Your moment of Zen

Sometimes bad is bad.

I find the strangest things to get angry about. Maybe it's because there's so much anger waiting for an opening, maybe because I'm a cranky, intolerant language snob -- who knows, but when reading about some scientific dispute over inflation and the early universe in Time ( yes, I know, what did I expect?)  some undoubtedly young know-it-all journalist felt good about defining the word Schmutz as used by a scientist  by going to the Urban Dictionary, instead of a German dictionary. (yes, God forbid an American should speak some other language than "Urban")

So what does it mean when something is "Urban?"  Obviously, and like everything in that publication, it means something other than what it means. It certainly doesn't mean "of or pertaining to cities or the people who live in them," it means slang, it means hipness.  It means dubious etymology and slang is hardly confined to metropolitan areas, now is it?  Urban means, when you're speaking urban:  hip and in America hip means -- well I don't know what it means, but it doesn't mean accurate, not when good means bad and bad means something other than bad-ass but both are good in a sense but only if you're bad -- and the authority for all this blather is unknown or non-existent but urban.  I'm afraid it often means that snarky jargon spoken by journalists who are writing off the tops of their heads about things they don't understand, seeking to add color and flavor to dull words -- and that's the opening from which to exercise my spleen this morning.

Schmutz is a German word and like German nouns in general, it's capitalized.  It means dirt and  whether or not the Urban Dictionary says it's a Yiddish term “used by Jewish mothers to identify that you’ve got some kind of crap on your face” it's still the German word for dirt used by German mothers and fathers.  Yiddish, of course has many German words in it although they often differ in meaning - sometimes dramatically. This one just means dirt in either and has nothing to do with being "Urban"  and everything to do with ethnic. Is this a slur against Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel? or just an annoying assumption? Either way it's just bad journalism and by bad I mean bad in the non-urban but not suburban or exurban or even country sense.  The German word for that is Schlecht.

Your Moment of Zen

Never Forget?

By Capt. Fogg

It's hard to find a coherent picture of Barack Obama in the roar of inflamed rhetoric.  The rhetoric itself is incoherent, mixing accusations and metaphors with the most bizarre results -- and such is the passion for defamation it's probable that no consistent pattern will emerge for a generation.  He is what he is, somewhere behind the halo of  howling hate that surrounds him. 

Whatever you might think of him, it's tempting to plug other presidents of another party and another color into the equation just to test for mendacity and absurdity: such as perhaps to assume Reagan were president during an embassy bombing ( he was) or W.  ( he was) and it's tempting to reverse it by assuming it were president Obama not showing up at the dedication of the 9/11 Memorial Museum last week instead of the notably absent Bush whose 8 year career was floated on the attack and the subsequent War on Terror. 

George W. Bush deliberately stayed away for reasons, possibly good reasons, of his own and was in Arkansas attending a ceremony for Medal of  Honor recipients, but anyone with an unfoxed memory remembers how the Republicans jeered, howled and hooted about flag pins and the size of the flag on Obama's airplane and posted endless doctored photos and forged documents designed to attack his patriotism -- anyone with a sense of irony would wonder what those dancing devils would have done to Obama and snicker at what they certainly are not doing to Bush for staying away. It would have been a three ring, twin tower circus for weeks and months and years if not cause for impeachment.

And of course, I had to find out about this from the foreign press, the mis-titled Liberal American Media being far too concerned with other trumped-up Obama scandals, racist comments by team owners, Benghazi bullshit and other ridiculous attacks on Hillary Clinton, missing airplanes and the various and ever-changing apocalyptic horsemen wearing Obama masks.

Never-Forget George probably didn't forget and he's probably right not to make the dedication all about him, about his going to war with an uninvolved country and permanently giving up important civil rights in the process instead of being about the dead.  Still, it  makes one wonder at all the "never-forget" passion that was and is as transient as the all the "never-forget" events -- but then, forgetting, like false remembering is part of  the game and it is a game after all.  The only real goal of that game is winning.

TFN

By Capt. Fogg

Seems as though I'm alone in worrying more about Russian aggression in Europe than about rooting out and punishing obnoxious racial opinions expressed in private.  But in fact I'm starting to worry about freedom of speech and it's de facto abuse even though that abuse isn't coming from the government.

