Monday Morality Mashup

Congratulations on surviving the weekend, but if you find yourself taking a bit too much pride in that singular accomplishment you probably fall into one of these three categories.

Number One

You’ve finally collected yourself off the bathroom floor, and are overjoyed that God took your vow of future abstinence as a reason not to kill you outright (as you clung to the commode for dear life).  Good thing that God doesn’t seem to take that promise very seriously or the college death rates in the US would skyrocket.  Don’t worry if you made that promise yourself last weekend. You’ve absolutely nothing to fear.  Drink up.

Number Two

You’re a murderous death row inmate who just got a stay of execution.

Number Three

You are deeply religious, and therefore so scared of dying and going to Heaven you’re overjoyed with every extra day that your savior allows you to exist here in the Devil’s Playground (aka Earth, not just Las Vegas).

Keeping You Accountable

There are all kinds of things that “God” can be credited with keeping you accountable for and not just murder, inebriation or your secret desire to wear women’s lingerie.

It really doesn’t matter which God you pick from.  One God may favor women in burlap, while another yearns for virgin sacrifice.  Some Gods are really into cows, while others deify rats.  The rules of accountability (morality), as outlined in many conflicting ancient texts, are themselves obtuse enough that internecine fractionalization of the major religions is geopolitically destabilizing.  But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s a post about morality and what constitutes the bedrock we should be building our moral foundations upon.

Lottery in June, Corn be heavy soon

What God holds you personally accountable for varies according to your time and place in history. but since this is now in history, and my readership is mainly American, I’ll focus on Christianity.  There’s little sense in deconstructing the lunacy of an Aztec priest ripping the heart out of a heavily drugged virgin for the greater good of society.  Most of us are already pretty sure that form of faith doesn’t really keep the crops from failing, though the stigma of such belief is still apparent in our English literature.

Christian Morality

What the hell is Christian morality these days?  For folks who ground their moral lives around beliefs supposedly written in stone, the shifting sands of Christian morality are changing so rapidly it’s hard to keep them in focus for one lifetime, let alone a millennia.

Shotgun Jeebus – Hommie Don’t Play That.

It is nearly impossible to witness species emerge through physical evolution in the short span of a couple human lifetimes.  It is equally impossible to miss the evolution of Christian morality over a similar timeframe.  Not that long ago a good Christian man was one who properly cared for his slaves, and as recently as last week (in archaeological time) the gays were still being vilified and lambasted by our Christian society, whereas now they’re being wed by US Supreme Court justices.  Next thing you know, Jeebus is going to be back to hitting the bong at the Seattle Hempfest like he was blazing it up back at Woodstock.

The Good Old Days

When I was a kid, God’s hippie son preached peace, forgiveness and charity to the poor.  He was often photographed with an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, surrounded by braless, misshapen girls in tie-dyed sundresses.. Don’t act like he never even existed!  If you’re over fifty you can’t deny it.  That imaginary Jeebus got kicked to the side of the road long ago, in lieu of a more strident militaristic Onward Christian Soldier version.   Today, there are high level Christians leading the charge to help the poor by starving them to death and they often get together to vainly pray that the worldwide violence they spread won’t end up right back on their doorstep.

Jeebus Wars

The verdict is still out over which imaginary Jeebus will return to the throne in America.  Will the rightwing militant Jeebus retain the throne or has his time passed?  To make things more interesting, there is a growing movement to throw all the imaginary Jeebus’ into the dustbin of history and let them party with the many lost and abandoned Gods before them.

In the meantime, your so-called bedrock Christian morality had better be as flexible as a yoga masters spine because depending on which outlaw territory of America you happen to find yourself in, you’re going to be heavily dependent on currying favor with whatever local warlord happens to run your neighborhood.  It pays to “open minded” and malleable to change in times like these.

Tomorrow:  How in the name of Goodness will we ground our human morality without some form of imaginary Jeebus?   Science can’t possibly project from “what is” to “what ought to be”,  or can it?

Enjoy.

Rant of the Day

I feel compelled into offering a long form analysis of the current state of affairs in the US. Bear with me as you will usually see my comments fit well within 140 characters. Nature of the beast….LOL. To wit:

The situation is more dire than most people realize. The public is forced to focus on distractions served up by the corporate controlled media (no offense to the memory of Trayvon, but in the overall scale of issues that need to be addressed, the coverage given is nothing less than a carnival show).

It’s endemic. There’s statistically much less crime (Steven Pinker has the stats) these days but significantly more coverage of crime in the media. Not that these diversionary media clown shows are restricted to crime “journalism”. No indeed. Pick a subject that can easily be broken down using scientific evidence. The media will find a way to give “equal time” to some plastic haired lunatic flat-earth leaning nut job with the appropriate fake smile and rhetorical flair.

