#156 Thinking Diversely (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

I have a friend who always challenges my thought process.  We'll call him "Scott," because that is his name.  I have enough trouble keeping track of the necessary truth without having to generate unnecessary fiction.  Scott and I often have wide-ranging discussions, arguments, and explorations that take me to places I'm not inclined to travel.  A few weeks ago, we got into a wrangle about immigration, diversity, and democracy.  Part of that was inspired by my thoughts about John Polkinghorne's goofy take on quantum physics and metaphysics, part was inspired by my cultural bias against anything that isn't democratic and "progressive."  As usual, we ended up leaving the conversation with an outrageous number of things to consider and a ridiculous collection of new ideas to assimilate.  At least I did.  Scott's mileage probably varies.

Somehow, our conversation about cultures, politics, and tolerance turned into something anthropological for me.  While a giant wad of folks on this planet have devolved into a fantasyland of metaphysics, I don't swing that way.  All evidence (fossils are evidence, magical myths are not) points to evolution being the sole factor in the development of life and, currently, the existence of humanity on earth.   A few tens of thousands of years ago, anthropologists speculate that there were likely a variety of human prototypes (herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores, big, little, and middle-sized humanoids, and so on).  Ecological catastrophes, disease, and competition reduced the variety to what we are today.  There is still a fair amount of specialized human diversity, but we're pretty much all the same species; able to freely interbreed, digest the same food, and be fooled by the same politicians and weight-loss scams. 

The modern economic model claims that, with minimal evidence, capitalism and mild forms of democracy are "the best" social systems.  The 20th Century, the "American Century," provided a moderately convincing argument for that claim, but one hundred years is not a significant test in evolutionary time.  Even compared to the standard set by the Roman Empire,  100 years is insignificant.  You could expand the argument, or limit it, by claiming that democracy and capitalism were not the dominate survival trait of the last five hundred years.  In that period, you could make a pretty convincing argument that being European, or even being "white," was the dominant trait of dominance and, therefore, survival.  Five hundred years out of fifty-thousand is still pretty insignificant.  Our sun is predicted to stay relatively stable for at least a few million more years, so even making a superiority claim for the last two or five thousand years isn't particularly impressive.  So, in this conversation I'm not thinking about the next fiscal quarter, the next election, or even the next generation, but the next 1,000, 10,000, or even 1,000,000 years of human existence

A variety of dinosaurs (remember the fossils?) roamed the earth for for as many as one-hundred-and-fifty million freaking years, so humanity's total fifty-thousand year run is pretty insignificant.  At our current rate of degeneration, we'll be lucky to even leave recoverable remains that will establish our presence.  So far, we've populated the earth for a blink of the geological eye. 

Diversity was the dinosaurs' secret to longevity and, if we're going to have a secret to extend our existence, we're going to need that same tool. Hence, my personal discovery from the conversation with Scott.  Diversity, not globalization, might be the key to humanity's survival.  

Not only does it make us (the United States) enemies when we try to pervert other countries' social systems to resemble ours, but it may be endangering the survival of the species.  Unless you're hearing voices telling you otherwise, it ought to be obvious that the United States social system is in decline and that our ravenous appetite for the world's resources is harmful to the planet, living things, and to the long term survival of the species of animal that we are.  If you are hearing inner voices to the contrary, you're crazy and should seek psychological counseling and medication. 

Technical skills may not be the panacea to all social, environmental, and disease tribulations.  It's possible, even likely, that jamming large populations into small geographic areas, feeding that population from the same trough and well, and diluting the gene pool into one "melting pot" is a formula for species disaster.  Even the dumbest corporate executive should know that developing and spreading "suicide seeds" is not a survival tactic, but corporate executives are drifting in the sands at the bottom of our breeding pool and they are unlikely to have the foresight to consider business plans longer than their next bonus payout.  In many ways, technology is working as hard to end humanity as it is to enhance corporate profits.

I suspect that every culture has some survival value.  Even the ones that we westerners hate, pity, and/or misunderstand probably have a survival value.  "Probably" is the key word here.  Unless you have some insight into what the next catastrophe will be, your guess as to which culture will survive is as bad as mine.  Maybe believing in one of our many fantastic religions will put a group on exactly the right mountain top at the right time to avoid the bird flu or the monster asteroid? Maybe militant atheism will keep that group from marching off a cliff with the majority of human lemmings.  Maybe technology and science will finally be the savior that, so far, it hasn't been for the majority of humans on earth.  And on and on the scenarios go without any of us knowing which one is the "right" one to save the species. 

So, if every culture, every language, every political system, every race, and every bad habit may be a saving grace, what does this do for the United States at this moment in time?  Something valuable, I hope. 

We have a culture in the United States, outside of our nutty ruling class and their insane tendencies toward monopoly and social inbreeding.  (England has mastered those skills, so there is no point in duplicating a dying class society.)  The United States has a culture of equality, justice, public education, technological and artistic and political creativity, non-secular government, and democracy.  There may be no other place on earth with these traits and we should treasure and nurture them.  That means we must decide how we want to develop these traits and how we want to refine our particular survival skills. 

In a rational world, that would mean that we'd stop trying to export our corporate world view, since it is antithetical to the ideals of this country, let alone the rest of the world.  We would leave the rest of humanity to develop their own survival tactics, interfering only when one of those tactics puts us at risk.  I don't mean when their defense of their natural resources inconveniences our ruling class or an international corporation's bottom line, I mean we should be concerned when they present an honest danger to our survival. 

It's also true that if you worship a god so devoutly that you want your government to "represent that god," there are already a world of nations ready to welcome your beliefs.  The United States should not be one of them.  We got where we are by avoiding the mix of religion and government and we should hold to that philosophy as if our species' life depends on it.  It might.

Immigration has been a key component of the success of this nation, too.  In the past, simply leaf blowing, coal mining, meat cutting, ditch digging immigration did the job, because those were middle-income, mid-tech jobs that attracted immigrants with skills and aspirations.  Today, the majority of our immigration seems to be attracting a subsistence, servant class and, again, I think there is no shortage of countries who have created a slave class to do the work their own citizens "won't do."   The United States has a different obligation to its ideals.

The United State's success came from the happy accident resulting from the belief that education is something due to every citizen.  The middle and lower classes provided the fuel for every substantial technological leap the United States has enjoyed.  For two centuries, whenever our ruling classes "took over" the country a massive depression quickly followed.  As in every other nation in the world, the inbred elites are incapable of providing anything but status quo.  Maybe the status quo will be the ingredient necessary for survival, but it might not be.  There is, again, no shortage of conservative cultures and there is only one of us, the United States.

May 2006

#155 Making Death Personal (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

This month death got personal.  On the scale of suffering that people experience, I admit my experience may be trivial.  My dog died.  I didn't lose a child, my wife, a sibling, a parent, or a dear friend.  Just a dog. 

I've suffered losses before, more substantial losses, but not more personal ones. 

When I was a kid, my mother died; after a year of suffering the failures of the American medical system that were typical of 1957.  Not long after that, my father's father, my grandfather, died.  During the Vietnam years, two close friends died in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.  A decade later, a young dear friend died of massive heart failure, thanks to a short life of tobacco abuse and poor diet and genetics, less than a year after I'd moved to California.   My youngest daughter was nearly killed in a terrible car accident and my wife and I clung to each other for support for four awful, long days, until we had some assurance that she would survive and we could imagine our lives restarting again.  I've survived death and near death of those close to me and it was painful, heartbreaking, and bits of me left with those spirits.

I've hunted and killed animals.  I've witnessed strangers' deaths so first hand that they took their last breath within sight; once, within range of my touch.  Death isn't something I fear, particularly.  I'm not religious, superstitious, or inclined to believe that a painless death is a bad thing at the end of a well-lived life. 

My dog died within minutes of my coming home at the end of a work day.  He, Puck, had been sick for a few weeks, noticeably.  I don't think he suffered much, except for loss of mobility in his last couple of days of life.

Puck was a pound dog.  He came into our lives at a pet store, a few weeks after our first dog had been killed when she escaped our yard and found her way into traffic.  I had no intention of replacing her, but my wife somehow thought we needed to fill that hole in our lives with another life.  Puck looked like a wild dog, we have no idea what breeds he came from, but he was the gentlest of souls ever to grace the earth.  His only fault was that he loved children uncontrollably.  Any excuse, any tiny sound of children laughing, and Puck would find a way to escape his leash, his fenced yard, or just slip away when we weren't looking to find the source of child-sound and be loved by a kid.  Kids all loved him, too. 

Adults were sometimes afraid of his wild eyes, his huge teeth, and his giant grin, but kids figured him out instantly.  My baby grand daughter's first word was "Puck" and that is still her favorite word for "dog."  She lavished love and abuse on him for a year of his life.  Not that she would even think about hurting him, but she loved him so much she leapt to hug him when he'd come into the house and, sometimes, she'd practically crush him to the floor. 