Wolfeboro, New Hampshire Police Commissioner Robert Copeland was overheard  sounding off in a restaurant last March, complaining that he hated watching television, because every time he turns it on, he sees “that f-cking n-gger.”  TFN, of course, being the president of the United States Barack Obama.   There has been, as you might expect, a call to have him resign or be fired, but the town just isn't having any part of that and a fellow commissioner claims he's a "very nice person." No doubt he is on matters other than insulting our country and its president, our citizens of African ancestry and basically everyone else who finds such public speech to be unacceptable and particularly by an elected official entrusted with public safety.

Am I the only one who finds that far more egregious than a private phone conversation, taken out of context and without permission and involving a businessman acting jealous with his would-be girlfriend?  It won't get the publicity of course, because it doesn't involve one of the sacred games our nation cares about more than anything else, but whether or not Copeland decides to step down with or without the support of his peers, perhaps the people's right to censure, if not censor such speech will be exercised at the polls and TFR that f-cking racist will have to find an honest job somewhere else.  I strongly defend the right to hold an opinion as well as I defend my right to use any legal means to make sure the holder thereof  isn't on the public payroll.

Honey, we never had kids!

By Capt. Fogg

Someone told me that the Church of the Latter Day Saints is the fastest growing religion in the world, but it isn't -- not if one can call a family of beliefs that share the philosophy that nothing you hear is true a religion.  Of course when it comes to Sunday Supplement health and nutrition articles and the books that make diet Doctors rich, little of it may actually be true, but there is no end of things that are really beyond reasonable doubt and should largely be beyond unreasonable doubt too.  I wasted some time last week for instance with a fool who insisted no airplane could have hit the Pentagon because of the "ground effect"  although I certainly know better than to do that.

But no, the winner, the fastest growing most universal faith is Denialism and I think it's time to stop looking at it as anything but a Religion.  It has a canon and a catechism, albeit simple:  Whatever happened didn't happen and I have a conspiracy to explain it.  I have proof that nobody ever went to the moon because the pictures they took would have been ruined by the Van Allen belts.  The pyramids were built by aliens because how else?  The World Trade Center must have been sabotaged because steel doesn't melt at the temperature of burning jet fuel. . .  No, don't go away, I'm not going to explain why this is the purest of bull, I'm more interested at how nothing true is exempt from Denialist interpretation  any more.

Sure, it's a big country and you can find a few people who think anything and deny anything.  It makes them feel important, but like most religions in today's America, they have their preachers and politicians and lobbyists spreading the faith like it was Ebola.  Think nothing is true and they're coming for your shotgun?  Who ya gonna call?   Rand Paul!  

Imagine someone calling you up and insisting that not only did your daughter not die in the school shooting at Sandy Hook, but she never existed!  Birth certificate?  Hey we know about birth certificates, don't we?  And we know about Photoshop too - you can't fool me with your pictures!  Hey, it was all a scam to allow the government to take our guns and you know they have no other purpose than to take your guns!

Rand Paul thinks so too, or at least he wants the nutjobs, nitwits and whackadoodles to think he does because after all, lunatics, idiots and devout Denialists need representation too.  Nope, nobody died, it never happened and if you know somebody who died, you're a liar, because they never existed. 

Stunning, isn't it, but that's the world of Denialists, or "truthers" as they often like to be known.  Who says they're immune to irony?  They're good at it, even if they can't see it. 

With Limbaugh and Coulter, who needs Satan?

By Capt. Fogg

Think the insanity in America isn't getting worse: angrier, more obtuse, more vicious and increasingly bought and paid for by people who admire Vladimir Putin and wish, like Fox News has so often said, we could have a leader like him?  Think again.  There is no bottom.  There is no fact so irrefutable, no cause so decent that the Republicans can't defame it or deny it.  I'm not going to waste any more time pointing out the lies about science and history and law that drown out the very processes of justice and government -- that inflame unstable people to violence, that argue for obedience to non-existent gods and anarchy over Democracy.

I'm going to talk about behavior that is so unforgivable and horrible as to be Sadistically pathological and  which provides proof that justice and compassion and any traces of  our founding ideals is no longer possible.  Behavior that is hardly noticed and rarely opposed in the festering ruins of America, where the poor, the suffering, the starving, the hopeless and bereaved are fair game for the millionaires who spend their lives shitting on morality itself.  I'm going to talk about the Republicans.

