A Brief Manifesto Against Outrage

The time for outrage is over.

The time to go into the courts, into the boardrooms, as well as into the streets is here.

It is time to be as cold and implacable as those who seek to tear apart the United States and pocket the pieces.

It is time for the wealthy liberals and the rich progressives to put up their money to save our, and their, country.

They must massively fund legal challenges and electoral challenges.

They must fund a movement to take the press back from a handful of cold barons who care nothing for truth but will sell a tale of lies to the highest bidder.

They must fund the training of activists in the ways of business and politics so those activists can become true weapons of democracy.

And the progressive and liberal rich must turn on their wealthy peers who fund the destruction of the nation: they must fight them on the economic front and impoverish them so they can never threaten this nation again.

From the smallest schoolhouse to the largest university, wherever the deniers of science, the purveyors of hatred of knowledge, the pushers of myth and religious falsehoods parading as science, wherever and whenever they appear they must be met by economic and intellectual force and driven back into their darkness. They must no longer be allowed to throw their cloak of willful ignorance over our education system.

From the local candidate for a village or town office to the major candidates for state and federal offices, whenever and wherever the voice of authoritarianism, of fascism, of ignorance, of misogyny, of prejudice, of bigotry is heard, it must be met with a well-funded and powerful voice of progressive ideals and policies.

The nation cannot wait any longer.

The progressive voices cannot sit back and sign on-line petitions and feel they have done their civic duty. The progressive rich cannot sit back and dribble out their wealth a little bit here and a little bit there, or sit back from the fray.

The darkness is here: it rages in the voices of the religious right; it rages in the voices of men who deny the personhood of women and would reduce them to the status of farm animals; it rages in the voices of corporate princes and elected officials who deny the facts and the evidence of science; it rages in the Republican Party where the religious right, the misogynists, the corporate polluters have all found comfortable homes. The darkness is here, it is here now, and it is ripping down the edifice of democracy for which so many have fought and have bled and have died.

Outrage must give way to cold reason and hard cash. Outrage must give way to planning and execution. Outrage must be focused into a steel sword of intelligence and mind and if necessary, blood.

The time is now.

The Case of The Phantom Cream

I loves me my coffee.

I buy Starbucks beans, several varieties at a time, and grind them fresh for each cup in either an electric grinder or in a little Japanese manual grinder from a firm called Hario.

I brew the coffee in a Chemex brewer, a simple hourglass-shaped glass pot, using laboratory grade filter paper, and using spring water instead of the foul tap water the town spews out.

I daresay I make the best coffee in town. Starbucks and the local coffee shop can’t compare.

When it’s brewed I pour it into a glass cup with some half-and-half. It’s delicious.

But the other day there was a disaster.

I had run out of half-and-half and thus gone to the store to get more. I brought it home and put it in the fridge for use the next day.

Now I should note that I have noticed myself making mistakes of perception as I get older. Simple things. Misreading words, for the most part. Thus the case of the Phantom Cream.

Half-and-half is half milk, half cream. It lacks the high fat content of straight cream and lacks the thinness of milk, imparting a smooth feel to coffee on the tongue.

Cream is, of course, the fatty part of milk that floats to the top of unhomogenized milk. The key word is fatty, or just fat. Fat is why humans like cream. Fat is what tells our body we’ve had enough to eat. Cream fat is the key to half-and-half.

Well, when I pulled the fresh carton of half-and-half from the fridge the next day I noticed I had made a horrible mistake. The label read ‘Fat Free Half & Half’. I was naturally dismayed and cursed myself, my age, my carelessness, and the Universe. But I said ‘Two and a half bucks is two and a half bucks,’ and poured some of this faux liquid into my coffee.

It did not taste right. Naturally. So while I was pumping the caffeine into my body I read the label on the carton. It said:

Ingredients: Fat Free Milk, Corn Syrup, Cream**, Artificial Color*, Disodium Phosphate, Carrageenan, Guar Gum*, and Vitamin A Palmitate.

*Not in regular Half & Half

**Adds a trivial amount of fat.

Contains milk.

That is not half-and-half. Not by half it isn’t.