There were a few, quite a few, times when I was less than a big admirer of that dog.  Puck would take off, any time we weren't paying perfect attention, chasing down the sound of kids or other dogs.  I spent too many afternoons and evenings stalking our neighborhood looking for "that damned dog" and I vowed, more than once, to beat him into a pulp when I found him.  I always found him playing with kids and he'd be so happy to see me that my anger would dissolve into something closer to disappointment.  Disappointment that he wasn't satisfied with our company, that he so desperately need to be around children, that two old people who cared for him weren't enough to keep him happy.  It wasn't his fault. He just wasn't our dog.  He was a kid's dog.

So, finally, we saw the light and my daughter's family adopted him.  He flourished, only running away a couple of times in the year he lived with them, with two in-house kids to love.  In the last couple of months, he developed a urinary problem.  My wife and daughter took him to a vet, who gave him antibiotics and said it was either an infection or something much more serious.  The bleeding cleared up and he did well, except for slowly dropping weight while appearing to have a good appetite, in the next month and a half.    Suddenly, one morning, my daughter discovered that Puck couldn't stand and was dragging his hind legs around the yard. 

She called us, my wife and I, for advice.  We aren't particularly wise about sickness, death, or doctors.  We both lost our mothers to cancer and we're fatalistic about death.  Still, I didn't want the kids to watch their pet die, so I offered to bring him back to our home, to what we still called "Puck's yard," to see if a change in place might help. 

For a day, it seemed to.  Puck couldn't walk down the porch steps, but he did take some tentative steps in his old yard and found his way up to the deck in his yard, where his dog house used to be and where he'd spent many hours listening for the sound of neighborhood children playing.  He was with us for two days and, the morning he died, my wife had spent a few moments with him before going to work.  She thought he seemed tired, but he didn't show any signs of being in pain.  I left for a department meeting that morning and didn't get out of the house in time to look in on him before I left for work. 

When I came home, about noon, I went out to see if he'd eaten.  It was starting to rain a little and Puck hated being in the rain.  If he was not in his dog house, I planned to carry him into our sun porch, where we had a mat and some blankets laid out for him.  I found him, slightly warm but stiffening, at the edge of the deck. He was probably trying to crawl under the deck, where he'd spent a lot of warm or rainy days when he lived with us.  His wild eyes were still open, his huge tongue was out, but cold and unmoving, and his constant grin was replaced by something lifeless, something not at all like the dog I'd known for almost eight years. 

Puck and I had something different than "love" between us.  He frustrated the hell out of me, running away and being the most incredibly "lazy" dog I've known.  He didn't chase balls, catch Frisbees, or play tug-a-war.  Puck didn't particularly like going for a walk and wouldn't run if you chased him with a pitchfork.  He hated water and cowered like he was being beaten when we took him to the lake to swim with the family.  He just wanted to lay in the shade and be played with by children.  Not a bad life's goal, obviously. 

Some folks will probably say we abused him by not taking him back to a vet to be prodded, probed, poked, x-rayed, hacked open, and experimented on.  Maybe.  He might have lived longer if we had.  He might have died miserably in a vet's cage or on an operating table.  Puck hated his visits to the vet, even when he was there for a few days while we traveled.  The women who cared for him on those occasions said he was "the best dog" and gushed over him like he was a baby, but he desperately wanted out of that place and acted as if we'd abandoned him for few days after he got back home. I'd have to carry him into the vet's office for his annual shots.  He was passive, didn't try to escape, bite me, or struggle, but he wouldn't walk into that building on his own power. 

I know how he feels.  I worked in medical devices for a couple of centuries, one decade.  I met lots of greedy, careless, arrogant, uninformed, unskilled doctors.  I also met a few dedicated, incredibly skilled rare exceptions.  I found that hospitals are soulless, heartless, unhealthy places to die, even though a wonderful facility (Denver General Hospital) and its amazing surgeons gave my daughter's life back to her and my family.

All I want from the medical business, when I'm dying, is whatever it takes to live as comfortably as possible for however long I have to live.  No chemotherapy, no radical surgery, no radiation, no messed-up pharmaceutical experiments, no funky plastic replacement organs or bone parts, no electronic cardio-stimulation crap, and no time wasted in a hospital bed.  Tell me how long I have to live, give me whatever I need to squash the pain, and get the hell out of my way while I finish up the days of my life. 

That's how I hope to finish this mortal coil (whatever that means).  I may fail.  I may lose courage and wallow in false hope while I make my family miserable caring for my gutless butt, but I hope to do better than that.  Besides, I'm a lousy patient. 

Puck died well.  I can only hope to die as untroubled. 

When I found him in the yard, I sat with him for a few moments, remembering how vital and loving he'd been.  Just the night before, I'd sat in the yard and talked to him while he rested his head on my leg.  We made some kind of peace with each other and I couldn't find any sign that he was in pain.  I rubbed his neck, he licked my hand, and we watched the geese in the lake and the trees waving in the wind.  Leaves were budding on the trees, it was a warm, sunny day.  I left him outside that night, thinking he'd be more comfortable in his yard, in his dog house, than on the tile floor of the sun porch. 

Now, he is dead. 

I closed his eyes, wrapped him in a sheet, carried him down by our lake, and buried him in the rain.  While I dug the hole, I put a tarp over him, to keep him dry.  Puck hated the rain and I stupidly thought he'd be "more comfortable" under a tarp than getting wet under a sheet.  When I put him into the hole, I was amazed at how small he was.  He'd lost a lot of weight, but that wasn't all.  He seemed so much larger in life than he was in death. 

Today, I'm working in the attic and it's raining again.  When I took a break and looked out the window, I had a perfect view of "Puck's yard."  I remembered him wandering the yard, looking up to see if someone was watching him, hoping someone would let him out to go look for kids to play with. Then that recollection vanished and was replaced with the memory of that dead, furry shell he'd left for me to bury.  I don't think I've yet shed tears for Puck.  Maybe I didn't love him as much as he deserved.  Maybe I'm old enough that a dog's death won't make me cry.  Maybe I'm an asshole who doesn't care about my own pet's life and death. 

What I did think about, looking out that window, was all the people who've lost more this year, this month.  Parents who've lost sons and daughters to war, terrorists, criminals, disease, and accidents.  Those who have lost a spouse, a friend, or someone or something dear to them through no fault of their own.   I thought about the people who had to bury or burn the bodies of their loved ones, because there was no one there to do it for them.  I compared that to my shallow experience burying my grandkids' dog. 

I thought about those pampered assholes in Washington and Wall Street who are so immune to human feeling; greedy rationalizing men and women who callously bomb innocents who had the gall to get between the oil coveted by the Texas Mafia.  I pictured myself as one of my fellow Americans trapped inside of nature's fires, hurricanes and floodwaters, ignored by those soul-dead bastards.  My dog's death didn't compare.  Nothing I've ever experienced compares.

What can it feel like to be treated that badly?  How much can you hate someone who causes that kind of misery?  How far would you go to "get back" at someone who dropped a bomb, carelessly and viciously, on someone you loved?  I think I feel a little of how far I'd go and it scares the hell out of me.  It scares me that this government is making that kind of enemies for my family and my country.

April 2006

Deserving the Government We Make

When the Onion ran this article back in November of 2008, I wonder if Barak Obama thought it was funny? I didn’t, because I believed satire had devolved into reality and had been obvious to me for three decades that this headline was true; at least for any decent person holding the office.

What would make a reasonably decent, honest, competent person want to run for President of the United States? In the case of Barak Obama, it was inexperience and an unreasonable belief in human decency and an irrational hope that the people elected to Congress and appointed to the Supreme Court actually cared about the people of the country and the future of the world. He was grossly wrong and as such might be the last such President of the United States. Since Reagan, the country has mostly been mismanaged by corrupt carpetbaggers whose sole purpose in seeking office has been to stuff their pockets with as much cash as possible. We’ve had that kind of government more than not in the history of the country, Nixon being the most obvious example in the recent past.

#154 True Unbelievers (2006)

Rat Rants 2006

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Every cult desperately attempts to eliminate folks the cult classifies as "heretics," "infidels," "secular humanists," or simply "different."  Have you ever wondered why?  Having grown up in a fundamentalist family, one that morphed from being fairly traditionally religious to one that today falls solidly in the radical Religious Right, I wondered about this phenomena a lot as a child, a young man, and it still mystifies me a little even today. 

A program that sometimes entertains me, NPR's "Speaking of Faith" was a little less entertaining this week.  The program interviewed "scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne," a poofy Brit who tries to link quarks to faith and creation, imagines that sub-atomic physics is some kind of link to the minds of the gods. Failing to make a noticeable mark in his chosen field of physics, he has slipped into the much milder waters of theology where evidence and mathematical proofs are not necessary, or even tolerated. 

Polkinghorne has a website that is even less entertaining.  In his blinded attempt to justify his illusions, he pushes off every major human excess on atheism.  According to Polkinghorn, the 20th Century horror show was all the result of atheism.  He wrote, ". . . if you don't believe in God it is very hard to believe in a morality that will constrain you when you have an enormous amount of power.  Christian leaders, however powerful, know that they are ‘under God’ and that they do not have ultimate power, but are themselves under judgment.  Atheists, manifestly, do not.  An absence of constraints on the abuse of power leads, understandably, to an abuse of power." 

