Where They Are the Same

Do you know where you can’t tell the far left from the far right, other than the level of crazy? They are both humorless. Before you put both feet in your mouth and spout out your asshole, look at the left wingnuts' comments on Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Stephen Cobert, and even George Carlin (who pissed off everyone).

You can also make a case for both groups lacking introspection (and the associated humility that comes with self-examination). The furthest lefty I know, so left he calls himself an “anarchist” which is also how Libertarians often self-identify, calls himself “a really smart guy” so often I wonder if he isn’t pretending to be Donny Maralardo. I know a few really smart people and I have yet to hear one call himself that in public. At those far polarities, both groups often seem to lack empathy, also. But the absolute lack of humor is astounding and practically a carbon-copy of each end of the political and social spectrum.

Being the fool I am, I drug Mrs. Day into an evening with a couple we have known since we moved to Red Wing. He is a retired adjunct community college social anthropology instructor and she is an artist and a gardener. They have lived on a small hobby farm in Wisconsin since the 70s and have had an interesting relationship with their mostly-cultish Trump Republican neighbors. Covid hasn’t nurtured or matured those relationships. We often have heated discussions because he’s convinced I’m a malleable kid who just hasn’t been jabbered at long enough to be indoctrinated. For years, Mrs. Day and I thought his wife was the family adult, but last night was worse than a Day family reunion.

Every time I tried to inject a bit of humor and to slow down the pace of attacks and non-stop lecturing, I got bit. It took me until this morning to recover enough from that awful evening to realize that while they often sneer, I can’t remember either of them ever laughing or even smiling in an open, friendly manner.It probably happened at some time, but it was so long ago I don't remember it.

For at least 50 years, after my brief experience with the Texas SDS and anti-Vietnam movement of the 60s, I have said, “The best we’re ever going to get in a political leader is someone who both the right and left hate.” Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden qualify by the measure. The rest have been train wrecks. I can't think of a single instance of a radical left political leader making it beyond even local U.S. politics, so we don't have any examples of that to compare. What the crazy right calls "socialists" any reasonable person would call "moderately liberal." Of course, fascists have thought liberals are the Devil's Spawn since the first bully got yelled at for beating up the first nerd. 

The differences between the far right and the far left are still pretty substantial. Wingnuts will quickly point to the momentary spots in U.S. history when anarchists, radical left rich kids, and minorities have spun out-of-control and taken to violence not so much to imagine they might affect change as to expel frustration at a mindless system that revels in waging expensive, high-tech war on Third World countries or hires high school bullies and racist goons to provide "police protection" to keep brown people from thinking they also have rights. As we've seen in the past 250 years or more of North American history, conservatives are quick to grab a gun (or a hammer) and attack anyone who challenges their preconceived notions of reality. And conservatives will always vastly out-number radicals and, even, moderate liberals. Comparing race riots and the moments of Weathermen radical student violence to the past 250 years of racist violence across the nation, north-to-south and east-to-west, is insane and mathematically inept.

Natural distribution defines how both our national intelligence and our political proclivities will lie (literally). Half of every population will be of below-average-intelligence and that is not a hard bar to beat. We're just not a particularly bright animal, on average. However, that curve does not accurately define the conservative-progressive split because the overwhelming majority of any animal will be afraid of change (the primary definition of "conservative"). So, combine a half-stupid population with a nine-tenths (being optimistic) conservative population and you have what has kept humans from becoming "the rational animal" for as long as we've been on this Earth. One of my favorite science fiction writers from the 50s and 60s, Theodore Sturgeon, said "90% of everything is crap" and I've always thought he was a starry-eyed optimist. In the curve above, at best, the population from 115 and up are who have been dragging the rest of this trainload of deadbeats toward a better world while the other 90% are either non-destructive but not particularly helpful or outright wrecking balls of mindless human flesh and meat. 

