Verbum Dei

One of the more tedious ongoing narratives in the current mediasphere is the supposed rending of garments in the Catholic church over (surprise!) the roughly ten-millionth "revelation" of pederast priests raping and abusing children. That it's a subject yet again for "discussion" merely reiterates once again the utter paucity of ideas, of clear thought, of individuals in free societies deciding to once and for all during their brief existences on the mortal plane of flesh and futility to assert their own rights.

There are few good things about religion, any religion, and they're generally outweighed by all the bad things. But perhaps the best thing about religion, even in a frequently puritanical country like the United States, is that it's purely voluntary. No one makes any adult go to church, any church, and certainly no one forces anyone to stay in any church that preys on their children and their wallets.

No matter what this or any pope says about his internal anguish over these vile events, the prime directive of that position is to preserve the organizational structure, to do nothing that would threaten the authority of the hierarchy, and its sacred ability to prise cash from it eternal customers. That's not going to change, no matter how "progressive" the current pope's views are on gays and atheists and such. The job description remains what it's always been for two millennia.

The good news is that most of the major western churches have been losing younger customers, who simply aren't sufficiently interested or motivated to join a club with dues they can't pay and rules they won't obey. Especially in 'murka, where self-help books and lifestyle gurus function as the secular religion of the would-be upwardly mobile. The "solace" that religion can provide pales in comparison to the possibility of consumerist redemption in the temple of the holy kardashian.

So the dilemma for the spiritually conflicted is actually fairly simple:  either you support this, with your dollars and your commitment, or you don't. Rationalizing with "times have changed" bunkum won't help, not after the next eventual revelation, and the one after that, and so on. If they want to be Charlie Brown to the pope's Lucy, and keep on believin' that this time they'll get to kick the football, they are welcome to it. But the rest of us don't care and don't want to know.

Then again, like all "news" stories, the article and those like it aren't meant to reach or inform the ordinary reader, the peon with plenty of opinions but no power whatsoever. What we think of as news is really just the amalgamation of elites talking to each other, and filtered out to the masses as manufactured, pre-approved consent. Whether the priest wears a collar and speaks Latin, or wears a suit and spews state-sponsored bullshit, the result is the same.

Yet Another Cletus Safari, Alabama Dingbats Edition

These people just never fucking learn:  the day before a hugely contentious Senate election, perhaps simply to prove that it's not just old angry white wimmins who love them some Roah (I say, Roah) Moah, Cosmo decides to give us all some "insight" into what the future iterations (one of them, I shit you not, is a Moah campaign intern) are cogimatatin'. Well, there's five minutes we'll never get back.

I honestly have no idea what purpose these stupid pieces are intended to serve, but let's note for the record that there does not appear to be any Cosmo article presenting an opposing point of view -- say, even one (1) person of any gender explificatin' to those of us dumb enough to waste time on these things, why they cannot vote for Roah Moah, and are in fact voting for Doug Jones.

Seriously, is there anyone out there who actually cares what these dipshits are thinking, why they do what they do, their excuses for the way they vote? It doesn't matter what they say -- their Christianity is the angel topping a Christmas tree, and their self-professed morals and values are merely the tinsel and lights to get you to look. It's a costume, a pose. It is meaningless.

They will say whatever they think is necessary to rationalize what they know inside to be a wretched choice. And their state will pay for it, as aerospace and tech companies will be the first to start divesting. Good.

We need a better media, one that doesn't keep legitimizing these jabbering retards by taking their pulses every few weeks. Listen close, assholes:  the majority of this country voted against Fuckface Von Clownstick, and his works, and people like Roah Moah. Maybe you should consider talking to a few of them once in a great while, if only to provide the veneer of "balance."

Poll Tree

I suppose it's okay to have a bit of a snicker over the idea that there's a small percentage of grown-ass adults who seriously think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, but it should be more concerning that nearly half of Americans take bible stories 100% literally.

Sometimes you figure that at least some of these people are just fucking around with the pollsters; after all, there's a fair chance that I would do something like that. But then you have occasion to venture out into the beautiful, big, messy world and talk to some of these folks, and you realize with much chagrin, they're dead fucking serious.

Big Love

It's always a good day when one of these FLDS pervs gets busted. This one is particularly funny -- Lyle Jeffs had been on the run from the feds for a year, and was found living in his truck outside of Yankton, South Dakota. I mean, if you're gonna go down, go down swingin', chief.

