#161 Terrorists and Biker Gangs (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Biker gangs have been with us since the beginning of history. This was first pointed out to me by my wife when I described the "Comancheros" who used to terrorize the American plains before and after the Civil War, before "civilization" replaced random acts of terror with organized terror (aka "government"). In this context, Viking marauders were boat-gangsters. The Mongol hordes were really big horse-riding gangs. Roaming packs of male chimpanzees are horseless, bike-less proto-gangsters. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were nations of biker-gangsters, finally, wearing helmets and uniforms. It's about time a biker gang thought about safety and strapped on helmets.

The basic concept of gangs could be taken from the Three Musketeers, "One for all, all for one."  Of course, when the going gets really tough and individual qualities are required, the members add "and everyone for himself" until the smoke clears. Without loud and clear orders to follow and simple rules to remember, biker gangsters revert to the most human primitive values. 

Years ago, I stumbled into a discussion with a guy who'd spent most of his life in biker gangs.  He talked about "honor" and "loyalty" as if those character traits didn't exist outside of gangs.  I had to comment on the fact that I had a hard time rectifying the habit biker gangs have of ganging up on an outsider who presented some minor challenge to one of their members with the quality of "honor." 

His reply was that disrespecting one member of the gang was disrespect to all.  Any challenge to a single member was a challenge to the whole group, even when the challenge was issued completely out of context to the group.  Honestly, I though that was the nuttiest answer possible.  I am incapable of seeing a gang beating as anything other than group cowardice and incredibly despicable.  But I'm never going to be recruited to be a gang member, partially because I don't think like gang members.  I'm all for "all for one and one for all," but at some point individuals have to accept the responsibility of their own actions.  Gang members are not individuals. They surrender their individuality when they merge their weak personalities into the slightly stronger group-mind.

How does a 12-on-1 gang beating fit into the concept of "honor?" The logical extension of this response is the old 10-for-1 reprisal rule that the Nazi's applied to resistance movements.  Today, the USA and Israel have extended that logic to several thousand for one in Iraq and Lebanon. To me, it still violates my Kansas cowboy sense of justice and fairness and I don't get it. Let's face it, when most of us saw L.A.'s cops beating the crap out of Rodney King we thought "somebody ought to help that guy," no matter what King did to get into that predicament.  At least, I hope most of us thought that. 

Paul William Roberts describes an American Special Forces soldier in A War Against Truth, "He was as alien as the yogis I'd seen up in isolated Himalayan caves - people who have had no interaction with other humans for years, who have forgotten how.  The soldier was both shy and lethal.  He had lost most human qualities. If he married, it would not last: she'd realize eventually that he had no feelings towards her - that he had no feelings at all. The 'company' would never let him go, either.  It might make his leash quite long, but it would always want to know what he was doing, because it had trained him and knew what he was capable of doing. If he turned to crime, no police force on earth would be any match for him. This was The Terminator for real." This is a pretty accurate description of the prototypical biker gang member; with the exception of the Special Forces' exceptional training. Some bikers are ex-Special Forces and the like, however, and we can thank our military for loosing them on the public.

One of the prime faults in biker gang logic is the misinterpretation of fear as respect. Nobody respects bikers, but most everyone from cops to man-on-the-street citizens fear them. Any group inspiring fear creates an equal amount of hate.  Hate and fear create a need for security.  The need for security creates an opposite reaction to the source of the fear and hate.  And arms races are born of thus.

Internationally, we're seeing these qualities displayed by at least two nations: Israel and the United States.  Both nations have decided that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them because . . . those rules are inconvenient. Both nations react to specific acts of violence with random, extended violence disproportionate to the initial event and without any concern for striking the actual perpetrators.  Like drunken biker gangs, Israel and the US blast everything in the general direction of their enemies, creating larger and more sophisticated enemies.  They intentionally pick on small, unarmed or barely armed nations and attempt to "shock and awe" them into submission.  They are careless about the "collateral damage" they cause to both those they attack and the nation (gang) they "represent." 

