The Death Cult that Wants to Kill Us All

There was a phase in the early period of Christianity where the clear objective was to die and go to Never-never Land as fast as possible. One of the first Christian sects, the Donatists, inspired a nutty group of fanatics called the Circumcellions who would initiate spontaneous acts of violence on strangers in the hopes of getting their asses killed and obtaining martyrdom status (sound familiar?). As one author put it, “The logic of Christianity leads to the disturbing conclusion that if heaven is better than this life, then death is a good and desirable outcome.” The nutjob Federalist Society even published an article titled “For Christians, Dying From COVID (Or Anything Else) Is A Good Thing” where the author wrote, “For one thing, Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter.” Joy Pullman goes on to pile one nutty superstitious claim on top of many others, but the main point is “For another thing, for Christians, death is good.” Add taking as many non-believers and believers with you as possible to this philosphy is “the Christian thing to do.”

The early leaders of the Catholic Church saw that this interpretation of the Bible would lead to an quick disappearance of their source of resources and followers. In the fifth century, Augustine wrote The City of God, which was Christianity’s first condemnation of suicide. In an effort to get some kind of renumeration even from the dead, as described in Wikipedia, “In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas denounced suicide as an act against God and as a sin for which one could not repent. Civil and criminal laws were enacted to discourage suicide, and as well as degrading the body rather than permitting a normal burial, the property and possessions of both the person who died by suicide and of their family were confiscated.” [And today’s faux-conservatives bitch about inheritance taxes?]

Today’s breed of radical Christian “Crack Suicide Squads” are only slightly more subtle. They have no interest in caring for other humans, but they’ve snagged themselves on the crazy idea that their only path to heaven is to commit to having as many humans born as possible. Obviously, once a baby is born, they have no obligation to it in any way because . . . that would cost the idle rich who profit from superstition and foolishness some of their unearned money and . . . money.

As the author of one analysis of the Christian suicide cult wrote, “In fact, belief in heaven makes this life actively undesirable. The longer we live, the more chances we have to encounter temptation, fall into sin, and lose our salvation—the worst catastrophe imaginable. If heaven is the goal, then the younger we die, the better.This idea is taken to an extreme by Christian apologists who say that fetuses which die before birth go straight to heaven, bypassing human existence entirely. In this belief system, that’s the best possible outcome. The second best outcome is children who die before the age of accountability. They may suffer, but they never have a chance to lose their salvation.”

Knowing that is their belief certainly diminishes any hope one might have that Christians actually care about anyone but their own imaginary souls and their place at the right hand of an all-powerful vengeful Jehovah who will smite their enemies and grade school bullies and high school cool kids with plagues and lightening bolts. Actually, that sounds kinda Marvel Comics cool.

Now we have a buttload of Christian suicide culters in charge of at least one branch of the federal government, the grossly mis-named House of Representatives:

• Current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who in his earlier employment was a lawyer for the wall-to-wall Christian crazies Alliance Defense Fund, a group of radical nutbags who have dedicated themselves to imagining that not being able to discriminate against LGBTQ rights will send the country to Hell. In an earlier moment in his career of failures and corruption, Johnson was the founding dean of the private Louisiana College Southern Baptist law school, established in 2010, where Johnson claimed would “acknowledge the Judeo-Christian foundation of the legal system.” Gullible sponsors flushed $5 million into Johnson’s mythical university, but it never opened its doors. Johnson slithered away after two years as an idle, but well-paid, dean.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene whose insanity, treason, insurrection, and stupidity  needs no further introduction.
• Matt Gaetz, yet another whack job who would be happier as a private rural girls’ school Principal in an uneducated conservative southern state.
• House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan who should have stuck with overseeing pervert Ohio coaches and team doctors.
• Rep. Bob Good (R-VA): “We should not fear a government shutdown. Most of what we do up here is bad anyway. Most of what we do up here hurts the American people, when we do stuff to the American people while promising to do things for the American people. Essential operations continue. 85% continues. Most of the American people won’t even miss if the government is shutdown temporarily.”
• Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) “I love Andy Biggs. I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him,” Krysten Sinema
• Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) a classical fact-free-zone of Republican insanity.
• Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) is one of two Representatives from a state that doesn’t have a large enough population to warrant any representation, Rosendale is a special case for reforming the structure of the US Constitution. “Rosendale touts his background as a real estate investor from Maryland who pretends he’s a rancher out on the range from almost all the way across the country, but all public records show, though, that Rosendale is a ‘rancher’ by way of just renting real estate out to others who actually do the ranching on that land.” In other words, Rosendale is just another Eastern millionaire taking advantage of gullible Montana rubes.
• Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) is just like his Montana welfare state cohort, Rosendale, in his disrespect for the fools who vote for him. After running away from his Trump cabinet position in the wake of a collection of ethics violations, Zinke pretended to be an outsider looking out for his fellow Montana rubes in his House campaign. Wearing his ponyboy cowboy hat, he claims that “Despite the deep state's attempts to repeatedly stop me I stand before you as a duly elected member of the congress and tell you that a deep state exists… They want to wipe out the American cowboy.” Little fella, the cowboy barely existed for 20 years after the Civil War and that job is long gone and couldn’t even pretend to exist today without buttloads of federal farm assistance.
• There are at least a half-dozen more Republican nutjobs in the House and as many equally suicidal characters in the Senate, but their names are hardly worth mentioning and their stories are too miserably despicable to research.

As another Christian critic wrote, “For the religious right, every war is a sign of the return of Jesus Christ, and the chance they’ll get to say, “I told you so. I was right. I was right all along.” Even if they have to burn down the world to prove it.” Sadly, “even” is the wrong word to chose in regard to the American Christian Taliban. They desperately want to take the whole world with them to prove they are right, but what they will prove to nobody (when no one is here to see it) is that we all get one life to live and that’s it.

Feeding the Bears for Centuries

One of faux-conservatives’ favorite analogies and war-chants is the idea that “feeding the bears” and welfare are some sort of population drivers, while (of course) pretending to be pro-life and anti-abortion. Since faux-conservatism is rampant in rural areas, it’s a pretty funny “pot calling the kettle black” comparison.

Rural areas have been intentionally overrepresented, propped-up and subsidized by urban welfare, and have whined about being the underdogs while getting far more resources and support than their economic or social contributions deserve since the founding of this nation (propped up on the back of low population, rural state slavery). In the vein of :”it takes one to know one,” I suspect there is a sliver of self-knowledge behind this argument being made by people who absolutely can not take care of themselves and consistently have larger families that they can’t support than urban averages. Rural people are consistently easier to fool, which makes tossing them a few bones occasionally outrageously profitable.

