it like trying to control reckless driving with air bags?

The community these men lived in is right down the road from me, right across the tracks from neighborhoods where houses start at 5 million.  It's peaceful, well kept and historically black, but life is very different as I have to notice, and it's not just because the real estate is so much cheaper.  It has a nice little park, it has more than one church from which you can hear some wonderful music if you go by on your bicycle on a Sunday morning.  It has a little grocery store that's been owned by the same family for most of a century, but life is different. I'm willing to bet there are very far fewer guns per capita than on my block. More people there can't own guns because of some prior offense that might have been bargained down to nothing in a different community.  It's not really crime ridden, it's not really run down, but it's been a black community for a century and things are different in such places and people there are treated differently.  Until we take an interest in knowing why, all our posturing about common sense but unscientific and emotionally driven causes isn't going to change anything.

So now I can't say I don't know anyone murdered by gunshot.  I'm not an island any more.

Sleepers awake!

"It's alive! It's ALIVE!" You'll remember the line from the movie Frankenstein. It must have been such a moment when Clarence Thomas broke a decade of silence and started asking questions from the bench. I notice this morning that the pundits are now taking notice of just what questions and why he asked them.

Interrupting Justice Department attorney Ilana Eisenstein in a case involving the constitutionality of abridging the second amendment rights of a convicted wife beater he asked whether she could provide any other example of a constitutional right being suspended because of a misdemeanor.  Now one can infer bias here, or one can realize that this is a legitimate constitutional quandary  Certainly it can be seen as being in the public interest to curtail the gun ownership privileges of someone convicted of assault, but there's the rub:  in the US it's not a privilege, it's a right.  I'm guessing that Thomas the Prank Engine* is going to decide that a misdemeanor isn't sufficient cause to curtail a man's God given Constitutional rights.

Now I could go off on several tangents related to a woman's right to be protected from having the crap beat out of her by her husband, but you'll get the point without my help.  My question and probably the court's question will be to decide what it takes to  "infinge" upon constitutional rights.  Many other second order questions will arise, no doubt, relative to what it takes to infringe on the right to vote or to be exempted from aspects of public employment because of religious feelings, but we have to face it: the right to keep and bear arms is seen by many as the keystone right, a fulcrum of liberty about which all other rights revolve.

I don't belittle the question itself: the question of  just how bad one must be to have one's rights stripped temporarily or permanently, but the question about which this case revolves is how strong is the right to be protected from harm, or is that to be seen by the court as a guarantee at all?

Can we treat the right to gun ownership and the right to carry one about as a privilege as we do with the privilege of driving a car?  The 'original intent' seems to be no and if silent Thom is about to decide thusly, perhaps it's time to consider an amendment to the amendment, hard sell though it may be.


* I refer to the incident of  the Justice putting his pubic hair on a can of coke and asking Anita Hill who put it there.  Oh, don't give me that -- there were 4 witnesses.

The Eye of the Cynic

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”

-Phaedrus-

I never thought I'd be saying this, but it just may be that America needs to be more cynical.  Our time is a time of crisis to crisis, calamity to calamity and outrage to outrage  with no intervals in between when  things aren't quite so bad and aren't getting worse. All in all, things may be better than they were for most people on most days, but how often are we prompted to contemplate it?

I wake up on a sunny morning in paradise and tuning in to get a weather report, the first thing I hear is MURDER! RAPE! ARSON!  Is it real or is it manufactured?  Nearly all the other 11 million people in Sunny Florida are having an ordinary morning hearing about little else but car crashes, electrocutions, inexplicable shootings and "isn't it getting worse? "  Did that "double dip" recession ever happen?  Did Obama take away a single gun from a single law-abiding citizen?  Did the markets recover?  Did that horrible scandal that would soon drive him from office materialize?  Who wastes a second talking about that? Who bothers to compare racism 50, 75 years ago to what we're anguishing about today? I keep seeing figures from reliable sources telling us of a downtrend in shootings. Is that a motivation for those who need to distract us from it to keep the spotlight on some subset and make a case for its increase?  Where there's motivation there's a manifestation.  Sometimes only a cynic will notice.