So, radicalization does seems to either take or create a particularly humorless sort of personality. In the United States, our history demonstrates that Marx might have been on to something when he claimed that a society has to pass through all phases of the idiocy of capitalism before it is adult enough to head toward socialism. Although some of the European nations made that passage a lot faster and more efficiently than we've managed. There is no "good people on both sides" stuff here. There are no good fascists. None.

Begging for Respect

In a recent Atlantic Magazine video-article, titled “Why Don't Democrats Take Religion Seriously?” Emma Green asks, "Why haven’t liberals tried harder to reach the broad percentage of Americans who identify as religious?' Democrats in Washington often have trouble speaking in religious terms, and they reflect a broader liberal culture that doesn’t take religion seriously.'" The answer lies in reality. Liberals/educated people don’t take all sorts of silly shit seriously. We argue about exposing our children to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, ghosts, vampires, zombies, talking animals and inanimate objects, along with various gods and semi-gods like Jesus and Mohammed. We worry about the slippery slope of letting kids believe in “harmless nonsense” when they are young enough to imprint on that crap. The upside to believing in nonsense is so small it appears to be immeasurable. The downside is immense.

It is absolutely true that the Civil Rights Movement was driven, mostly, by religious conservatives like Martin Luther King. That was then, this is now. Today, religion has joined forces with the opposite view. Evangelicals and other so-called Christian groups have thrown their hat in the ring with Trump and the Republicans who are trying to turn the US into an oligarchy. Not that this is news, but from the Catholic Church to evangelicals to more traditional Protestant churches, sex scandals, financial scandals, and political wingnutery abounds. For the most part, the practitioners of religion have abandoned any pretense of moral character and its priests have turned religion into a poorly-disguised money machine; just like Republicans.

There is a reason liberals don’t take religion seriously, it is not a serious thing. It’s dangerous, it holds the whole society back, but it is not a subject for serious philosophical consideration.

Just to sum up the argument, you believe that there is a just, kind, jealous, vengeful god who randomly punishes little kids and other innocents with disease, starvation, war, and general mayhem for “mysterious reasons.” You believe that when Jebus comes back you will rise up from the grave (in prime condition, not the rotting mess your physical body became in the grave or the pile of ashes your kids were supposed to preserve) and go to a heaven that is designed to be ideal for every person (with a god who looks exactly like you). Belief is a funny thing. However, no matter what you believe the universe operates on the laws of physics and could not care less about your faith.  

It’s not the delusions or the superstition or even the arrogance that puts off many liberals, intellectuals, and generally sentient humans, it’s the celebration of death. Not just of death of the self but of the whole world. All of the Abrahamic religions have cults that believe the end of the world will be the beginning of Nirvana or whatever they’ve named their Big Rock Candy Mountain.  Christianity, as it is practiced in the US, is particularly driven to end life on this planet in the hope that the “faithful” will drift up to the sky and sit at “the right hand side” of their god for eternity. With the usual poor math skills exhibited by conservatives everywhere, I suspect they haven’t bothered to visualize how remote a position they are likely to have with the billions of believers stacked up on that side of the god’s throne.

If Christians were able to settle on eliminating themselves, leaving the rest of the planet to get along without them, the aversion to their belief wouldn’t be nearly as strong. Fundamentalist Christians appear to have a weak grip on their “faith” so, in case they are wrong and the whole Rapture thing doesn’t happen, they seem to be convinced it is important to turn the planet into a smoking husk before they drift off to where ever they will be going. That is the reason liberals and other rational thinkers are hostile to religion. If you want to Jim Jones yourself into oblivion, please be our guest. If you want to take the rest of us with you, get ready for a fight.