The Dunning-Kruger arrogance of this bunch of ignorant rubes is always stunning. Without even basic the most simple K-12 science and mathematics to support their goober-beliefs, they will loudly and proudly argue against scientific consensus about man-made global warming, disease and epidemic management, the solar system and universe, evolution and biology, psychology and neurology, and, of course, even the freaklin’ shape of the planet.

The solution, eventually, will likely be the urban economic centers simply cutting off the money flow to rural areas. As populations continue to move toward urban areas, that will become increasingly easier. At any point in the past 100 years, it would have been painlessly easy to simply convert states like the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and most of the southeast back into territories without federal representation. Their only threat would be to withhold paying federal taxes which would immediately be countered with zero’ing out federal payments and investments in those territories. The same could be done inside larger population states with equally dependent rural areas. Personally, I think this is more likely than the splitting of the nation into several smaller nations, but either way rural areas will quickly discover what it’s like to be “a dependent population unable to take care of themselves.”

 

Don’t Blame Me

A local shanty in one of our old, more run-down neighborhoods proudly displays a buttload of ignorance and lack of responsibility in his (I assume) front yard: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for TRUMP.” He also has a cute piece of “art” depicting President Biden as the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow. I guess that’s what passes for humor among the humor-deprived fascists these days. Not enough people falling down stairs, being shot by cops, or suffocating in a pandemic to keep them entertained?

1,000,000 Americans dead from Covid, thanks to this nitwit’s irresponsible politics, but he’s convinced it’s “not my fault” and “you can’t blame me.” They put our political system on the edge of collapse and chaos thanks to Der Orange Führer’s inciting an insurrection and civil unrest among the well-armed right wing crazies and their favorite fake news sources getting their marching orders from Vladimir Putin. Trump’s incompetent handling of the beginning of the pandemic put a spotlight on the supply chain problems, but dependent industries, like automotive and robotics,  began to see delays in semiconductor and chip deliveries a year before that. Trump’s uneducated and unintelligent and barely-employable white power extremists have been set loose to vent their frustrations and demand their entitlements. Police believed they were going to deal out racist violence and corruption, backed by a President who wanted the country to return “to the good old days” when cops had no more responsibility than street thugs. Trump voters blithely ignore their responsibility in creating this national disaster, but they are wrong. We can and we do blame them.

You can’t blame me, sure the killer was my son,
but I didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun.
It’s the killing on his TV screen.
You can’t blame me, it’s those images he’s seen.

“Cookie Jar,” Jack Johnson

This small, semi-rural Minnesota town is like most of rural America, more than half-stupid. 50.3% of my county voted for Trump in 2020 and 54.6% voted for that moron in 2016. If you were a glass-half-full kind of person, you might take some solace from that slim margin and the tiny improvement between 2016 and 2020. I’m not. As my wife says, “Every other person here is a fascist.” 

When half of a population is proudly below average intelligence and education, I think the area is headed downhill with little-to-no chance of improvement. I have immense faith in the power of down-breeding. If, for example, the character proudly posting those two idiot statements in his yard reproduced, I’d bet the offspring are even dumber. It’s not like the odds are good that a substantially more intelligent person would breed with an idiot, even by accident.

From here, it’s hard to see a way back to sanity in the country. Trump and the white power idiots have started a fire that was had to be extinguished with a Civil War the last time something similar happened in North America. We’ve jumped well past “the tipping point of stupid” and, for many, it appears that they can not risk having to admit defeat, incompetence, or anything resembling a personal intellectual failure. They would rather die or live in a authoritarian shit hole than be wrong and drag the rest of us into it with them. As Mark Leibovich described them, “the former president has mainstreamed an authentic collection of cranks, bozos, and racists.” As part of the fatally flawed 2020 census, my area fell out of District 2, which included a bit of the Twin Cities, and was swept into one of the dumbest US congresscritter districts, a solid-red District 1 where all of our Republican candidates are election-results-denying, pro welfare-for-rich-farmers and screw everyone else, under-achieving, uneducated half-wits who are no more capable of contributing anything useful to the state or nation than is their timid Maralardo “fearless leader.” If it weren’t for the Rochester bright spot, District 1 would be a train wreck of dropouts, Proud Boys still living with Mom, single moms on welfare, and “farmers” completely dependent on their federal support checks growing crops no one needs or wants.

We had barely been in our retirement home for a year when most of our neighbors were overwhelmingly and foolishly lead by their noses to vote for Trump in 2016. We’d left an area of St. Paul where 85% of our neighbors were not complete fools. Mrs. Day immediately wanted to pull up stakes and move back to civilization. The fact that almost half of our neighbors were not fascists and fools was not a convincing argument. Outside of Rochester, Minnesota’s District 1 is home to many of the state’s dumbest cities, which is pretty amazing since most of the “cities” in our district are vanishing into ghost towns (under 5,000 population).  Worthington is proudly the state’s undisputed dumbest state for a collection of reasons including the fact that 3 out of 10 residents couldn’t manage to finish high school. As a friend said before the 2016 election, “Half of every population is below average intelligence and half have below average education. They are not the same group and they amount to more than 50% of the population. They are all voting for Trump.” (If they manage to vote at all, that is.)

Like many of the people in Minnesota’s District 2, we’re old. We retired and moved here, which mostly means we moved here to die. Lots of young people are here dying, too. The most common story I hear from people who grew up here is “I moved to the Cities when I graduated and failed miserably there. I moved back in with my parents (usually to “take care of my Mom”) and haven’t left.” 10% of the district live below the poverty line. The district’s average income is about 90% of the state’s average. 80% of the district drives 20 minutes to get to work, mostly in the Cities or Rochester. The district’s property values are about 3/4 of the state average. College graduates are about 80% of the state’s average. The district’s veteran population (poverty draft) is about 10% above the state’s average. If Rochester weren’t in the district and the Twin Cities weren’t in moderate commuting distance, none of those numbers would be anything but dramatically more dismal. In almost every way, Minnesota’s District 2 resembles Lauren Bobert’s Colorado District 3, except they are less educated, poorer, older, and more likely to be veterans and US native-born.