Half-and-half is half milk, half cream. Cream is nicely fatted.  And I would venture a wild guess that half the contents of the container is not cream. In order for their ‘cream’ to add a ‘trivial amount of fat’ it would have to be a trivial amount of  cream, certainly not half the carton.

Instead they have dumped in an inordinate amount of corn syrup. Note that it is the second item in the list, meaning it is the second most common ingredient. Which means there is more corn syrup than cream.

And what is corn syrup?

Liquid sugar. Just the sort of thing you would not want if you were on a diet and were pursuing that diet using ‘fat free’ foods. You would be far better off with cream than with pancreas-killing corn syrup.

Just for comparison I read the label on the real stuff that I ran out and bought after reading the label on the faux stuff. It read:

Ingredients: Milk, Cream.

Now that’s half-and-half!

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R.I.P. Binky 02.15.2013 4:30 a.m.

She had a good day yesterday.

C Street Fellowship Of Christians Supports Rape Of Children

Jeff Sharlet writes in his new book, “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”, about the secretive group that helped cover up Senator John Ensign’s extramarital affair.

A stunning excerpt:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ’s avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family’s early days, they debated registering as “a lobby for God’s Kingdom.” Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. “The more invisible you can make your organization,” Vereide’s successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, “the more influence you can have.” That’s true — which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe’s son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He’s a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was — or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate — he asked a young man who’d put himself, body and soul, under the Family’s authority, “Let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?” The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. “No,” answered Coe, “I wouldn’t.” Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he’s among what Family leaders refer to as the “new chosen.” If you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.

These are the men that Republican families trust to lead the country out of the moral wilderness those families believe we are in.

Now we have a good idea why the country has been going to hell, with Republicans leading the way. What the hell, if it’s okay by the Republicans to rape children, then it’s okay to invade countries illegally and slaughter foreigners; it’s okay to act like whores for corporations; it’s okay to deny health care to Americans; it’s okay to lie and cheat and deceive to get the government to follow your personal agenda of immoral war and torture and unending imprisonment without charges.

Where will these people take us? Once again, The Lion suggests the answer lies in the words of Jacob Bronowski, particularly when he speaks of arrogance.

Jacob Bronowski,in The Ascent of Man, at the pond in Auschwitz prison camp, squeezing the mud between his fingers…

“It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

“Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’.

“I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

Technorati Tags: Jeff Sharlet, The Family, C Street, John Ensign, Pedophilia, Child Rape, David Coe, Doug Coe, Abraham Vereide, Politics, Jacob Bronowski, Mark Sanford, Religion, Christianity

America the Stupid: The Great American Religion of Ooga Booga

Here are named some of the leading lights of American governance, all in crucial positions.

James Sensenbrenner, of Wisconsin: Complained about scientific ‘fascism’. Called climate change science an ‘international conspiracy’.

Todd Akin, of Missouri: Speaking of women who have been raped, said, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Paul Broun, of Georgia: At a church banquet not long ago he said, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”

Dana Rohrbacher, of California: Speaking of an ancient period of climate change, said, “We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows?”

Randy Neugebauer, of Texas: Sought to pass a resolution that Americans pray ‘to humbly seek fair weather conditions’. That was his response to violent tornadoes and extensive drought.

These men are all members of the American House of Representatives, duly elected by the people of their home districts, and they are all members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

The House Republicans, the people in charge now of the House of Representatives, have appointed to a critical committee dealing with significant issues of the Twenty-First century, in a time of critical need for intelligent, informed, and wide-ranging discussion and action on a number of issues involving science, the Republicans have appointed men from the Stone Age whose greatest ability, aside from getting the ignorant rubes back home to elect them, is to hide in the back of caves mumbling ‘Ooga booga’ while a thunderstorm rages outside.

And just to ice the cake, just to put the cherry on top of the American ice cream sundae, the chairman of the committee, one Ralph Hall, of Texas, has said about climate change, “I’m really more fearful of freezing. And I don’t have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts.”

This is America, the leader of the free world as the whole world falls down the rabbit hole of massive, global climate heating, on the way to mass extinction, all documented, all researched, all full of facts and intelligence. America, still living in the Stone Age, led by shamans and priests of Ooga Booga.