Educational Danger Signs

I just discovered that a friend who I’d worked with for ten years back in the eighties has a BS in Physics. From what I knew of his life and professional story, I’d always assumed he was a college dropout. There were lots of reasonable reasons that I’d made that assumption, but it was still surprising to find that not only did my friend attend and complete his undergraduate work, but he did it in the most difficult field in higher education.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. During my career, I worked with more than a few terrific engineers and researchers who said absolutely nothing about their academic life at the beginning of their careers. That might not seem unusual, unless you consider the fact that I was a part-time college student going nights and weekends for two decades and a full-time electrical engineer until I finally completed my own undergrad work when I was 43 years old. Many of my co-workers knew I was struggling my way through school and I had lots of conversations with quite a variety of people about why I was doing that and got even more advice on how to make college less painful. I had a fair list of professors and college instructors who were also personal friends and who also helped me figure out the devious path to a degree in a system that brags a lot about being “non-traditional student friendly,” but puts as little effort into that as possible.

The other end of that academic non-disclosure phenomena is the inspiration for this rant, though. During my brief stint as a college educator, I was suddenly surrounded by a wide variety of “academics”: from professionals who were winding up their careers as instructors to academics who had spent their whole lives pursuing academic credentials or leveraging those credentials into an academic career to recent college graduates with no life or professional experience. It didn’t take long to discover that the more useless and pointless an academic career had been, the more proud of that wasted time an instructor would be. I sat in course development meetings, listening to pitches for totally useless and frivolous courses from clearly awful instructors desperately trying to justify their existence in the institution, amazed at how corrupt academia could be.

An acquaintance in his mid-70s regularly feels the need to remind me that he has a PhD in one of the many trivial liberal arts self-study fields. He uses that “credential” to justify a host of marginally informed positions on everything from economics (he can’t balance his own checkbook) to science, mathematics, and engineer (with no background in any of those fields) to arguing the validity of his own field of study since the foundations of that field have been wreaked and reconstructed since he received his education fifty years ago. Literally, nothing he was told was true and incontrovertible has turned out to be fact and the thrust and direction from his former field of self-declared expertise has taken a 180^o turn from when he was an active academic. None of that has any effect on his grip on his academic credentials as a weapon against all debate on every subject.

I wish this were the only time I’d run into this strange academic dychotemy. At a once-vocational school turned-academic failure where I once worked, the really obscure and mostly-unemployable academics (art history, cultural and linguistic anthropology, musicology and ethnomusicology, English and speech, and so on) became the political powerhouse in the organization and, in record time, drove the school to bankruptcy. I was blessed to get to watch the last five years of this American farce and tragedy from the distance of retirement, which took a lot of the sting out of seeing something good and productive turn to crap. However, I did get stuck attending a couple years of meetings with that crowd in the driver’s seat and it was both painful and enlightening. Their entire professional and personal lives revolved around their academic “accomplishments,” since no one had ever once paid them money for actual work or measurable productivity. Young and old alike, since their outside-of-academia “experience” was the same, these characters were convinced that their academic career was equivalent to actual work and should be regarded with the same respect as the music instructors who had actually produced products and services someone willingly bought.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to observe this weirdness up close and I’m gladder that my actual career preceeding that experience provided me with enough resources to be able to say “that’s enough of that” before it seriously pissed me off.

They Took Ur Jobs!

Trump promised to bring the jobs he shopped out to China back to the USA. What do you think the chances are that Trump’s hats, shirts, ties, and other cheap shit will come back to US clothing manufacturers? How about zero, unless he can get US wages down to China’s.

The Trumpets wailed about how badly they were being treated, most of whom are living on Social Security and Unemployment and Welfare. These are the same people who elected Reagan and started the transfer of wealth from the US to Indochina and from the working class to the 1%. But they don’t get that, because they are the “uneducated” that Trump loves so much. When Reagan took his dribble-down axe to the federal tax code and made “unearned income” (interest and investment income, rent, income received from the ownership of natural resources, inheritance: aka “passive income”) more profitable than active income, any chance of US jobs expanding died and has almost no chance of ever returning. Trump is a prime beneficiary of this tax/social engineering plan and if you think Donald Trump has ever done one thing that didn’t benefit himself over every other person on the planet, you are one of his beloved “uneducated.”