Hopefully, you are historically conscious enough to know that is incredibly, historically, untrue.  At best, it is a diversion to call Hitler's Germany "atheist."  While the Nazis certainly misread Darwin and tried to turn science into a justification for yet another Manifest Destiny bloodbath, I think it would be hard to find proof that the majority of that crowd didn’t think they had “God on our side.”  The long, vicious history of the Catholic Church establishes the lack of restraint imposed by being “under God.”  The current President of the United States is demonstrating exactly that same freedom of action; based a good bit on his “ability” to talk to God and turn those conversations into anti-democratic and violent action.  If you can find some evidence of restraint in the long, vicious, genocidal history of America’s interpretation of God’s will and an earlier exercise of Manifest Destiny against Native Americans, I’ll be amazed.  Some of the most outspoken God-fearing groups provided the most violence. 

As far as having “ultimate power,” the power of life and death is about as ultimate as power gets and I think Polkinghorne ought to be able to admit that Christian leaders are as likely to abuse that power as are members of any other sect or atheists, for that matter. 

Later in his Q&A page, Polkinghorne states that atheists "actively reject" gods, rather than simply disbelieve, logically, such human fabrications.  As evidence, he claims that rejecting gods requires the atheist to reject “the existence of the universe, anthropic fine-tuning, the existence of objective morality, and the life and witness of Christ and his resurrection.” 

That's quite a collection of red herrings.  My least favorites of these fishy arguments is the bit that makes Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, first, atheists and, second, worse than history's runners-up by quantity. 

Hitler may have been a "Christian-hater," but that hardly makes him an atheist.  Satanists are also Christian-haters but they sure as hell aren't atheists.  Hitler was a freak serial murderer in a serial murdering nation in a serial murdering time of human history.  I think it may be true that many of these freaks and their henchmen were inspired by knee-jerk reactions to the moral failures of Christianity in the previous centuries, but I'm unconvinced that Hitler, Stalin, or Mao put in the investigative work necessary to be atheists.  They were equal inopportunity murderers, wiping out political opponents and political allies, almost equally.  God didn't slow up their murderous intentions any more than gods had an effect on the Manifest Destiny New World freaks who thought a god was telling them to wipe the Native American from the face of the earth or to pillage the civilizations of Africa for warm bodies to man and woman their slave culture.  Particularly, Stalin and Mao were considerably less spiritually or philosophically motivated than they were driven by power and greed.  You can make a better argument for Lenin's philosophical motivation, but he purged his new nation of its best minds early, so I think giving him credit for a higher calling is fallacious. 

I absolutely hate the argument that states that, because Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were born in a world that presented them with the opportunity to murder in previously impossible quantities, these were the world's worst murderers.  I suspect the early Americans came closer to committing the most perfect "civilized" genocide in human history, but there weren't millions of victims available to them, so they failed to achieve to the high standards of 20th Century murder.  Personally, I think once you've murdered for any vile reason, you've committed an unforgivable sin against man, life, and, if there are any, gods.  Two murders is only worse than one because of the additional pain caused to the additional loved ones of the second victim.  Two million vs. two is only worse because of that nearly infinite pain added to the karma of our species.  Dropping a single bomb on a single innocent is unforgivable, regardless of the color of your cowboy hat or the justification provided by gods, politics, or history. 

Linking an obvious fact, the existence of the universe, to a collection of unproven concepts is an old, tired conservative debate tactic.  For example, if objective morality truly existed, our concept of morality should be at least somewhat consistent from culture to culture.  It isn’t.  In fact, morality appears to be evolving as constantly as technology, society, and far faster than biology.  It appears to me that morality is currently evolving in about fifty different directions, in this country alone.  Polkinghorne's using the FDA’s fallacious standard for safe medicine in his last “proof.”  It should not be society’s job to prove a medicine is not harmful before a company experiments on society’s members for profit.  It is not up to atheists to prove the non-existence of Jesus or the non-occurrence of his resurrection.  Before atheists need to consider the possibility, it is the “responsibility” of believers to prove he existed and violated nature by returning from the dead. Evolution and infinite probability in an infinite universe do a fine job of resolving the anthropic fine-tuning issue.

For that matter, the anthropic argument has a hole or ten thousand.  This strange circular and species-centric argument poses the weirdness that if we humans see something, it must exist for us.  Meaning, it was put here for our entertainment or something equally simplistic and egotistical.  This is a spin on the old Socratic imaginary universe, did-a-tree-fall-if-a-human-didn't-see-it, bullshit. 

Personally, I doubt the sincerity of all religions and religious leaders.  Christians do their damnedest to avoid being restrained by anything humble or honest that Christ required of them.  Muslims pick and choose what they want from the Koran and ignore the more difficult, peaceful, generous requirements at their convenience.  Gods are created in man’s image and, because of that, the gods and their creators are as flawed as the worst of men. 

The apparent terror that many humans have of death creates an irrational desire for a magical eternity, life after death, and that cowardice seems to inspire all sorts of evil behaviors.  The intolerance religions have for infidels and heretics seems to me to be based on a lack of belief in the inventions of faith.  The best way to purge that doubt is the kill anyone who inspires uncertainty.  That trait appears to be the link between the Roman persecution of Christians, Christian persecution of Native Americans and Africans, the French and Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, Stalin and Mao’s purges (which had more socio-political than religious components), and most of western abuses of Muslim countries. 

Polkinghorne's willingness to use fallacious arguments to "prove" his position, in light of his rigorous scientific background, seems to me to be more evidence that "believers don't often believe."  The fear he is showing toward the challenge to his illusions is the same fear that has led to persecution, execution, marauding crusades, and human history of violence and misery. The True Unbelievers can not tolerate challenge to their fantastic creations because it causes them to consider the possibility that they are making it all up.  I think it is obvious that is exactly what they are doing, making up gods to relieve their fear of death.  It seems to me that simply facing reality and getting on with life is a more healthy response. 

April 2006

Gospel Music

I have spent my life being the last guy to the party. I guess you can’t grow up in western Kansas and hope to ever become sophisticated, but . . . damn this is ridiculous. For most of my life, I’ve thought this song, written by Janis Joplin, Michael McClure, and Bob Neuwirth, was a novelty tune. For the last couple of weeks it has slowly dawned on me that in this age of football players thanking Jesus for helping them earn their millions of dollars, politicians asking their sheeple to pray for their election, mega churches telling their followers that financial success was evidence of God’s love, and everyone praying that the gods will reward them with some sort of justification for belief Janis was right this is a song of “great social and political import.”

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?
I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?

Everybody!
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends,
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

With that in mind, I think every Christian church in the world should be required to open their services with this song. It’s best done a cappella, since it’s important that nothing interferes with the song’s clear “message.” The more I think about it, the more I believe this might be the single most honest spiritual in human history. If there are gods out there, they are gonna know if you’re not being honest.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to do the song solidly on either alcohol or heroin, like Janis intended. If that’s what it took for Pearl to write this piece of genius, it’s probably what it takes to really get in touch with the gods. Maybe that’s what I need to help me figure out stuff like this in than 45 years?

#153 What Do the Words Mean? (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

George W. Bush often likes to talk about "jobs Americans won't take."  What does that mean?  It's not like we have an in-control unemployment statistic.  While the government sponsored number jabbers about single-digit unemployment, government makes a serious effort to quickly classify out-of-work-workers as "unemployable."  After a few months of job hunting, a worker is switched from unemployed to unemployable.  He or she might be putting in hundreds of hours looking for work, retraining to earn skills that will enhance the opportunity if one should arise, networking and doing everything humanly possible to find a living wage job, but that person is unemployable as far as the statistics are concerned. 

There are millions of people in this unemployable bracket.  There are millions more who have, in fact, given up.  And, of course, there are at least 12 million illegal immigrants who are perfectly willing to take these jobs.  The jobs Americans don't want.  They will risk their lives to cross our massively porous boarders, with little impediment from the INS or our ridiculously misnamed Homeland Security Agency. 

You gotta ask yourself, "why don't we want these jobs?"  I can answer that for a good number of Americans. 

First, those jobs don't pay a living wage.  The best of these jobs are called "McJobs" and for good reason.  They are minimum or less-than-minimum wage jobs without benefits, security, reasonable working conditions, or any redeeming quality.  The businesses that "create" these jobs ought to be ashamed of themselves.  Most of these companies have collections of useless executives, drawing monstrous salaries with benefits that would stagger Arabian princes.  But they can't find the cash to pay a working wage to the few people who actually do work.

The employers, if you will give them that much credibility, constantly complain that they can't keep workers on the job, but they don't make the slightest effort to do the things that any decent human would do to reward fair labor.  So, they're "forced" to hire illegals.  If you don't believe me, take a job with one of these companies for a week, or just read Nickel and Dimed and experience another middle class American's experience as a minimum wage earner.  You'll find that Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and a host of substantial corporations are barely more than slaveowners. 

If that's the case for giant international corporations, with mountains of resources, multi-millionaire executives and multi-billionaire owners, and hundreds of thousands of wealthy investors, what's life like for "unwanted jobholders" of small companies?  If you haven't noticed, OSHA hasn't exactly been an active part of the business world for the last decade or two. Employee protection is about as far from the current national concern as serious exploration of alternative energy.  Minimum wage employees are at the bottom of that low priority.  Illegal employees are far below that standard.