This is not just Little George's gang, Clinton's gang, Old George's Gang, and Reagan's gang (who have mostly moved on to Little George's gang) all felt the same way.  Remember Madeleine Albright's response to the possibility of 300,000 children dying to effect "regime change in Iraq?" "I think it is worth the price."  That's what she said.  Billy Clinton's Secretary of State was willing to sacrifice 300,000 children to replace Saddam with an unknown (but more compliant) political system. So, we did. 

Things have changed in Iraq, mostly much for the worse.  A few hundred thousand Iraqis have been sacrificed since 1991. We patrol, but don't control, the oil wells that were the real reason for this sacrifice. And we've created an image for ourselves that is equal to the shining aura of the Hell's Angels. We've become a nation of crack-importing, meth-manufacturing, gang-banging bikers who instill fear in every sane nation in the world. 

Any national leader who cares about his country's security is either cranking up the national defense mechanisms, building weapons of self-defense and mass destruction, or is sucking up to Little George in hopes that obedience is all he and his loons want.  In the case of Great Britain, that's probably all that is necessary.  They have used up their natural resources, so there is nothing worth stealing on that pitiful island. The rest of North Africa, however, is scared to death.  South America is bracing for another round of assassinations and invasions. George Pataki, New York's nutty governor and the potential 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, ramped up the hyperbola about to be concentrated against Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez in his National Press speech, "Energy Freedom: Putting an End to Foreign Oil's Dangerous Grip on America's Future." "Energy freedom" was a side-issue in Pataki's speech, mostly he used the forum to rant against the elected leader of a country that has failed to allow American corporations unrestricted access to that country's national resources. 

Shame on them. Everybody grab a weapon.  We're gonna go beat the crap out of those disrespectful civilians.

August 2006

#160 Jews Who Hate Jews (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

"Christianity" has confused me since I was a young boy.  In church, the Methodist Church to be exact, I learned that Jesus (the "Christ" in "Christian," as best I understood) was a particularly intolerant man who set out some extremely clear and simple rules to get to heaven.  In his little section of the Bible he supposedly said, "You have heard the commandment, 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'  But what I say to you is: offer no resistance to injury.  When a person strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other. If anyone wants your shirt, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the man who begs from you. Do not turn your back on the borrower. . . If you want to avoid judgment, stop passing judgment. Your verdict on others will be the verdict passed on you . . . Threat others the way you would have them treat you: this sums up the law and the prophets . . . I have come to call, not the self-righteous, but sinners . . . It is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth . . . It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God."  And on he goes, condemning public prayer, cathedrals of religion, organized religion in general, prejudice, jealousy, violence, and greed.  Wow! If you can find room in that to be rich, for capital punishment, to persecute anyone for anything, and to go to war, you read between the lines much better than me. If "Christians" actually listened to Jesus, they'd be pretty astoundingly peaceful people.

Nothing I saw from the parishioners or even the pastor of my hometown church, or practically anyone else's church, resembled attempts to live the life Jesus described as "the way" into Heaven.  My country was an even worse offender.  The United States was building and using the world's worst weapons of mass destruction decades before I was born, conducting a horrific war in Korea when I was two, spreading instability and supporting anti-democratic regimes in Africa and South America through my toddling years, and bombing the snot out of a small Asian country when I was a teenager.  Through all of these greedy and violent acts, most US churches argued that "god was on our side," even if his "only begotten son" would have sentenced us to eternal damnation for those sins.  Our current fearful leader actually personally condemned people to death in his old job of Texas Head Executioner and, still, imagines himself to be following Jesus.  He believes his current crusade to enrich the already filthy rich and powerful is, somehow, found in Jesus' teachings.  You'd have to be completely illiterate to read that in Jesus' small portion of the New Testament. 