For example, the unemployed (probably for decades) steel workers who campaigned and voted for Trump are great examples of uneducated voters without a clue. What could Trump do to bring steel production back to the US? He doesn’t even us US steel in his own casinos. The problem is on multiple levels: 1) the US tax system does not reward capital investment, 2) even if someone were insane enough take on creating a modern steel production facility, it wouldn’t employ uneducated, unskilled labor and would be highly automated, and 3) the US hasn’t invested in manufacturing and engineering education for so long that the country doesn’t have the talent to build a competitive steel production facility. Financial services has siphoned off at least two generations of the nation’s most talented people to the point that 45% of US STEM undergrads are foreign students who intend to return home with their US-subsidized education and skills. Our manufacturing economy is so weak that 74% of US STEM grads work in non-STEM related jobs. And why not? Engineering is complicated, competitive, and constantly demanding new skills. Finance is barely any different today than it was in the early 1980’s, when the Reagan Administration decided to blow-off enforcing Glass-Steagall. To become a finance millionaire, all you need is ruthlessness, a total lack of morality, and a little luck. You actually have to have talent, education, and perseverance to be Elon Musk.

The media has decided to blame Trump on liberals who, supposedly, ignored the “plight” of the poor white man. The reality is that the poor white man has always had the tools he needed to crawl out of poverty and step into the middle class: public education and white entitlement. The problem is these are the same poor white men who were easily distracted by the 1% aiming them at poor blacks, Hispanics, and every other ethic immigrant with a work ethic. The one skill poor whites will always have is an innate capacity for hate and violence. Otherwise, their claim of “white supremacy” is disproven by their existence.

There is, as best I can see, no fix for massive unemployment in the unskilled labor demographic. The best this lot can hope for is decent healthcare, available education for the small percentage with the values to work for it, tolerable housing, and the usual distractions of sports, religion, and guns. Preying on this crowd with easy credit and heartless bankruptcy laws is the Republican tactic and, so far, telling these nitwits that Democrats and liberals and immigrants are to blame has worked. It doesn’t make their lives any better, but it does keep their capacity for hate and violence in play.

#140 Why Do Conservatives Hate the United States? (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Ok, I admit it.  This rant was inspired by conservative propaganda that begins or ends with statements like "why [Michael Moore/Liberals/The Liberal Media] hate(s) America."  But at the core, I believe that conservatives, especially the radical (is there any other kind?) religious right, hate the United States and the representative democracy that it represents.  I don't mean "dislike," "mistrust," or have a reasonable disagreement among patriots and well-meaning, honest men and women.  I mean hate. 
First, our current herd of neo-conservatives are stupid.  The "America" that they imagine liberals hate doesn't exist.  It never existed.  "America" is a pair of continents; not a country, system of government, or a collection of ideals.  We have North America, of which the United States of America is a part and we have South America where US corporations have a lot of financial interests but no honestly held rights or morally earned privileges.  The bulk of the folks who claim to love "America" don't even know where the United States ends and where America becomes other countries, cultures, and economic systems. 

Even more to the point, I doubt there is anyone living on this continent who hates the soil and the continental shelf upon which they live, liberal or conservative.  "America" is a pair of continents (with an often-contested sub-continent, Central America, connecting the two larger land bodies); not a culture, social or economic system, or a flag-symbolized nationalistic god-fearing corporate prison camp.

Hell, most of the nationalist right-wing "Americans" don't know much about the United States geographically, historically, politically, or in any other critical specific.  They chant about "America, the Christian Nation" and babble their foolish notions of capitalism, taxation, and defending the homeland in exactly the same words (other than the actual language) as did their idealistic predecessors, in Nazi Germany.  When it comes time for them to demonstrate their understanding of the foundations of the nation, the principles of economics or democracy, or their legitimate rights and responsibilities, they are often and usually found to be missing in action.