Remember the names you read here. These are the men your children will curse as they struggle to breathe in a dying world.

Reprise: Afghanistan Again

Just to return for a wee moment to the United States government’s claim that it is murdering people in Afghanistan so that the country will never again be used as a base to attack the United States…

The claim is ridiculous on its face, as I’ve often said. The attacks could have been planned anywhere in the world. The attackers trained in the United States. Their weapons, airplanes, were American airplanes flown from American airports and hijacked in American airspace.

The Americans would have been better off ignoring Afghanistan as a player and hunting Bin Laden and his co-workers with small teams using intelligence gathered from multiple international sources. Instead they did the equivalent of dropping a bomb on a biological weapons warehouse, spreading the deadly bugs all over the place. Now the Americans are killing people all over the world, including their own citizens, all in the name of fighting a disease which they in large part are responsible for creating and disseminating.

And now the Americans use the ultimate coward’s weapon and coward’s rationale: airborne drones using missiles to murder ‘suspected militants’. Suspected. Militants. Not known terrorists actually guilty of criminal acts. Suspected. Militants. Speak too loudly in support of your country and your beliefs and the Americans will strike like an invisible god from the sky, hurling lightning bolts at you. And your womenfolk. And your children. Because they ‘suspect’ you and your women and your children just plain don’t like the United States of America.

What a pathetic, shambling, mindless thing America has become.

USA! USA! We’re Number One! We’re Number One!

Among industrialized nations, the United States has the

• highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• greatest inequality of incomes;
• lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;
• lowest average number of days for paid holiday, annual leaves, and maternity leaves;
• lowest score on the United Nations index of “material well-being of children”;
• worst score on the United Nations gender inequality index;
• lowest social mobility;
• highest public and private expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP

These trends are accompanied by the

• highest infant mortality rate;
• highest prevalence of mental health problems;
• highest obesity rate;
• highest proportion of population going without health care due to cost;
• second-lowest birth-weight for children per capita, behind only Japan;
• highest consumption of antidepressants per capita;
• third-shortest life expectancy at birth, behind only Denmark and Portugal;
• highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;
• second-lowest score on the World Economic Forum’s environmental performance index, behind only Belgium;
• third-largest ecological footprint per capita, behind only Belgium and Denmark;
• highest rate of failure to ratify international agreements;
• lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;
• highest military spending as a portion of GDP;
• largest international arms sales;
• fourth-worst balance of payments, behind only New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal;
• third-lowest scores for student performance in math, behind only Portugal and Italy, and far from the top in both science and reading;
• second-highest high-school dropout rate, behind only Spain;
• highest homicide rate;
• largest prison population per capita.

From Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: 2012, Nation Books.

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We’ll Take Our Country Back From Unspeakable Darkness, Says Mitt

Okay, the RTP piece of wood didn’t actually say that last night.

What he did say, among all the nonsense and empty flim-flam language and phony homespun babble, was that the United States is supposed to save the world from ‘unspeakable darkness’. The context was vaguely historical, but given the RTP’s affinity for Klannishness, it’s not far fetched to suggest that he was throwing some meat to the racial bigots, to the peanut throwers, the animal feeders, out there in the convention center that was built with taxpayer money from blacks and whites alike.

And today, babbling some other speech somewhere, he shouted, in his finish, ‘We’re going to take America back.’

We’re going to take America back.

Now that’s a bit ambiguous.

Does he mean he wants to take America back to the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth, or possibly the Dark Ages? That’s where RTP policies, such as they are, would take us. Of course Mitten would be satisfied to take us back to the status of a third-world country by bankrupting us with his lust for absolute military power at the cost of every other aspect of American life except for the part where he gives even more money to his rich friends and masters.

Or did he mean he wants to take America back from some force or power that took America away? Last time I looked the country was being run and staffed by Americans, duly elected. Perhaps he means the Americans in the White House. That American. Obama. The black guy who took America away from the real Americans, you know, the white ones who mumble in their sleep, mumble in their coffee, and blither in their get-togethers that they want to take ‘their White House back from the nigger.’