Probably more than any other reason these jobs go wanting for employees is the employers.  The people hiring for this kind of job, jobs that "Americans don't want," are the worst of the worst.  These employers are arrogant, ignorant, unstable, incapable, and short-tempered. They are unconcerned with their employee's safety, job satisfaction, security, or any other characteristic that might be common to a quality job and a competent employer.  If this pack of low-brow aristocrats could beat the crap out of their employees to get a little more productivity, they would.

Not that long ago, a group of these folks testified regarding the difficulty, not in finding employees, but in paying them the going wage.  I heard scumbag after scumbag talk about how awful it was that they had to pay roofers up to $100,000 per year.  Their attitude was that it was unfair that rich, powerful, well-connected men like themselves were unreasonably inconvenienced by being asked to pay that much money to skilled, high-risk employees.  If these douche bags were paying ten times that amount to pro baseball players they wouldn't think twice about the cost.  But paying a fair salary to a lowly roofer, someone whose career could be cut short by knee injuries, falls, or any number of industrial mishaps, is an "unreasonable" hardship.  Have I mentioned how much I like Aerosmith's "Eat the Rich?"

The kind of employers who desperately "need" illegal labor are packing plants, industrial agricultural facilities, barely-legal-themselves non-union smokestack industries, fast food restaurants, and below-the-tax-line small service businesses.  No one willingly works for any of these businesses--not because the work is demeaning, particularly hazardous or difficult--but because these companies are universally mismanaged by vicious bastards who would own slaves, and abuse them, if they could get away with it.  If all of these companies, as they exist today, vanished from the country, they would be replaced with better managed substitutes in minimal time.  If this kind of work paid a living wage and was performed in an employee-respectful business, there would be no shortage of Americans who would want to do these jobs. 

Not only are these the jobs Americans don't want, they are jobs only unwilling hostages will take for the salary these vile bastards will pay and in the unreasonable conditions they will be asked to work.  Personally, I'd like to see Bush and Cheney put in a couple of years doing this kind of work (any kind of work, actually) and, then, if they still want to drive the price of labor down, import sub-skilled labor, and talk about unwilling American laborers, I'll be amazed.  If they knew there was a good chance that they'd have to go back to those jobs again, I know they'd care a lot more about why Americans shun those jobs.  But we don't have to worry about Bush or Cheney ever actually working for a living, do we?  They are the aristocratic elite.  The folks the rest of us labor to support.  They'll never have to work and they'll never comprehend what working for a living is like when the work doesn't support living.

April 2006

#152 Believing the Unbelievable (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

There's a movie you ought to see on the web, 911 Loose Change.  Suspend your credibility for a moment of 90 minutes and listen to the charges made in this film.  After you watch it, come back and hear my opinion of this interpretation of events.  If you've already watched Loose Change, stick around and here comes another rant. 

You back with your doubting cap firmly in place?  Ok, here I go.

I know you don't want to believe that Bush and his corrupt little band of rat-bastards blew up the Twin Towers, Building 7, and/or the Pentagon.  I'm glad you have some sliver of optimism left in your shredded little hearts.  I do too.  Honestly, my vote is still out.  I know the movie is mostly sensational.  I know many of the points made have been refuted by moderately believable sources.  Obviously, what little remains of our free press is ignoring this possibility out of fear, disbelief, and . . . more fear.  Like the Kennedy and the grassy knoll, Martin Luther King's assassination, Bobby Kennedy and his lack of security in 1968, and the deaths of Wellstone and his family, I doubt that I'll live long enough to hear the truth about any of these national disasters.  It's possible that we have heard the truth.  Maybe all of these nation-altering events were as simple as the government has described them.  

However, here's the real question you should ask yourself.  Do you believe the Bushies wouldn't do something exactly this vicious, traitorous, and evil if they thought they could get away with it? 

No, you don't.  I don't either.  I can't imagine a deed foul enough that, if there were profit in it for them, that these vicious sub-animals wouldn't do.  Bush would betray his father, kill his children, smother baby kittens, bankrupt his neighbors, and sell this country to the highest bidder for a few million in profit.  For hundreds of millions, Cheney would shotgun an old friend, disown his lesbian daughter, take an ink eraser and a pair of scissors to the Constitution, and hand over the keys to the national defense to Saudi Arabia, North Korea and China.  Both of these men have emptied Fort Knox for exactly these financial causes and they will do more, much more, before they leave office. 

You know it.  I know it.  Even their supporters, who will lose everything by the time these vile mobsters have gone to hell, know it.  Anyone smart enough to breathe without assistance knows these men are amoral representatives of the worst humanity has ever bred. 

As much as they hated him, even the dumbest neocon knew that Clinton wasn't vicious.  Their "fear" of Clinton was more fear of ideas than action. They were terrified that he might extend civil rights, for women and minorities.  They were worried that universal health care might piss off their corporate masters.  They scared that Clinton might actually do something about the environment and, somehow, limit their access to oil and carbon monoxide.  That fear was more an exercise in motivation than real.  Clinton was proud to call himself "an Eisenhower Republican," so he was no real threat to the Establishment.

The fear is real with the Bushies and neocons, though.  The only thing that, maybe, saves us from absolutely believing the premise of 911 Loose Change is that these guys are fools.  Georgie's goofy lady lawyer friend, Harriet Miers, said "George is the smartest man I ever met."  Come on.  Is there anyone out there who doesn't know at least a hundred men who are smarter than G.W. Bush?  If this is the kind of folks Bush surrounds himself with, we have a margin of safety, because they can only accomplish so much with their limited abilities.  Incompetence will only protect us so far, though.  Eventually, even the dumbest man (Hitler or Mussolini, for example) can create massive havoc on the country and the world.  Given time, the neocons can turn back the clock on democracy, equality, science, justice, and progress.  They will divide this country into a dim shadow of its former greatness.

This is the kind of people who are running the store in Washington.  Dumb as bricks, crooked as the Dismal River, and vicious as rabid coyotes.   If they didn't plane-bomb New York and Washington, we all know they would if they thought they could get away with it.  The real question is, "if we know that, why don't we do something about it?"  Are there any real Americans left.  Citizens who believe that government is for and by the people?  Are there any voting citizens who understand that "people should not fear their government, governments should fear the people?"  If not, the "freedoms" that Bush keeps babbling about, as he removes them, will vanish faster than the assassin's bullet that took our most optimistic and courageous social and political heroes. 

April 2006

#151 Magic and Stupidity (2006)

 

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Ronald Reagan believed in the "magic of the markets."  Nancy believed in the magic of astrology.  G.W. Bush believes in the magic of a military that he busted his butt to avoid serving in during his misspent youth and a version of Christianity that would be unrecognizable to Christ.  Many of the seriously freaky neocons believe in all sorts of magical religious weirdness.  G.W.'s good buddies, Enron psychos Kenny-boy Lay and Jeffy Skilling, believed in the magic of money and power as do the conservative freaks with whom Little George surrounds himself. The religious right curses everyone with the power of their gods and nature seems intent on squashing the Red States.  The religious whackos claim that's because the nation tolerates homosexuality, abortion, and/or racial equality.  Nobody questions why the gods appear to be picking on the "true believers."  Is that magic?

Bush has done everything he can to avoid reality and because the country is filled with fantasy lovers, he's still getting away with it.  Bush allowed Enron to crush California's economy and pervert an already viciously ignorant and corrupt California political system.  Bush's corporate buddies raided the national checkbook and blew through the country's savings before 911 gave them an excuse to spend even more cash on themselves.  Magic.

Bush and Cheney presided over the worst breach of security in the history of the United States, somehow turning that into a reputation for defenders of the nation.  They claimed that "nobody" had considered using airplanes as weapons, even though Tom Clancy wrote a book that described a terrorist wiping out the Senate and killing the President with a plane.  The public and press appeared to be as amazed as Bush.  Magic. 

Then, Bush and CRAP fabricated a list of Iraq's weapons of mass "descrucion" that would have humiliated the old Soviet Union.  Because this group of traitors and criminals had a near-perfect record of failure, incompetence, and corruption, their fairy tail found few doubters in Congress, in the media, and among the majority of uninformed and timid citizens.  The Bush dipshits declared the war "over and won" long before it was barely started and acted surprised when their invading army wasn't showered with flowers and barrels of oil.  The American sheeple were just as amazed.  Nearly 3,000 dead Americans and a half-million dead Iraqis later and the end of this war isn't even in the territory of being in sight.  Magic, fuckin' magic, and unbelievable fuckin' magic. 

Follow those circus acts with Katrina and New Orleans.  Nobody, but nobody, is surprised that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane.  The place is twenty feet below sea level.  As the globe warms, we've seen an increase in east coast storms, many of which are going to sink Florida and Louisiana.  Not only that, but there is at least a week's warning when an actual hurricane, say Katrina, is going to hit the beach, or the levies.  With that background, the Bushies manage to ignore all this information and claim "nobody expected" this kind of disaster when New Orleans is flattened and washed out to sea in the Mississippi mud.  A good portion of the country appears to believe this fantastic tale of incompetence.  A year later and New Orleans and most of the Gulf Coast is still a disaster zone, the country is broke and still pouring money down the Iraq toilet, and we've thrown most of the freedoms Bush claims "the terrorists hate us for" away in one unpatriotic Patriot Act after another.  Freakin' magical magic done with fuckin' amazing magic.