The odds are good that we’ll end up being misrepresented by Brad Finstad (who won the interim election earlier this year against a far more qualified Democratic candidate). In his short time in the House, Finstad has voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, opposed the president’s student loan debt forgiveness plans, . blamed Democrats for inflation and for the spike in crime that began in the middle of Trump’s term. Like most of the current Republican herd, Finstad was anti-Trump until the wind blew in another direction. Other than being a “famous local (small town) baseball player” and a mediocre state Representative and a Trump appointee to the Department of Education, Finstad is what you’d expect from a rural Republican candidate, exceptionally unqualified, uneducated, and uninspiring. Weirdly, Finstad is so uninteresting that even the wingnuts don’t know what to think of him. Of course, they think Tim Pawlenty is “radical left,” so “think” is probably not the right word for describing their garbage spewing.

Whatever happens, I suspect Mrs. Day will become more adamant in her desire to move someplace less stupid and nuts. As a life-long Midwesterner who wishes he wasn’t, it will be a one-sided debate.

Rural and Old

An interesting aspect of my McNally Smith College of Music experience was the fact that a small city, St. Paul, attracted an outsized population of rural students. I don’t think I ever heard any statistics from our marketing/recruitment department, but I would be surprised if more than 10% of our student body came from cities of more than 10,000 people. Unfortunately, the school’s recruiters went hard after a fair number of inner city victims/students and while their tastes were at least 21st Century they mostly couldn’t afford either the “education” or the business. The music business has long passed the moment when ordinary people can hope to earn a living either as a musician or a technician.

The point I’m hoping to make here, though, is that rural people fairly consistently live in the past; often a fantastic non-existent past. The kids who came into that music school were almost universally 1960-1980 music fans, what should have been their parents’ or grandparents’ music genre. Weirdly, they are not even aware of how strange that is.

Having retired to a rural small town, I’ve discovered that people from my own generation in this area are fans of their parents’ or grandparents’ music genres; mostly really old country music or 1940s and 50s pop crap like Frank Sinatra or worse. Weirdly, they are [also] not even aware of how strange that is. [Remember, retiring to some place is exactly the same as picking a place to die. Nobody with a lick of sense in my age group expects to see the next decade and that makes for very short term planning.]  I have never been around so many people my age who know almost nothing about 1960s pop music. When they play a popular song from their own youth, they play it like it is an act of either defiance or extreme hipness. There is nothing hip about 60-year-old music. I often feel like I’m surrounded by reincarnations of my parents’ generation.

When liberal politicians talk about closing the gap between rural and urban voters, they are either dreaming or have a plan to dumb-down urban voters. Part of the attraction to rural areas is the lack of competition, low tech job demands, and a “more simple life” (read dumber and lazier). It is, literally, impossible to make silk purses out of sows’ ears and you can’t invent an education system that will thwart the low standards, superstitions, and fears of rural parents. In the 1950s and early 60s, the federal government made a strong push toward encouraging teachers to go to less desirable communities; rural and poor urban areas. The result was improved test scores, more of those kids finding their way into higher education and professions, but the push-back was fierce. A surprising number of parents do not want their kids to live better lives than their own and a high percentage of those parents are rural.

Today, we’re going the opposite direction. Rural and red state education has become an oxymoron as teachers abandon rural schools and many are closing or shortening their hours. “Teaching to the test” has been the state of K-12 “education” since Bush II’s “No Child’s Behind Left Unmolested” and the tests are getting dumbed-down every year. The complaint that “Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level” does not include the fact that the 8th grade level reference point has been slipping for 40 years. The average American reads at the lowered 7th to 8th grade level, which means they might be able to read a “young adults” book if they really concentrated. These are Trump’s beloved “uneducated.” A pitiful 12% of Americans are “proficient” readers; meaning people who could be useful employees or even business owners and professionals. This is the “demanding” criteria for “proficient”: “Click to the second page of search results from a library website to identify the author of a book called Ecomyth.” The top category, Level 5 and the most literate 2% are able to “Identify from search results a book suggesting that the claims made both for and against genetically modified foods are unreliable.” Holy crap! We’re toast.

Keep in mind, these are the people, the lower 88% for whom Republican politicians are making their MAGA pitch. They couldn’t make a 1st grade classroom great, or even slightly more intelligent, if their lives depended on it. When you read for the bottom, you don’t have to work very hard to accomplish your goals.

Woe Is Rural America (and it’s well-deserved)

“Greater Minnesota” is just a politically correct phrase for “rural Minnesota,” which is everywhere in the state except Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and . . . that’s about it. Duluth is a wannabe city, but that northern industrial area is just a black hole for development tax dollars with little-to-no possible return. St. Cloud is even less likely to stage any sort of economic comeback. Rural everywhere has suffered a brain and skills drain since the turn of the last century. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm” was a popular song in 1919 and popular music has never been great at spotting trends early. Back in the 60s, Larry McMurtry explained what had happened to rural Texas with “The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three; those with brains, zip, and daring were soon off to Dallas or Houston.”

Red Wing and Goodhue County, for example, has suffered a steadily declining population since 2000 and regular property tax increases that make the area less and less attractive to anyone with the math skills to know what will happen to residential property taxes when Xcel closes the nuclear plans in the next decade. $15/hour or about $30,000/year is not a living wage in a town where even a serious fixer-upper costs more than $150,000. Area property values have increased by 37% in the last decade and wages by less than 3%. The city’s “average commute time” is 19.8 minutes, which means a substantial number of the area’s workforce is working a good distance from the city (mostly in the Twin Cities). Almost 14% of the city’s residents live in poverty, with women between 55 and 64 the largest demographic in that group. One quarter of the people employed in the area are over-65. The average resident’s age is 42.7 years, 6 years older than Minnesota’s average, and 41% of the City’s residents are past retirement age.

So, filling those local jobs means competing with employers from outside of the area with wages, benefits, decent management, and advancement opportunities. And that is for a rural city only 50 miles from the serious competition. Cities and businesses further from the state’s economic hub have to be shedding young talent like my sheepdog loses her winter undercoat when spring hits. Red Wing is pretending/attempting to shift to a more tourist-friendly destination, but noise and air pollution and a lack of recreational resources (other than the river) and a serious lack of city development talent has turned that effort into pointless and ineffective construction and economic flailing and rapidly growing property taxes. A short look at the rural area’s economic and demographic situation would make any reasonable person suspect it is not sustainable. The city has at least a half-dozen massive development failures in its recent history, a downtown that is being rapidly abandoned by businesses and customers, an excess of empty commercial buildings and, even, more than a few empty housing units, a decent infrastructure but large and expensive municipal and county services, and an aging population that is less able to finance the “if you build it they will come” city government’s delusional attitude.

