I think it is hard to imagine for the young today the system shock from the riots and assassinations of the late 60’s. When the price of gas doubled in the oil shock and then you couldn’t have all you wanted even if you could afford it. That just freaked the counter culture right the fuck out. Want to know why the peace and love generation turned into the greedy selfish fucks that everyone loves to hate the baby boomers that is what made them that way.
Over the next couple of years I am afraid that same youth will get to experience something far worse. There are no jobs. The very wealthy are doing very well, they are buying lots of new toys. Apple pads, pods, phones and their numerous clones are flying off the shelves. The top quintile is now 60 million people and that is more than enough to sustain the top quintile. As long as they can quit paying for anything needed by the other 4/5ths. The 13 million long term unemployed are about to start running out of benefits. “The little depression” as Paul Krugman calls it is upon the rest of us and the safety net we spent the last seventy years building is about to be destroyed. The government is out of money when tax burdens are at the lowest in 60 years. No brainier to raise taxes in a normal world but in Randistan that is heresy. The co-operative government that created the highest material standard of living in the history of civilization was now evil, but that is another rant. Because of Austerity measures to combat a revenue problem unemployment will go up and poverty will become endemic in a manner not seen since the 1930’s
I look around my little town and it is dying a slow death. A high end clothing shop opening at the mall will not make up for the closing of schools and restaurants. And for the newly fired most wont even get 26 weeks unemployment let alone extended benefits. It is my opinion that we are at the breaking point. There are not enough cans to pick out of the trash for us all to survive and humans being what they are it will not be pretty. The tent cities are already full. There is now a block long Bushville in the warehouse district now. It wont be fair to call the Obamavilles until he passes his grand bargain then all bets are off. When the next wave of foreclosures hit there is no place for these folks to go.
Putting together an omnibus post on the political spectrum to serve as my rant for a while. Then I am going to dive back into fiction. I have one new concept and the Socrates code project that have long term potential. If I spend my time screaming at the corporatists to get off my lawn and shaking my fist it eats up too much of my energy. I will continue to throw the occasional metaphorical brick but this is my parting shot for a while. I have given my view on theism. I have distilled my view down as simply as my limited language skills allow. Belief in that for which there is no evidence is destructive in all of the forms it takes. This includes pseudo science as well as religion. There are lots of implications from the mathematics of quantum mechanics. One gets many worlds and string theories with 11 dimensions or is it 13. In the hands of well grounded theorists these ideas lead to things like quantum computers and the discovery of dark energy and all kinds of cool things that may or may not pan out in their exact format but that does not excuse the charlatan that hides in the ambiguities. The existence of “Entanglement” does not mean we are all part of a spiritual realm. We all exist as conscious entities and that consciousness is a function of a physical brain conducting chemical processes. In all of the work we have done studying the brain we have seen no evidence for a soul that exists beyond the life of the functioning brain. When you have something get back to us. Being a rational human requires one to come to grips with the fact that some questions have no answer. That does not mean that anything you make up is possible. We will not be able to tell folks with absolute certainty how the chemical soup that was available to the primordial environment turned into life. That data is simply unavailable. Plate tectonics has recycled that data beyond retrieval. That does not alter the fact that Humans evolved from earlier species through the process broadly known as natural selection. I prefer the term descent with modification as it does less to imply purpose than the other. There is no reasonable, and by that I mean fitting with basic physics, theory for the existence of the universe that requires any god. By definition the universe formed from a singularity in big bang theory. There for we will never be able to know what happened before that event. We may some day figure out the most likely precursors to life and recreate it from scratch in an update of the Miller experiment. We may even have the opportunity to observe a planet while it is evolving new life over a few million years on another world. We could turn out to be wrong about the singularity and find out something from before the beginning it is just that those chances are infinitesimally small. At a very minimum the idea that there exists an intercessional god is beyond ludicrous as portrayed in any of the sacred texts that reveal all to the snake oil salesman. As thinking creatures we have the ability to create meaning even if is an artificial construct. I broke my rule in the middle of thinking about this piece and have begun to ramble. As long as your construct allows for others to pursue their construct fine. By definition the dogmatic faiths cannot do this. The word has been revealed and you must remain ignorant of all future developments to remain true to the faith. To Admit that the ravings in Leviticus are not valid is to admit it is all invalid. Either it is all the word of god or none of it is. If you refuse to show us the gold plates or accept the results when your shroud is proven false beyond all reasonable doubt then I say fuck you and your ignorance. I have no time to waste on your ignorant superstition. I will ridicule it at will but not one second of deference or respect. There isn’t anything else I can do but beat the dead idiot and there are already folks making a living at that task. The course politically is set for the next cycle so I am not going to expend any more efforts in that direction. The centrist has sold us out to oil and pharma interests. The climate bill will be inadequate, the energy bill will include off shore drilling and nuclear energy both disasters. The drift toward a police state will continue as this group is now trying to eliminate rights for citizens while continuing to show contempt for human life around the globe. I won’t vote republican and see little point in continuing to support the rush to compromise of principles that is this failed system. There will be a slaughter in November and then we will get nothing but screwed until 2012 when the right wing will take power once again. This was the best shot at some actual progressive changes to government for the 8 year cycle with the utter destruction of everything the right had been saying and the gutless piece of god wad that won sold us out. I see no point in continuing to point out the obvious for the next two years. It will just serve to make me appear shrill. Enjoy the break.