In modern history, these radicals, misnamed "conservatives" have been on the morally wrong side of every national crisis since before 1776.  Conservatives opposed the Revolutionary War and the concept of representational democracy.  The first conservatives to pollute the New World's political thinking fantasized that Kings and Queens and inherited wealth and power was vested by the gods and mere mortals were incapable of divining the gods' will in matters as complicated as creating a civil and just society.  Dumb-asses, all of them.  Our first conservatives were known, by the country's patriot forefathers, as "Tories."  If you are interested in finding yourself on the morally right side of practically any disagreement in the history of humanity, determine which side the current breed of conservatives has selected and join the opposition.

Following the footsteps of the country's first conservative dolts were slave owners.  They were the second American wave of god-fearing conservative big thinkers and they fantasized that their ability to terrorize other people, initially including other white folks, somehow illuminated their moral superiority.  This pack of inbred hillbillies were willing and nearly able to disassemble the Union in favor of an economically degenerate system based on slaves and serfs with a collective government that mostly resembled Jolly old England from the previous unenlightened centuries commonly known as "The Dark Ages."  Fortunately for us, them, and the rest of the world, the liberals of the 1860's decided that living next to a pack of moral decadents was unacceptable and we had a Civil War that put to the test upon which side the gods actually stood.  Again, conservatives turned out to be on the down-slope of cultural and human evolution and they had their asses kicked by bleeding heart liberals and the power and creativity that is commonly found only in liberal cultures. 

The gods weren't on their side, either.  If gods exist, it's hard to imagine their preference being for evil, selfish, vicious, and simple-minded humans.  I could more easily imagine a god only interested in cats than one who would pick Karl Rove or G.W. Bush as an eternal neighbor. 

However, if conservatives can't do anything else they can breed like vermin and they kept reproducing their progeny, misinformation, and ignorance all over the country, especially in the south and the hillbilly segments of the Midwest and west also known as "the Bible Belt."  Even after having their asses kicked and their ill-founded faith in their gods' will proven to be false, they continued to imagine that white people had some inherent superiority over other cultures.  Shortly after the end of the Civil War, economic and social discrimination against everyone but rich white people became the southern standard. 

The sludge at the bottom of the intellectual pool, dumb poor whites, somehow managed to become convinced that they had some interests in common with dumb rich white people.  Dumb whites dedicated themselves to protecting rich folks from non-white poor folks.  This misdirection resulted in the Civil Rights Movement and we wasted nearly one hundred years in making our national intention semi-coherent.  In the meantime, we have had Civil Rights Acts passed and ignored in 1886, 1957, 1964, and 1991.  All the while, conservatives still battled to preserve discrimination, segregation, and outright hostility toward people of varying races, religions, and political beliefs.  Just another example of how much conservatives hate the democratic intentions of the United States of America. 

World wide conservatives did their best to allow their fellow true believers in Nazi Germany to complete the extermination of Jews and other "undesirables" deemed to be imperfect non-Aryans in the 1930s.  Eventually, liberals became irritated enough at this vicious and inhuman activity and, once again, conservatives had their asses kicked.  A fair number of conservatives are so disturbed by this ass-whipping that they deny the existence of the entire period of history, commonly known as World War II.  Many of these inbred morons wear swastikas on their clothing and body art and claim to be "Americans" while hating the government of the United States of America and doing everything within their limited mental capacity to undermine the process of democracy.  More examples of conservatives hating the USA.

Conservatives drug the nation into Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, twice.  Not in the interest of spreading democracy, but in the interests of the military-industrial complex that desperately needs wars to sell it's products.  Of course, the bonus was international corporate access to Iraq's oil resources.  Hardly a moral issue. 