An unrealistic attitude is a rural problem, too. Much of rural American believes it is full of strong, independent individuals who are more able to take care of themselves than “city folks.” That couldn’t be much further from the truth. Rural areas and states receive an outsized investment relative to their contributions to the GNP and tax base. Rural areas need cities, but cities are steadily less dependent on the goods and services produced by rural areas; to the point that this has become a loud “taxation without representation” issue for cities that have had their education systems, infrastructure, and services scavenged for the benefit of declining rural areas. Rural areas, mostly, imagine themselves to be indispensable and their anger and outrage in the face of facts drives them to the Fox and Republican propaganda machines, which isolates them even more.

There is a lot of data supporting the argument that the keys to economic success are tightly linked to diversity, inclusion, and openness. It is incredibly rare to find any small town that exemplifies any of those attributes. 50 years ago, Mr. McMurtry also had a pretty strong and accurate opinion of the kind of people who live in outstate “cities” and rural areas, “Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain—cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, in winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with imperfectly suppressed malice." The vaccine paranoia, anger and resentment, and self-destructive “rebellion” against science is a great example of that “imperfectly suppressed malice.” And an obvious result is the mass exodus from those areas by healthcare professionals. “Toxic individualism” is the media’s phrase for people who grossly over-estimate their own intelligence, knowledge and capabilities, and distrust anyone smarter than themselves; which is often practically everyone outside of their narrow and sheltered society. Attracting talented young people, or retaining them, into that environment is an impossible task.

If You Build It . . . You’re A Fool

Like a lot of small rural villages, Red Wing, MN has visions of grandeur that may be reflections of the town’s past or, more likely, are evidence that down-breeding has consequences. The current city bureaucracy and mismanagement have been hustling growth bullshit since the momentary burst in the area’s economy in the 70’s when Xcel’s Prairie Island Nuclear plant generated a substantial increase in the city and county population and tax base.Since the 70s, Red Wing has clearly suffered from a Field of Dreams syndrome, believing that if the city builds enough expensive crap people will finally be attracted to moving here and creating jobs and businesses that will make the dreamers look like actual planners. So far, if anyone is coming they must be the ghosts that populated that corn field baseball game in Costner's movie. They are very much invisible.

The city “planners” have been hacking away at a weird idea to convert the only significant riverside area of the city into some sort of “shopping district" and a misbegotten concert venue. The project name is the "Old West Main & Upper Harbor Renewal Project." The picture above is what the area looks like now and it is obvious that this is a grossly underused and somewhat unsightly waste of a prime Mississippi River location. The two videos below are concept renderings of the anticipated outcome of this multi-million dollar project in an economically disadvantaged area that has a mostly-abandoned downtown and a rapidly vanishing retail economic segment (like almost every small town in the country).

It’s a dream, obviously, and one based on a gross over-estimate of the city’s planning and development skills that could only be sustained if one were to ignore the long, expensive, and sad history of the city’s weird attempts to encourage growth, population-wise and economically. Currently, what businesses exist in the area are a couple of biker bars, some tiny and insignificant consumer retail businesses, a fair amount of small manufacturing, and some of the city’s scabbier housing units. Odds are, when the $3.5-5M are spent, if the city is lucky a few of those businesses will survive the customer and access problems caused by the grossly optimistic time schedule for the project. My bet is that there will be no more than one more restaurant in the area and several of the small manufacturing companies will either be forced out or will leave, probably Red Wing altogether, “willingly.” And the local citizens will be stuck with another large cost overrun bill, higher taxes, an enlarged and even more inefficient Public Works department that will do at least as poor a job of maintaining both the “pedestrian bridge” and the additional sidewalks as they do with the existing paths, sidewalks, and city parking areas. All of this as Xcel is likely to continue to decommission the property tax cash cow that has, in the past, funded every City Council pipedream and city planner's vanity “legacy” project since 1970.

In case you think I’m overstating Red Wing’s development past, here are a few examples of the city’s development track record. #1 the most recent (2017 through 2019) Spring Creek Road Project was promoted as being a business “starter” that would free up anticipated commercial real estate and increase business to existing businesses and to “to reduce traffic deaths along Highway 61.” That last bit was a pretty tough sell, since the next major intersection, which has all of the “features” the Spring Creek Road Project would bring to the Spring Creek/HW61 intersection is one of the city’s highest “impact points” for crashes and traffic deaths. 

This foolish project was, unbelievably, “20 years in the making.” Instead of accomplishing any useful goals, the city removed 3 supposedly desperately needed lower income duplexes and created two large, toxic-material-leaking and highly illegal junk yards and there have been some spectacular crashes at the new traffic light intersection.I’ve witnessed two of of those crashes while sitting on my bicycle at the intersection waiting for the “walk” light. Not to mention driving one of the city's grocery stores (Econofoods) out of business during the long project delays and due to the difficult access to the

 

This isn't the first time Red Wing has tried to "develop" Spring Creek Road along Highway 61. More than a decade ago, the city removed three houses from the southwest side of the street in a strange attempt to create a commercial section where there had been homes on a street that has about as much commercial appeal as a back alley in an abandoned mining town. Obviously, this was another waste of local taxpayer money and one from which the city learned nothing.

This might be my favorite Red Wing "development" failure. Anderson Park was obviously someone's pipedream of a recreational attraction to the city and for the half-dozen people who use the lower park it really can be a special place to hide out, walk the dog, experience a little mildly natural Minnesota flora and fauna, or start a ride on the Cannon River bicycle trail. Clearly, someone thought that would be a big draw because a buttload of money was spent on this park. 

Just as clearly, that someone had no idea that regular maintenance would be an issue in an area and facilities that would see the kind of use the design implied. Maintenance is not a Red Wing city skill. City sidewalks go the entire winter without seeing a single attempt at snow removal. Water faucets in the few areas where there is some tourist and local traffic almost always remain "out of order" all summer. And this bathroom was massively outside of the city Public Works' capabilities. The city can't even manage placing and maintaining trash cans at the more obvious tourist attractions. A public bathroom on a bicycle trail? What a pipedream. This building has been closed and a public reminder of city incompetence for more than a decade.

The Old Main Street and Harbor area where all of the upcoming and ongoing development disaster is just beginning is a reminder of the city's maintenance lethargy, too. Believe it or not, there is a sidewalk buried under the snow in this picture and that sidewalk remained buried from January to April in 2021, while the city was convincing taxpayers to add even more maintenance to ignore with the newest development disaster. There is almost a mile of this expensive sidewalk that gets ignored by the city all winter, every winter.