All these years, I've been unable to figure out why so many people call themselves "Christian" when "the Christ" has so little to do with their behavior.  They could be followers of Moses or any number of hateful, murdering, greedy, child-virgin-raping Old Testament characters or even Islam's Mohammed, but the teachings of Jesus are unimaginably far from their actions and beliefs. 

It's not a matter of failing to act, they are outright proud of ignoring Jesus' instructions. So, if they aren't Christ-followers, what are they?

This week, Mel Gibson the smugly-righteous, deeply-religious conservative, proudly-retro-Catholic, constantly-breeding actor in Hollywood gets drunk, drives down a busy California road, and, when he is pulled over for endangering innocent lives on the highway, flames into a nutty rant blaming Jews for all of his ineptitudes and moral failures.  Of course, having a god-complex Gibson also has to toss out blame for all of the world's problems to this tiny fraction of the world's population. If you're going to be insane, you might was well go for the whole ball of mania. Having read a bit from his roadside rant, it dawned on me what he and the rest of the knee-jerking fundamentalist crowd are; Jews who hate Jews.

The difference between the Old Testament and the Torah is miniscule, I've been told.  That's the best I can do for you.  Both books are so full of murder, prejudice, hatred, mumbo-jumbo, and obscure inconsistencies that I can more easily re-read my old college calculus textbooks than I can wade through the gore and misery found in those giant manuscripts.  College calculus has been a cure for insomnia since I was a teenager.  Suffering the ancient sheepherder ranting found in the Old Testament is as painfully weird as reading the Greek and Irish Ulysses randomly sorted and backwards.

If those two books are fundamentally the same, however, nothing else explains the actions of fundamentalist neocons.  In deed and word, they are exactly like the characters who run modern Israel.  Nobody loves revenge like these folks. They extract thousands of eyes for a single Jewish or US eye. The closest they get to turning the other cheek is when they have to reach across their body for a weapon. They celebrate the death penalty. They covet wealth and abuse the poor, the downtrodden, and the "unclean."  It's hard for them to decide which group they want to persecute next, there are so many to choose from.  If Pat Robertson, Jerry Farwell, Oral Roberts, and the rest were not "self-righteous" they wouldn't have personalities at all. 

And rich?  Man, these folks can't get their hands on enough cash.  The Treasury can't print it fast enough for them. When they aren't grubbing money, they're coveting power.  It's hard for them to keep track of which they desire the most.

All of these characteristics are exactly like the state and the people they love to hate; Israel and the Jews.  Listening to Israel's politicians explain away the inconvenience of all the innocent life they are wasting in Lebanon is "déjà' vu' all over again." I've heard exactly the same words from Bush and CRAP, throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and occupations. Their exchange rate for eyes must require a dump truck for each US or Israeli optical injury. And they justify it through exactly the same religious context. 

It still remains unclear to me why our fundamentalists have chosen not to call themselves Jewish.  It, obviously, isn't because they have some serious attachment to any part of Jesus of Nazareth.  Maybe they just think "Christian" sounds better than "Jewish?"

August 2006

#158 The Amerika Factor (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Joe Klein is a funny guy.  I'm never sure if he's trying to be funny, but he usually is (even if it's in spite of himself). He's doing a hard set, too.  Time Magazine is filled with funny guys and girls.  This uber-conservative-trying-to-appear-fair-and-balanced rag is so full of contradictions and irrational statements that it has the feel of a wordy Mag Magazine suffering from absentee editors.  I can never guess what kind of wackiness Time will deliver, but I can always count on it being biased and marginally researched.  Consistency is the spice of conservatism. Klein, still, puts on a consistently funny set.

I bumped into Joe Klein, the Time Magazine commentator, accidentally.  Pretty much the same way I discovered jazz through a childish subscription to the Columbia Record Club in 1957.  After a few years of being nagged by Northwest Airlines to do something with my Frequent Flyer Miles, I randomly checked off a pile of boxes on their magazine subscription option and returned to my life. Most of the rags I picked have been disappointing, which is why I don't spend real money on them.  A couple bankrupted and disappeared before they delivered their first issue.  Time has been an education. 