If you build it, it will break. Get used to it there is nothing ever built with a 100% success rate. Even NASA with all of their technical expertise has about a 2% death rate per astronaut flight and those failures have been spectacular. When president Obama was speaking on April 2nd as he was signing on to the drill baby drill mantra and opening up the east coast to off shore drilling he claimed that oil wells don’t leak. He claimed that the leaks in the Gulf of Mexico after every hurricane are from refineries not from wells. Here is a transcript link,I am looking for the video they used but it is not up on the ABC site yet. I will put my plug in here for the disqualifying defect of being under the God Delusion. If you believe in that for which there is no evidence, if you conduct conversations with your imaginary friend and think that he is going to act in some way you are unfit to make any decisions for anyone other than yourself. Faith as a virtue is a destructive meme. It results in the best case scenario being adopted by the risk management folks as the worst case scenario. I cannot speak for other nations but the American Exceptionalism that is hammered into children in the US with a religious fervor doesn’t help. Manifest destiny is a myth used to justify genocide. There is at present a horrible example of this being sold to a whole new generation on the history channel as slavery was just an unfortunate externality of the booming cotton trade that American ingenuity created with the cotton gin. It wasn’t desperate people fleeing exhausted farm land that came west but adventure seeking entrepreneurs. They completely ignore the propaganda that was spread to get folks to go just as they ignore the fraud conducted by everyone of their business people talking heads. Why am I surprised that the network that has the “The Nostradumbass Effect,” as a serious program gives a crap about reality. They are selling a narrative that has always been a lie from the time they said George could never tell one. Back to my point and I do have one, there are no failure proof systems. When some one tells you that their widget can’t break they are lying. When the President goes in front of the cameras as he did on April 2nd 2010 and tells you that oil wells never leak anymore in hurricanes he is lying his ass off. Just another in the long list of acts that put him up there with the worst presidents in my lifetime. (Bush, Nixon, Reagan) the order is determined by the number of innocent people they murdered in unjust wars. Saint Ron the traitor had a much larger negative effect than the others as his “gospel of government bad” is still propelling the ignorance of sister Sarah on us today. Escalating unjust wars Spying on citizens without warrants and ordering their murder without due process. Murdering civilians with drone strikes in violation of law without a declaration of war. Then having the poor taste to joke about it. Failing to prosecute torture and crimes against humanity. Continuing to commit said torture and crimes against humanity at military installations around the world. This is not the change I voted for.
Watching Bill Moyer’s last dance tonight and I have to say it aggravated me no end. Phony folksy types like Hightower make me want to puke with their false equivalences and their total silence when their true friends the Republicans are in power. These farmers screaming about bank bailouts while any attempt to cut their welfare subsidies is met with shrieks about the family farm. Ethanol is an economic disaster and is awful for the environment. It requires more energy to produce than you get out of it so it makes no sense but because the family farm is some how sacred we piss away tons of money on it. The reason for this waste is the archaic political system that was created to perpetuate slavery and has succeeded for 230 years. You have no right to cry about fair market prices when you demand a huge subsidy. They simply do not understand that the capitalism they are nostalgic for never existed. They are as delusional as their tea bagging counterparts on the farther right. And make no mistake their positions are right wing in nature. They want the other guy regulated but pay a minimum wage like any other business? No they are special and living wages are for land owners not migrant workers. There was something special that led their ancestors to come to America for a better life but now we have all these illegal aliens running around. The solution is not to scream in impotent rage at the bankers greed while resisting fundamental reform. The rich getting everything they can is capitalism. Read their bible, Atlas Shrugged. That is the system Europeans have been fighting since the day they stole the place from the folks that came here from Asia. These are the same populists that elected Raygun because he made them feel good about America by tearing the Solar panels off the White House. The fact that he was looting the treasury with his defense contractor masters was not important. It was just another pesky fact that the folks in flyover country want no part of. It is God and country with those folks and when their Saint Ron broke the unions they cheered. They believe teacher’s unions are the problem with education just as they believe Jesus loves them. They can produce no evidence of either but they know it to be true. Now that they are on the same side unions are now A OK. It is very hard for me to get behind a group that feels a living wage isn’t their responsibility as an employer. The populist notion that we are all in this together is not compatible with capitalism. They are not wrong when they rail at the bankers, the financialization of America has been a disaster for all but the very few at the very top. The idea was that we would pass free trade agreements that let capital flee to the lowest least regulated areas. This has had a huge redistribution effect and raised about a billion people out of abject poverty. The fallacy was that higher productivity of an educated work force would compete for the more sophisticated jobs and higher productivity would keep the country competitive. This has proved to be a myth much like the rational market. The hot flat and crowded retread of Malthus set was partly correct in that American workers are now competing against children in China. The reason I despair is that we never seem to learn anything. In the late 1960’s off the California coast they were using all the latest technology to safely drill for oil. They screwed up and devastated the coast around Santa Barbra. We decided that the small amount of energy to be extracted was not worth the economic loss of the spill. Fast forward fifty years and We are again told that it is safe to drill and we again find that they were not telling the truth and the Gulf Coast will now be devastated and the economic losses will be massive. The problem is that there is no one speaking for the other side.
This a bold statement but those that hear me rave have never accused me of being humble. This is offensive to the believer crowd but no more then celebrating the slaughter of little Egyptian children or the Homo erotic torture displays of the believers offends the rational.
I gave my prespeech perspective here is my post speech wrap up. Needless to say by my last line you will be sure that I remain unconvinced.
My analysis of the program. The President is planning to increase troop strength by approximately 1/3 in the hopes of reversing the trend in return to Taliban control. 18 months from now having stabilized the situation we will begin to pull out in Jul 2011. We will have trained the Afghan security forces to replace us at providing protection for the local population from said Taliban. We will increase our efforts at creating an economy based on something other than narcotics and root out the corruption in the central government. We will then get completely out of Afghanistan in terms of combat operations at some future date dependent on conditions on the ground. This I am sure in his opinion is the best of a bad lot of options. He used the usual fear tactics and military props to sell it and he gave a pretty lackluster speech to roll it out. I will leave it for the Daily Show and Jon Stewart to put together the side by side comparison of Bush selling us the Iraq surge with the same rhetoric. He tried to tell us this wasn’t the next Vietnam while trying to fight it like Iraq, another place it is not. Always fighting the last war isn’t that the problem?