Even the newest addition to the upcoming project, the traffic circle and harbor trail, that hasn't been in place for five years and, as you can see by the footprints in the snow, gets used in spite of the city's inability to make even the slightest effort to keep the sidewalks safe to use. You know that giant footbridge is going to be everything from an accidental deathtrap to a suicide launching pad and I'm sure the city will act surprised when the first city budget-crushing liability lawsuit is filed.

And my all-time favorite Red Wing boondoggle happened long before I arrived in Red Wing and, maybe, before we moved to Minnesota in '96. This retaining wall must have cost the city a half-million dollars or more and if it had a development purpose, it failed miserably. My picture doesn't convey how massive this retaining wall is. There are thousands of large retaining wall blocks in this thing and the lot it "protects" is idiotically small and impractical for any serious development. It is for sale, if you are interested, though. Beyond that, there is about 1/2 mile of marginal "condos" and apartments along this frontage road. The development cost to local taxpayers will take a couple centuries to recover. The city owns acres of undeveloped land and various abandoned "business" and industrial properties repossessed over the years due to unpaid taxes. In the right light, Red Wing could become the next great place for apocalypse or zombie movies: just add dead people and/or zombies.

In another burst of irrational optimism, in 2019 the city spontaneously decided to blow $3,655,200 (estimated cost and probably a fraction of the final bill) on a 2nd fire station on the sparsely populated west end of the village. The idea was that adding a dozen fire fighters and a multi-million dollar fire station would shorten the response time by about 5 minutes, at best. Curiously, there was a west end fire station that closed in the 1970s. That must have been a brief burst of actual conservative financial planning for the city that has since been solidly squashed by the "if you build it" nonsense. In a few years, this building will be one more monument to unrestrained municipal spending,
"irrational exuberance," and apathetic and uneducated taxpayers. Whoopee!

If this story and series of pictures does not make you want to hire Red Wing's City Council and the City "Engineer" for your next development project . . . good for you. Personally, with my money I wouldn't employ anyone associated with Red Wing's city government to run a kids' lemonade stand. 

So, with all of this insanity, why would anyone consider living in Red Wing, let alone moving there. There is one gigantic, overwhelming, massively impressive feature of Red Wing, Minnesota: the Red Wing branch of the Mayo Clinic. The majority of Red Wing's incoming citizens (and out-going, for that matter) are healthcare workers and the senior citizens and retirees they are here to serve. We come to Red Wing because of the incredibly high quality healthcare the Mayo Clinic provides to an otherwise very isolated and under-served area. Lose the Mayo and I'd bet half of us would have our houses and condos up for sale by the end of the first year. There are at least 100 places my wife and I would rather live, but none of them have anything near the quality of healthcare services of the Mayo Clinic. I know of at least another dozen couples, our age, in town who are here for exactly the same reason. Yeah, the Mississippi River valley is picturesque, but the weather sucks 10 months out of every year, and the working-age population are unskilled and uneducated and as racist and foolish as the January 6th Goober Rioters. A substantial portion, the overwhelming majority, of the new construction in town are apartments near the Mayo Clinic.  If that isn't a scary fact for the future of the village, you are either a fool (and highly qualified to serve on Red Wing's City Council) or someone who doesn't care what happens to the town in a decade or two when that big rat passing through the bull snake economy (aka "Boomers") dies off and the places is left with hundreds of expensive and empty condos and apartments and dozens of over-priced/over-sized housing units. It's going to be scary for someone, but not us. We'll be dead. I've been in the situation that the two or three generations behind us will be in before. In the 1970s, I bought a large, older home in Fremont, Nebraska in 1976. By 1978, the Nebraska farm economy had been crushed by Vietnam War-caused inflation and the town's major employers, ag-based manufacturing (like my employer), died like they had been shot in the heart. When we moved to Fremont, there were no more than a total of a half-dozen houses for sale in a 20,000 population town. When we were forced to sell after I was laid-off, there were hundreds of houses desperately up for sale. Not having any real attachment to the area was a big advantage for us. I sold the house for a substantial (for us, at the time) loss, but I got out without having to declare bankruptcy, suffer foreclosure, or being stuck with a house payment without employment for an extended period. So many people we knew went the other route, because Fremont was "home" to them and they didn't feel they had the luxury to abandon the place while the ship-jumping was good; or as good as it would get for the next 20 years or more. I have a strong sense of déjà vu these days in Red Wing. This time, however, I don't have my life savings tied up in a house. I don't have a young career and a young family to manage, but for those who do these should be very nervous times.

Digging a Deeper Hole

A little more than two years ago, I wrote about the kind of people who voted for Donald Trump and their motivations: “I’m tired of everyone else doing better than me,” racism, homophobia, superstition/religion, anti-intellectualism, anti-science-phobia, and general purpose intolerance for everthing and everyone not like them. They were successful. For eight years of Obama, the far right cocooned themselves in an echo chamber of Fox News, Breitbart and Alex Jones fake news insanity, and every racist, right wing hate website and blog they could focus their beady little eyes on. Their world was apocalyptical, with successful, educated non-white people coming at them from every direction (“They took ur jobs!), their lack of education and tolerance driving them deeper into Red State dependence, and their “information sources” reinforcing their paranoia and racism at every opportunity. For eight years, these pitiful, uneducated and uninformed old white people (and a depressing number of young white people) were terrorized by all sorts of disasters that didn’t exist and wouldn’t exist until they elected the nation’s first modern fascist President. Now that Donald Trump and the Republicans are in power, every one of the terrible things Trump’s voters were afraid of are happening for real.

Things are so bad that the average citizen is actually hoping the FBI gets the job done. This is the same FBI that wastes “counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate domestic political organizations that criticize business interests and government policies, despite a lack of evidence that the groups are engaging in or supporting violent action.” A Freedom of Information inquiry by the ACLU found “Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) show the FBI expanding the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests or civil disobedience.” That FBI. Those guys are now the “good guys?” If you needed any sort of weights and measures system to determine how far the nation has fallen down the swampy Trump rabbit hole, this might the the only thing you need to look at.

The Trump voters got what they wanted, however. We are now all equally miserable. They still don’t have a wall, they still can’t get more than a minimum wage job with no real benefits, their Social Security is less secure than it has been since the 1930s, national security is a non-existent joke, Trump has rebooted the nuclear arms race, the United States has low international status and our national credibility is at an all-time low, our economy is poised to crash into at least another Great Recession or worse, and the right wing is headed for, and looking forward to, a showdown that could turn into a 2nd US Civil War. It’s hard to imagine being on the edge of more catestrophies. Thanks Trump voters.