This month, Klein began his column (titled "The Iran Factor") with this little dialog, "When I visited Iran a few years ago, my favorite question was, 'Who runs this country?' The response often was nervous laughter, followed by a raised eyebrow, a shrug and a stage whisper: 'The dark forces.'"

Klein went on to describe this mysterious country with it's levels and shades of "governmental and religious and bazaari" conspirators and a hilarious quote from a  "senior U.S. diplomat," "We really don't have any real idea about what goes on inside that government."

I'm blowing breakfast cereal milk from my nose and I'm not even half-way through the article.  I'm having recent-news-flashbacks, suffering survivor-syndrome, and post-traumatic-stress episodes.  What country is Klein talking about?  Iran?  Amerika?  Them?  Us?  Both them and us?  Damn this is funny stuff!

Ok, ok, I'm better now.  I put away the cereal bowl.  I'm not sipping coffee.  I'm just going to try to write this rant without letting any complications confuse the issue. 

So, who the hell is Klein talking about?  If it weren't for the article's title and an occasional reference to some Islamic nutjob with a name that appears to be a random list of consonants, I'd have thought he was talking about us.  The USofA.  The country now known as Amerika the Red. 

If there is any country in the world that is being run by mysterious "Dark Forces," it's us.  The neocons think the country is controlled by Satanists, Hollywood, and the totally invisible, amazingly silent liberal MSM.  Liberals think the country has gone to hell and is being disassembled for fuel by shark-mind international corporations, greedy bankers and investment hucksters, neo-Nazi Christian fundamentalists, crooked electronic election machine manufacturers, and disgruntled Cold War military-industrial leftovers.  The Silent Majority, recently more accurately renamed "the TFM vote" (see "Bush Losing Core Supporters"), blames witches, liberals, and Mexicans for the nation's problems. 

The only thing we all agree on is that this is no longer a representative democracy and that the "we the people" opening declaration of the Constitution of the United States is no longer applicable. While "government of the people, by the people, for the people" may be an obsolete concept, replacing "people" with "corporation" might get closer to the truth.  However, corporations are not the living entities that our flawed judicial system imagines.  Corporations are simply shields and tax haves for our elite ruling class.  This group is as theocratic, shadowy, and self-interested as anything the craziest folks in Iran could dream up. 

The incredible effort Republicans and the media have put behind redefining the Estate Tax as the ominous "Death Tax" is a wonderful example of how powerful and insidious our richest few can be.  The fact that the media hasn't laughed this campaign into late night talk show comedy routines tells us all we need to know about the power of our "Dark Forces."  These folks control the country so completely that we've lost our sense of humor regarding their motivations and manipulations.  Damn, that's good propaganda!

Back in Kansas, earlier this summer, I listened to my one of my family's crazies rant about "activist judges" describing the unknown Dark Forces that loosed the terror of lawlessness on the country.  Casually, I asked for an example of judges making law, knowing full well the answer would be "Roe vs. Wade." I wasn't disappointed, but the explanation was so filled with right wing MSM misrepresentations that I was amazed that even my foolish Kansas relatives could be so easily duped.  In some states, apparently, for practical purposes you can "fool all of the people all of the time." 

The Iranian Dark Forces are not particularly clever and either are ours.  The fatal flaw in democratic government is that an open government has few defenses against an uneducated and ignorant public.  The easiest way to overthrow a democracy is to, first, damage public education.  Follow that by turning over the nation's information systems to corrupt interests and you have a simple blueprint for transferring power from the citizens to the Dark Forces. 

The fact that a popular magazine like Time can publish an article like Klein's "The Iran Factor" without a hint of irony, expecting no blow-back and no outrage, is a sign of the times.  Simply by wiping out the free press, eliminating quality public education, and handing over the reins of power to corporate interests, we've given up any hope of democratic reforms.  Apparently, we're content to worry about other nations' paranoid hysteria while tolerating our own. 

