Obama Lights Up: Ruminations from a Fellow Addict

Will the stunning revelations never cease? When pressed during an interview with Tom Brokaw, Barack Obama waffled a bit before admitting that he hasn't been entirely successful in kicking his nicotine addiction. He still lights up from time to time, but he's promised that he won't do it in the White House.

During his interview with NBC News' Tom Brokaw over the weekend, President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged that he has had some trouble kicking his smoking habit but promised that the White House would remain a smoke-free zone.

"There are times where I've fallen off the wagon," Mr. Obama said when asked if he had stopped smoking...

— Source

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Smoking is bad. Kids, don't try this at home. Everybody tells you this stuff, so why should I repeat it? In most ways, this item is a non-story. The last eight years of radical misgovernment have left many aspects of our nation's well-being in smoking ruins. A smoking Executive? If he can pull America out of its historical nosedive and make repairs to our economy, infrastructure, international relations and commitment to education, I don't care if Obama likes to pound nails up his nose while singing the theme song from Bonanza at 3:00 in the morning in drag. Really, really bad drag. Get over yourselves, snap snap.

So while I'll readily admit that a smoking president might not be the greatest thing in the world, it's far from the worst. I say this as a smoker myself, and one who, like Obama, has made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to kick the habit. In light of that, my first bit of advice to the President-Elect, were he listening, would be to stay away from Chantix. It did weird things to me when I tried it, and I got my hands on a prescription the week after it went on the market. Chantix impaired my memory and caused me to have multiple episodes of sleep paralysis that left me an utter wreck after about two months on the stuff. We can't risk having that in a president. All things considered, he's better off sneaking out to the Rose Garden for the occasional smokebreak... and so are we if he stays away from varenicline.

So, even though I am painfully aware of how addictive cigarettes are and have a pretty thorough understanding of how and why they're so bad for you, I'm going to play the optimist here and speak about the upside of this nasty habit. Yes, there is one and no, it's not worth the health consequences and no, this isn't an endorsement of inhaling particulate matter. Still, the guy already smokes. Let's think about the lung being half-full for a moment.

In one way, I've benefited from being a smoker. Because we smokers are banned from indulging our habit indoors in the workplace (and rightfully so), we have to step away from whatever else we're doing every so often in order to pump a little sweet, sweet nicocrackatein into our bodies in order to be able to maintain our concentration and evenness of mood. It's boring to do that by ourselves, so smokers naturally form little cliques that take breaks together. From experience, I can say that these little sessions have allowed me the opportunity to learn about all sorts of things — useful things — from other smoking colleagues. This is as true now that I am studying biology as it was when I was a headhunter. It's hard to get time from people to simply learn from them what they know; everyone's days are pretty full. Those smokebreaks make it happen. I've learned about everything from inside information regarding the executive teams at high-tech startups to the problems with designing primers for insect mitochondrial genes from fellow junkies.

Might Obama reap the same sort of benefit from amongst the negative consequences of his unhealthful indulgence? He might. You know, he might not be the only world leader, or staffer employed by a world leader, who smokes. He might not be alone out there on the White House steps puffing away in the dead of winter. Who knows what breakthroughs might come when he's joined out there by some government official from another country? What inside knowledge might he gain from sharing a few tar-tawnied moments with a staffer traveling with the Prime Minister of Brunei? Scorn if you must, but these smoke session are intimate in a way that the inside of an office or conference room can never hope to be. You're removed from that environment. You're outside. Maybe you're cold and feeling a little alienated. It's natural that such a situation breeds candor amongst those involved. Obama's health might suffer just a little, but we as a nation might just come out ahead because of it.

I have another common trait I share with Obama, or at least I like to think so. Both he and I are highly educated and possessed of a level of intelligence markedly higher than the outgoing president. The latter is, in and of itself, not saying very much, I know. Still, from my own experience I can state that my own awareness of both the costs of smoking and my inability (so far) to quit is a rather humbling thing. It reminds me of my own frailties and it probably does the same for Obama. Such weaknesses are intrinsically humiliating things to anyone with even a modicum of self-awareness, and Obama's waffling in the interview likely demonstrates that he has experienced a similar awareness and its consequent humbling effect. I've long maintained that anyone narcissistic enough to think they ought to be president probably shouldn't be elected, so it's a hopeful sign that Obama gets this periodic thump upside his head with the two-by-four of an unresolved character flaw. He's aware that he's not perfect, that he can do wrong by himself. He's not likely to wave that silly banner of divine right and council like some Chief Executives we know. I'm aware that plenty of people will disagree with this notion that I prefer my humans both flawed and aware of their flaws. Lots of folks think that a president should be a spiritual leader of some sort, a shining paragon of white knight rectitude. Me, I like to see that the guy knows there are some chinks in the armor. It's hard to be humble when one thinks of themselves as perfected. Besides, as embarrassing a habit as smoking is, is it really any more humiliating than


I think not.