        "There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact" 

-Sherlock Holmes-

Our opinions, our fears and our serial episodes of righteous indignation may just be manufactured, cultivated and fed because it's not only big business, but it's an instrument of control and power. One after the other we hear clusters of stories that seem alike:  Pederast priests, brutal, racist cops, shooting sprees,  Innocent Black "children" being senselessly murdered.  It's normal to ask whether the scenario is being arranged, tuned up, framed to fit the model. Is someone arranging or even fabricating anecdotes because he wants some law changed that really has no bearing on events?   It's not completely out of the question that incidents are being assembled and connected to make the latest campaign of some group newsworthy.  It's not to say there are no trends, no clusters no increases of this or that -- it's to say that it's very difficult to tell when there are serial obsessions caused by regular and sequential news blitzes where on story is told over and over for weeks and connections are made to similar stories or stories made to seem similar because if America isn't glued to the tube, revenue at Fox or CNN is going to fall short of projections and hell will have to be paid.

How long have young women and boys been abused by the Roman Catholic Church?  Hard to say, but you only hear about it in outrage clusters even though it's probably been a steady thing for centuries.  Is violence on the increase in America?  It certainly seems so if you don't look back to those "better times" and read papers full of  riots, shootings and rampant violence. It's hard to tell if someone is trying hard to generate a sense of crisis.  It's hard to tell when these little campaigns, crusades and jihads are professionally stage managed and you can be swatted like a fly if you buzz too much about it. Say that human life matters and you're a racist, not that it doesn't or that you are, but for interfering with some organization's agenda of making racism seem on the increase.

"When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: Who stands to gain?”

-Vladimir Lenin-

I can only speculate, it's an experiment that would be very hard to carry out, but airing a cluster of completely fake stories - about young people jumping off bridges, for instance, might just cause young people to jump off bridges.  Certainly I've read about how how some young rampage shooters have studied and taken notes about others so as to exceed their "scores."  But such things are difficult to arrange although we can do research, we can talk about it.  We can look a bit harder for invisible hands pulling invisible strings. Cynicism!  We can peek behind the curtain and pay attention to the little man. We can ask Cui bono? -- who benefits from our outrage and is motivated to make the level of crisis high enough to meet his political purposes.

Me,Myself and Guns

A year or so ago, I was talking to someone about a fellow in a popular reality show about alligator hunters in Louisiana.  We share the same name, but  he lives in a homemade shack in the Bayou and lives by hunting and fishing.  Someone chimed in with "isn't it great that we live in a country where you have the freedom to live that way?"   In fact I think it is.  Looking at the success of the dozens of "off the grid" shows and books and movies, Others probably do too. Looking at the number of "survival" shows, I think many of us wish we had the skills and the opportunity -- and the nerve.

"I love the power of guns and the elegance and precision of the engineering, especially in the revolvers and side-by-side shotguns. The machining is so fine, the fit of the parts so precise, the movement of the parts so smooth. The gun itself can be a work of art, whatever you might think about its purpose, usefulness or danger. For an admirer of the mechanical craft, a well-made gun is a thing of beauty."

Juan F. Thompson: Stories I tell Myself

I really have no recollection of it as I was less than a year old in 1945 after the War ended,  but my Father, still a naval officer, and my young, city girl mother would take target pistols and go out to a creek and shoot at bottles in the water.  There apparently was little  else to do in that  remote area of Northern California and since my dad grew up in Wyoming, that's the sort of thing a boy and his girl did on a sunny weekend. If you've never done it, you'd be surprised at how relaxing it is.  But I was exposed to the sound of gunfire early in life and like an old  gun dog.  I've never been gun shy.