Bush gets caught tapping the telephone lines of terrorist organizations like the Quaker Church, Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and other well-known scary people and Congress immediately wants to launch an investigation into who ratted out the traitors.  It reminds me of the "Stop Squealing" gangbanging rapper campaigns going on in New Jersey.  Obviously, it's a worse crime to rat out a President who violates the law than it is to be an actual criminal/traitor.  Now that's not only magic, but great comedy. 

What could be next? 

What it won't be is a courageous press growing a testicle and doing its job to protect our democracy.  It won't be a majority of Democratic Senators and Representatives acting like Democrats instead of gutless Republicans.  It won't be Bush and CRAP admitting that they've done the worst possible job of managing and protecting the country and showing themselves the door out of honor, humility, and disgrace.  If any of those things happened, it would be real magic.  Wouldn't it?

March 2006

Hypocracy on Display

 

John Oliver does what he does as well as anyone on the planet, exposing Repuglican hypocracy. These assholes are like the Bush war criminals who knew Iraq had WMDs "because we still have the receipts." They are convinced that the rest of us are fraudulent voters because they do it so often and so shamelessly.

#150 Murder in South Dakota (2006)

Rat Rants 2006

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

One of the dullest states in the nation, South Dakota, is trying to lead the country into the 21st Century, leaving Roe vs. Wade, science, logic, and rational law in history's dust. You gotta wonder why women live in a state that doesn't even consider them to be a critical character in their own abortion.  The newest anti-abortion legislation penalizes a doctor who performs an abortion, the doctor and pharmacist who prescribe and deliver "morning after pills," and anyone with an IQ higher than a piece of toast. 

Who is making these nutty laws?  Who's electing the idiots who make the nutty laws?

Taking a look at the state's demographics, I found that South Dakota population growth is half the nation's average, while the birth rate is at the norm.  So, more folks are leaving the state than are immigrating to this intellectual dead zone.  Surprise! 51% of the population are women.  Dumb women, apparently.  The state proudly boasts that 80% of its citizens are high school graduates.  Just guessing, I'd suspect that not many of that number are women.  I wonder what the South Dakota berka looks like?  While you wouldn't expect this to be a state full of scientists, I was surprised to see that science is even taught in South Dakota schools. As dumb as their politicians are, it appears that the average high school graduate is no worse equipped than the national average.  I have to wonder if South Dakota suffers more than typically from the usual Midwest "exodus of the intelligent?"

The state isn't particularly concerned with children already born.  Like most of the country, a significant percentage (16%) of children live in poverty and a substantial percentage (36%) live in low income families.  Education-wise, the state has a high school graduation rate that is slightly higher (4% higher) and substantially fewer college graduates (18% fewer) than the national norm.  Not surprisingly, the state is overwhelmingly white (85%, compared to 58% nationally) with the majority minority being "American Indian" (10.7%).  In just about every educational measurement, SD is pretty much in the middle of the pack.  It's a depressingly poorly performing pack, but South Dakota isn't as overwhelmingly moronic as I'd expected.

If nothing else, I think this proves that statistics are not often useful data. Some aspects of the stats prove that South Dakotans are less than committed to bettering the lives of children once they are born.  So, what does the state's most recent piece of legislative foolishness mean to the rest of us?

Taking this idiot attempt to control abortion at its face value, let's look at what South Dakota legislators are saying.  The doctor who is asked to perform this operation, an abortion, is contracted by a woman and, often, her male partner.  If the doctor performs the operation, he/she is going to be prosecuted as a Class 5 felony (five years in prison and up to $5,000 in fines).  The woman, on the other hand, is assumed to be a helpless, defenseless idiot; "Nothing in this Act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty."  Judging by the general simplemindedness of the majority of South Dakota, I think that assumption is probably correct. 

Per this silly piece of shit legislation, a woman who becomes pregnant and requests and pays for and subjects her unborn child to an abortion is guiltless.  Obviously, she must be too dumb to know what she's doing?  A man/husband who, with the woman, also conspires to request the abortion is also innocent of any crime?  The only person being prosecuted by this moronic law is the doctor, the hired help.  This is, obviously, a chicken-shit way to short circuit the process, attacking the extremely limited supply of professionals who provide the service instead of the unlimited supply of customers who want the service.  That doesn't make it right or logical, though.  Just like all conservative totalitarian attempts to regulate human behavior by superstition, ignorance, arrogance, oppression, and tyranny, this legislation is seriously stupid. 

However, it does open up some creative opportunities for people wanting to commit other types of crimes.  Simply put, the South Dakota law says that the only person guilty of a crime-for-hire is the hireling.   If this anti-logic spreads to other South Dakota criminal laws, an employee violating a law is a criminal.  An employer who requires, requests, or specifically contracts that employee for the purpose of violating the law is disassociated, legally, from the crime. Practically speaking, this has been the way the law works for corporations since the beginning of Corporate America.  I guess it's about time that other areas of criminal law apply the same twisted logic.

Deep in the heart of the Mob, hit men must be considering asking their clients to stay away from South Dakota these days. It only makes sense that the guy who does the hit is screwed in SD, but the person who paid for the contract should be held as innocent as a woman wanting an abortion.  What's the difference, after all?  If you want someone whacked, try to hire the job done in South Dakota.  Murder is legal in that state as long as you don't do the killing yourself. 

February 2006

#149 A Foolish Immigration Policy (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

The recent stupid chain of events in Europe and the Mideast have illustrated how incompatible Islam (and, probably, religion in general) is with democracy.  Islam has a long, primitive, painful history as a repeat theocratic offender.  The best government all of the Islamic nations has managed is a collection of corrupt kingdoms and a much larger collection of dictatorships.  The worst they have managed is the trampling of the free speech rights of most of the world's democracies.  The recent rampage of ignorant fools raging across Europe over the "abuses" of the free press is all the evidence I need to know that it's time to send Islam's children a message. Like Christian conservatives, Islamic conservatives are afraid of their own shadows and freedom is a concept that they view as subversive and heretical. 

I can not, for the life of me, imagine a good reason for why we have allowed ourselves to become so degraded that we care about the opinions and superstitions of a pack of retrograde desert hillbillies who haven't managed a moment of technological success or a single cultural achievement since long before the time this country separated itself from England.  I lie, I know why we do it.  We do it for the oil.

I wrote, way back in 2001, that the best way to get revenge against the people and cultures that attacked this nation on September 11, 2001 was to wipe out their primitive economies.  I still say that's the best tactic.  After the complete failure of Bush's primitive fight-fire-with-fire tactics, I'm more convinced that I was right five years ago.  It's not like they have anything other than oil to sell.  They don't have intellectual properties.  They don't have an education system of their own among the entire lot of Islamic nations.  To learn even the most basic modern skills, they must send their children and the children of their slaves to the universities of the nations that they hate.  We are among those nations.

Do we really have so little respect for our culture, our history, our science, our democracy, our nation that we would sell it for a few drops of oil? 

Apparently.

However, I'd like to propose something different.  I'd like to suggest that we all, every single western culture, stop wasting cash on trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's asshole and turn our attention to divesting ourselves of Arab oil.  Brain-dead Bush has blown almost a half-trillion dollars trying to convince Iraqis to consider becoming a civilization.  The current "plan" is to burn up at least another one-and-one-half trillion dollars before we give up and go home with a religious dictatorship left behind.  It ain't gonna happen.  After centuries of illiteracy and corruption and superstition, Iraq and the rest of North Africa is not going to flip directions and become enlightened.  And, honestly, I don't know why we should worry about it. 

Sooner or later, we have to consider our own self-interest.  Closing the boarders to students from terrorist states and religions is a start.  Shutting off commerce with those countries is at the heart of closing down the terrorist states.  Once we have completely wreaked their economy, we can expect considerably more cooperation in hunting down bin Laden and any other fruitcake we want to talk to.  But my advice is that we take as little of their help as possible.  They want ten times the value of everything they offer, so we need to wean ourselves from them to get their price down to what it's worth. 

As a collection of cultures, they have demonstrated that they are intolerant of every freedom held dear to a free society.  Their violent reaction to the horrible threat of . . . cartoons proves that they can't be trusted with sharp objects of intellectual stimulation.  Let the "guys sitting around" continue to sit around until they starve to death.  The reason there seems to be no shortage of idiots willing to strap on a bomb and walk into a crowd is that these fools have no other options; nothing to lose.  We need to lock them down and lock them out so that the discover they have quite a lot to lose.  Once the oil money dries up, we ban their ruling freaks from civil society, eliminating their ability to be playboys and perverse freaks outside of the constraints of their own countries.  Make all the whackos live together, with no avenue for escape from each other, and they will implode.  The few intellectuals their cultures generate will be driven to do something to fix their countries, because they'll go nuts having to live with the fools who make up the majority of those places.  Until they are valuable contributors to the world community, the world's majority economies will be encouraged to boycott these places and their citizens, and refugees.  They will be forced to suffer the consequences of their fantasies and corruption and they will become another example of "the destructive meme." 