I will begin with point 1. Afghanistan and its’ citizens did not attack us on 9/11. The hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. The mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamed was born in Kuwaiti of Pakistani refugee parents. Osama bin Laden the leader of this criminal band was another Saudi. In case you are not seeing the pattern here there are no Afghans on that list. The history of The United States drawing all these criminal men to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians and then leaving them trained and heavily armed to prey on the populace should be well known Perhaps that is why the President left it out of his history narrative. I am only bringing it up to give the proper time horizon. Afghanistan has not had a functioning educational system in all that time. They have a 20% literacy rate, very bad but the bulk of the reading is taught at religious schools that instill fundamentalism, even worse. Looking at the president's claim that a false reading of history leads to the Vietnam analogy. I contend that all analogies to past wars are pointless as no two situations are ever the same but the lessons learned still apply. Then he sets out points that are themselves a false reading of history. We had the entire west bloc from the cold war with us on the Vietnam war when it came to votes in the UN and world opinion. Our partners in the Vietnam war contributed huge numbers of troops. South Korea provided 320,000 troops to the war effort, more than all the contribution of the coalition of the willing in Afghanistan. We are sending 30,000 troops at a cost of roughly 60 billion dollars total, assuming you meet your withdrawal target. The Brits are sending an additional 500 while the Canadians are doing the smart thing and leaving. Half truths when it comes to war are inexcusable. The belief that soviet style communism posed a threat to the world unparalleled in the history of civilization prevailed in the world at the time so again the distinction does not exist. The South Vietnamese government was deemed illegitimate by the world after the murder of Diem. Who did what isn’t the point so much as now the whole world knows that The current Afghan government is illegitimate. They stole the election and we went along with the Vietnam Coup. Waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 rings false to me for the reasons I have already stated above but there is again an untruth in the Presidents statement. We had been viciously attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Of course that turned out not to be factually accurate as well. The war lords and the Taliban have been fighting over the area for 30 plus years so the home grown insurgency argument may hold up the best of any of his points. The hero status of Ho Chi Minh among his followers remained intact throughout the war. The terrorism took much of the luster off the freedom fighter image of bin Laden. The war lords were horrible when they were in charge. The Taliban was religious horrible leading to the degradation of women and unbelievers. After 9/11 we hired the warlords as mercenaries and put them back into power. Now we have the war lords losing power once again because they are horribly corrupt and the people hate them again. The possibility exists that can win the people in Afghanistan there was no way in Vietnam. Now as to why it isn’t like Iraq and Surge 2.0 Af/Pak is the last war. Iraq was a fully functioning nation with lots of educated urban people. The level of entrepreneurship and innovation was much higher even though they operated under a pretty brutal dictatorship. The countries economy weakened by years of sanctions was still much stronger than Afghanistan and with the oil fields able to raise cash rapidly after they were stabilized. The parts of Afghanistan we need to recruit the police forces and security forces from are the least educated portions of a horribly uneducated land. In 8 years we have still been unable to build an effective security force in Iraq, We still do not have all of our combat troops out. How can you expect to have anything like a functioning force in 18 months? The myth that the Surge worked. The violence that occurred in Iraq post, "mission accomplished" was mostly ethnic cleansing. The once integrated sections segregated over time through violence against a foreground of terrorist Al Qaeda types fighting our troops. They unleashed the pent up hatred of the suppressed majority on the oppressors and unlike South Africa in Iraq we got Liberia. The violence had already begun to decline before the new troops arrived in Iraq so the idea that they caused the reduction is in question. We have been paying off vast numbers of the players all along in the Afghan operation. In Iraq we began paying them to not fight as a change in strategy. At first we made every effort to ensure that no American monies went to anyone that had fought against our troops. It was not until that policy was changed that we began to have some success. The promise of jobs with the police and security forces. We are running out of patience for paying them off and they are not getting the promised jobs in the Iraq government and violence is ticking back up. In Afghanistan we have been paying bribes to build bases bribes to drive on roads, bribes for information and bribes for safe conduct of our supplies since the very beginning. The development money has been sucked up by corruption much the same as in Iraq but as it was a significantly smaller number the amount that trickled down to the population was correspondingly small. I have no way to verify all of the rumors about The CIA and their paying off of President Karzai’s brother and how much of the 15 billion we bribed the Pakistani’s with went to the other side so we have no non corrupt partner in the region. I Give the President some credit for at least trying to put forth arguments and justifications for his plan as opposed to The Bush pattern of the lies about babies being thrown from incubators as Bush 41 did or Lies about Uranium yellow cake and mushroom clouds as Bush 43 did. He failed to answer what went wrong with his last escalation. He has deployed 31,000 troops to Afghanistan already in his short presidency. Why did that escalation fail and what changed that that makes you think doubling down will work now? It is important at this point to look at the goal of the other side here. They want to cause us to spend so much money that our system collapses. They believe that this is what they did to the Soviet Empire. I would submit another misreading of history. There were vague statements about paying for the war. No commitment to pay for it. With this President if it is not explicitly spelled out he will not honor his pledge. Even when it is explicit he will not necessarily honor it as in the case of FISA immunity. The General in charge has been proven to lie to the nation as a propagandist so he cannot be trusted, Google Pat Tillman cover up. It was Gates that was Secretary of Defense when the requested troops were not sent. Rumsfeld had been replaced with the man you kept when McKiernan's requests were denied. You cannot use half truths to lie us further into war you must tell the whole truth. As in Vietnam we will get more people killed and the end result will be the same failed stalemate we could have gotten 3 years earlier. The other alternative is that we continue to fail at securing the country and three years from now we are force to throw more blood and treasure into a failed enterprise. I will leave you with this question. Hey, Hey LBJ How many Kids will Obama Kill Today?
This was a great old tune by a guy named Barry McGuire
It seemed apropos to today as another Barry is about to give us his decision on pouring more lives down the rat hole of war. The leaked number is 30,000 more troops. I have no reason to believe that number and the actual number is not that important in the long run. The cost of 30,000 troops will be an additional 30 billion dollars. That is thirty billion dollars every year for as long as they are there. In February of this year the President already escalated the war to a total of 34,000 troops. Combat troops with their support units.This was done in a deceptive manner in my opinion but I have made no bones about my opinion of this administration and the truth. Charlie Gibbs and Dana Perino lie with equal alacrity and as Dana’s lying netted her a cushy job in government why not? I have been working on writing fiction in a furious and frenzied attempt to write a novel in a month and so I may tend to ramble but to the topic at hand. The Graveyard of Empires that is Afghanistan and A deeper issue, what as a nation do we value? Last year we spent 130 billion on hot wars along with another 750 billion on the military industrial complex. Another 30 billion on top of that seems like chicken feed. It does until you consider that 160 billion is twice what the estimated cost of health care reform will be. 840 billion over ten years. This does not take into account the fact that we are financing the enemy as well we have to bribe the Taliban to let our convoys through to resupply our soldiers. For a frame of reference The gross domestic product of Afghanistan in 2008 was 11.7 billion dollars. The escalation of our part in this war not including the money and men contributed by NATO is three times the entire countries economy.