How Do You Resolve This?

Almost all of my life, Republican presidents have made incredible messes that they left for Democrats to clean up. The worst were Nixon, Reagan, Bush I & II, and, now, Trump. Nixon took a failing war and doubled-down on it along with making the USA a debtor nation for the first time in the country’s history. Nixon left the country divided, distrustful, more racist and more unjust than it was before he took office, and broke. Reagan was a knee-jerk reaction to a dose of reality President Carter administered to the nation and he set the country back at least two generations on so many levels it would take a book (The book I recommend is The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America by William Kleinknecht.) to detail all of his betrayals, corruption, and incompetence. Reagan tossed so many trillions into the military-industrial toilet that he made the national debt an international affair in 1983. Bush I just continued the stupid policies of his predecessor, including the amazing cast of nitwits who surrounded Reagan. There was a reason Clinton’s “it’s about the economy, stupid” resonated so soundly. Unfortunately, stupid has been breeding like rats since 1992 and they can’t even spell “economy” let alone comprehend any aspect of economics.

The only saving grace regarding that trio of idiots and traitors was that my generation was not responsible for their existence and power. Bush II changed all of that. He was the worst of my generation. Every step of his life was a train wreak: personally, ethically, and intellectually. He brought Reagan’s pack of vicious idiots back to Washington, bumbled the Katrina response, fumbled the country into two endless, multi-trillion dollar wars, and deregulated the banksters until they crashed the world’s economy. Now Trump, another of the worst from my generation, is dragging the country closer to fascism every day. He has made the country a laughing stock, which could be a good thing, and alerted our allies to how divided, incompetent, and alienated the American public has become. Trump is a waving flag telling the world, “Americans are fools, we are arrogant and incompetent, we are self-absorbed, and we are unstable and dangerous.”

In 2016, I ran for local political office; for city council. There were several excellent people running for those offices (and a couple of not-so-excellent faux-conservative wannabes), including two young Red Wing citizens with big ideas about how to move Red Wing into the 21st Century. At the national level, the election seemed surreal, with neither candidate attracting much positive attention. Our US Representative race was between a nitwit hate radio Republican, Jason Lewis, and a Democrat, a woman, who had a long history of public service and competence. While Minnesota voted for Clinton, the outstate idiots in the state went Republican for practically every office. My country and hometown voted for Trump and Jason Lewis. To that point, I had no idea where I had moved, or who my neighbors were.

I lost my election, but because I spent the last two months of the campaign being far more involved in my wife’s cancer treatment than the election results I had almost no emotional connection to that “loss.” As the years have moved us further into Trump’s world of fools and traitors, I am even less attached to or interested in what happens in Red Wing and Goodhue County or even Minnesota. That is not natural for me. I have been politically active and interested since the 1960’s. Some part of me still wants to care, if just out of habit, but I mostly don’t. For the 18 years we lived in Little Canada, Ramsey County, Minnesota were considered our house and home to be the same entity. In fact, my wife and I are very fond of our house, but we’re ambiguous about our Red Wing, Goodhue County, Minnesota home. We are constantly considering flipping the place and heading west toward civilization; if we could identify an actual civilization in this declining empire.

One of my fellow failed 2016 candidates packed up his family, his businesses, and himself and left town a year after the election. He might not publically admit that the reason he left was that he felt his Red Wing neighbors were dangerously ignorant and vicious people, but that is essentially what he admitted to me. If I were in his position, I would do the same thing. If I had young children, I would not want them anywhere near neo-Nazi Trump voters. Our old home country and city overwhelmingly voted for Democrat candidates, including Clinton. We felt like we had jumped away from the table and into the stove. The majority of our old neighbors saw through Trump and Lewis as easily as though those two con artists were fine crystal. Our new neighbors fell for the con and carefully took aim and shot off their own feet and the feet of their children.

A candidate is supposed to represent all of the people in his district and the country. Republicans don’t believe this and, like Jason Lewis, they only speak to and for “their kind,” but Democrats and any elected official of good conscience have always given voice to the concept of trying to work for everyone; even if they failed or were disingenuous. To this point in my life, that would have been my intention also, but no more. Now, after Trump and Lewis, I am clinging to the barest capacity to care what happens to Trump voters. Because of that, I don’t have the slightest inclination to submit myself to either a political campaign or the misery of weekly city council meetings if I were to “win” an election in this community. This is the time in my life where I could apply what’s left of my energy and talents to working for my country and community. I just wish I had one of those that I believed in enough to make that effort seem worthwhile.

Un-Fixable

The angry white voters who claimed Democrats and liberals have abandoned them are probably right. The only thing that could save the jobs these people imagine they are entitled to have would be education and education is the one bit of reality that poor, pseudo-conservative white people resent the most. Back in 2008 Barak Obama made his infamous statement about the disenfranchised white voters, "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." He wasn’t wrong and he is just as right today, except that you’ll have to add meth and oxy to the things they are clinging to. Those three hallmarks of the unemployable are still going strong and Donald Trump is reaping the rewards of stoking those brain-dead fires.

The real problem liberals and progressives have yet to face is that the core problems of the welfare states are un-fixable. Here are some facts that prove my point, “32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.” Those statistics have not changed, for the better, in a decade and we can count on them getting much worse over the next four to eight years. Over the last ten years, at least 25% of the US population did not read a book in part or whole in the previous year. Trump and Republicans may “love the uneducated,” but society and our democracy can not afford them. The purpose in creating a public education system was to prevent idiotic catastrophes like Donald Trump and the “modern” Republican Party from destroying the nation.

And that’s where the problem lies today. Substantial portions of the nation are never going to change, except for the worse. Places like most of the Southeast and Midwest have chased out the smart kids and encouraged the dumb ones to stay and reproduce and, culturally, the places and people have become intolerant, uneducated, unemployable, and proud of all of those “qualities.” When I was young, alcohol was the primary self-medication drug of choice for the losers who couldn’t escape. Today, there are far more effective drugs for that purpose. I came from one of those parts of the country and, like most of my high school graduating class who went on to obtain an education and some sort of career, I got the “hell out of Dodge” as soon as possible and stayed away. There is nothing that would ever induce me to move back to Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, or any of the states similar or worse than where I came from. Minnesota is as red a state as I can tolerate and away from the Twin Cities it’s a good bit redder (and dumber) than I like.