The quote is from Juan Thompson, the son of the famous and notorious Hunter S. Thompson; Gonzo journalist, Colorado ranch owner, Liberal Activist and aficionado of recreational shooting.  One of the few ways they could endure each other's presence was while shooting or cleaning firearms.

My dad collected antiques and antique firearms for many years.  He still has some of them, hanging on the wall of his den.  Few if any, are operable and those which are,  haven't been fired since he acquired them 50 years ago. They accompany an interest in 18th and 19th century American history which we have shared, but I'm interested in fine mechanisms in general, tools, cameras, knives. Vintage motor vehicles:  I have and have had a whole lot of those things as well as some firearms, most of which are historical items.

When I dare to mention that I have  perhaps 75 vintage cameras: finely made and finished metal objects by Leica, Minox, Hasselblad, Linhof, Nikon, Rollei, etc. most people think it's odd to cherish those obsolete things.  My hundred or so pocket knives make me only a little bit more so, but guns?  Face it, after years of demonization, after a long, steady and often virulent association with madmen and especially rampage shooters there's a stigma, attached not only to me, but to the objects themselves. I'm not a guy nostalgic about things, I'm a menace, a potential murderer and madman. It was not always so.

When I went off to summer camp and when I became a Boy Scout in the mid 1950's one of the primary lessons one was expected to learn was  how to shoot safely. It was one of those "pioneer skills" one was urged to acquire. Like making fires or shelters, it was a useful survival skill and a discipline akin to archery or fly fishing.  When I visited Colonial Williamsburg in those years I fell in love with the handmade flintlocks being made with antique tools and I never lost my affection.  I still have a couple which have,not been fired since we sold the farm 35 years ago.  It would be tough to part with them.

But the focus of life in this not-so-brave new world is Not the world where people live off the land and with nature, it's urban.  Our paradigm, our standard American is urban, works in an office. Perhaps he commutes, but he's far more Bourgeois than Bayou in fact if not in appearance.  He's more likely to be surrounded by huge numbers of people all the time.  When he thinks of something that shoots lead and goes bang, he thinks of bloody crime and wanton destruction.  He's been taught that association all his life despite endless TV and movies where guns are universally there. He has fear and all out of proportion to the risks, yet there's a titillating fascination. He's no longer the man of open spaces or endless forests and mountains for whom living as he pleases is a matter of pride and joy.  We're suspicious of such men these days. Suspicious and contemptuous of his unfamiliarity with the urban slang, the street culture, the popular fears and obsessions.  In the city, guns are sinister things.

Are we in greater danger of being shot in our daily lives than we once were?  Probably not.  But fear is in the air. Fear is in the marketing of everything from food to constitutional law.  It's not the Daniel Boons, the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark we Liberals admire, it's the deliberately helpless passive vegan gluten avoider who won't own a car, is terrified of "preservatives and cooked food and is made nervous by a Swiss Army knife..  It's the guy who thinks of cars not as liberators but polluters, it's the mother who thinks of cars only in terms of crashes and their survival and safety above liberty..

How much of our changing perception of safety and civilization are really changes in us, not in circumstances?   Is the fear that someone will shoot us today really on the same rational level as the fear that headache is brain cancer or that pain a heart attack or that we're likely to get diabetes or any of the things that are certain to kill us?  How more likely is it that Mom in her SUV will kill me than some crazed movie theater shootist?  A lot. Are we after Detroit to stop selling these things?   How much gun violence is alcohol violence?   I could go on, but not one person anywhere will consider his founding rears or attitudes and no one wants to leave the safety of his opinions and certainties and so we have more anger, more shouting, more malediction and denunciation  and more fear. Fear that makes us line up to buy more guns and fear that makes us terrified about other people who own them. Fear that makes us dress up the story, makes us frame, makes us present things tactically rather than objectively. It's fear that will end our idealism and our love of democracy and our passion for freedom and the ability to live the way we want rather than the way some corporation wants.