Much like In Iraq no one is counting the number of civilians we are killing on a regular basis. We may never no how many people are dying to keep a corrupt government in charge of a failed nation. We have no more right to murder the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan then the terrorists conducting their attacks on 9/11. We could have done it right but we hired the awful scum that were so terrible to their own people that welcomed the Taliban with open arms to get rid of them and are shocked when they screw everything up. We have the same criminal crony capitalists in charge of the money supply that destroyed our economy impoverishing only those at the bottom. The Rich are doing quite nicely in the same old story. Now the Same criminals that tortured and lied under Bush are Torturing and Lying under Obama, Gates and McChrystal. We were told during the campaign that it was foolish to trust those that drove us into the ditch to get us out, Of course we were also told that the guys that screwed up the Financial system and lost all the poor folks money were the only ones that could save us. The scientific approach of a god waddder that thinks prayer will solve everything. Since you are evidently not the smartest man on the planet I will say it slowly for you. There are no good wars. Your are murdering people everyday in these wars and in our own country by wasting resources on the continued American love of killing brown folks. You are about to do your usual half assed compromise crap and lose politically as well as get a shitload of people killed for no good reason. You are going to get creamed by the right for not giving the Generals all the tools to win and when you lose it will be your fault. You cant win with the left without ending the war. You lied about federal wiretaps you lied about Guantanamo you let the war criminals walk with impunity and now you will kill thousands more before you fail again. Hey, hey LBJ how many kids did Obama kill today? Do I think this screw-up will be the end of the world? Probably not but the folks in the Kremlin probably didn’t think it would destroy their country either.
Putting myself on the record as saying this is the beginning of a whitewashing of the war crimes of the Bush years. By limiting the scope and not allowing it to go up the chain to those that wrote the memos and asked for them to be written we get nothing. The way to prevent torture is to prosecute all those involved in torture. War crimes must be taken seriously and prosecuted or the spew of all those America is exceptional scumbags must cease. I am deploying the, "Rally Hamster" on behalf of human rights. Hoping he does better than he did over the weekend.
Today is the international day to end violence against sex workers day. The key to this in my opinion is to destigmatize and decriminalize these activities. I am sad to say I see neither of these things happening anytime soon. The rich need to have low cost whores available to the rabble or they will agitate for enough money to have the same access to sex that others have. Once they stigmatize an individual through a criminal record the worker has many fewer options for making a living. They keep the options limited they keep the prices down and prevent the workers from garnering enough resources to change their life in a capitalist system. The second factor is the prison industrial complex. Many parts of rural America are dependent upon incarceration for their economic development. We lost our manufacturing and built prisons and those cells need to have occupants. The police exploit the poor at all levels forcing them to become informants and extorting the poor workers for favors. This is more control of the underclass. If legalized the workers would be entitled to police protection like any other commercial enterprise. The policing of the lower classes is punitive not protective for the most part. The moralists are too wrapped up in their superstition to allow reason to get in the way of punishing sin. These are a powerful constituency and sex workers are not. The patrons that have a modicum of power are shamed into silence so the puritans get their way.
I am watching the markets fall again today and the news is reporting another round of government plans for bailouts. There is talk of another stimulus package and a bailout of the big three auto makers. The liberal bloggosphere is now debating how to make the car makers eco-friendly in exchange for the money. More of the too big to fail mentality that is doomed to failure. This will be a horrible boondoggle just as the financial sector bailout is turning into. The auto industry is not truly in trouble just the American auto industry. Yes all sales are down but in this recession but the big three were tanking long before the downturn. This is a symptom of a larger American attitude that is the root of the problem but first let us look at industry as a whole. Companies like Volkswagen and Toyota are profitable and have been while GM looses billions. If we are going to bail out bad decisions and bad business practices we must abandon the idea that we are a market economy. Rather than pour money down the rat hole let these companies go into bankruptcy and have the government backstop the people at the bottom that will lose out. Don’t hand the idiots running these companies billions to waste instead let them fail and take over the pension and medical insurance payments for the retirees. This should be done as part of a national single payer health care reform that will help to make all American industry more viable and competitive. The big three have been losing market share due to bad products and poor workmanship. The market does in fact work in cars, make a product people want and it sells. Once you have a reputation for making bad poor quality products it is tough to come back. This brings me back to the larger American attitude that is failing. Marketing will make up for bad product. The big three think polishing a turd is the solution rather than flushing the toilet. The idea that we are going to bail out these companies seems to no longer be the argument but how the government should determine what they make is the position of the left. The right and let them fail is actually correct but their reasoning as usual is faulty and they do not want to deal with the fallout. Planned economies fail. I have accepted that fact even though I tend toward socialist solutions. The market is pretty good at deciding which types of goods consumers will buy. Badly made poor quality ugly looking boxy hybrids will tank and that is the kind of crap Detroit’s designers will spew forth if the government steps in with mandates in exchange for loan guarantees. The management of the big three are of the same mentality as the American way of life is nonnegotiable wing of the anti environmental party. The automobile is not conducive to a sustainable lifestyle for 6 billion plus people and the sooner we warm up to that concept the sooner we can keep the world from getting too hot. Let them fail. Force the unions to work out a new deal and let the taxpayers bail out the retirees not the investors. Take the money and spend it on public transportation. There simply are not enough resources in the world for everyone to drive around in their own car. This is the fundamental change that we need to deal with. If we start now we can save lots of pain in the long run.
The other day or should I say night I was woken up twice by the shaking of earthquakes. They were small and did no damage but still it was a bit disconcerting. It got me thinking about the vagaries of life and perception. I have friends around the country that ask how I can handle the earthquake thing and they live places that have tornadoes and hurricanes almost every year. The sounds are so odd, the humming of the world on a grand scale. The rocks screaming in a low whine as opposed to the howl of the wind. The difference in energy from one to the other, quick burst or sustained violence are both emasculating in their own way. I think the shaking ground for me is less of a problem because I am good at reacting to things. The other forms of disaster come with warnings and anticipation and the buildup while earthquakes just happen and then they are done. With warning I spend too much time worrying about things and that is wasted energy. I have been somewhat lucky from the standpoint that the big ones have happened shortly after I departed. The 89 quake that hit the bay area was about a year after I moved away north and there was another big quake in the Seattle Tacoma area about a year after I left for the south. I do not see this as having any greater meaning in the larger scope of things, just random occurrences. Or should I say they seem random. The one truly random event in the universe was the bubbling up of the big bang. The idea that the Obama campaign is somehow transformational will lead the democrats to the same disaster that the turning of the Reagan win into a religion has done to the republican party. Look at the historic parallels. Bush has been horrible just as carter was perceived as horrible. The price of gas was through the roof we were being humiliated overseas by a bunch of religious fundies and housing prices and mutual funds were in the toilet. The country is rejecting the status quo not embracing some new idealism. The idea that we are fundamentally different is a fantasy of the left. The bigots are still defeating equal rights for gays. The idea that drilling and despoiling our natural environment is a good thing is wildly popular. We are still fighting about god and imaginary friends like they actually exist. The idea that a woman is entitled to determine her own health care is still anathema to huge segments of the population. McCain was actually winning this race until the market collapsed in spite of the fact that the incumbents had destroyed the nation. The belief that Reaganism was changing America was the trap for the right, the result is now that their philosophy is crumbling as the dogma is disproved. Back when this cycle began the idea that a democrat could lose this election was ridiculous just as the idea that the disgraced Carter had any chance was idiotic. Stop spouting nonsense about transformation and actually govern well. Competence is the only transformation that the electorate is seeking. In closing I will remind the left that even after the humiliation of impeachment Al Gore still won the election before it was stolen Hope everyone enjoyed All Hallow's Eve.