Every issue with an attached real moral value is, and has been, opposed by American conservatives.  From women's rights to ecological conservation to racial equality to public education to the social safety net, conservatives have consistently come down on the side of international corporations and the interests of the ruling class.  Conservatives, without fail, have fought against progress, justice, freedom, peace, and common sense since the founding of this country.  Most likely, conservatives have argued against all of those things since the first group of cave people decided to band together. 
The great migration of southern whites to the Republican Party, which became blatant during the Carter Administration and resulted in white backlash and Reagan's election and the current radical Republican domination of the federal government, was all about racism and the long, ignorant history of poor white trash whose irritation is easily misdirected by international corporations and idle rich white trash.  You can't fool "all of the people all of the time," but you can fool these dumb fucks without putting up much of a show. 

The "values" represented by the Red States are limited to gun ownership, anti-feminism (thinly disguised as the "life" issue), the establishment of a national religion, and white power.  Not one of these issues could be described as central to the founding of the United States of America.

Conservatives protect the status quo, by definition.  Conservatives do not invent, improve, or initiate anything for the betterment of the country or the world.  They inhibit, repress, and regress at every junction of human, and especially the United States', history.  The reason they hate the United States of America is that this union of citizens, under the banner and protection of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, is liberal by its foundation and nature.  Liberals are progressive, conservatives are regressive.  The United States of America was a progressive, innovative, liberal idea. 

England was conservative in 1776 and still is, today.  The Soviet Union and Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party were conservative.  Iran's Assembly of Experts is conservative and so was Iraq's Arab Baath Socialist Party and Hussein's  Revolutionary Command Council.  These government systems were "loved" by the local conservatives and hated by the same countries' liberals. 

In this nation, when the government is obeying the law and serving the interests of the majority of its citizens, conservatives hate their government and want it changed by any method possible.  When the government is trampling personal rights and representing international corporate interests, conservatives are happy as hogs overdosing on PCP.  American conservatives have never loved the concept of the United States of America.  From the cocaine fields of Columbia to the Aryan Nation's compounds in the Pacific Northwest, conservative Americans have found things to hate about the United States of America.  The ideals they hate are what all intelligent citizens should all love about this country.  Freedom is a liberal goal.  Justice is a liberal ideal.  Equality and prosperity is the result of a liberal culture.  Those are the things conservatives hate all over the world and those are the things liberals must fight to protect. 

August 2005

#112 The Lesser of Two Evils (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Since 1968, every election in which I've voted, for every significant office, state or federal, the choices have been the selection of the lesser of two evils; Demolican or Republicrat, conservative or less conservative, Tweedly Dee or Tweedly Dumb.  Since I began my voting career writing-in my Presidential candidate, Eugene McCarthy, I pretty much did the same for every other office on the ballot.  Except for the rare exception of a local candidate who I know and believe might be uncorrupted enough to do some good in political office, I have written-in a candidate for almost every office for which I've voted in the last 36 years.  If I didn't write-in someone I thought could do the job, I voted for one of the alternative party candidates.  Maybe that's a wasted vote, but I don't think so. 

The only vote I feel I ever wasted was in 1996, here in Minnesota, for the office of state governor.  The race was tight, too close to call between the Demolicans or Republicrats.  An alternative party was fronting a complete political unknown, Independence Party candidate Jesse Ventura, for the office and while I thought Ventura would make a terrific governor I thought the Republicrat, Norm Coleman, would be a disaster for the state.  Coleman was a corporate welfare promoter for sports teams and crooked construction companies as the mayor of St. Paul and I thought bringing that attitude to the state government would be a disaster.  I voted for Hubert Humphrey II, the Demolican, a candidate I despised from his pitiful performance as the state auditor. 

I was disgusted with myself as I cast my vote.  I wasn't voting for someone I respected, for the first time in my life, I was voting against someone I despised.  Even more disgusting, I had a choice on the ballot.  I had a choice that I thought was better than anyone I could have written-in for the office.  Out of cowardice, fear of the more obvious evil, I voted for someone who I thought had no chance of doing the job well, but who had a chance of winning. 