I have a dream.  No really I have it often and usually I'm walking on  a dirt path in what looks like my old farm or crossing that ruined stone bridge .  I'm always carrying a rifle, like the "boys" rifle I had a lifetime ago, or that 1873 Remington I never actually fired and I'm at peace with the world as I never am in reality.   I don't have the farm or those rifles any more or the dog who sometimes appears.  I'm afraid I don't have the country where those things still happen, but the dream never dies..

THE PRICE WE PAY

Another shooting spree in America and so another year of violence and death begins. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/02/21/reports-gunman-kills-least-6-michigan/80694468/

There are those who want to believe that our country is not getting more violent, we are just becoming more aware due to the internet. This is a lie and here are the statistics:

( I eliminated any domestic motivated killings and I have not counted the wounded which is some cases was a mind numbing number)

During the whole of the 1970s there were 3 mass killings leaving 12 dead. This does not include the Kent State massacre or any other government sanctioned shootings of that era. US population in 1970 was 203 million.

During the 1980s there were 8 mass shootings, including 5 committed by postal workers (coining the term "going postal") 58 dead. Population in 1980 was 226 million

During the 1990s there were 19 mass shootings leaving 130 dead. ( this included the Columbine shooting that left 28 dead, mostly high school students).

Population in 1990 was 248 million.

During the 2000s there were 21 mass shootings including the worst one in US history (VA Tech - Hokies forever RIP - 58 people killed, mostly college students) A total of 150 dead.

Population in 2000 was 281 million.

Too many people are dying, they are someone's children, someone's Mom or Dad, brother or sister. For every number in the dead column is a name and a face and a life cut short.

We have to do better. We have to do better in vetting those who are buying guns and ammo. We have to do better at catching up the mentally ill before they reach a critical state. We have to do better in this country to be compassionate and inclusive of all our citizens. We need to stop shutting people out, of our lives, of society, of community. This is a complex trend that is escalating and will not be solved by any one intervention. We can't just add more gun laws without addressing mental health and hate and prejudice. Many of these shootings were motivated by hatred of religious sects, gender, orientation, race, exclusion. Hate that is fostered in unstable minds by flaming rhetoric and twisted doctrine and escalates in isolation. Interestingly, in the 1970s there began a process of deinstitutionalizing mental patients by closing pysch hospitals and defunding many mental health programs. Today it is difficult to get mental health services for those who are ill and perhaps homeless and unemployed. We tend to ignore unstable behavior we see in our communities - someone else's problem, not ours. We are quiet on the verbal and physical attacks on those in our society who are being targeted, be it for their religion, sexual orientation, etc. And each year we pay the price. If not your friend or relative this year maybe some time in the next 5 years you will be affected by a mass shooting, losing someone you know and love.

We really have to do better

Brilliant, Just Brilliant!

I wonder what the world "Brilliant" means in our time. Lately I've heard it applied to people who insist we drill enthusiastically for oil in the midst of a glut which has disrupted the world economy. I've heard it applied to a mind convinced the Great Pyramid is full of wheat, to a candidate who thinks  that the Constitution allows us to outlaw a religion and round up its adherents. I heard another talk about winning "for the greater glory of God."  I've heard all sorts of puzzling words and I might speculate that things have become identified with their opposites, not only in our popular usage but in matters of law.

Not only does shall not mean must, but the strict interpretation of the Constitution's intent according to a prominent legal mind is to praise God and  it never was intended to protect the citizen from the requirements of a religion not of his own choosing.  Nor should the government grant as much freedom to those of non-established beliefs as it does to the favored faiths. I'm talking here about the brilliant legal mind of Antonin Scalia.

"I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion… We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.o impose it on all of us through the Constitution."