This post was generated by a discussion from Dkos about the nature of superstition and its effect on politics in America. I am an antitheist. I try to combat the ignorance of faith with rational argument whenever I encounter it. I feel we will never solve many of our problems as long as we live in a faith based society. I am aware that this puts me at odds with the vast majority of the populace but truth is not democratic. I do not claim to have a monopoly on truth but once something is falsified it is over for me. Even though I live an unconventional life I am bound by convention. It inhibits my creativity and prevents me from reaching my full potential in some ways. I fall into habits from fear or laziness, I am not prepared to answer which. I think it is to some extent a function of my chronic depression. These people trying to claim that the universe has been fine tuned for life are driving me to distraction today. It ignores the way in which life happens. These physicists are deliberately ignorant of evolution or so it would seem. They have this desire to make a, “God.” We do not like the world not to have meaning. We are not happy when there is a how but no why. We want a why and we want a complete story. I have heard it said that we are constantly making predictions about the world around us and that that was what intelligence was, making better predictions. . Science is about the what and the how not the why. The universe is not well suited for life. Most of the universe is unable to sustain any form of life. The very idea that it is fine tuned for life is on its face laughable. It took about 8 billion years for our little corner of the universe to get around to creating life. It seems that once the suitable conditions developed life evolved pretty quickly on earth. 300 million years after it first formed. It then took another 4 billion plus to get to what we call intelligence. We will probably never know exactly how it started as the data is not well preserved. We will also never know why other than the fact that the laws of physics permitted it to happen. If we ever find life elsewhere we may be able to conclude that these same laws required it to happen but until then that at least remains an open question. Our present understanding of the formation of the solar system leads us to think that this type of formation has happened elsewhere many billions of times over. If that is true then the probability that we are unique is very low but it is not zero. As Fermi asked, “If the universe is full of intelligent beings where are they?” or words to that effect. I have been looking further into Quantum mechanics of late, listening to some lectures and trying to learn the math. Uncertainty and probability waves appear to be the latest refuge of the sellers of superstition. God in the gaps allows for the industry of ignorance that is religion to continue to sell its idiocy to the uneducated. The god wads will say that the concept that life exists because the universe and the laws of physics allows for it is intellectually lazy. I say the idea that there is a creator is intellectually lazy in the extreme not the other way around. Biological fine tuning is an invention of the charlatans. It is encompassant on them to explain why it took 2/3 of the life of the universe to get to life if it so brilliantly fine tuned for the purpose of our existence. . We as humans have existed for .000000014% of the life of the universe. The fraction of space that we occupy is so small I would compare it to the space one electron takes up in your body. So the concept that an all-knowing all powerful being sucks that bad at creating a universe insults even my feeble intelligence.
I am sure to be dating myself somewhat but back in my high school days there existed a fad known as streaking. At its height it inspired a parody song by Ray Stevens and interrupted the academy awards appearance of David Niven. The point was to strip down and run naked through some large gathering of people to piss off the squares. Many of the fads of the young are about pissing off the squares, tattoos, men piercing their ears and nose rings for women to name just a few. But today I want to talk about a different kind of streak, the kind that the superstitious revel in to everyone’s detriment not the young nudes running thru the crowd that don’t hurt anything. This is the story of a sour old man that lives in a cave kept warm by hate for the new and the love of the streak. Just another square yelling at the kids to, “get off my lawn” wrapping himself in the certitude of his beliefs with his superstition as the belt tying it all together. A grim tale indeed. Long ago in a land of sand a man discovered the rituals. He learned them from his father and his fathers father and he learned them very well. He practiced and practiced until he knew them inside and out. As his family was friends with the ruler in the land with the sand they lived a good life and were very, very happy. The tall young man practiced the rituals and then one day he heard about a far off land that also practiced the rituals. All I know about the land I learned in Kipling poems and pictures of poppy fields on the news. And the news was bad, very bad. Some evil men from an evil empire were attacking the land of mountains and poppies and men of the ritual. These evil men had the wrong answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything. They did not follow the ritual these evil men and that is bad indeed. Now part of the ritual that the man followed every day in every way was to go to the aid of the fellow followers. Since the man was faithful to the ritual he felt that he must pack up his goods and go to the land of the mountains and poppies and fight the evil empire. After many battles and many setbacks and with the help of some men from other far off lands the evil empire lost. As with many that had come before the mountains and the poppies and the barren landscape proved to much. Battered and bruised the evil men tucked their tails between their legs and slunk back to their own lands defeated by the man in the cave. The man in the cave had been true to the ritual and become a hero in the land. The bad men were gone and the killing could stop and he married many wives and fathered many children and told all that would listen about the rituals. He was a humble man and he gave all the credit to the streak and the faithful following of the rituals. And so the pitcher wears the same undershirt unwashed for every game and the Giants win the world series for the first time in San Francisco and. Hey I am telling this tale and so I get to include my fantasy so piss off all you Cubs whiners. Time passes and the man does the rituals everyday and convinced of he rightness of the streak the man in the cave decides he must share the good news with all the world. He took a look at his new friends, the ones that had given him the food and the guns and the money to drive out the evil ones. Did they know the answer to the big question? Did they know that the ritual and the streak would tell them the answer to the meaning of life the origin of the universe and everything? He had tried to tell the evil men about the streak and the rituals giving them the answer to the great question, the meaning of life, the universe and everything but they had not cared. They had just wanted to get stuff that might be valuable and eventually once the man in the cave succeeded in making it cost more than the hills and poppies were worth they had split. But now the land was run by armed men that believed in the rituals and were convinced of the rightness of the streak. Part of the rituals was to embrace the enemy of my enemy as my friend but now my enemy was gone. Were they still my friend? He looked hard at the new friends and found them lacking. They