Though he's getting popped for welfare fraud, Lyle Jeffs is part of a multi-generational, multi-family, multi-community cult that rapes girls, drives out boys, ruins towns, steals money from taxpayers, produces scads of inbred children and destructive intra-family relationships, and serves as a shameful vestige of a religion that, whatever its faults, has at least made some real effort to modernize itself a great deal in a relatively short period of time.

It would be nice to think that this shuts down these goofballs, once and for all, but like mushrooms and cockroaches, they pop up everywhere and are tremendously difficult to completely eradicate.

The God Deception

If political god-botherers wonder why no one outside their own circles take them seriously, Roy hits it on the head. They prattle on about "principles" and "testifying" and "bearing witness" and all that bullshit, while they connive and contrive ways to conceal their support for someone who routinely bears false witness against others, is on trial for fraud, has bragged about his adulterous behavior, and lives a life entirely based on covetousness, thus violating five of the ten commandments they supposedly revere.

The most off-putting thing about self-styled "moral majority" Christian conservatives is how convinced they are of their own righteousness, of how much better they and their bullshit principles are than we worldly secular types. Well, bunky, you're a liar, and a pretty fuckin' bad one at that, if you can support a candidate whose entire adult life is characterized by some of the most un-Christian behavior imaginable. We'd all be better off if you just came clean and admitted that you're full of shit, that your principles are empty and meaningless.

But then, it was always a lie. These are people who have spent the last generation or two lining up for transparent charlatans like Marion "Pat" Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The only consolation is knowing that these suckers keep giving money to the hucksters in exchange for a salvation that will never come. If there was a god, they'd have been fried by divine lightning years ago.

Saint Misbehavin'

Apparently Pope Francis is formally canonizing Mother Teresa this weekend, and the only fair response is whatever, pal. I don't understand the purpose of saints anymore than I understand the purpose of the Catholic church itself. It's merely custom, tradition, and not much more than that. We do it this way because we've always done things this way.

One of the finest polemic efforts by the late great Christopher Hitchens was to pierce the impermeable balloon of perfection that MT had cultivated for herself, by buddying up to Princess Di, while taking money from scumbags like Baby Doc Duvalier and Charles Keating. (As Hitchens famously recounts in The Missionary Position, the prosecutor in the Keating case personally implored MT to return Keating's ill-gotten, fraudulent, tax-evading contribution to her cause, to which she feigned ignorance in perhaps the most literal sense of the word -- she gave a nonsensical response to the request, and then essentially ignored him.)

Hitchens nails it by pointing out that while MT postured as a friend to the poor, what she really turned out to be was a friend of poverty and suffering, as she sincerely believed those things to be gifts from god. Relief from those ailments was not the goal; the more elusive goal of "redemption" was the point of her ministries. (Well, that and her more public stances against abortion and divorce. Anything that might empower women, MT's cause was to stand against such things.)

Bloc Heads

One of the most tedious features of political horse-race coverage is how inept it tends to be. Even the Monday-morning-quarterback hindsight assessments tend to be off, because they tend to be based on assumptions going in.

Last night's South Carolina primary is a good example of that. Conventional wisdom had it that "evangelicals" would go for Cruz, and instead they went for Trump. The media don't really know what to make of evangelicals, and when they ask them questions, of course the evangelicals spout a bunch of god-bothering jabber about their morals and values.

I saw a commenter somewhere -- a conservative Trump supporter, mind you -- recently say something to the effect that most of the southern evangelicals he knew had been divorced several times, used meth, oxy, and or alcohol, and usually could be found at a casino. He was not saying this disparagingly or admiringly, just in a matter-of-fact way.

Cruz Control

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. -- President Lyndon Baines Johnson

From the "couldn't happen to a nicer guy" file, it seems that 'murka's Favorite Comb-Forward, upset at someone approaching his yuuuge poll numbers, has decided to turn up the heat on noted immigrant Rafael Edward Cruz, Junior. (Bonus fun:  If you like Junior, you'll love Senior.)

Perhaps the most hilarious part of this is Chump's threat to file suit against Cruz for not being native-born:

When I file suits, I file real suits.

Yeah. Sure he does. Does George Stephanopoulos not have access to The Google, the better to challenge Chump's idiotic assertion with something along the lines of, "Really? Can you specify one of your lawsuits that didn't get tossed out of court, that was actually successful? What the hell is wrong with you?". That sort of thing.

