Well, isn't that special!
The number of people on earth just hit seven billion. And the putative seven billionth is an undernourished looking female from an undernourished family in an undernourished country.
And here we are, the fattest country on earth, agitating for person status for little clots of bloody protoplasm only seconds old.
Are we the stupidist people on earth?
You betcha!
If you have any doubts that religion has reached its slimy tentacles up to stratospheric heights of idiocy, shouldn't the push to make a woman's miscarriage an object of legal investigation in order to impute manslaughter, if not murder, to her carelessness the final straw?
I am ashamed to say I'm from the United States of Christianity.
After we symbolically cut off the greedy hands of the Wall Street crowd, do you think we could cut off the actual testicles of the evangelicals?
I probably can't convince anyone to really do this, but in the time span of one generation we might improve our chances of survival from this cesspit of religious fervor.
And what makes the religious frenzy even more shocking is that all the priests and imams and rabbis dispensing this ordure probably don't believe any of it. They're just gifted salesmen.
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Oh for the days when men were men and disputes were settled with clubs. Maybe then we would be able to say, "The best man won!"
Listening to some of these candidates weasel their way out of misstatements and outright lies, and covering their tracks afterwards with accusations of having had to battle "unfair" gotcha questions, makes me want to commit all manner of mayhem - or maybe just puke.
Do you remember the last debate Georgie Porgie submitted to? I think it was the one where cameras detected a Charlie McCarthy wire under his jacket that many have alleged was the source of his ability to survive even those softballs that were allowed to be tossed at him.
The debates of today are total frauds. Even without the successful cribbing W is suspected of, the tortuously contrived set of parameters that each side demands insures the public will never know the real measure of any candidate
In September 2004, reporter Connie Rice filed a story with NPR outlining 10 things the political parties don't want the public to know. She wrote:
"The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984. The men running the major campaigns ended the (LWV) control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn't like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates — the CPD." — in 1986.'
Among some of the other things that are now forbidden are any back and forth communication and the audience must be divided with equal numbers of "soft supporters" who can't make approving or disapproving noises. They even have made agreements about what can be mentioned and what must be avoided.
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4052162)
Maybe the public needs to do a little rabble rousing when it comes to these debates. One of the most effective things would be to have the veracity of candidates' statements confirmed - on the spot - while the horsepucky is still hot.
While it might be impossible for the questioner(s) to have the information at hand to do so, IBM's super computer, Watson, who more than held held his own with Alex Trebeck's contestants on Jeopardy, certainly could.
It might even add some interest to these stultifying affairs and maybe, just maybe, we could end up with some useful information that was not canned, prechewed and predigested for our voting pleasure.
And if we like the results of that, we can hire Watson to check every idiot utterance a candidate makes throughout his or her interminable campaign.
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I'm a firm believer that too many of the least well informed and the least well financially endowed among us have been artfully convinced by Conservatives to support politicians who do not represent their own best interests.
The have-nots who have attached themselves to more liberal representatives are called "brain washed" by one of our more unlikely GOP candidates.
No question, Herman Cain is a smarty. I'm trying to determine if "patina" or "veneer" best describes his intellect. I make the differentiation of the two by how recent is the acquisition and how deep it goes.
He uses his basso profundo voice to good effect. By enunciating carefully, clearly and in unhurried fashion, he gives off the tonal clues people attach to education. But he is glib, not truly educated.
I believe the impression he is giving to the hoi polloi has evolved from his learning how useful mimicry is. Mimicry is used most successfully in the insect world where edible insects mimic the patterns of the poisonous ones.
In other words, he sounds good, tastes bad.
Perhaps this is too harsh an indictment. And I probably wouldn't have made it so quickly had it not been for the interview Lawrence O'Donnell conducted with him last week. An interview that was criticized, even by brilliant liberal intellectual Melissa Harris-Perry, for being unfair because of O'Donnell's apparent premise that because he was black he was required to participate in the civil rights movement.
O'Donnell asked him why he did not. That he was in high school at the time was a credible excuse, if one needs an excuse. But his further explanation that he was following his father's advice to keep his head down and not get in trouble was a less convincing and viable reason. His description of his father's credo was unfortunately reminsicent of Uncle Tom.
Keeping your head down, working hard and not asking for help is an admirable formula for success. He can't be criticized for that. However, he is succeeding because braver, more visionary activists risked everything for his right to succeed in a white world.
And succeed he has. Unfortunately, his current sympathies still do not lie with those who laid down their lives so that he might bloviate on the merits of capitalism.
He should be on the griddle tonight. I will be interested to see if he maintains his equilibrium now that he will be a target of his political peers.
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While we are on Wall Street trying to right our ship of state, maybe we could expand the parameters to include ridding ourselves of those insidious, mind-rotting, soul-searing, science-denying peddlers of faith and self-styled morality.
Preachers, priests, shamans, witch doctors and, particularly, evangelical pastors should have preceded the Dodo bird but, unfortunately, superstition appears to have the upper hand.....still!
Did you see and hear that little Texas pastor, Rev. Robert Jeffress, who addressed the gathering of the GOP faithful yesterday where he self-righteously made all those definitive declarations about faith and god?
His god. The god he is convinced is the only god. The god that he insists must be believed in before you can be elected to any office, including dog catcher, or even before you can be considered a "bona fide" person.
Who the hell ever wrote this on any rock, or edifice, or beating heart, or on a mind that contains all its working parts?
Unfortunately, it's hard for me to defend the obvious object of his criticism - Mormon Mitt Romney. While Jeffress is, to me, a vulgar, soulless little man who doesn't think Romney can be considered for office because of his cult membership status, I have my own criterion for a leader: a man who believes in magic underwear has an intellect that must come in for a fair share of examination.
I think I would crawl naked over glass if it would help to free mankind from this idiotic attachment to worshiping at the altars of man-made codes that have proved themselves fallible, evil, cruel, stupid and bloody at every instant of our history.
Further, the religious zealots appear to be getting dumber and meaner. Not to mention how many, on close examination, are sexually deviant.
What is it about the fundamentalist faithful that makes them so far from god-like, but so convinced that they can tell us - with no empirical proof - that they know what we must believe?
Resist, thinkers of the world. We must overcome.
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This is the first illustration I have used on my blog. Why? I didn't know how to put one here. But this blew me away sufficiently that I figured out how to copy it and install it. Millions won't see it here, but I hope whoever does will pass it on.
You can talk about the disparity in compensation, and you can talk about class warfare, and you can listen to the sages on wages.....but, as they say, a picture is worth billions of dollars.
How can anyone defend this? How can any of our elected politicians sanction this? How can this stand? Why aren't the sanctimonious clergy up in arms? Why isn't every citizen in the country outraged?
There is a kind of sickness running through a part of our population that will not heal until we rid ourselves of the idea that greed is goodly and wealth is godly; that the poor are poor because they are lazy; that because luck allows even one idiot to rise to the top without having to do anything onerous, that this is manifest destiny.
Of course there will be a revolution. Let's hope it doesn't include bloodshed. If ever there was a reason to shed blood, this blind worship of the almighty dollar might be it.
Let's take the Kochs and the Cantors, the Norquists and the Know-nothings, the Mitts and the Mitches, the Becks, the Rushes and the rest of the rats in the political sewers, out to the woodshed and convince them of the error of their ways.
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