“The One Indispensable Nation”? January 5, 2017

Obama called the U.S. ‘the one indispensable nation’. What a crock of shit that is. That’s on a par with the morons who say ‘we’re the greatest nation on Earth’. No, we’re not, not by any measure other than military power. In virtually everything else we’re lagging behind most nations in so-called Western civilization. Health care, education, infrastructure. We vote the stupidest of people into public office, expecting them to do miraculous things, when too many of them can’t even tie their shoelaces. Interesting how many of those are Republicans. Wannabe fascists.

The fucking idiots who voted for Trump are members of the know-nothing clan who want to be babied because oh my oh dear life just isn’t fair. They expect Trump to kiss their widdle foreheads and make everything better, and in return they kiss Trump’s fat, ignorant ass. And they’ll turn around and blather about being independent individuals blah blah blah. Assholes to a man. And woman.

Indispensable nation? Hardly. We’re a curse on the earth because we’re a stupid people, an arrogant people, an ignorant people. And cruel. The United States is responsible for far more deaths of innocents than any number of terrorists. We have destroyed countries, made homeless and stateless millions, slaughtered untold numbers of innocents, while the terrorists have blown up marketplaces and buildings and killed what… thousands? Terrorists breed in the places the United States has violated. Terrorists breed in the policies the United States has forced down the throats of small nations. Where the United States sets foot, terrorists rise up from our bootprints. The sound of American drones and jets raises terrorists from the rocket-heated air and the blasted craters left behind, from the body parts of children blasted to red paste and white bone by our missiles and bombs.

But Americans don’t know much about any of that. Ask them what they know about politics and they’ll tell you all about ‘Kardashian’.

Yeah, we’re the indispensable nation all right, just like in fairy tales designed to scare children the bogeyman is an indispensable character.

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Ebola And The Three Stooges October 18, 2014

The three stooges in this case are any three Republican wingers who are pushing the idea that the United States is in deadly peril because we had a couple of cases of Ebola and one entire, whole dead man. By extension ‘any three Republican wingers’ pretty much covers the entire Republican party, which seeks to spread terror about Ebola for the sole purpose of garnering votes next month. Americans appear to be stupid enough to allow that strategy to succeed.

However, by misdirecting the attention of the American electorate, they leave more room for the real threat. India. Southeast Asia. If the virus gets to India and Southeast Asia, given the massive poverty and the massive crowding of the poor in the major cities and the culture of saving face rather than saving lives, the virus will feed on those conditions and with a base like that it’s likely to burn its way through the primate population across the whole planet (primates include humans, though most of the other primates, I suspect, want as little as possible to do with humans).

For all the macho talk coming from Washington about the United States being prepared to handle an Ebola outbreak here, the truth is closer to the thought that American hospitals, in a serious outbreak, would just wash away in a stream of blood. They couldn’t handle it. They’d be overwhelmed in a matter of weeks.

Here’s a bit of a sample of what’s up, from a commenter at Talking Points Memo yesterday:

My wife’s ER has an ‘ebola cart’ with some lightweight protective gear and written instructions for putting on a PPE, but the instructions are a loose bundle of papers and the pictures don’t match the gear in the cart and has inaccuracies that put them at serious risk. It’s an object of gallows humor for the staff. That’s the totality of their training or preparedness so far.

The commenter notes further on that the head of the hospital publicly declared that the hospital, a large hospital in a major city, is fully prepared to handle an outbreak.

Yeah, okay. The American Ethic: Cover your ass, always, and never mind reality.

Imagine masses of people fleeing India and Asia ahead of the epidemic. Panicked. Hysterical. Seriously determined to get the hell out of the way and into… oh, right, the United States where they will be safe and secure. A dozen carriers hiding in American city slums and civilization falls apart, with half the world dead. Slums in London. Paris. Moscow. Madrid. Istanbul. Indonesia. Tokyo. Manila. Australia might make it through, being an island continent, but all those sneaky Indonesians are just a stone’s throw away and they’ll just come crawling up the beaches in the dead of night, bleeding as they go, and pretty soon it’s ‘On The Beach’ again, only messier. Maybe Tony Abbott can build walls of coal along the shores of the continent.

Not too far fetched really. Especially given the willful ignorance and unmitigated stupidity of the politicians the Americans have sent to Washington and to their various state capitols the last couple of decades. Most of the Republican members of the House science committee have publicly stated, one way or another, that they don’t believe in science. I suspect that for all the noise they’re making about Ebola they don’t believe in viruses either.