And the Home of Depraved, Part Too: Dipshit Boogaloo

As more information on the horror at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood yesterday comes in, one thing is clear:  it would be a mistake to focus on the gun-control aspect of the case. Unless this asshole literally bought his weapon out of the trunk of some other asshole's car in a cash transaction -- and probably even then -- nothing will be done. The usual bloviators will do their thing, and America will go right back to what it was doing.

We seem to have collectively "agreed" that these now-routine events are the cost of doing business, as well as (rightly to some extent) that's there just no percentage in penalizing the majority of responsible gun owners because of the actions of a growing number of psychopaths. You may not agree with that, yet still recognize that it's the way things are, and they're not likely to change. This is not exactly a surprise or a secret.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that they took the gunman alive, even after he killed a cop (who was also a Christian minister). I can't be the only person to wonder that if this fool had been black, they would have turned his dumb ass into Swiss cheese. Do we even need to guess about that one, given that black men get shot into the double digits just for maybe having a knife, or trying to buy a BB gun? But they took this cracker motherfucker alive. If you didn't know better, you might start to think that some lives matter more than others.

But what really makes this one a bit different is that there is almost certainly a direct line that can be drawn from the (to put it mildly) creatively edited stealth videos designed to put Planned Parenthood in the worst possible light in the summer, to the (to put it even more generously) fact-challenged speechifying from most of the Gooper clown car over the fall. Obviously, this is a highly emotional issue, and the anti-abortion movementarians seem to be an emotionally turbulent group of folks, unmoved by appeals to logic, reason, common sense, or even just the basic idea that adults should be allowed to make their own medical decisions without interference from the basement case picketing on the sidewalk.

It's even more nakedly cynical than that, as there is at least enough of a plurality in the Republican party that is pro-choice, to make the repealment of Roe v. Wade very unlikely. It is a false carrot dangled by the party establishment, like gay marriage, to gull the "social conservative" maroons into voting for something that doesn't affect them in the first place (until, of course, as inevitable as the sun rising in the east, of their kids comes out of the closet or needs a "procedure"). Even then, it doesn't matter, as the right to choose has been gutted throughout most of Jebusland, thanks to the Democrats' complete inability to convince broke-ass dopes to vote for their own rational self-interest.

So there was no practical reason for those PP videos to even be made, as the issue has no national traction, yet is succeeding already at the state level. They just did it to do it, again to consolidate the vaunted base. But the ramped-up inflammatory rhetoric aimed at the aforementioned emotionally turbulent target demo takes it to another level. They were asking for it, and now they got it; an irrational person responded irrationally to an argument that was irrational in the first place. Who could have predicted such an outcome?

Maybe someone should ask Cruz and Fiorina and Huckabee and the rest of the short bus crew how they like their wedge issue now.

Thanks But No Thanks

Well, you can't say the headline doesn't try to warn you, but yeeeeaaahhh, I don't think any of us really needed to see Kim Davis' emails to know that she really is a narcissistic loon with a persecution complex. Ordinarily you might figure that at least some Kentucky taxpayers might resent their tax dollars going to keep such a clearly unqualified fool employed in any capacity.

But then, this is the state that, despite being one of the most unhealthy in the nation, overwhelmingly voted for a governor whose main promise is to dismantle Obamacare in the state. So fuck 'em. May they reap exactly what they sow.

Lie of the Crier

Not sure what the hell Mike Huckabee thinks he's going to get out of bandwagoning and orchestrating the small (300 people? really?) pep rally for oft-married, recently converted super-Christian Kim Davis' release from county jail. If he thinks his single-issue preaching to the converted is going to get him so much as a low-level cabinet appointment in a never-gonna-happen Ted Cruz administration, he's even dumber than he sounds trying to defend this sanctimonious dunce.

Are her fifteen minutes up yet already? Again, who gives two shits what a handful of inbred rubes and jokers think about anything? They've already got their minds made up; we know who they'll be voting for next year and for the next ten to twenty years. There's no mystery about places like this. These are people who literally cannot decide whether or not they should be allowed to purchase alcohol. Are they Moooslims, or just stoopid?

OK Stupid

So looks like good ol' Josh Duggar has stepped on his dick yet again, getting caught in the Ashley Madison hack not only as a denizen of that site, but apparently he has an OK Cupid account as well. Knock me over with a feather.