Mittens may not have offered a single bit of substance in his entire primary campaign and during the entire RTPNC convention in Tampa, but he sure does seem to be whistling Dixie to the white RTP people whose hearts belong to the Klan.

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To See The Stars, To Know One’s Mind

I’m normally a pessimist regarding global warming, the depredations of the human race, and the big issues. And with justification, I think. Civilization is coming to an end because we screwed with the laws of physics and as a species we continue to demonstrate that we simply don’t understand the laws of physics and that they apply to us. So, civilization is over. Mass extinction is underway. Our intent, as a species, is to hasten it.

But this morning, while the sky was still dark, I went out on the porch and looked up. A bright planet to the east, I think Venus, sat like a jewel among the stars. So many stars, yet only a small fraction of what I could see if the lights of the town and the neighborhood were off. Even so. So many. So bright. So far. It was wondrous to look at them, to realize what they were, to understand how they got there, how they came to be, how they work. And equally wondrous to know that there is so much we don’t know about them, and how much we can learn.

That’s a feeling the religionists cannot have. To them their god made the stars and planets. Not for them the understanding of the subatomic processes that keep the stars glowing for billions of years. Not for them the incredible processes of a nova, a supernova, a stellar collapse. God did it. Religion, religious belief, god: those stunt the mind, weaken the intellect, narrow mental and emotional horizons, undermine the human species, and now, hasten life toward extinction.

Perhaps that is pessimistic, to think, to believe that most of life in this biosphere will soon disappear. On the other hand I’m not afraid of it, no more than I am afraid of my own death. Because I am an atheist the religionists tell me I will burn in eternal torment once I die, while they will go to some place of eternal bliss, such place usually described as one of the most inconceivably boring, dull, terrible places imaginable, where one’s whole being must spend eternity worshipping some hugely narcissistic being. I’ve always said that given the choice I’d take the torment because the really interesting people and interesting ideas would be found there. Religious people tend to be boring even in this life: apparently their idea of bliss is eternal boredom and enslavement to a narcissistic being, and their idea of hell is a ferment of ideas and questioning and seeking after facts and evidence and truths. They have much to fear, and much to torment themselves with.

I have none of that. I think it sad that we are so incompetent as a species that we are willing to destroy life on earth in order to satisfy the whims and stupidities and fears of our weakest minds, but I know that the laws of physics will operate no matter what we do. By understanding and following them, we might save the biosphere. Unfortunately, and in large part due to religious ignorance, willful ignorance it must be said, and human stupidity and greed and selfishness, we choose to ignore physics. Nonetheless I take comfort in the fact that the laws of physics do work, that they aren’t subject to the caprice of invisible beings, and that we can understand them. That knowledge gives me a sense of optimism, a sense that though we will extinguish most life, including our own, in time life will rise again on the planet, and it is to be hoped that it will be devoid of the flawed intelligence evolution gave us, intelligence that cursed the world.

As for the theists and the rest of the superstitious crowd, frankly I do hope they get to their heaven of eternal worship. I can think of no greater curse to call down on them while I drink my morning coffee and gaze at the stars.

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Ronald Reagan Redux, America In His Darkness

It’s evening in America.

Today fewer men and women will go to work than ten years ago.

With banks paying virtually no interest on savings, with a financial sector filled with thieves, hucksters, and con men drawing astronomical salaries as they destroy American’s ability to take care of their families, Americans are more fearful and less secure than ever.

Hundreds of young men and women will marry today, and they can look forward to a nation that values weapons more than education; that values scientific ignorance more than facts and evidence; that values people with money more than people struggling with three jobs to support their families; that sends American jobs overseas to enrich wealthy owners who pay little or nothing in taxes; that gives pride of place to religious superstition and ignorance instead of knowledge and understanding; that seeks to degrade women to the status of farm animals.

It’s evening in America, and under the cover of darkness the forces of wealth, amorality, and ignorance, the forces of forty years of Republican and Conservative political deceit and lies, our country is weaker and worse off than ever.

Ronald Reagan told us it was morning in America and then he started turning out the lights.

Today in America, night is falling and the lights are still going out. Why would we ever want to put Republicans back in power?

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