did not have the right answer and they were kind of pushy these new friends. What was this good man that lived in a cave to do? He thought and he thought and he finally had an idea. He would make a video, of course. And in the video he would explain to his new friends that thank you for giving me the guns and the money and the food. Thanks for showing us the cool new gadgets to drive out the evil men but now we have a problem. You guys have the answer to the great question wrong. You do not have the right answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything. You guys don’t know about the rituals and the streak and if you are going to hang out with us and get the stuff that has value it is imperative that you get it right. So he made the video and he found one of those Ted Stevens tubes. I think that’s what they are called that lead to the Algorenet and all around the world people saw the video and went yawn., “Dude you live in a cave.” Time passed and the rest of the world went on with their lives while the man in the cave did the rituals and kept the streak alive and waited for everyone else to get smart. Time passed and the man in the cave kept making videos telling his new friends, “you really should put down the Stephen King and the El Ron Hubbard for a couple of weekends and read our book and learn about the rituals and you will see that we are correct and we will all know about the streak and we will all do the rituals and we will always win and everything will be wonderful. If you can’t do that at least honor the streak and get your jinx guys away from our really cool places where the streak began back before any of us were born all the way back at the beginning. And they kept shoving them up the tubes to the Algorenet and they waited and watched and kept the streak alive and did the rituals and turned their attentions to reeducating the locals that had lost their way. They blew up some statues that some other guys that had the wrong answer to the question had spent a really long time working on and did not even have the courtesy to say, “my bad’. The loud bang woke up some of the dudes in the , “Intelligence community”. I don’t know where this community is but it probably has gates and a guard and fresh water and lots to eat and cool toys to play with so when guys that live in caves start to throw rocks they go, “Dude he lives in a cave” for the most part and went on about taking the stuff they wanted from the place that the streak began. But even in a place called intelligence by the law of averages there had to be somebody that had some. Sure enough there were a few. They remembered some of the old ways of the , “Cold Times” and they knew some of the magic that they kept to themselves and their masters had been given to the man in the cave and they began to watch him. To look and learn and gather the mysterious ranting that came to the Algorenet from the many Stevenstubes. They heard about guys at the magical schools that taught man how to fly with the birds and not be like Icarus but these guys didn’t care about not crashing and how could that possibly be right. The only reason anyone learned the magic is to make money and people with money always want to land and not crash so that must be a mistake because, “no one could have imagined.” Time continued to pass as it always does and the man in the cave and some of his friends got tired of waiting. Time passes really slow when you live in a cave keeping the streak alive and so they decided maybe just maybe these great Satan people with their women drivers and stupid cartoonists were never going to get to 42. So they made another video and sent it up the tubes and said if you aren’t going to do the rituals and honor the streak you must go away. The man in the cave had been in the cave for a very long time and as any of you that have spent time living in a cave can tell you it can have its moments but dude it’s a cave. Even with the rituals and the streak, “come on people wise up and get the answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything.” “Let me go see some of those wives that I married when I was still the newest Idol winner before I moved back into the cave.” So the man in the cave sent his friends out into the lands to call attention to the streak. Since they had been in the caves for quite a while thinking about the old days they forgot to get on the cell and call the Dolly Madison Avenue guys and ask them how they disguised disgusting chemicals as food and made them so popular that people would still eat them and think this is way better than the bowl of fruit I was eating last week so please give me more food that will give me a big belly no. They used the same tactics that they had used to drive out the other bad men. They bombed and they taught the streak in the schools and they planned and they plotted and the sat in the caves and they kept the streak alive. They shoved more of those videos into the tubes like little fishes to be caught in the nets and the few warriors that thawed out their brains in the far off land of intelligence began to look and learn. And why didn’t the men want to learn the comedown magic? They always wanted to learn that first and so they sent up the smoke signals to warn the frozen soldiers in the community of Intelligence to watch these dudes from the land of the man in the cave. The few dudes put their pointy little heads together and wrote a PDB which should not be confused with a PDF but both are full of words and words is for reading and reading is good as the leader of the great land once said. But maybe he had eaten a little too much Rice and destroyed the integrity of his Colon and spent to much time on the thrown. So when they read the PBD with the ominous title of, “The man in the cave really, really, really wants to kick you square in the nuts so maybe we should kick him in the nuts first.” He couldn’t hear them over the sound of his own farts. The different tribes of the national security gated communities had the old computers that couldn’t read each others smoke signals and come on the only people that put smoke into their computers are the kind of people that live in caves and believe in different kinds of streaks like get off our manifest destiny you people that have lived here for thousands of years. You obviously don’t have the right answer to the meaning of life the universe and everything so I can lie to you and peanut butter jelly dance peanut butter Jelly dance. So the man in the cave did the rituals and cast the sooth and said to the cave guys this will get these guys to realize that they have the wrong answer to the question . And like all the guys that live in caves and cling to the streak and practice the rituals and are sure that they are right about the answer to the big question they sent out their dudes to shove their answer up the asses of the unbelievers. They never think that killing a whole bunch of the unbelievers might not have the desired effect but instead might make them come and bomb them back to the stone age. So next time dude maybe we should think this through? It is highly possible that they did think about it and said hey we have the streak and all you guys have been going around and beating the crap out of everyone that screws up the ritual so the streak is alive and dude we are already living in a cave, how far back is the stone age anyway. So they decided to say “GFI” So the man in the cave got a lot of people killed and made a horrible mess and made the world suffer all because he never could get the fact that your side didn’t win because you all wore the same colored socks. The streak is just a coincidence.
As part of my efforts to become a new media douche bag I have entered the realm of podcasting. My Virtual midlife crisis first episode is up here a rant about economic deception.