And if the Republicans win control of the Senate next month, you can bet the Three Stooges Protocols of the American Government will be operating in full force. (Apologies to the original Three Stooges, who were a lot smarter than most of the Republicans slithering around on the floor of the House and Senate.)

Some of the more astute among you may have noticed I didn’t include China in the scenario. I suspect that if Ebola showed its bloody face in China, the victims and their families and friends would be summarily executed, their bodies burned en masse, and any town or city that harbored the virus  would be firebombed to ashes, people and all. Followed of course by an announcement that there is not and never was Ebola in China.

C Street Fellowship Of Christians Supports Rape Of Children December 11, 2012

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 December 10, 2012

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.

We’ll Take Our Country Back From Unspeakable Darkness, Says Mitt August 31, 2012

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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Texas Republicans Choose To Make Texas Children Stupid July 1, 2012

 

From Common Dreams:

Here is the actual language from a position statement in the 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

The heart of Republicanism:

1) Fear intelligence

2) Fear intelligent people

3) Promote and praise stupidity

4) Keep people ignorant and uninformed

5) Eschew thinking and reason

6) Cripple schools and education

7) Keep our boots on the necks of the peons by denying them a decent education – that would be the niggers, the spics, the slants, the gooks, the redskins, and all the mud races

8) Get that damned nigger out of our White House

That about sums it up. Or as another famous Southerner said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

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First They Came For The Little Debbie Snack Cakes And I Did Not Speak Up… June 12, 2012

That was a line on the National Public Radio show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, which is probably the most fun you can have with news on radio.

But it brings to mind the original quote, by Martin Niemoller:

“In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”
― Martin Niemöller

A little history: According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, "Martin Niemoller was a Protestant pastor and head of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Arrested for ‘malicious attacks against the state’, he spent seven years in the Dachau and Sachsenhausen [concentration camps. He was] released in 1945 by the Allies."

We might well keep his words in mind these days in the United States. Maybe a little like this:

First they came for the immigrants, and I didn’t speak up because they did dirty jobs I wouldn’t do and they didn’t dress well and, well, they’re really not like us.

They they came for the unions, and I didn’t speak up because I don’t belong to a union and who needs them anyway and you can’t trust those people because a lot of them are immigrants and a lot of them are just people looking for cushy jobs, you know?

Then they came for the firemen, and I didn’t speak up because I’ve got enough money to pay for private fire protection, and public firemen mostly just sit around the fire house playing cards anyway, right?

Then they came for the policemen, and I didn’t speak up because I’ve got private police protection, but we need some public police to keep the lower classes in line.

Then they came for the teachers, and I didn’t speak up because my kids go to private schools, and the public schools are terrible and always whining about money and class size and teacher training, so let them go work for a living at a real job.

Then they came for the public service workers, and I didn’t speak up because they’re a bunch of leeches and I can never get anyone to answer my demands at town hall and they’ve got these huge pensions, you know?

They won’t ever come for me, though, because I’m just like them, a Republican, I’m one of them and I’ve got money.

                                                                   — Willard Mitt Romney

(My apologies to Martin Niemoller, but it’s got to be said again and again, generation after generation, because humans are a stupid species with short memories and shorter attention spans.)

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What the Right Really Believes… May 29, 2012

What follows is the complete text of an email I received recently.

This really is priceless!!

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away"

THE FIRE CHIEF SAID..PRICELESS

The Fire Chief Said…

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
Not fair to make judgment of this, until you see what the Fire Chief says!!!!

In South Los Angeles , a 4-plex home was destroyed by a fire.

A Mexican family of six, all welfare recipients and gang members,
Lived on the first floor, they died.

An Islamic group of seven welfare cheats,
All illegally in the country from Kenya , lived on the second floor,
And they, too, all perished in the fire.

6 LA, Hispanic, Gang Bangers, & ex-cons,
Lived on the 3rd floor and they, too, died.

A lone, white couple lived on the top floor.
The couple survived the fire.

Jesse Jackson, John Burris and Al Sharpton were furious!!
They flew into LA and met with the fire chief, on camera.
They loudly demanded to know,
Why the Blacks, Black Muslims and Hispanics,
All died in the fire and why only the White couple lived?