July 2006

The Republican National Committee (and party) Theme Song

#157 Where Did the Creativity Go? (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

The nation's head doofus, G.W. Bush, and his band of merry Mayberry conservatives have suddenly discovered that the nation is short on "nerds and geeks."  After thirty years of ridiculing anyone with a talent for math, science, and engineering, the crazy right is in a panic because this nation is producing an economy-stifling, constantly-shrinking minimum of youth with skills in math, science, and engineering.  Again we hear the plaintive cry of the double-breasted conservative pundit, "nobody knew this would happen!"

While they've put some effort into turning education institutions into centers of superstitious and political fantasies, conservatives been blindsided by the fact that those concepts are in opposition to the needs of a technical and scientific nation and world.  It even seems to be something of a surprise to these folks that importing a plentiful supply of menial labor has not produced intellectual stimulus to the nation's "melting pot."  The best and brightest of the immigration class are going elsewhere; where their talents will be appreciated, rewarded, and utilized.  All the sleaziest Republicrat and Demolican efforts have produced a nation that is poised on the edge of technical collapse.  Still, they wonder why.

For three generations, the Bush family has labored under the unfounded delusion that pampering the nation's elite class would produce creativity, economic stability, and national brilliance.  Yeah, that's worked out really well for the Family, hasn't it?  Can anyone in that pack of inbred mutants say "nuclear" without a lisp?  The Bush family is an established gang of dysfunctional, dyslexic, hedonistic, technically challenged, intellectual midgets who desperately rely on mommy's money, daddy's connections, and a long history of corruption and nepotism for their survival and success.  Now that is an inspirational role model, don't you think?  I'm sure every Rockefeller wants to grow up to be a Bush, but that model doesn't do much for the children of the productive working class.

The foolishness behind this sudden movement toward encouraging practical technical skills is a textbook example of "do what I say, not what I do."  The dumbest folks in the nation think they can con the smartest folks into working harder for no apparent reason.  If the most powerful, richest people in the country earned their golden spoons through inheritance and/or corruption, why would anyone pick a different route? 

Most working class kids are not that stupid.  When minimal skills will provide a doorway to corporate success, very few of us have chosen the more demanding math, science, and engineering path.  Trust fund  babies, lawyers, MBAs, economists, politicians, actors, and pro athletes are the most successful, most powerful people in the country.  The are also the least technically competent.  Why would an enterprising, creative, intelligent student pick a different career (especially one steeped in difficult concepts and long, mostly unsuccessful, hours of study followed by a career of hardship and instability) when there are so many easier ways to succeed? 

Reagan was the watermark for the latest phase in the decline of the United States' technical base.  Reagan, the ignorant Hollywood conservative, ridiculed Carter, the engineering "egghead," publicly and often for "overcomplicating" the nation and world's problems.  Reagan simply represented the lowest common denominator's belief that "somewhere there is a simple solution to every complicated problem."  There usually is, but that solution rarely works. 

Reagan's simpleminded "trickle down" economics didn't work and we suffered twelve years of recession while he and his goofy elitists proved and re-proved that point.  In the meantime, Reagan and Bush I cut back funding for education, scientific research on everything from alternative energy to medicine.  They promoted the export of technical jobs, manufacturing, and skills while obsolescing those skills in the USA by exporting industry to Asia.  After a brief revival of a few of those critical proficiencies during the Clinton years, Bush II is back in the export business with the single-minded focus of someone who is serious about the damage he wants to do to this nation.

Let's face it, a country governed and managed by characters like Ken Lay, G.H.W. and G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove might as well skip the pretense and nominate, appoint, and promote Tony Soprano and his family.  With mobsters like ours in charge of the country's present and future, we're as bound for decadence and humiliation as were Great Britain, Spain, France, Rome, Greece, and every other fallen nation in human history. 