Have been busy with the housework and mundane tasks as well as body recovery the last few days, sorry for no new posts. When I feel like crap I just don’t do much in the way of creativity and tend to fall into a depressive rut. Plotting another trip south, debating whether or not to fight the crowds that will be at the music festivals that are upcoming in Benbow and Laytonville. In addition Don has been less able than usual so I don’t want to go off until he is getting around better. I think I will hit the beach Friday and clear out the cobwebs. Keeping the training up doing a minimum of 10 miles a day except for yesterday when I did laundry. The other thing bumming me has been on the politics front. With the primary season over it has now become apparent that the media is in the tank for the corporations and the story is going to be that the dems are evil tax and spend flip floppers and that whatever talking points come from the right wing will be the story. We have the need for independent media in America but I have no Idea where it will come from. The internet should have been that source but it seems to be turning into an echo chamber . I read and comment on the Dailykos and the Huffington post as well as tripping thru the blogrolls on those sites and see a disturbing trend. These communities tolerate dissent about as much as the church. Try pointing out that Tim Russert is not a good journalist in the midst of his promotion to saint hood or that Keith Olbermann is a bit of a dick for attacking anyone that points out the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton by the media and you are branded a troll or worse. I am way too far to the left to support Clinton but the mainstream treated her as a second class citizen as it tends to treat all women and I call bullshit when I see it. My problem with the Russert crap is that he knew the truth about the Plame lies coming from the White House and about the WMD crap VP Dickhead was selling but to protect his income and friendships he kept quiet and thousands of people are dead because of it. If you are complicit in the launching of an illegal war you are scum I don’t care if you were nice to your dad and kids. You are supposed to take care of your own kids so you get no points for that from me. The country is in trouble and as I have pointed out here and elsewhere I see no chance that we are willing to change. The democrats are not much better that the current scum running the country as they will continue to spend trillions on weapons and a pittance on education. They have already caved on universal healthcare and as I write this they are selling us out on immunity for the telecommunication industry for warrentless wiretaps. A two star general has come out and stated that the president is a war criminal for torturing detainees but the media is spending its time talking about little girls that want to have babies. The desire to drill more holes and burn more carbon rather than change our consumer culture and conserve permeates the airwaves. This rant has gone on long enough so I will close and say to all, “good night and good fracking luck.”
Those of you that are frequent crisis visitors will probably have noted my penchant for bad alliteration.In today's post I am ripping off Strawberry Alarm clocks incense and peppermints. Thought this video here was cool and I spent a big chunk of the day in political junkie mode hence the politics. The ignorance I will explain later but first a little bike related news. My workouts are going well did 140 miles this week and hit a milestone, 1000 miles on the odometer. Considering it is only a few months old I was impressed. I am planning to ride north again first part of next week. I had wanted to get out sooner but I have a doctor visit Monday and was supposed to be attending camp Obama this weekend but it was canceled. This time I am going all the way to the Oregon border if it takes a week each way. Today was the Rules and Bylaws committee meeting for the democratic party. Generally a snore but because of the cluster frack of Florida and Michigan there was some actual drama promised and sort of delivered. As usual the Clinton camp acted like asses and Obama showed an amazing amount of class. In a for Democrats pretty organized event they argued and eventually compromised on the seating of delegates from the two rogue states with the only sour note the performance of Harold Ickes a douche of the highest magnitude trying to claim that Hilary Clinton was getting screwed because they did not let her have all the delegates from the illegal primary. He ended his whine reserving the right to take it to the credentials committee before being embarrassed by the speeches of the other members of the committee. This may be a little inside baseball for most of you but Obama had given Clinton what she wanted on Florida and the vote on Michigan was 19 to 8 against her by a group that was supposed to have at least 15 of her supporters on it. The Clinton supporters pretty much made asses of themselves shouting down speakers and yelling out non sequiturs. When all was said and done Obama was still in the lead by an insurmountable number and Hillbilly was vowing to fight on to the bitter end. Not a bad days entertainment all in all. And now for the ignorance portion of today's program. I was pretty up beat having written the 2nd instalment of A New Obsession an adult story that I posted on my rude blog. Then my friend Mina was shooting some pictures with some of the props I had sent her and I was watching on the Spycams. Then the folks at CNN killed my buzz with more fallout from the latest crazy preacher scandal at Trinity United Church. You know home of the Reverend Wright that wacky spiritual advisor to the Obama family. Turns out that He and Michele were having to quit their church after a visiting preacher gave an insulting little moronic ridicule filled rant about Hilary. Father dipstick made the mistake of making it all about race and the idiots in the pews danced around like, well idiots and Fox news had another weeks programing. If Obama is not the next president we will have the good folks at a little south side church in Chicago to thank for it. I have spoken before about the Ignorance of faith but today I have a slightly different take on the theme. I watched the presser from South Dakota Barack had to explain why he had quit the church and felt genuinely sorry for the guy. He takes this shit seriously and so does his wife so it is really crappy that the news goons have hounded him out of his little social club. Especially when these same dickhead media morons can't seem to be bothered to investigate real stories like say lies about WMD or contractor fraud. Running for president is not supposed to have a religious test, look it up the Constitution prohibits it, look it up.
The war in Iraq has been a study in propaganda in its most pernicious form. I was listening to the archivist and folk singer Utah Phillips the other day in an interview recorded before his death and he pointed out that before the Nazi party the word had a much more benign meaning. It was the conveying of information to support a position. In other words making an argument based on facts that supported your side. Goebbels corrupted that idea to mean making up the facts to support your side and the folks in the White House today have adopted this use of the word as their model. In making the case for the invasion it was not incumbent upon those that took the position that we had to invade to put forth the facts that did not favor their argument. In the market place of ideas that is the responsibility of the opposition. We can get to the failure of said opposition in another debate but the current administration new that the facts they were asserting were untrue. That is why they should be prosecuted as traitors and war criminals. When Dick Cheney went on television and said they knew the location of the WMD he knew that the fact he was asserting was a fabrication. The center for public integrity documented the 100’s of instances of this so I will move on to the present and the need for this little exercise in propaganda as it was originally defined. The idea that John McCain is a teller of truths in the language of Bill Clinton is a fairytale. Let me provide a few examples. When the good Senator visited Iraq in 2007 in an effort to garner support for the ill-conceived war he visited an open air market. He then went on television to tell us that his visit proved that we winning the war because he could walk around and shop. One of his companions compared it to a farmers market in Indiana. Not having been to Indiana in a few years I can’t say that you do not need armed guards to shop there but here is the truth about Baghdad. For the Senator to walk around this safe secure marketplace he had to strap on a bullet proof vest, surround himself with 100 of our finest young soldiers and put 4 helicopters overhead to circle the area. A few weeks later this same market was closed by suicide bombings but as I stated before that is not his responsibility to bring out. Just don’t lie about your trip that’s all I ask. Did he forget that the cameras were running as Hilary Clinton did in Bosnia or was he counting on his pals in the mainstream media to go along with his lie as they had with the Bush folks. McCain is pushing the, “the surge is working” meme so hard he make Sisyphus look like a piker. He quips in his speeches that General Petraeus drove around in an unarmored Humvee.The pentagon was denying this nonsense the moment they heard it and again McCain was forced to admit he, “misspoke” but in the same breath he uses the lie to support his bigger lie. For those that try to advance the idea that we are winning in Iraq the phrase that our troops are doing everything we ask them to brilliantly tumbles from their mouths with ease. They deify the generals and when anyone dares to question their wisdom or competence that questioner is called un-American and traitor. I have one but one question for those folks. If they have done everything they have been asked and the surge strategy was so brilliantly designed to win why are they not on their way home to a well deserved victory parade?