And I’m not alone. Reams of newspaper and books have been written about the exodus of talent and creativity from “the heartland.” Lots of people have wrung their hands over the fact that those desperate and depressed Trump voters are stuck in an endless cycle of poverty, ignorance, and drug addiction. Unless some miracle of disease and death suddenly purges those places of their populations, it’s only going to get worse.

Growing up in western Kansas, a high school teacher’s son and surrounded by “educators,” I was consistently unimpressed by what passed for education in my 1950’s K-12 experience. I, immediately, enrolled in the local community college where that experience only got worse. After losing my college savings to a scam Texas for-profit “computer school,” I stumbled on to a downtown Dallas community college and discovered that there are actually people who have a talent for teaching who are attracted to institutions that are committed to education. After a few years of suffering the more familiar uninspired “higher education” in western Texas and Nebraska, I moved to southern California. I was lucky to be in California in the 1980’s, before Reagan’s Prop 13 damage began to wreak that state’s once-great education system and make it unavailable to working class people. Even more, I was lucky to be there while California was enjoying the only economic stability in the country so that I had the luxury of being the sole support of my family and going to school part-to-full time for 8 years. The point to take away for this essay is that out of 130 credit hours from three different California state institutions, I endured no more than 6 hours of mediocre classroom experience. California attracted high quality instructors and there was enough competition for positions and institutions that kept instruction quality at a level I’d never seen before or since.

The reverse is true for the red states. No one with skill, experience, or credentials wants to live in those depressed and depressing areas. The chances of attracting instructors of quality to the Southeast, the Midwest, or much of the Northeast are slim-to-none. Even if the nation were to apply Peace Corps tactics to enticing teachers to work in the depressed areas as a way to pay off college debt, the end result will be that those few quality teachers will identify the few quality students and encourage them to get out before their hometown destroys their life. Clearly, plenty of that is going on now in most of these places, based on the fact that small towns are losing population and skills and can’t find any way to attract new blood. The brain-drain exodus from those places might actually accelerate if outside education resources were applied.

While it’s not true that intelligent people are no longer having children, it’s true that damn few smart people are staying “on the farm” or in small towns when opportunity, tolerance, entertainment, security, and quality of life are available just a short plane ride away. The Trump disaster is just an indication of elections to come, as impoverished states cling to their political power through a rigged system designed to protect the rich from democracy. Now, that system is protecting the rich and the stupid from reality and democracy. Either the Electoral College has to die or the nation will die from the damage done to democracy by that idiotic institution.

I’m With Garrison

Garrison Keillor went further out on a limb than most writers this election. He warned Trump that he’d have “nothing he wants” after the election, win or lose. He wrote a lot about how the Trumpers were so clueless, vicious, and out-of-touch with not just the country and the world but reality. It didn’t matter. In the end, enough (although a minority) Americans voted for the end. I’m not a big Garrison Keillor fan. I think he hung on too long, took himself too seriously as a musician, and became the old face of liberal NPR that deluded too many public radio fans into believing that the new NPR resembled the old NPR. However, I am totally on board with his last statement to the Trumpers: “Done, Over. He’s Here. Goodbye.”

Garrison wrote, “Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure."

"Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones and they will not like what happens next."

"America is still the land where the waitress' kids can grow up to become physicists and novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given talents and the kids aren't plugged into electronics day and night. Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than nothing for your kids."

"Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids and we Democrats can go for a long brisk walk and smell the roses."

The responses to this article were informative. A gutless dirtbag “deplorable” who, typically, hid his identify with the fake name, “RandomCitizen” said, "Suck it up libs, the world is going to change. Femisinsts [sic] will learn how to become women and will be put back into their correct role. Jobs will be brought back to hardworking men. Foreign and domestic enemies will be destroyed. Enjoy the show, libs. You lost and now you're toast."

Oh you clueless moron, the world is going to change, but you are going to be ground under that change-vehicle. Most likely, RandomCitizen is one of the red state’s unemployable, lazy deadbeats sucking off of the federal welfare tit while pretending to be one of the master race.  Trump could not care less about the fate of people like RandomCitizen. He won’t lift a finger to relieve their drug addictions, economic dysfunction, ignorance, unemployability, or even do more than Tweet to encourage their delusions of genetic superiority. The face Donald Trump sees in the mirror is the only person on this planet he has ever cared about and a whole bunch of RandomCitizens are going to discover how much worse their lives can get.

Dropping the Bar Further than Ever

Minnesota’s second congressional district, my new home town, elected a character right out of America’s worst nightmares and history: Jason Lewis. Our old representative, John Kline, wasn’t much better, but he at least pretended to be a local representative rather than the corporate shill he has been since 2003. Kline mouthed the Republican code words for racism, economic inequality, corporate rights over human rights, and the usual litany of bullshit Republicans have spewed since Nixon. Lewis doesn’t bother.

Jason Lewis thought the US was mistaken in actively deciding to banish slavery. In his steaming pile of gibbering monkey drivel, Power Divided is Power Checked: The Argument for States' Rights, Lewis wrote “In fact, if you really want to be quite frank about it, how does somebody else owning a slave affect me? It doesn’t. If I don’t think it is right, I won’t own one, and people always say ‘well if you don’t want to marry somebody of the same sex, you don’t have to, but why tell somebody else they can’t. Uh, you know if you don’t want to own a slave, don’t. But don’t tell other people they can’t.” So, Minnesota’s proud Union heritage has been blasted into history by electing a quasi-modern pro-slavery half-wit. Yeah, he’s anti-civil rights, too, but that’s just a given for what passes for “modern” Republicans.

Not surprisingly, Lewis has an elevated opinion of his own sex. Lewis called women “simply ignorant of the important issues in life” and “non-thinking” during one of many mentally-deficient moments on his hate-jock radio show. Of course, if you can tolerate his bullshit book for even a few pages, you’d discover that Lewis is the poster boy for historical delusion and technological incompetence. You might even be tempted to call him “non-thinking.”

Most hilariously, he has referred to himself as John Galt-like, which is pretty amazing. This child of the idle upper-class a couple of party animal degrees: a master's degree in political science (University of Colorado at Denver) and a BA in education/business (University of Northern Iowa). With that background, he’s barely equipped to manage a Dollar Store. Galt was, at least, a fictional character who had some ability to create and utilize technology. Lewis needs help identifying his microphone in a radio studio. Like most of the pseudo-conservative nut jobs in the Republican Party, Lewis will demonstrate his job killing skills in Washington, but his nitwit voters will blame his incompetence and laziness on Democrats.

Minnesota foisted one idiot, Michelle Bachmann, on the US political scene, which made the state a world-wide laughing stock. Here we go again.