In the meantime, the transfer of wealth from the many to the few continues to accelerate even after the US banks “collapsed” as a result of their overzealous self regulation and return to the banking practices circa 1890, (a point at which we are still mired, no offense to Elizabeth Warren. Heaven knows she’s trying). Banks are giving something like 2% “return” on your money while simultaneously charging 30% interest on credit. Sounds fair.

Healthcare costs were already off the charts when I bailed out of the US several years ago. It isn’t gonna matter how much you pay for insurance or who is paying it so long as we allow immoral profiteering off our sick, elderly and dying. And let’s be blunt here. It’s outright highway robbery on a scale unseen in human history. The suffering and misery imposed by the US healthcare system is shameful to me as an American and as a human, but that’s just because even though I’m a devout and militant atheist, I stand firm in my Christian values. It’s what my momma raised me in.

Something’s gotta give sooner than later in the US. If it doesn’t then America will be like any other South American country where the rich are forced to live behind walls. That’ll work for plenty of the idiots I left America to get away from but not for me. The stink of the ghetto and the desperation of the deprived always manage to breach the walls which is not the way I wanna live my life. If I thought there would or could be a peaceful, political way to diffuse the powder keg that will ultimately explode, I would not be so pessimistic. We’re still spending money we don’t have on military expeditions we should never have started while simultaneously making it harder for poor people to either abort or feed their babies. I quote the immortal words from a popular song:

Who is to blame in what country? Never can get to the One.
Dealing in multiplication but they still can’t feed everyone.

Enjoy.

A Eulogy over Tea

If you find it morbidly inappropriate to speak ill of the dead, click away now. If you’d have enjoyed getting the chance to drag the remains of Hitler’s smoldering corpse though the streets like the Italians did with Mussolini, please proceed.

I find it morally reprehensible to gloss over the damages done by morally reprehensible people who publicly propagate the most vile sorts of ideas into the public domain. I am moved to displays of public outrage like this blogpost when the people doing the damage claim to be working under direct contract with God.. Expect a much more scathing eulogy on the occasion of the deaths of all those monsters who promulgated legal torture and shamed us as a nation.
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I have been receiving a lot of questions regarding the whereabouts of Mark Francis Krebs. His prolific trolling on Facebook feeds (mine and others) suddenly went silent and it left many people wondering what happened to him.

Facebook might know more about you than the NSA, FBI and CIA combined, but one thing they haven’t yet mastered is the concept of death. In real life people actually die all the time, but on Facebook your electronic soul can exist in an amorphous cloud of bits, ready to be called upon to hawk any brand or any cause you intentionally (or accidentally) clicked a “like” button when your finger still had a pulse.

Such is the case for Mark Francis Krebs, dead at age 52 of bloat and self-neglect (see pic). Sad, lonely figure of a man, laying dead in his Texas apartment for ten days, rotting away unnoticed in his Lazy Boy until the stretch of his decay invaded the physical space of his neighbors invoking calls to the authorities.

Mark was an underachieving underclassman from high school that I ‘reconnected’ with thru Facebook awhile back. His academic acumen was so sub par it left him wide open for a life addicted to Fox News propaganda and Pentacostal wing-nuts alike, which resulted in his stalwart support of the kind of idiotic thinking that favors “rapist’s rights” over the dignity of our wives, mothers and daughters. Krebs was a shadow member of “Zygotes over People”, and a persistent right wing troll on my Facebook feed. If he were alive today Krebs would be pimping shotguns for babies as a solution to gun violence. He was the sad, bloated, living stereotype of every Tea Party lunatic, NRA slobbering gun nut and Jeebus freak you ever encountered, all rolled into one apparently corpulent soul.

I did my best to try and council the crazy out of him but given the limitations on what can be accomplished through Facebook, I was unable to move Mark from the extreme rightwing category on religion or politics.

All surviving family should be joyously consoled with my testimony that he went to his grave fully believing every bit of religious tripe ever fed to him, so he should be safe in the arms of imaginary Jeebus by now and insulated from my necessarily savage review of our online relationship

Mark was my most dedicated Fundamentalist Facebook troll. I figured he must have been getting paid a few pennies per post from Rove’s 350 million dollar wingnut welfare machine just based on the amount and intensity of his efforts, but that’s just a guess.

Though his extremism and Christian delusion knew no bounds, I never thought to block or unfriend him. My theory is that the best defense against people that far off the map of common public sense and decency Is to make sure they are seen. The more people see of these types of lunatics, the better off for the rest of us. Sunshine, disinfectant,

Enjoy.