He's concerned here with the argument that having an official US religious oath is legal because of a tradition from the 1950's and that those who object to acknowledging someone elses god as America's official god need to be "fought." We need, says he, to persuade people that the prohibition against the government taking a position on one religion or another, is something else -- something that favors one religion or category of religions over another according to the acceptability of its beliefs. If you have a god, you're OK, if you have something else; a philosopher, a hero, a stone tablet an idol or an ethical principle. If you have faith in the teachings of the Dharma and the Buddha to lead you to the extinction of your ego -- if you have the body of science and the blood of mathematics within you, that doesn't count. Secular views are not protected because it's not a religion unless we officially establish it.  Establishment clause?  Maybe you're not Brilliant!

So OK, we can't establish a religion, but we can establish its tenets, myths and superstitions because, well, it's traditional and it's all our responsibility to honor a God we may not believe in -- and honoring God is a good thing because the Constitution says so, doesn't it?  So making my kids bow to your god and have an allegiance to it and perform public ceremonies honoring it is within the government's power and not within my power to prevent. Yes, indeed, the government may function as an instrument of worship, and of course that's the original intent of the Constitution, never mind what its creators said. A fine legal mind indeed. This is the incisive, sharp-edged razor that tells us so often that the United States is based on Christianity and therefore its laws must be interpreted, not by the firmly secular writers' intentions but by some ecclesiastical kind of ventriloquism where Tony's God speaks through the law. A brilliant mind indeed,  if dishonest and a bit stupid.

Its a word game. It's equivocation, it's a trick. It's flim-flam.  It's taking a theistic belief to be a religion and another belief to be the antithesis instead of an equal alternative. It's a deceptive way to call one belief legitimate and another not. Neither is actually constitutional. It's our right to have a government with no religious affiliation. Preaching from the bench is Judicial affiliation with a religion. It's unconstitutional.

"On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea."

Apparently some of us - people like Jefferson and Madison have invented a provision that forbids the government to say one belief, one idea, understanding or philosophical orientation is the official government one and informs our laws. No, don't look at that piece of parchment, you're not qualified to understand it because you're not an official State priest like Scalia. The government never guaranteed you freedom of anything. This is not the Bill of Rights you're looking for.

"God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools…and He has not been disappointed. Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world. If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."

So let's simply ignore the "sophisticated" world - God loves a foolish judge. God smiles when the Judge lies. Let's tell ourselves that error is virtue, that blindness to the truth and to the law is blessed. But sorry, God may give free passes to the fool, but the law does not. The law requires that justice be unbiased, disinterested, that Judges know the law and precedent and not be carrying a cross or a Crescent or a Torah or a book of any other laws than those of the United States of America. And how would any know what God assumes but from some other foreign code of law? In what part of our body of laws is God's law found?  In what part of our law is it said that arguments need make no sense because God said Christians look like fools?  And where most of all, I ask, is the job description of a Federal Judge that he in fact be a fool?

Obama, Texas Strangler

Well certainly it's reasonable to assert that Obama is behind the very, very suspicious death of a 79 year old fat man well past the life expectancy of his generation.  After all people who weren't there assure us it's suspicious that his pillow was covering his head.  Anyone having smothered him and having covered up all traces of his presence would have been sure to leave it there and the ability of Obama to transform himself into a bat and fly into and out of locked rooms is well known. Case closed.  We can't discount the suspicion because after all, people are asking questions: people like Alex Jones and that foul Fascist piece of human garbage Allen West.

Is it a sign of  some kind of progress in our society that people who once would have been in a straitjacket  and locked in a cell now run for political office and have radio shows and have followings of millions?  There are times when large numbers of people go insane; when whole countries go insane and the result is often genocide, war and the collapse of law and order.  Is this one of those times? How would we even know, when madness is everywhere we look for guidance? The internet, the radio and TV give us propaganda, lies and the ravings of lunatics and get respect for it.  In a world of blind men, the one eyed man gets ripped to pieces.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

Which old witch?  The Wicked Witch!

R.I.P. Tony.  Good timing buddy-boy.