Unlike sanctimonious, holier-than-thou shitheads like, well, the entire Duggar family, most of us realize that humans are messy, complex, full of contradictions and complications. The difference is that most of us do not earn a cushy living trying to legislate morality for all.

Devil's Advocate

So this must be one of those "assaults on religious freedumbs" we keep hearing about:

Shofars sounded amid the chanting and cheering, clapping and crying as about 100 people crowded together on a strip of sidewalk in Eastern Market today to pray and protest the Satanic Temple’s plans to unveil a Baphomet monument in Detroit later tonight.
....
A news release billed the unveiling as the largest Satanic ceremony in history. The event was ticket-only, and the location was to be given via email to ticket holders on Saturday.

Those in the crowd were not having it.
....
The bronze statute weighs one ton and stands nearly 9 feet tall. It has horns, hooves, wings and a beard. It had been planned for the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, until Oklahoma’s Supreme Court banned religious displays on Capitol grounds.

As the crowd grew, two women huddled on their hands and knees as people sang and prayed over them. One of them crawled through the crowd, tears falling in big drops to the pavement. “The blood of Jesus,” she recited, over and over.

Yeah, that'll help. Good grief.

It would be nice to know a little more about this "Satanic Temple" beyond the Baphomet statue. Where are they based? How many people are part of it? Do they have a spokesperson, do they have other plans? Answering questions such as those is admittedly a bit more challenging than transcribing the babblings and brayings of the addled faithful, but if this organization plays its cards right -- and so far they have -- they could conceivably push to get all religions back into their places of worship and the homes of their respective believers.

Which is where such things belong.

The Audacity of Pope

It's interesting to watch liberals and environmentalists make common cause with the pope on the subject of climate change, since chances are they profoundly disagree with him on many other issues -- not the least of which would be the proximal causes of said environmental shift. I guess you take support where you can get it, but this a pretty tough one to get around.

Don't get me wrong, compared to his predecessors, the current pope is relatively (dare I say it?) progressive. He has made overtures to other faiths, gays, even atheists. Credit where it's due and all.

But I don't see how you can logically separate the acknowledgement of an ongoing climate crisis, and the worsening problem of overpopulation. Consumerism is certainly a substantial part of global warming and environmental degradation, but it doesn't account for, to name one egregious example, the mass extinction we're now in the middle of.

Somewhat oddly, the major areas that are and will be experiencing continued population increases are India and Africa, regions which are not necessarily attuned to what the head of the Catholic Church has to say about much of anything. China has some responsibility to bear as well, not just for the sheer scale of their population, but because they are the primary consumers of these endangered species that are being poached. Americans are obese and vulgar, but they're not buying ivory and eating tiger penis soup.

It is sickening to think that within another generation or so, we will almost certainly be without any tigers, rhinos, lions, elephants, lemurs, and many other amazing graceful creatures that used to share the planet with us. But we'll have somewhere between nine and ten billion humans by 2050, many of them scavenging and poaching and pillaging and overbreeding their way through what passes for a life, each putting toxic drops into an ocean of impending catastrophe (I defy you to find a more purple metaphor in the next, say, 24 hours).

His Holiness has very little to say about all that; in fact, he's taken the opposite tack. It's as if he recognizes that we are falling off a cliff, on the verge of a perilous precipice, and yet would rather ignore that whole pesky gravity thing.

This is not a small point. The church is never going to budge from condemning abortion, and one assumes that even the most ardent atheist or pro-choice advocate can at least understand that stance. But a smart -- and truly progressive (ugh) -- pontiff would strike a creative and useful balance by moving the dial on contraception. Again, the parts of the world most in need of that are not Catholic in the first place. But it can't hurt, and you have to start somewhere.

There's a phrase I've oft repeated in this here venue, and I sincerely believe it should be the motto or operational guideline for virtually every governing body of any size or importance:  People (in the collective, aggregate sense) will not change their behavior until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing. This is as true and axiomatic as noting that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. The corollary to this is that it usually takes some sort of catalyzing event to get them to realize this; life has to break one off in their asses before the light bulb finally goes on and they see that their current path is unsustainable.

You used to be able to at least count on the basic principle that individuals wanted to leave the world as good or better than they found it, for future generations, that they wouldn't want to leave a toxic shithole for their children and grandchildren. The boomers squashed that long-held precept; those motherfuckers refuse to compromise on a goddamned thing as they dodder off into senescence. They fucked us, and they're entirely cool with it. Very well then, at least own the damage you've wrought. Consider yourselves lucky we don't shut off the payout valve the second you've recouped exactly what you paid in, and then set you out on a fucking ice floe with a crate of Matlock and Murder She Wrote DVDs.