GOP Irrelevancy

Good morning all,

First off. housekeeping. Woke up 55 years old this morning. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just old enough to remember when all the “lazy blacks” in Detroit were so busy making cars that that moniker didn’t work so well.   A lot of people I remember fondly from my youth had good union jobs and lived well. Then Reagan came along and garrotted the unions in 1980.  Many believe Reagan also killed Disco, but Disco never died. Reagan stuffed it in a duffel bag and sent it to Guantanamo.

In any event, the country has been on a Republican built road-to-Hell since then.  Republican greed totally destroyed any chance for those of my generation to implement the dreams and ideals we all grew up cherishing.  Our fathers had just landed on the moon and we were poised for Mars just about the time the crazy old man got hold of the wheel and steered us off into the direction of Star Wars instead.

There’s still a ray of hope for our children and grandchildren, if we don’t allow them to drown in the slime pit of oil dependency and warmongering the Republicans have built into our system.  We’ll see.

Big shout out to all the Walmart workers who stood against the corporate tyrants.  Walmart can’t compete in an environment where civility and fair play are honored above institutional profits.  They fizzled here in Germany after pissing a billion dollars away, and at the end of the day, they weren’t even able to offer lower prices than their competitors!!

How Can the Republicans Regain Relevance?

Having graduated from high school in Fort Dodge Iowa (1976 – State of Iowa Scholar), I can say with some authority that what the Republicans need to do to become relevant again. I expect my suggestions to be received by the GOP with all the enthusiasm and applause as pre-election Nate Silver polls, but it might help if somebody from the great plains, who isn’t a highly paid (bought off) beltway insider adds a main-street view. I am pretty sure I have mentioned these things before, but the Republicans weren’t listening to me then and they likely won’t listen to me now, but if ever there was a time when Googling “mainstream viewpoints” and “U.S. voters” might interest a Republican, this seems a likely moment in time for that occurrence.

Republicans need to drop their crazy ideas on reproductive freedoms. This last election cycle saw things spin so far into crazy town that there were candidates actually advancing the cause of rapist’s rights in having their unholy offspring borne by our mothers, wives and daughters. I have a memory of Mississippi trying to outlaw condoms, but that might have been spin from their “rights of the zygote” legislation that failed, even in the bastion of the Baptist holy land. At the end of the day, the Republican adoption of the Christian Bible as a handbook for political and scientific guidance is as ill-advised, un-American and disgusting. Relying on faith over facts is not a road to success into the future.

Modern Republicanism is now 20 percent politics and 80 percent fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism. This is something they used to know enough to hide because they knew it was a losing minority position. I remember noting the TRUE percent of “lunatic fringe” Christians when Pat Robertson ran for president. IIRC, it was about five percent, and I doubt the actual numbers are higher today (40% of US now “non-religious”).

What the Relignicans lack in numbers they try to make up for in astroturf and echo chambers. Fox (Faux) News is HELPING elect Democrats now that everybody isn’t afraid to laugh at the Naked Emperor.

I have an iPad mini to unwrap.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Enjoy.

The Dope has Been Roped

While Andrew Sullivan was having his big gay panic attacks over Obama’s first debate performance, I was posting about the longer term rope-a-dope strategy that Mohammed Ali employed against George Foreman in his 1974 bout, commonly referred to as “The Rumble in the Jungle”.  Since there are still precious few engaged in the business of promoting my particularly insightful brand of intellectual political analysis, I guess it is left to me to say, “I told you so”

President Obama not only “roped-a-dope” in his second debate performance yesterday evening, he also did it with the rope that Romney brought to hang him with.  Romney laid into the business of tying the noose with the enthusiasm and clueless self awareness of the Mormon youth evangelizing our neighborhoods (all the while avoiding the landmine of myriad Coke machines placed in their path to taunt them).

Mitt Romney is an expert on making Mitt Romney rich, a point to which the President was cornered into admitting after nearly being clubbed to death by Romney”s fully engorged pension.

Mitt would also like you to know that he is a deep student of current affairs in Benghazi:

Please proceed Governor….
http://youtu.be/…

At the end of the day, Romney did the ONE thing he absolutely could not afford to do.  He got caught in an attempt at outright fraud.  The fact that he was put in check by a woman was just schadenfreude of an entirely different magnitude.  Something I would describe as almost celestial in nature.  Romney’s overall demeanor did nothing for his case either. Whoever coached him on how to act like a pushy fat guy at a casino buffet ought to be handed a pink slip.

#landslide #coattails #cleansweep #Obama2012

Cross-posted all over creation.

Enjoy.