In the meantime, we've focused all of our energy on fighting terrorism by ripping the funding from the terrorists.  We've also freed ourselves from the tyranny of oil and oil money.  We might save the world from the side effects of world-wide oil use, if it isn't too late for that.  We could punish three perfectly evil groups at the same time; Islamic terrorists and American oil executives and the politicians they own. Seems like all the motivation a country could need.

We will be creating a peaceful world for our children to enjoy, instead of a never-ending war that will only get worse.  We will free ourselves from this Orwellian future that the conservatives seem to want to create.  They want it so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything good about humanity, about our way of life, about life itself. 

We can't continue to fight ignorance with ignorance.  We have to use the tools of science.  Tools that democracy invents faster than any system in history. 

February 2006

#148 Coming to America (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

A lot of young, smart, hip, politically-alert United States citizens are thinking about immigration.  Some are considering the effects of uncontrolled, irrational over-population of an already resource-crowded nation, some are trying to find a sane political system, some are convinced that the United States is about to go on a fascist witch-hunt and don't want to be "the last Jew looking for transportation out of Germany."  Maybe more than any time since the Civil War, there are more good reasons to leave the United States than there are to stay.  These are terrifying times and most of the terrorist forces are internal.  The possibility of Orwell's 1984 becoming a reality have never been more likely. Vancouver is being overrun by immigrants from the United States and housing prices are reflecting the cash those immigrants are moving from this country to Canada.

The problem with Americans immigrating outward is that most of the countries we'd consider immigrating to don't want us.  Our limited educations have limited our options.  We only speak pidgin English with a variety of accents, only a few of which are intelligible to folks outside of our regional neighborhoods. Rarely does a US citizen offer the receiving country the advantage of competency in the local language.  Many of us are not particularly talented, technically, socially, or politically.  Our education system has short-circuited our natural abilities to learn complicated disciplines and techniques, which suggests to the immigrating country that we may be a liability on their carefully designed economic systems.  So, those countries design restrictive immigration policies that require huge non-interest-bearing bonds (the most desirable European destinations ask for nearly a million dollars in non-interest-bearing bonds), long periods of unemployment designed to prove self-sufficiency, and have installed a huge variety of minor violations that will result in instant deportation (and loss of those security bonds).. 

The simple fact is, even for the best of our best, as immigrants United States citizens are not particularly welcome anywhere outside of our own boarders.  An even more discouraging fact is that most nations would rather suffer Islamic fundamentalist immigrants with no skills of any sort, no interest in fitting into the local culture, and a tendency toward violence at the hint of any perceived slight toward their native superstitions.

On the other hand, our government is particularly interested in maintaining low labor costs.  You can jabber about cynical humanitarian reasons for maintaining high immigration rates until you are almost liberal, but we all know our government represents our ruling class.  That group of anti-patriots doesn't want to pay a living wage for the services they fancy.  Have you noticed how many wannabe high government officials have lost their jobs when someone found that they had hired undocumented house-help?  This isn't a trend, it's the way of our world.  Actually, it's their world; the rest of us just rent a space in an unwanted corner.

The cool thing, for the low-brow ruling crud, about wanton immigration is that they don't have to pay for . . . anything.  They can de-fund education, because there is no shortage of desperate mid-tech refugees from totalitarian third world nations who will self-educate themselves, to the point necessary to fill the shrinking technical requirements of US jobs. Instead of paying a living wage to current citizens, the management class can pay a subsistence wage to a desperate immigrant.  Better yet, they can pay a fraction of a living wave to an illegal immigrant under threat of deportation if the employee complains. 

I want be perfectly clear about this.  It is not rational to consider illegal immigrants as criminals.  In a moral society, it is irrational to criminalize an effort to improve your life, to attempt to ensure a better life for your children, to leave a corrupt political system to immigrate to a more democratic place.  We can only call this “illegal immigration” because it violates our laws, not because it violates natural law.  The most damning thing we can say to the immigrant is, "Sorry, you'll have to go back home, fill out the correct paperwork , meet the requirements of this country for immigration, and please try again.  Thanks for taking an interest in the United States.  Have a nice trip back to where you came from."

The real criminals, the only immigration criminals, are the United States citizens who hire these immigrants in a blatant, intentional, and treasonous effort to violate the laws of this country.  This specially protected group of traitors and terrorists can wipe out any services the government provides to anyone but them.  They'll convince the uneducated masses that these basic services are "welfare" and convince the drooling middle class that anyone accepting welfare from the state (even if that "welfare" was actually an insurance program paid for by that same group of people) is un-American.  Soon, the only job left for the government will be to suppress populist political movements, to invade foreign countries to obtain natural resources for corporations and their executives, and to manage the distribution of national wealth and resources to the ruling class.  Which, if you honestly analyze the former Soviet Union or the current communist Chinese state, is exactly the practical result of communism.  This class of criminals are our ruling elites; best represented by the current President and his pack of inbred hillbillies.

For the rest of us, the question of immigration should be very simple.  Immigration drives down wages, reduces the opportunities for our children, overpopulates our cities and nation, strains the capacity of social systems, damages democracy by diluting the acumen of the electorate, and increases the power of the elite.

While monkey-boy Bush chatters about "jobs that Americans won't do," it's pretty obvious that he won't work for a pittance.  Our elitist spoiled rich kid President seems to think that his government income barely pays for part-time employment, based on the dozens of extended vacations he takes every year.  The number of jobs that Americans won't do is rapidly on the rise, because jobs that used to be middle class occupations are quickly being shipped to China and India or handed over to third world immigrants at minimum pay or less.  We "won't do" those jobs because they don't pay a living wage.  Americans seem to be doing multiple jobs a lot more often these days. 

Even more obvious, Cheney, the hand that turns the hurdy-gurdy crank for incurious George's dance, won't even work for the hundreds of thousands in salary and perks the Vice President receives.  Cheney still has his fingers and wallet stuck in Halliburton and other corporate and political income sources.  He practically laughed at the suggestion that part of volunteering for public service meant that you have to stop draining the public cash register until your stint of "service" was finished.  Cheney has always had and eaten his cake, from years of employment in corrupt political regimes from Nixon to the Bush family.  If he didn't have to work for only a few hundred thousand in 1972, why should he suffer now?

The rest of us do the suffering for him.  Under the guise of keeping waves "reasonable," Cheney and Bush and the Republican part drag wages below the poverty line and suppress both the economy and our political system.  Hard times are a conservative's wet dream.  When people are scratching for survival and worrying about hanging on to their marginal jobs, they don't worry about fine points like justice, racial equality, the social net, public education, or their children's future. 

When times are bad enough, humans commonly bash in the heads of their youngest children to conserve resources for adults and older, more independent and productive children.  Conservatives seem to put a real premium on the ability to rampantly use capital punishment as long as the criminals are poor people.  Maybe that's the conservative ideal.  Actions always speak louder than words.

January 2006

#147 Send More Jobs to India (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

This morning, the NPR dill-hole "economic expert" and other similar fools were marveling at the "fact" that most Americans are suspicious of the current "economic upturn."  I put all this crap in quotes, because these terms are being tossed about, in the media, like they have some meaning.  I am regularly amazed at the minimal math skills required to become an "economic expert." 

The United States has become a feudal state, with 1% of the population owning nearly 90% of the country's assets.  The majority of that 1% produces absolutely nothing, contributes nothing of value to the nation's gross national product, and would barely be noticed if they instantly vanished from the planet.  But they are the people for whom the economy is slightly upturning. 

The rest of us are seeing declining wages, rapid inflation, reduced buying power, vanishing middle class jobs, erratic and irrational government attention to the economy, social insecurity, and no sign of anything improving our lot.  So, why is it so difficult to figure out why most of us are not optimistic about the current and future economy of this country? 

Easy.  Managers and their "experts" are fools.  Like Republican politicians, they either think the rest of us are dumb enough to buy what they're crapping out or they are fooled by their own bullshit.  Mostly, though, they are simply inbred, upper-crust idiots.

Which brings me to my current business solution; send more jobs to India.  Here's where that inspiration came from:

I recently wanted to verify some information on my AT&T/Citibank credit card.  I called the 800 number on the back of the card and ended up in India or Pakistan of some damn place where English is spoken with a mouth full of marbles. It's not that the connection was bad, although it was pretty awful considering that AT&T is supposedly a telephone service.  For ten minutes, I asked my question and listened to a collection of random syllables in response.  I'm assuming they were a response, since I have no idea what was being said on the other, distant end of the line.

After a series of non-communicative exchanges, I decided that I didn't really need this credit card and said, "I want to cancel my card.  Please say 'yes' if you understand this request and have closed my account." 

Instead of the response I'd requested, I received another long string of random vowels and I waited it out.  When she had finished talking space alien, I repeated my request.  Another pile of vowels poured through the telephone line, but I interrupted and said, very slowly and, probably, a little forcefully, "I'm not kidding.  I just want to cancel the account.  Please just respond with a single word, 'yes,' if you understand what I said and have closed my account with AT&T/Citibank." 