This groaning, overburdened planet cannot take much more of what we're giving it. A deity that wants countless individual souls to be actualized, only to perish early in an impending mass die-off if we continue down this road, is no friend to its believers. Like any politician, a pope has a balance to strike between the intellectual, the spiritual, and the practical. (Yeah, I know.) But time gets shorter, and the practical must start taking precedence.

The C Word

Some people find religion, in the comparative sense, fascinating. I am not one of those people. Sure, I get the idea that a system of proscribed mores and values can help provide comfort and solace in a violent, chaotic, entropic universe full of unexplainable -- and indeed unfair -- events and entities. It is the warm pink blanky that can grant purpose and meaning to someone who might otherwise not see any point to enduring a brutish existence.

The part of religion I do find interesting is how people can get caught up in more, let's say, dogmatic and rigid belief systems, especially those without any cultural standing or acceptance. In other words, cults. Now, like any good atheist I tend to subscribe to the notion that a "cult" is simply a religion that hasn't been around long enough to gain wide acceptance. But I think we can also describe pretty clear qualitative differences between, say, Judaism and the FLDS (or even mainstream Mormonism and the FLDS). It is a strange phenomenon to watch people who are willing to join and stay with a club that subjugates and abuses them as part of official policy. It's the worst form of Stockholm syndrome.

You may have watched the recent Alex Gibney doc Going Clear, a rather energetic broadside against Scientology that premiered on HBO last month. It's well-made, if not ideally sourced, and perhaps the most contentious section is the now well-known Xenu backstory that is revealed to adherents when they pass the coveted Operating Thetan 3 (aka OT III) level. This mythos is held as prima facie evidence that Scientology is a cult founded by a crackpot.

It's difficult to contest that assertion, except to note that pretty much all religions, mainstream and otherwise, have these types of stories built into them, either as creation mythos or as supporting evidence of certitude (for example, Jesus rising from the dead three days after being crucified). These stories serve two primary purposes:  one, to provide a colorful metaphor to convey some key component of the religion's belief system or pantheon; two, to challenge adherents to take that proverbial leap of faith (it is, after all, a leap of faith and not a leap of reason, n'est-ce pas?).

Freedom of Choice

So the outrage de la semaine is, as it turns out, completely imaginary -- that is, a small business has been mercilessly e-heckled not because they refused to cater a gay wedding, but because they said they would refuse if asked. Is this what it's come to?

This is a tough one to be sure, friends 'n' neighbors, at least at first blush. From a practical standpoint, it's difficult to see how the appearance, right or wrong, of kajillions of cyber-twats over-reacting and e-spewing their self-righteous virtual venom is going to help win any converts to The Cause. All it's going to do is make the folks who already have their backs up pitch their coccyges that much higher, so much so that the pizza place in question -- which, let's recall, didn't actually have any complaints about discriminating against gay customers -- is now probably going to get a nice payday from ButthurtWingnutCrowdfunding.com, or whatever it's called.

It's one thing if a Big Corporation pulls that sort of shit and gets hit up with the Big Angry, quite another when it's a mom-and-pop prayer-circle pizza joint. I'm sure some noted sage or other had something pithy to say about picking and choosing one's battles wisely, but goddamned if some of these dopes never got the memo.

Of course, as you might suppose, that other side rushing to the defense of "religious freedom" is every bit as insufferable as their bien pensant counterparts, if anything even more so. I can't envision a scenario that puts me on the same side of any issue as noob tool Tom Cotton, and I'm not about to start with this issue, especially since the guy seems about as hinky as it gets. (Seriously, what kind of a grown-ass man buys birthday cake every few days?)

What all this nonsense has accomplished is that it's allowed idiots to crowdfund a cross to nail themselves to for their piety. This one is just a peach:

The florist who refused to provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding has netted more than $80,000 from an online crowdfunding page dedicated to “protect her and her livelihood.”

Stutzman was fined $1,000, plus $1 for court costs and fees in March for refusing to serve a gay couple when they tried to buy wedding flowers in 2013, reported ABC News.

Stutzman said even though one of the men who wanted the flowers was her friend, providing flowers for his marriage went against her beliefs as a Southern Baptist.

Well, with "friends" like that....