A system designed to reject and neglect the best and the brightest is bound to be limited by the worst and the least capable.  This country's nerd and geek shortage is just beginning.  While colleges are building stadiums and cranking out bushels of useless lawyers and MBAs, the rest of the world is producing the future scientists who will drive the world economy for the rest of this century and beyond.  But we'll be prepared ask them if they "want fries with that."

May 2006

#158 The Class Tax (2006)

All Rights Reserved © 2006 Thomas W. Day

Way back in 2002, the Trent and Bill Republican comedy team, Lott and Frist, were pissed.  This was the dark days of when their previous attempt at making a royalty class permanent failed,  Phil Gramm threatened "this will be a campaign issue..  Frist could hardly breathe after this year's 57 to 41 Senate vote turned against the Paris Hiltons, the Bush girls, the Rockefellers, Jeff Shilling and Kenny "Boy" Lay's precious offspring, and the elite trust fund babies who are the core investors of the Republican Party; "my base," as George II often calls them. 

Lott and Frist were barely able to deliver their usual Washington comedy routine to the waiting press drones.  It was that depressing to be them on this sad day for the nation's elites.  And don't let these ruling class representatives fool you, this piece of legislation is intended to be a gift to a very few of the very few.  Even by their own admission, the estate tax (or, more honestly, the inheritance tax) only applies to "less than 1 percent" of family estates. 

It's less than 1 percent, alright.  More accurately, the current federal estate tax only affects about 1 percent of the nation's richest 1 percent.  Currently, an inheritance has to exceed three million dollars ($3,000,000), after estate planning has eliminated a substantial portion of the booty, before any of it is subjected to taxation.

The comedians are back again.  Working their fat asses off for the nations' fattest cats.

Hiding three million bucks from taxation is not enough protection for the nation's elite who want to pass on their royalty to generations of Hiltons, Bushes, and the rest of the freaky-looking inbred offspring of our ruling class.  Republicans, who represent the richest 1% who own more than 90% of the nation's assets, were rightly disappointed that they weren't able to stand up and deliver for their "base." The elimination of the "death tax," as Republicans so cutely describe the federal inheritance tax system, would go a long way towards creating a permanent royalty class in the United States.  Once this passed-down wealth and power is made absolutely secure, nothing stands between the nation's trust fund babies and absolute power over the country's economic and political system.  The counter-revolution would be complete and all that would remain would be for our government to apply for readmission to the British Empire.  I'm sure Paris Hilton can hardly wait to be called "Princess Paris."

Back in the 1980's, Sony's founder, Akiro Morito, reminded us ("Made in Japan," 1986) that inherited industries are, by nature, decadent and doomed to failure because "second-generation industrialists" are not as competent, motivated, creative, or hard-working as first generation founders.  He was trying to be consoling, by reminding his readers that Japan's first generation of industrial giants and geniuses were old and retiring, leaving that country to the pitiful future of mismanagement by the offspring of the original industrialists.  I think one of his great examples was his speculation that Henry Ford VI probably couldn't even drive a car, let alone design one.  He fully expected that Soichiro Honda VI would be just as incompetent.  We can only hope. 

Apparently, Japan's second generation of industrialists are quick studies.  Hirotoshi Honda was recently forced from heading his racing division and his company auditor will be spending a few years in prison for tax evasion.  Like his American corporate-exec counterparts, Honda claimed that he only signed the troubled tax documents and was too dumb to know what he was signing.  However, Honda has his inherited wealth to fall back on, so he won't be expected to work for a living. 

We have enough of that kind of system in the US.  Current law allows two-million for an individual and four-million for couples to pass un-federally taxed and that amount will increase until it vanishes in 2010.  But it will return to original status in 2011.  Obviously, smart little rich kids ought to seriously consider patricide, big-time, in 2010.  Maybe that's the real reason that the ruling class wants this law made permanent, they're terrified of their spoiled-rotten offspring. 

They ought to be afraid of the rest of us. 

June 2006

#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