Think there's no one low enough to mock Michelle Obama for expressing solidarity with kidnapped girls to be sold into sexual slavery?  Sorry, there's Rush Limbaugh with his long history of siding with genocidal African terrorists like Joseph Kony and calling Obama "anti-Christian" for not supporting him in the rape and slaughter of women and children.

Think Ann Coulter isn't trying to outdo Limbaugh in the mockery?  Of course not and after all, these girls are African and Michelle Obama is African American and like her husband who "went over there and apologized to them" and isn't the legal president anyway so he's fair game and they're not important.

No, there's no bottom. There's only American mud and the slimy things that squirm out, vermicular, batrachian, reptilian, festering and pustulent and septic, out of the corrupted body of right wing politics to shit on everything decent and to drag what's left of my country straight down to hell.

Your moment of Zen

Wisteria tunnel Kawachi Fuji Gardens in Kitakyushu, Japan. [via Landscape Architects]

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Reality bites Reality Show

By Capt. Fogg

I think we have to hold this truth self-evident: bigotry doesn't pay. Bible-Based or not, and even expressed in private, Racism, Homophobia, and Bigotry can cost you almost everything. Nobody will hire you other than Fox News and other GOP franchises.

David and Jason Benham were about to get their own HGTV 'reality TV series until it came out on Right Wing Watch that David, one of the twin Biblievers had been ranting outside the Democratic National Convention at Charlotte, NC in 2012 about "homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation" and "demonic ideologies" taking hold in colleges and public schools.  Hot Potato time again at HGTV.  Gay people and people who are tired of people who rant about what their toothless old threadbare god hates watch HGTV and in sufficient numbers that bigotry doesn't pay.  Hey who said the market doesn't sometimes correct itself? Who says Capitalism can't force bad products off the market?

Hey -- that reality real enough for ya?

Liberal Nazis don't want you to know this!

By Capt. Fogg

Lots of things are happening in the world that Cable News disciples don't seem to notice or know about.  Lots of crazy stuff is swept under the racist team owner, missing airplane, sunken ferry rug every day.  It's a revelation.

I read today about another one of those wonderful preachers who seem to have a handle on our real problems -- the kind of stuff we need to read more of.  I'm talking about Brother Dean Samuel who showed up a a screening of  a film about 1998 Miss World Pageant winner and rape survivor Linor Abargil last month, wearing a T-shirt saying "You Whore."  It's her fault for being raped, he says, she should have stayed home.

He's right.  That neighbor across the street who leaves his garage door open is just inviting me to steal his Ferrari  and it's his own damned fault if I do. Don't you just love Christianity?  Do what thou wilt is the law - for men of course.  Hey, don't argue, God's a man, or two men and a bird, but don't ask.  The answer gets kind of weird.

And then there's that moral and righteous Newt Gingrich who got all Puritan on us when Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down, cheating on his wife while Newt was doing the same thing?  I'm glad I didn't get distracted by the Missing Plane and got to read how "Liberal Nazis" forced Condoleeza to cancel her commencement speech at Rutgers. He blamed an "elite Media" for this horror:  "an elite media that would have been screaming if right-wing groups had done this to a Somali woman and an African-American woman."  'This' meaning calling her to task for helping to falsify information about Iraq,  ignore information about al Qaeda and justify a war that killed hundreds of thousands, helped punish critics, destroyed a country that had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 and bankrupted our economy.   Thanks Newt, you're a real piece of Patriot.  Who else could conflate opposites and accuse others of your own sins with a straight face?

There's so much going on with those damned Liberal Nazis elsewhere we need to know about.  Take the outrage perpetrated on a California school district superintendent, Mohammad Z. Islam who wanted 8th graders to research the Holocaust to see it if ever happened or the Jews actually made the whole thing up for money.  Those Liberals didn't want us to know about this so we couldn't offer Mr. Islam our support for his freedom of speech!

If you only watched commercial, for-profit news (other than Fox) you'd probably never know that the people of Oklahoma have no blood on their hands for the grizzly execution that took 43 minutes to kill Clayton Lockett, bound to a table and zapped with a cattle prod so they could continue to pump agonizing chemicals into his groin. It's true - he didn't bleed.  Damn bleeding heart liberals anyway -- too busy telling us we're not a Christian Nation to help hold the guy down.