As if fate was trying to teach me a lesson in civic responsibility, Jesse Ventura won.  For the first time in my life, I had a chance to vote for both someone I respected and someone who had a chance of winning and I missed it.  For a brief moment in my life, I was a conservative, a political coward, and I was rewarded for that failure when I watched Jesse's election celebration and knew that I'd had nothing to do with that success.  I never felt less of an American than the evening of Ventura's inaugural celebration.  I will never again vote for the lesser of two evils.  A recent bumper sticker reads, "Kerry sucks less."  I'm not convinced that is a terrific endorsement.  Bush, on the other hand, sucks more.  That doesn't make the choice much easier. 

I'm an American.  I don't give a damn about the "rights" of international corporations, dictators, kings and queens, the idle rich, or any other piece of worthless human crap.  The positive history of this country is all about the battle between the middle class and the inherited power class.  I'm back in the war and I don't care if we win it this year or any other election.  If I do my part, the rest is up to you.

#111 The Liberals in Congress (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

To explain the many stupid things done in Washington, Bush often blames "the liberals in Congress."  The four-legged fools who think that Bush could identify a problem if it was pecking a hole in the top of his head repeat the chant "the liberals in Congress" as if it was actual information.  You could count the liberals in Congress on the fingers of one hand.  If there are that many.  Many real liberals thought the one and only liberal left in Congress, Paul Wellstone, died in 2002.  If John Kerry and John Edwards are examples of what passes for a congressional liberal today, then this country has a severe liberal leadership deficit. 

For the last two decades, counting the number of liberals in Washington has been a grossly overrated activity.  Democrats are not necessarily liberal, regardless of the ignorant and boneheaded claims of the Bushies.  Those fools think anyone who isn't to the right of Adolph Hitler is a liberal.  Their definition of "conservative" is so simplistic that it resembles a meaningless chant, "pro-life good, pro-choice bad."  On every issue of government action, the neo-cons are radically socialist. 

Remember, Nazi Germany was called The Socialist Republic of Germany.  The definition of socialism is "a social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively and political power is exercised by the whole community."  We have allowed our government to redistribute national wealth to less than 1% of the population and we have allowed a tiny number of international corporations to absorb the majority of the nation's economic activity.  In our case, the production and distribution is exclusively within the means, and under the control, of a socialist elite, just like the old Soviet Union.  Just like the Soviet Union's nomenclature, that elite is uninterested in the welfare of the nation, its security, or the future of its citizens.  If things get bad enough, they'll move to a country they have yet to wreak.  They are no more the loyal citizens of the United States than were the mobsters who destroyed the Soviet Union.  Who knows, when it gets bad enough here maybe our mobsters will move to Russia?

The Bushies would like you to believe that anyone elected as a Democrat is a liberal, for the sake of their simplified, inaccurate political propaganda.  The reality is that very few southern or western Democrats hold a single liberal political view.  Outside of Teddy Kennedy, it's hard to find a northern Democrat who could be seriously defined as "liberal."  Leiberman, Gore's running mate in 2000, is more consistently conservative than anyone in the Bush Administration.  Those of you with a few functioning memory cells might remember that Gore was a good deal less than liberal, to the point that Frank Zappa suffered a trip to Washington to argue that Gore's attempt to censor music lyrics violated the First Amendment.  Gore's wife, Tipper, is as radically socially conservative as any Republican. 

Since the definition of conservative is someone who is limited to "traditional views and values" and tends "to oppose change," it's hard to imagine anyone who isn't conservative getting elected in the current US climate.  The current voting generation of Americans is timid, unimaginative, politically ignorant, and under serious economic pressure.  That is not a formula for electing people who are "not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded."  That is the definition of "liberal."  If you can find fault in any of those characteristics, you will be happy to be called a conservative.  Most intelligent humans, especially Americans, would be happy to aspire to be liberal, knowing that it is nearly impossible for a human to consistently hold to those values.