It would be interesting if one (1) of the media entities publicizing this martyrdom jabber would follow up on the crowdfunding aspect of all these people, see how many of those pledges actually pay up, or if some of them, once the drunken glow of self-satisfaction wears off, look at a pizza place getting nearly a million dollars pledged to it in the course of just a few days, and decide that for that amount of money, what's the harm in changing your mind?

The concern trolls will ask questions, as is their wont, and they should be answered, as they apply across the board: does a Muslim bakery have a right to refuse service to a Christian or Jew, or to an unaccompanied woman; does a gay wedding photographer have a right to refuse to serve a straight couple; and on and on. Turning some of these tables on the most strident voices, forcing them to confront their own choices and their own personal bigotries, might just beat it into the heads of at least a few of them.

The current whinging will die down soon enough, as these dumb things tend to do. But it will be back, again and again, as the perennial presidential campaign continues apace. We've come a long way on this issue in a very short amount of time -- it was barely ten years ago that ol' Turd Blossom used it as a wedge in the southern states to get the win for his boy Fredo, and to grab a few down-ticket races as a bonus. But people have come around, the anti-marriage laws have been dumped and replaced.

Right now it's being portrayed as "personal rights" or "religious freedom," in much the same way that the Woah o' Nawthun Aggression is about "states' rights." But as Primus said long ago, the flame that burns twice as bright burns only half as long, and this is no exception. Once the brave and noble e-defenders of liberty have moved on to the next imaginary outrage, gay patrons will remember, and they'll be buying their flowers and pizzas elsewhere. In the end, this is not politics, or even religion. It's just business.

Dick Dynasty

If I'm going to bother to pray, it's going to be for Phil Robertson to kindly go fuck himself, and take his retarded "show" and his bullshit fantasies with him. Your fifteen minutes are up, and you're still a braying shitbird, "dude." I might actually order a Duck Dynasty t-shirt just to make a YouTube video of me taking a big creamy dump on it, and wiping my ass with it. These American ISIS types can go straight to hell already.

Of course, I could easily deconstruct everything Robertson actually said at this so-called prayer breakfast, and point out fact-by-fact how he has a bizarre and ridiculous misunderstanding of what atheists actually believe (and don't believe). I could point out that his weirdly detailed torture/murder fantasy of his imaginary atheist family says a lot about Robertson's fevered brain, just as much it utterly denies how a real Christian would characterize their savior's message of love and tolerance.

But it would be a waste of time to do that. Robertson is a turd who inexplicably got rich and famous for doing very little, and has chosen to use his platform to push a cultlike mentality of what constitutes morality and belief. This pig-fucking dipshit can't disappear soon enough.

Yahweh or No Way

The tragic news of seven children perishing in a fire in an Orthodox household, started by a malfunctioning hot plate left on for 25 hours through the sabbath observance, naturally inspires the usual religion-bashing for some. Perhaps not without some justification -- after all, seven children died under entirely preventable circumstances. (And is it just me, or is this just about the weirdest, dopiest write-up of such a tragedy? "Red Devil"? Hanh?)

To me, the various "step on a crack, break your mama's back" sabbath rules are less of a point of conjecture than the cheats some "believers" have developed to work around said rules. Cafeteria Catholics are one thing, but it is truly perplexing that someone would take the time to modify existing pieces of standard equipment like telephones and elevators just to avoid pushing buttons.

One would think that the spirit of the Melacha rules, aside from showing compliance with the rules, is to encourage the believer to use the sabbath day for contemplation and reflection. Or not; maybe the rules are just there to make sure people obey them. In either case, what is the urge there to try to find ways to sneak around the rule?

Apparently this hot plate work-around -- and the house fires that start when they're left on for too long -- is commonplace in these communities, which makes you wonder if they can't just make a sandwich or something for the night, have some cereal, something that doesn't require you to leave a dangerous device plugged in all night. No deity worth worshipping would seriously expect you to endanger your life and your family's lives with obsessive rule-following.

Perhaps instead of finding inventive ways to squint around the foma, it might be more productive -- and intellectually honest -- to simply decide to obey them, or not.

World On Fire

The Republicans are basically the proverbial car-chasing dog who, once he's caught his quarry, has no idea what to do with it. If they really want to stick with their formula of Johnny Walnuts having a permanent seat at the Sunday morning follies, the usual think-tank monkeys agitating for war with whoever looks good, and Ted Cruz making an ass of himself at every turn, hey, go with what you know, guys.