And again, are the Liberals trying to keep you from hearing Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court tell us we need a new constitution to protect us from "gays and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg?"  The same judge who bravely asserted that "Buddha didn't create us so the first amendment only applies to Christians?"  Liberals don't want you to know the truth.  Not like Fox News who aren't afraid to tell you that people who want to take prayer out of state supported schools are like Hitler.

No all this stuff that makes me proud to be an American and I had to find it on the web because the liberals don't want us to know!

My own moment of Zen

I'm making a major life shift this month. The path is uncertain but too enticing to refuse. [Image via and via]

You can get anything you want

By Capt. Fogg

You hear a lot about "enlightened self-interest" and mostly from people who think Ayn Rand's fiction illustrates a paved path to a better world. Of course I can't argue against enlightenment in principle or against the fact that as living beings we must put self-interest on a high plane. My problem though, is with the slipperiness of the term.  In general it resembles self-interest wearing a nice Sunday suit, but everyone has his own ideas, from the ascetic practicing Ahimsa, to the libertine, to the employer or Investor amassing wealth.  It's hard to pin down, but your idea and your degree of enlightenment is in the eye of the beholder.

In an age where religion as a moral teacher and ethical authority has exceeded the credulousness of many Westerners -- and in an America where the most audible religion has receded into vicious threats and angry condemnation of most things other schools of enlightenment might accept or even applaud there are too many tempting choices on the menu.   This Alice's Restaurant style religion  really doesn't serve to direct us away from the authoritarian self-interests of  its merchants if it has a direction at all. You can get anything you want, but will the waitress let you eat it?

Take Arizona Pastor Steven Anderson, for instance, whose obsession with regulating sexual thought and behavior and the consequences of defying preachers isn't much different than other sticky things left in the bottom of the religion barrel like sludge as the lighter substances in the crude evaporate off.  For his ilk, birth control is just an evil thing, because it introduces an element of freedom, an element of personal choice.  It allows that God's plan for unrestrained procreation be tinkered with by other concerns like health, economics or that Humanist blasphemy: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

He's not content to give us his malediction without condiment however. He has to spice up the Crazy Christian Chalupa by insisting that women who don't feel like getting pregnant are whores and that women were meant to suffer in childbirth and probably suffer with the commandment to ignore her own needs and desires as well.  He has to point out to an audience  that needs, none the less, to give a false nod to science and pragmatism and public health, that birth control is somehow harmful to their bodies, unlike cigarettes and alcohol and punishment from the husbands to whom they are commanded to submit. After all, the woman not burdened and suffering as the Biblegod requires, is likely to "sin" which in general means to pursue life, liberty and all that happy evil  -- and that specifically means she's likely to have not only sexual thoughts, but act on them despite authority.

In general Steve, like the rest of the Oldest Profession, wants to tell us the freedom of not having to choose between love and suffering is  "ruining the country" which is really the admission that he and the other voices of ancient evil are losing control. It's also an unnoticed admission that the idea of Democracy is essentially and unavoidably sinful. 

Few of us would contest that enlightenment in the vague way most of us would define it, is the enemy of self-justified moral authority and divine but ambiguous wisdom, but who do we have to teach us just when altruism is required and how much and for how long?  Who will set guidelines with regard to how we treat others who compete with us or work for us -- or for whom we work?  Face it, the Bible leans both ways if we can discern any concern for human well being in it at all. The Bible in fact does not approve of democracy nor did Jesus and without democracy all we have left is -- well you know: people like Pastor Steven Anderson. He's no help.

So can we stop talking about enlightenment and begin to talk about our right to choose -- everything? Nobody is going to enlighten us without a self-interest of his own design and that means we have to settle for consensus and when 70% of America wants not only to have a minimum wage but to raise it, that's enlightenment enough and warring theories about what is good or bad or what Pastor Steve, Rand Paul, great yelping Yahweh or St. Loonie up the cream bun thinks are irrelevant.  Democracy is the best we can do and the only way we have to give everyone's enlightenment a voice. And what does that say about those who argue for limiting it to those with a specific interest?