The Fire Chief said,
"They were at work"

This has just got to keep on circulating… it’s too good…

This is how the right wing thinks. This is Tea Party. This is Republican conservatism. This is the heart of the modern Republican party.

Nineteen people burned to death in a house fire. None of them were white. The white people survived because they were at work.

Nineteen people burned to death.

And that’s funny. Because they weren’t white. Because their lives were different. Because they were, what, morally defective?

But the white couple? Apparently very virtuous. They were at work, of some kind.

This is virulently racist stereotyping. It’s the sort of thing that serves to confirm the beliefs of the shallow ‘thinkers’ on the right.

It’s the sort of thing that leads to concentration camps and furnaces, all run by the ‘right people’, the good people, the moral people, the people who think it funny that nineteen people burned to death in a house fire.

And it is the sort of thing that appears to be very popular on the right. The party of Boehner. Of Palin. Of Kantor. Of the Koch brothers. Of Romney. Of Limbaugh and Hannity. Of fundogelicals. The party of morality and family values.

It is now an American value that people of color burn to death in house fires. That’s a family value today.

And it’s funny. Pricelessly funny.

Isn’t it?

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Want An Abortion In Alaska? Then Get A Note From The Guy Who Raped You. March 22, 2012

No, really, State Representative Alan Dick (who apparently is a Dick in the worst sense) is just terribly worried about… wait for it… his peace of mind, for which he feels he must subject women to insane regulation.

From The Mudflats:

And if you’re not fully convinced yet that Alaska is the next front in the GOP’s war on women, you just have to listen to State Rep. Alan Dick. He said in a House Health and Social Services Committee Hearing last week that he doesn’t believe that when a woman is pregnant, it’s really “her pregnancy.” As a matter of fact, he would advocate for criminalizing women who have an abortion without the permission via written signature from the man who impregnated her. He stated, “If I thought that the man’s signature was required… required, in order for a woman to have an abortion, I’d have a little more peace about it…”   He didn’t say whether a rapist would be able to send his signature by fax from prison, or not. But he’ll have “peace” and women will require a permission slip for their own bodies.

See  more links to legislation proposed by perverted Republican legislators who just cannot get women’s vaginas, uteruses, and all the other women’s sex parts their mommies never told them about, out of their sick heads… make that their sick big and little heads.

It would be a boon to the country if this November the adults go to the polls and shoot the Republican Party in the head so the rest of us can get on with the twenty-first century instead of heading back into the Dark Ages.

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Alabama Sinks Deeper Into The Sea Of Stupid February 2, 2012

Alabama Republican State Senator Shadrack McGill is doing his godawful best to make the State of Alabama the dumbest place in America.

His clever two-pronged attack involves using the Bible to justify keeping the pay of teachers low, while using bogus logic absent fact to justify raising his own pay.

The  world stares in silent, stunned wonder at the  brilliance of the American political system that continually fills its legislatures with these great minds of absolute genius.

McGill said that by paying legislators more, they’re less susceptible to taking bribes.

"He needs to make enough that he can say no, in regards to temptation. … Teachers need to make the money that they need to make. There needs to be a balance there. If you double what you’re paying education, you know what’s going to happen? I’ve heard the comment many times, ‘Well, the quality of education’s going to go up.’ That’s never proven to happen, guys.

"It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.

And perhaps at the next prayer breakfast or prayer lunch or prayer dinner Mr. McGill, obviously a product of Alabama’s school system, can explain how raising legislators’ pay makes them less likely to take bribes, since he hasn’t got a set of facts out there to prove that point, but apparently that must be in the Bible too, no doubt somewhere near the verse that says you should impoverish teachers in order to make your kids as stupid as you are, thus reducing intergenerational discord.

Yessiree, bubba, these Southern religious geniuses is just the best and brightest.

Like one of  their own said, ‘You can’t fix stupid.’ The  country needs a border fence alright – right around  the Southern Bible belt states.

Maybe old Abe should have just let the idiots go in 1861.

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[The Lion recognizes that picking on an entire region of the country just because it seems constantly to produce dumbassery is not really fair. But really, they manage to come up with so much of it that it just beggars belief. Of course we have our clowns in the North too, but we just can’t compete on the numbers as well as the utter depth to which the Southern legislators manage to reach when they pull up the gobs of stupidity they use to smear their states. But perhaps it’s not fair to be so hard on the legislators. After all, they usually don’t vote themselves into office, do they? Or is that a Southern custom I missed?]