#192 Comparing the Candidates

Watching the recent speeches, I realized something amazing about the Republican candidate: John McSame is Eric Cartman, sort of grown up. Listen to his ranting, his strange nasal grunt used to punctuate his "important" moments. If we could just get him to sing "In the Ghetto," I think it would be obvious that John McCain and South Park's Eric Cartman are the same guy.

I wish I had written this brilliant analysis, but I didn't. However, it is so perfect that I wanted to do my bit to distribute it further. The comparisons between the two sets of Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are clear and obvious. One set is completely unsuited and unprepared for any office more critical than small town American (preferably small town Alaska or Arizona where nothing of importance ever happens and nothing of value is created). The other set is prepared, educated, intelligent, and capable. If you are still inclined to vote for the unprepared pair, racism is clearly your motivation. In fact, you are simply casting your vote for two pink boobs.

 

In the 2008 Presidential Election, what if the candidates resumes were reversed?

• What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
• What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
• What if Barack Obama finished 894 out of 899 graduates from the Navy Academy in 1958?
• What if Barack Obama had been a prisoner in Vietnam for five years and suffered from Delayed Stress Syndrome?
• What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
• What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
• What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
• What if Barack Obama had failed at an attempted suicide?
• What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
• What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
• What if Obama had punched a woman in the face in the halls of Congress?
• What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
• What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
• What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?
• What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
• What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem? Or if he used high levels of profanity in his private and public conversations.
• What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?
• What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
• You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:

• Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
• Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude, Editor and President of Harvard Law Review
• Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years.

Michelle Obama:

• Princeton University - BA in Sociology, Cum Laude
• Harvard Law School, Juris Doctor (J.D.)

Joseph Biden:

• University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
• Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain:

• United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Cindy McCain:

• BA in Education - University of Southern California
• MA in Special Education - University of Southern California

Sarah Palin:

• Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
• North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
• University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
• Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
• University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Todd Palin:

• High School Graduate

Some try to sweep the issue under the rug but this is about racism. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

 

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land, the second highest office and the spouses who wield influence over them, as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

 

¹Sheldon Aubut http://www.sheldonaubut.com

November 2008

#191 Religulous

I saw Bill Maher's Religulous last night with a friend in a tiny, out-of-the-way theater in St. Paul. Two theaters are showing this film, although the show was better attended than all of the offerings in my local mega-theater for a very late night showing in an area with limited parking. It's not for lack of audience that this film is languishing in obscure "art theaters." It's most likely fear. If this is true in a "liberal" state and city like Minnesota and St. Paul/Minneapolis, consider how much more true it is in the nation's Red States (when did being "Red" become a positive?).

Many of the film's reviewers tentatively talk about their reaction to Religulous by reminding us all that "religion is a sensitive subject."  In this case, "sensitive" means "dangerous." Overwhelmingly, religious people share traits with other crazy people, especially the trait of unpredictable (and predictable) violence. From Timmy McVeigh to Osama bin Laden, religious fanatics are among the scariest people on the planet. Just to calibrate yourself, consider that when a few of the major theaters attempted to cash in on Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, protestors swarmed those theaters attempting to scare off viewers with their abortion clinic tactics. Mostly, they found themselves outwitted, overwhelmed by numbers, and ignored, but the message was received by the theater chains. None of the major corporate commies have anything resembling the courage to show a film as controversial as Religulous, but showing a snuff flick like The Passion of Christ is right up their alley, sewer, or ditch.

Religulous is well made, entertaining (as this subject can be), intelligent, and disturbing. As any rational person knows, the connection between many nations possessing the means to destroy the world (in fire) and the desire to create a self-fulfilling prophesy by so many fools is scary stuff. Listening to these fools try to justify their "Bronze Age" beliefs is depressing and scary. The first twenty minutes are funny, but after a while the relentless stupidity of the "faithful" is nothing more than ghoulish and gloomy. Maher isn't trying to entertain us. He's trying to frighten the few remaining intelligent, unsuperstitious souls left on the planet into action. Mostly, he succeeded in convincing me that humans are the bottom of the evolutionary heap and the best thing that could happen is for humanity to breed itself into a plague that reduces our numbers as quickly as possible, to save the rest of the world from "God's dumbest creation."

I've read some reviewers complain that Maher "made to look foolish" the faithful he interviewed. Maher simply asked them questions and reported their foolish answers. Religious nuts, apparently, don't like mirrors.

One of the typically irrational reviewers of Religulous, Tim McNabb in a website misnamed The American Thinker, claimed "Maher claims that agnostics represent 16% of the population, but so far they have not built 16% of the nation's charities (unless you count voting for Democrats)." That's typical of religious arguments. As Maher discovers when he interviews Francis Collins, a "scientist" who made strange claims for "faith" and backed his arguments with an obvious lack of knowledge of the Bible he worships. If he's the head of the US government's Genome Project, that segment of the scientific world is in trouble, if not dead and buried. Fortunately, the US is no longer leading this field of research, so progress has not been stopped by Collins. As Maher reminds us, the majority of scientists in the world are agnostic or atheist. They attempt to remedy the world's problems with science and technologies that actually "fix" those problems rather than cater to the pitiful results of overpopulation, starvation, superstition, and ignorance.  

Another religious apologist asked, "Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian." Actually, that tactic has been tried (The God Who Wasn't There and The Lost Gospel of Judas) and religious nuts liked it even less. "Learned theologians" tend to be as agnostic as they become historians or scientists. The more you know about the history of, for instance, Christianity, the more you doubt. Obviously, Maher consulted with many learned theologians, because his timeline of Christianity was accurate and his knowledge of the history of the Bible and the things actually in the Bible exceeded that of the Christians he interviewed. In fact, most of the professed "Christians" know less about their religion than the average uninterested agnostic.

Religious excuse-makers argue that "99% of the world's population can't be wrong." That's the dumbest of all arguments for any subject. Humans are insane and ignorant by nature. Not only can 99% of us be wrong, but as Maher says, we have a long, violent, depressing history of getting practically "everything exactly wrong." From math to nature to the universe, humans have long believed in concepts that were so far from logical or right that it's hard to take humans serious, even if you are one. Mark Twain speculated that we "fell from the higher animals." If we don't start correcting some of the more dangerous misunderstandings our species believes, we may take out the higher animals with us in our suicidal drive to Armageddon.

Maher has either created this link or linked himself to it, http://disbeliefnet.com. Whatever, it's an interest source of information/entertainment on what the majority of the world's nutjobs are up to.

October 2008