It's become a well-worn truism that football (yes, American football, dammit) has become more dangerous in recent years not in spite of better technology, training, and protective gear, but because of those things. Instead of average-sized men holding off-season jobs to make ends meet so they can play football for a couple months in the fall, you now have superbly conditioned, freakishly proportioned men colliding with one another in suits of technologically sophisticated armor, at much higher rates of force and impact than in the era of Chuck Bednarik.

Similarly, the rapid advancement of drone technology has emboldened the hawks to instantly assume that airstrikes and drone-bombings are the "safe" option. And they are safe -- for us. Drones give policy-makers, armchair generals, and average joes alike the ability to just not think about there being any consequences to military actions. Not that they think about those things unless they or one of theirs is in the line of fire.

It's bad enough that we have been bombing -- maybe not indiscriminately, but not all that carefully either -- civilians in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But airstriking Iranian nuclear facilities means hitting cities. Tehran and its suburbs have somewhere around 20 million people. The nuclear labs have been quite deliberately placed in populated areas, albeit mostly underground. They make it sound so simple, we'll just "take out" their facilities, knock out their program, end their attempt at regional hegemony. Done and done.

Did we not just finally extricate ourselves from a decade-long clusterfuck that was sold as a slam-dunk, one that we'll be paying the financial, ethical, and medical costs for the next generation? Is the region not worse off in every way since we barged in and gave them their sweet, sweet freedom? Is there really a preponderance of 'murkins that thinks it's a simple and good plan to "surgically strike" the Iranians pre-emptively, that moral considerations aside, it would even just accomplish what its advocates say it will accomplish, nothing more, nothing less?

I don't think anyone has any illusions about what Iran is up to here. They really are moving, quickly and with purpose, to expand their influence in the Middle East. They are Bashar Assad's lifeline; they do flex nuts in Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad -- and now in Sana'a, Yemen. They are surrounding the Saudis, waiting for the off chance that they flinch and provoke the Iranians, or more likely, waiting for ISIS to continue streaming into Saudi from the north, radicalizing an already radical citizenry, overthrowing the petrocrats, sending that country and probably the world economy into (to put it lightly) a turbulent situation.

So no one's saying that they're the good guys, the mullahs. But when the very same people who got us into Iraq are insisting that we simply must start it up with Iran, that it'll be quick and precise and work better than any other option, well, that's the time when you look at the people and politicians in this country, the United States, and see if they're ready to fall for that one again, so soon after the last one.

Some of them will; some of them are always ready to fall for whatever affirms their assumptions about how the world works. Some of them have trouble remembering that while we are friends to Israel (and they have the checks to prove it), our foreign policy is supposed to protect our interests first. But if it's a majority that's in favor of that mess, then you have a real problem.

The God Racket

Religious huckster Ken Ham (yes, the "Creation Museum" jagoff) is at it again. Since even a Bible Belt backwater like Kin-tucky won't grant his Noah's Ark theme park (you read that right) a fat tax rebate, Ham has responded with perhaps the dopiest conceivable propaganda campaign -- a barrage of crayon-scrawled letters purportedly written by young children, anguished and aggrieved at the state's "refusal" to let the nice whackjob build his stupid park.

Just for the hell of it, let's enumerate just a few of the ways in which the supposedly Christian Ham is, well, a goddamned liar:

• The letters use clearly adult phrasing and appeals to argument, such as “Kentucky doesn’t want to be pushed around by non-believers," and “I am not just speaking for me but for the people of Kentucky, for the Christians of Kentucky, and for the next generation of Christians.”
• No one is preventing Ham from building his shitbox, the state simply decided that since Ham engages in discriminatory hiring practices, the taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill for his business.
• There is no such thing as a "Christian ark". Even if he actually existed and actually built an ark, Noah was not a "Christian", as Christians did not exist until, you know, Christ came along. These mouth-breathing halfwits can't even get the fundamental tenets of their own religion right.

Again, because I sincerely believe that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money, I support Ken Ham's plan to build his silly ark park. I hope he fleeces these maroons for everything they're worth, and spends every dime of it on hookers and blow. But there is absolutely no reason taxpayers should help him build the damned thing.

These people are the lowest form of hypocrites, really -- they talk shit about the evil gubmint every chance they get, emphasize their independence from secular authority, until it comes time to pay their fair share. It's the oldest ongoing racket of all.