The photo is of the Ingomar club. It was built by one of the timber barons in the late 1800’s and is the most distinctive building in my little corner of the universe. It always reminds me of the Winchester Mystery House, the gun makers widow haunted by the spirits of dead Indians thought she would live as long as they never stopped building on the home. What does this have to do with elitists you might ask? Well the difference between being elite and elitist is in the details and a story I am working on for you guys from a trip to South Dakota put me in mind of dead natives. I am not of the elite, it took me 18 years to finish a BA for Christ sake not exactly Rhodes Scholar material. That being said I am a liberal latte sipping pinko bleeding heart elitist and proud of it. Well I really don’t like lattes that much but the phrase is so evocative I couldn’t resist. Allow me to elaborate. I live in America. I was born here and it is a pretty nice place to live. I have had the chance to visit a few other countries and some of them are pretty nice as well. In my time in the good ole USAF I also got to meet lots of folks from other lands, Asian dependent wives, middle eastern pilot trainees and central American refugees serving to become citizens to name a few. I point out these facts only to show that my position is not one of ignorance of other cultures but from my own sense of morality. The term elitist is probably inaccurate to some extent, it might be better to say that the upcoming rant is more cultural imperialism but the world will be a better place when we adjust cultural diversity to exclude nonsense and barbarism. I want the guy in charge to be smarter than me. If you are a legacy to a school that isn’t exactly noted for academic brilliance and finish at the bottom of your class you are not really qualified to run the worlds largest military. I think the last legacy guy proved that point. Oh I forgot evidence isn’t important only faith. If your religion thinks that mutilating genitals of children is acceptable then your religion is not period no exceptions All religion is a problem in my opinion but that is just an opinion and we already established that as an ass I have one but your right in a free society to think whatever nonsense you like stops when you start cutting the fun bits off other people especially children that have no say. If your culture treats ½ the worlds population like second class humans than screw your culture. It is inferior not the woman get over it and join the civilized world. No honor killings, rape is not a right that comes with a marriage license, nobody has to wear a sack over their head because you can’t keep it in your pants. You do not have the right to tell one person they must die rather than remove your DNA from their womb. These points are not negotiable either All humans are equal and endowed with inalienable rights or none of us are. My anti theism does not negate Jefferson’s assertion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator ….” the fact that the creator was a pool of primordial ooze and the creation took several billion years doesn’t alter the fact that human rights are given to us all by virtue of being human. I have mixed feelings about Thomas, a brilliant thinker as well as slave holding rapist. How did he reconcile these dichotomies in his own mind. Sort of the same way that so many in our culture believe that separate but equal is horrible for blacks but just fine for the gays and lesbians among us. Many of the worlds great thinkers held some rather strange beliefs so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised I should just be thankful that Newton didn’t let his religion interfere with his mechanics and that Darwin didn’t either. My culture is full of its own viral memes, rampant commercialism, the elevation of private property over the environment and the most destructive of all Manifest Destiny. I freely admit that this glass house rock thrower is far from perfect and invite corrections from all quarters. After all as an over privileged white male I am way past due for a little comeuppance.
I have blogged about this before but watching today’s news makes my head want to explode. Let me first dispense with the Governor of NY and expensive hypocrites. My position on prostitution is that humans own their own bodies and you should be able to sell sex like anything else. I think you should be able to sell Kidneys and other extra parts on Ebay as well in theory. In reality prostitution means exploitation and pain even when legalized for lots of its participants. The legal prostitution in Amsterdam’s red-light for instance while better than the system most places has been unable to prevent the trafficking of poor women from eastern Europe into a form of slavery. Nor has prohibition prevented San Francisco from having Asian slaves in massage parlors. The dualism pervasive in western thought works against solutions as does the puritan sniggling of the talking news chicks. That being said prostitution does not have to degrade anyone and should be decriminalized at least to protect the participants. It is my same feeling, as on immigration making a human being illegal helps nothing. It simply allows those in authority an opportunity to prey on the weak. Spitzer still had to go because rather than stand up and say, “hey I like to bang hookers bare-back in the rear” he gave us some disappointed my standards bull crap. You were putting people in danger of ass rape to build your career for doing exactly what you were doing. My solution for you, don’t drop the soap scumbag. Bang a hooker, blow guys in airport bathrooms, put on a diaper and get your freak on I don’t care but if you make your living persecuting your fellow enthusiasts when you get caught you go down. Now to the race baiting affirmative action dog whistling that is dominating the campaign news. I voted for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket and at the time thought that Gerri made the case that she was qualified but I have never been of the opinion that men are smarter than women having grown up with a sister that is a genius so I was easily convinced evidently. She seems to actually believe that as a product of affirmative action she was peter principled and so all affirmative action leads to incompetence. If she had not run out this same meme in the 80’s about Jessie Jackson I would give her the benefit of the doubt but unfortunately like Dr. Watson another highly educated pioneer she is stuck in the dark-ages about skin color. Feminists are pissed as their chance at power is slipping away and it may not be fair but going race is to hand the election to McBush. I wonder if the Red phone fear mongering from the Mondale era was her idea. My position is that we can ill afford 4 years of the right as we are already past the tipping point for global climate and the endless war is evil. This subject leaps out at me as a white male of lower middle class background, as my ilk is the target audience I see it sometimes when it may not be there as this is the same thing that the Regan scum used to attract the so called, “Reagan Democrats.” I have made no secret of the fact that I think we are still pretty bigoted and as my black friend from the Daily show so aptly put it, “We are only voting for the chance to vote for a black president. Come November a 70 year old white guy might be just the change they are looking for” And actions like Senator Clinton and her surrogates are part of the problem not the solution.