Today's problems were created by conservatives of both parties.  In fact, various flavors of conservatives are all that either party is capable of producing.  Conservatives sponsored by labor unions, conservatives sponsored by corporate executives, conservatives sponsored by government employees or government agencies, or, worst of all, conservatives sponsored by religious organizations.  Anyone with a lick of sense would be desperate to see a liberal find a position of power in this stagnate society.  Unless we all have to suffer years of another Great Depression, I don't see it happening.  We are not experiencing desperate times and without desperation humans never resort to creativity. 

Santorum and I . . . Agree?

After years of arguing that when Repuglicans say "elite" they mean "smart people," Rick Santorum puts his feet in his mouth and admits exactly that. Of course, his audience is exclusively moronic. So, no one got the joke(?). I was recently exposed to this double-speak when my son-in-law argued that the media is "liberal." It took a while to figure out that he meant "literate." He wasn't talking about the people who owned the media, but the people who actually have to write material for a public with a 3rd grade education to read. However, you have to read something more than large print self-help books to qualify as literate and that sort of activity poses the terrible risk that one might become liberal from exposure to knowledge. Don't worry, literacy isn't like gayness; it's not catching. You are safe.

Now, if Rick Perry, Willard Romney, Sarah Palin or one of the other Republican retards will just admit that reality has a liberal bias and that mathematics is too complicated to be used for things like budgeting, government planning, or moon shots.

How to Know if Your State Is an Armpit

Regardless of the wingnut slant to modern United States, there is a fairly easy and reliable way to tell if your hometown or homestate are reasonable and, at least, contains a few rational people. There is one community organization that has been a place for a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning" Since the founding of this country, this one organization has been an ethical and moral, logical and spiritual community for the best and brightest the country has produced. Political leaders such as John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Horace Greely, Adlai Stevenson, William Taft, Paul Douglas, Kent Conrad, Mike Gravel, Roman Hruska, and many others were and are members. More brilliant people than can be listed in a short rant are famous members. The organization I'm talking about is the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations community. They don't even call themselves "churches."

I'm not religious, superstitious, spiritual, or slightly interested in the future of humanity, but I absolutely respect the Unitarian Universalists' congregations and organization. They are consistently on the right side of every major moral and social issue. Unlike evangelistic and traditional religion which claim to speak for (and control) the mind of gods, Unitarians Universalists talk about what they know. They work to improve their communities. They are a reality-based organization and, therefore, are progressive and liberal (as were the country's founders). They support the sick, the weak, the old and anyone who needs their help. The two churches, Unitarians and Universalists, can fairly claim to have been the original American churches. They have been on the leading edge of American independence, abolition, women's rights, civil rights, world peace, science, and world-wide human rights.

For the last 50 years, Unitarians Universalists have been on the decline; along with every other positive attribute of this country. In some states, like South Dakota, the remnants of once-substantial UU communities are relegated to senior center meeting rooms. That should be all the evidence you need to know how backwards those cities and states have become. It's not necessary that everyone in an area be intelligent, progressive, and rational. But when people with those qualities have declined to the point that the community can not support a UU organization, it is a very telling sign. It means the marching morons have driven the area's intellect below self-sustaining levels (also indicated by the usual Red State's inability to live off of the federal tit) and the place is unfit for intelligent life. 


If you want to know where to live or find out if where you live is populated by idiots, use this search: http://www.uua.org/directory/congregations/results.php?state=?? (replacing the last two question marks with your state's two letter ID). Not surprisingly, red states are just as dependent on federal welfare as they are devoid of UU organizations.

"You may notice that UU's tend to take a couple of months off during the summer with some churches completely closing. Other denomination might question this practice, saying 'God never rests.'


"The right answer is that UU's are the only ones that God trusts enough to let out of his sight for a while."