A long pause followed, clicking noises covered the silence, and, finally, I think I heard her say "yes."  Honestly, I couldn't understand what she was saying, even with a single syllable word, well enough to know for sure that she managed to comprehend what I wanted done.  I cut up the card, posted a note to my credit record describing why I'd cancelled the account and put a note in Outlook to remind me to check on the account in a month to see if it is closed. 

Over the years, I've collected a small pile of credit cards from back in the day when credit card companies simply mailed a card, unrequested, and created a customer.  Like dope pushers, credit card companies are always looking for new addicts and I used to simply drop the new cards either in the trash or in a fireproof safe.  I rarely use credit for anything and think of the cards as more of an emergency fund than an actual financial gadget.  I opened up the safe and took out all of my unused credit cards.  I had two MBNA accounts, another Citibank account, a couple of Chase cards, and a Discover Card.  Suddenly, it seemed like a good time to simply my financial life. 

I called the 800 number for MBNA, got another noisy long line, a series of automated instructions, and, finally, another non-English speaking service person.  After listening to his long, barely intelligible drone touting the great benefits I would realize by consolidating all of my non-existent debt into a six-month, zero-interest loan from MBNA, I slowly repeated my AT&T request, "I want to cancel my account.  Please just respond with a single word, 'yes,' if you understand what I said and have closed my account with MBNA."  Just like my AT&T/Citibank experience, I had to repeat myself about a half-dozen times to get the job done, but I finally heard a simple "yes" from the long end of the line, thanked the fellow, and moved on to the rest of my cards.

It turned out that only Discover Card had either kept telephone service in the US or done one hell of a job of teaching English to the lady with whom I spoke.  So, I reluctantly kept my unused Discover Card. 

Personally, I recommend that we all go through this exercise.  Those US companies that think so little of their US customers that they save a few bucks on service by shipping that service to non-English speaking countries do not deserve out business.  In fact, we ought to be closely watching where our dollars go because the jobs we save are our own.  Some people buy Toyotas instead of Fords or GM cars because it's more likely that the Toyota is built here than the so-called US manufactured cars. 

That said, there are some jobs that could easily, profitably, and practically be moved to India.  Positions that cost far more than they provide in service to customers or to productive employees can be displaced to third world countries.  High paid, non-technical, non-essential positions, which are often held by middle-aged white men who have gravitated to those jobs solely because of longevity and an ability to avoid doing productive work, would be ideally suited for foreign export. 

There is no reason why the nation couldn't export the job done by every single multi-national executive position, every media expert spokesperson, every Fox News talking head, and every government office to India, Pakistan, South Korea, or, even, Iraq.  Once all of those non-essential positions are securely positioned in their tar-paper shanties and grass huts (equipped with cell phones, iMacs, and bug spray) billions of dollars would be saved and our nation's productivity would skyrocket.  Most US corporations would shave 20-40% from their overhead just by trading in their inefficient mismanagement for low-paid, third world executive services.

The best bit I've saved for last, though.  With our wasteful US-based management systems, we have to fritter away precious resources in golden parachute payoffs, executive retirement plans, and all sorts of pointless and unproductive expenditures to be rid of useless executives.  Move those jobs to India and executive downsizing is a simple problem.  When hard times come, as they always do, those same corporations could easily downsize by cutting off the cell phone service to their off-shore executive staff.

With this simple reorganization, service to customers would improved, employee productivity would be enhanced, profitability would explode, and nobody anyone cares about would be harmed.  Couple the corporate efficiency with the improvement in national communications provided by moving the media and government offices offshore and you have the perfect modern social and economic system.

January 2006

#146 When Do You Shoot? (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

I woke up this morning to a news report that a Milwaukee man had been beaten to death by a gang of a dozen or more kids.  Apparently, a pack of parent-less brats were blocking the street and, when this unfortunate man honked his horn to get their attention, they ripped him from his car and assaulted him.  The beating resulted in the death of a 52 year-old man. 

This story caught my attention because a friend, David Santistevan, found himself in a similar situation two years ago.  He wasn't in Milwaukee or another urban armpit.  He was in a small town in Idaho.  He wasn't confronted by a large gang, but by two young men on ATVs in a dark alley behind a bar.  An Idaho court decided that in defending himself from what he perceived to be a threat, he had committed "attempted murder" and sentenced him to 22-45 years in prison. 

I don't know all of the details of the event, other than what I read in local Idaho newspapers and what David has told me.  The newspaper reports were so biased that I found it hard to believe that David could receive a fair trial in that state.  I know that David shot both of the young men and one was critically injured and the other received a minor wound.  I also know that both of the boys were white and David is Hispanic in an often radically-racist, state.  The newspapers and prosecutor regularly called the men "boys" and "kids," but one of the "kids" was six-two and weighed 220 pounds.  David is five-five, 50-years-old, and an overweight guitar player.  I doubt that anyone would imagine an Idaho court returning a similar verdict if a 50-year-old white man had been in a similar situation with two large, young Hispanic men. 

In reading the reports from the trial, I felt the judge clearly spent a lot of time posing as a champion of justice and the Great White American Way.  I suspect his posturing means that judges hold elected offices in Idaho.  In his closing statement, Judge Elgee said, “Mr. Santistevan did all he could do to commit two murders.  This has been a life sentence for the victims. I considered the sentence very carefully when I imposed it and can see no basis to change it.”  Ridiculous.  Doing "all he could" to commit murder would have resulted in two deaths.  David fired two shots in panic, left an easy target on the ground, made no effort to catch the other victim, ran away from the scene, and hid in his home.  He was obviously terrified by every aspect of this event.  Nothing about that set of actions resembles an intent to commit murder.  In all, I felt that David took a ride on a railroad in his trial.

What David did was akin to the old American proverb, "don't bring a knife to a gunfight."  In his case, he brought the gun while his antagonists brought youth and we may never know what else.  There was no effort in the police "investigation" or in the trial to determine what incited the fear that caused David to fire his weapon at the two young men.  As I mentioned before, the local newspapers made no effort at presenting an unbiased report of the incident or, later, David's character.  The Wood River Journal, the local paper, was particularly one-sided, going as far as collecting and printing derogatory character statements before the trial and pronouncing David guilty long before the trial began.

Even with that background, it took the jury 15 hours of deliberation to convict David and, by the newspaper report "None of them looked in the direction of the defendant."  In other words, they couldn't face the man they had convicted.  Who could?  Presented with a half-hearted police investigation, a biased community, a politically motivated judge, and a jury that faced returning to a community that had already convicted David and would have been happy to hang him from the nearest tree, the jury did what they had to do; they found him guilty and ran back to their ordinary lives as quickly as possible. 

In the past couple of decades, Idaho has regularly been a national embarrassment. Idaho has become a dumping ground for slack-jawed losers and idle and addled trust fund babies, often demonstrated by White-Power-Aryan-Nation crap, Scientology-Creationist-Intelligent-Design superstitious jabber, and rich-Californians-turned-small-town-hicks nuttiness. These days, that is less of a character flaw, since the whole country seems to be going to the conservative dogs.  If Idaho has a fault, today, it's that the state is slightly worse than the rest of the country in a time when it would be so easy to be better. 

The only clear message this trial conveys is that Idaho is stuck in the conundrum that haunts the rest of the country; guns are good/bad.  In this case, David defended himself with a gun and that resulted in an attempted murder conviction.  If he were white and his attackers were brown, black, yellow, or red the result would be different.  If he'd have tried to defend himself with a baseball bat, he probably would have been beaten to a pulp but he wouldn't be in prison today.  If he'd have tried to defend himself with a knife, he'd probably be dead.  He successfully used a gun and he's in prison.  The judge tacked on considerable extra time to his sentence because David used a gun in the "crime."  But politicians, everywhere, take thousands and millions of dollars from the gun lobby to make sure criminals have easy access to as many guns as they desire.  Most likely, this Idaho judge and prosecutor will receive political contributions from the Idaho gun industry in their next campaign. 

As a nation, we consistently defend the right to own guns but are less convinced that we have the right to use them in defense.  If anything good can come from this poor excuse for justice, I hope it causes a few people to review their position on handguns and licensing.  A lot of the misery caused by this incident could have been easily prevented with competent law enforcement, before the event, and simple regulation of handguns.  People kill people with guns.  Maybe that's not such a good thing.

January 2006

#145 Too Many Targets (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

Wow!  This has been an incredible month to look through the rat hole into the real world.  Republicans are drizzling ooze in all directions and they're presenting so many targets that writing about them is like shooting catfish in a barrel.  Just as a reference, for those of you who aren't counting:

• Bush's mole in the last remaining piece of non-right wing media, ex-Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, quit before he was fired by the CPB's board.  The CPB's inspector general had found that Tomlinson had hired lobbyists and contractors, without the board's knowledge, to campaign Congress to restrict public broadcasting's ability to report the news, unless it was favorable to the administration.
• Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pled guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion and resigned his office.  Cunningham soaked up $2.4 million in graft to while working for a collection of crooked military contractors.  Cunningham, who often promoted his military connection as a former Navy pilot, was one of the few Republicans in office who could actually make any kind of claim to national service.  He's facing 10 years in prison and had to give back some of his booty.  I'm sure he'll receive a sharp slap on the wrist.  Republicans are really into "taking responsibility" when the responsibility can be passed on to someone else.
• Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his lobbying partner, Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Tommy DeLay, bribed Rep. Bob Ney and a collection of Republican congressmen into making bold statements in favor of gambling casino interests in return for at least $10,000 in contributions to the RNC.  Big surprise, Republicans and the Mafia are connected.  Who'd have thought?  Funny, when cops find drugs on poor person, those drugs are astronomically priced.  When they discover a Republican politician is taking bribes, we're barely talking any money at all.  Raise your hands if you seriously believe that a gambling casino siphoned only $10,000 to the RNC.  Ok, so there are a few really stupid folks still able to breed.  Nature works overtime to populate the species, no matter how dumb a move that may be. 
• Bush and Cheney are on the road promoting their right to torture captives while the rest of the world wonders what the hell happened to "the land of the free and the home of the brave?"  On the upside, many people (Lawrence Wilkerson, Rep. Norm Dicks, Sen Jack Murtha) are beginning to locate their lost testicles and are speaking out against this abomination and perversion of our national values.
• Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. has become as interesting as an afternoon soap opera.  He has ruled in favor of investment companies that, incidentally, he had considerable financial interest.  Paragons of propriety, such as Arlon Spector decided, "It is my conclusion that there has been no impropriety on your part," but folks with a conscience and a lick of sense are less convinced.  Alito ruled that a strip search of a 10 year old girl was within the powers of our police state.  Alito has ruled that machine gun ownership is every (mobster) American's right.  And on it goes.  Where do Republicans find these whack jobs?  
• The new Iraqi Congress resolved that Iraq’s opposition has a “legitimate right'’ to provide resistance to American occupation.  They also asked for a timetable for an American troop withdrawal, something Bush has claimed he'd do the moment Iraq asked us to leave.  Of course, now he's saying it's "premature" (wonder if he knows what that word means?) for us to consider withdrawal while Iraq still has oil and Halliburton hasn't yet extracted all of the gold in Fort Knox. 
• Senator Tom Delay is sinking further into the Texas court system.  For me, the highpoint of his legal mess has been the difficulty a Texas politician has had in finding a competent, unbiased Texas judge to hear his case.  Bush seemed to think that every damn court in Texas was competent to try death cases, even without a state public defender system, but political corruption is beyond their capacity.  How difficult is it to determine if a Republican is taking bribes?  I'd be surprised if it's any harder than deciding if a politician is lying (are his lips moving?).
• New Orleans and Katrina are still spilling into Bush's lap.  Corruption and incompetence seem to be the legal tender of this administration's attitude toward domestic issues.  As our weather changes, lots of red states are likely to be experiencing natural disasters.  I'm sure Pat Robertson will be praying for their contributions to his newest castle on a mountain.  One thing for sure, Bush and the Republican wolf pack has made sure none of those damn homeless freeloaders can escape from natural disasters through filing bankruptcy. 
• Lastly, a collection of "conservative think tanks" (an obvious oxymoron) have been advocating large families as a "solution" to the Social Security crisis.  Their argument is that Social Security was "set up" to be a system that relied on the contributions of new workers to support retiring workers.  This ignores the fact that the original system was a "pay as you go" insurance program that has been grossly mismanaged and liberally robbed from by every Republican President from Eisenhower to Bush II.  Republicans hate "pay as you go," because it requires the people they represent, the grossly rich, to contribute to the nation's expenses.  This idiot "solution" ignores the fact that large families are overwhelmingly the major contributors to poverty, child abuse, illiteracy, and unemployment.  I heard one of the brain-dead "conservative intellectuals" explaining this solution on NPR and nearly hurt myself laughing at his justifications.  Finally, the poor boy had to fall on his sword and admit that there was a religious/superstitious component to the argument that made large families "even more compelling."  Ah, the Corporate God demands "more customers" and who are we to disobey?

The list is much longer and funnier than this.  If it weren't scary beyond belief and dangerous beyond our wildest terrors of the Cold War, it would be a lot more entertaining. 

The most important thing we should have learned from the Cold War was that a national government run by a single party is dumb beyond belief.  Instead, Reagan imported Soviet Union-style politics to the United States and the right has promoted that incompetence to a fine, political art.  There are few signs that the media is going to contribute anything useful to the reform of our political system and our elections have been contaminated beyond simple reform.  Unless individual citizens wise up and rise up against the nuttiness of the right, we're screwed.  For the short term, we're screwed anyway.  Bush and his puppeteers have blown the national budget, decimated our national reputation, and lowered our future standard of living to third world status.  Good thing they're entertaining, otherwise they would be totally worthless. 

November 2005

#144 Religious Organizations and Leaders (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

"Oxymoron: A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in a deafening silence and a mournful optimist."

• "Religious: Having or showing belief in and reverence for God or a deity."
• "Organized: Functioning within a formal structure, as in the coordination and direction of activities."
• "Leader: One who is in charge or in command of others."

Good 'ole boy, Reverend Pat Robertson, is a leader of modern organized religion.  I have to suspect that claim contains a pair of oxymoronic phrases.  The folks Robertson leads are as scary as the followers that Hitler led into Hell. 

This week, Robertson condemned the citizens of Dover, PA for having the audacity to vote to oppose the insertion of creationist dogma in their local public school science programs (by replacing 8 Creationist school board members with folks who picked science over myth).  Robertson ranted, "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city."  Florida, Louisiana, and most of the deep South are hotbeds of superstitious belief and I haven't noticed any god-given relief provided to those places.  I suspect that Dover won't be any less protected than any other area of the world.  God is spectacularly consistent in his absence in times of natural or unnatural disaster, political upheaval, and personal loss. 

Not content to prove himself mostly arrogant and stupid, Robertson went on to rant, "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever.  If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them." 

Calling on Darwin will be at least as effective as would be a prayer to Robertson's god.  Both efforts are a waste of time and energy, but superstitious people never run out of time to waste.  At least, if they pay attention to insane freaks and charlatans like Robertson, that would be my best guess.  The lil' fella' has a lot of followers and, based on his fine collection of expensive suits and jewelry and mansions and palaces, I suspect he has collected a bunch of money from those fools with excess time on their hands. 

By the time he was finished with Dover, Robertson had moved himself into the rare territory of the completely arrogant and stupid.  If Robertson is a "religious leader" in "organized religion" he is doing his best to prove that organization and religion and leadership don't mix.  At it's best, religion is a spiritual foundation that provides moral guidance and strength to a believer.

Religion doesn't often function at an optimal level, though.  Most folks inclined toward organized religion are there for the money and/or power.  Folks like Robertson get off on inventing gods and forcing others to bow to their inventions.  This is an ancient, primitive crowd control tactic that has been practiced ever since humans began to hang out in groups.  Some dickwad invents a god or ten, pretends to be in communication with powerful supernatural voices, and comes up with a fanciful list of behaviors that everyone else is forced to imitate or be doomed to eternal discomfort and bad luck.  If Robertson wore a bone in his nose, waved bags of sticks and chicken bits, and painted himself to look like a nasty Bozo the clown, he wouldn't be any less modern than he is today. 

Minnesota's ex-Governor, Jesse Ventura, created a smoke storm of superstitious frenzy during his term in office by stating that "organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers."  He recanted that statement, but he should have simply defined it.  There is no shortage of weak-minded religious people; "weak" as in uneducated, cowardly, crazy, and gullible.  That's all Jesse needed to say. 

Whenever this fact is pointed out, the crutch-leaners always pull up Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, and the short list of brave souls who fairly justify the existence of religious faith.  The short list of equally brave souls who did not invoke divine authority for their acts of humanity and courage is rarely considered in the argument. 

Humans, by definition, are a faulty animal.  Society at its best, whether religious or secular, attempts to guide human activity toward what we call "civilized behavior."  Robertson and the Religious Right are not examples of people or organizations with moral or sincere intentions.  Robertson is simply another of a long line of witch doctors acting in his own interests while doing as much damage to his culture as he can manage with his limited abilities. 

What Robertson does represent is the contradiction between the best meaning of "religion" and the reality of either "organized" or "leader."  Spirituality is so individual that intrusion by someone claiming to be "a leader" turns internal spirituality to mere imitation, which removes the possibility of "reverence for God or a deity."  Instead, the hoard are simply revering the human representative of a fanciful idol.  Manipulators like Robertson represent themselves as the "voice of God," which reduces that supernatural being to something easily interpreted, grossly fallible, and an embarrassing mockery of the high standards humans are capable of aspiring.  Instead of rousing heroism and moral behavior, religious leaders lower their followers to "monkey see, monkey do" ritual and cowardly conservatism. 

Organizations, by their nature, repress the creativity and sacrifice required by the very same brave souls those institutions refer to when they attempt to justify their existence.  Every one of our spiritual heroes (secular and non-secular) claimed by religious organizations had to work far outside of religious tradition to accomplish their goals.  Not a one of those organizations claimed a relationship with their own heroes when it would have been useful to those champions.  God's guidance appears to only have hindsight, when it comes to religious organizations.  With that in mind, I suspect the citizens of Dover will do just fine, regardless of Robertson's feeble curses.  At least, they won't do any worse than cities that suffer Robertson's blessing. 

October 2005