Now, look, the fact that Obama is going to sneak off for a cigarette when the pressure is on every so often is not something to be celebrated. Still, presidents have done a lot worse in recent memory. I'll take smoke-n-choke over shock-n-awe any day of the week.

So, Mr. President-Elect, smoke 'em if you got 'em until you don't need to get 'em anymore. From one smokin' schmuck to another, you have my sympathy on this. It must hurt to have the press and the naysayers jabbing their fingers into this bullet wound in your self-image. I'm sure Michelle gives you as much grief over the habit as LL gives me; I also can't smoke in my home or in my office and I'm quite acquainted with the winter winds of New England as one result. Still, maybe you can leverage this for our benefit somehow. Whatever it takes. If I'm ever in DC and see you out having a dose of the bad stuff, I'd love to come and join in your act of enlightened self-destruction. I've got a few thoughts on research funding, and so do you. We can talk about it while we die just a little.

See? Smokers' optimism.

Sphere: Related Content

A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

Sphere: Related Content

Spot the Looney: Ralph Nader and Al Qaeda Say the Same Things

It's time once again to play...

Spot the Looney!

A couple of weeks ago, Ralph Nader used the term "Uncle Tom" to describe Barack Obama. Today comes revelation of a new (still to be fully vetted) audio recording featuring Al Qaeda's #2 lunatic, Ayman al-Zawahri. In it, the fundamentalist blood-sucker inveighs against Obama, calling him a "house negro" and complaining that he isn't enough like Malcolm X.

In an audio message which appeared on militant Web sites Wednesday, al-Zawahri said that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X. He called Obama a "house negro."

— Source

Compare this to Nader's June 25, 2008 statements as well:

He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner.

Ralph Nader should feel proud that he has found common ground with Al-Zawahri. Since it should be apparent to even Nader by now that he's never going to win any public office in the US, perhaps he should look into the possibility of becoming Al Qaeda's official consumer protection advocate. I hear some of the car bombs they're using are "unsafe at any speed."

Buh-bye, Ralph, and thanks for playing Spot the Looney!

Sphere: Related Content

After the Election: Symptoms of an American Pathology

With all of the joyful noise following the last Presidential election,it's sad to have to be reminded that there's still an old sickness in our cultural body that is yet to be cured. Still, it doesn't come as a surprise. Months before the election, the purveyors of hatred were already making their voices heard. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the threats have kept on coming and have gone beyond words to action in some cases. Now that America will have its first president whose skin isn't pinky-beige, whose hair looks a bit different than the Caucasian type, whose father was an African, the venom is ratcheting up.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

Some of the incidents tracked include:

• ...Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door...
  
• Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that nigger in the head..."
  
• At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."
  
• Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted
  
• Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.
  
• Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
  
• University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur...
  
• Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported...
  
• Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.
  
• A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'
  
• In Forest Hills, PA, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

— Source

From sea to shining sea, indeed.

It would be naive to even ask why this is happening. We all know why. The pathology has been around long enough. One might as well ask what causes the common cold or why the sky is blue. There are people in this country who, having accomplished nothing with their own lives, identify their own value — and by extension the value of other human beings — by some easily distinguishable physical trait, some bit of superficial biological coincidence. It's all they've got, and they'll cling to it for all they're worth because it is all they're worth. Call that bit of inconsequential physicality into question and you call their value as a human being into question. You make an enemy who may well take it upon himself to extract vengeance.

That someone who looks different, who doesn't share some valued hue of the flesh with such people, has achieved the nation's highest political office drives such people into a rage. Some meaningful privilege that they'd hoped and believed was connected with their appearance has turned out not to be so connected. It is for this reason that I expect at least one assassination attempt to be made upon Obama. It's a pathetic expectation, I know, but it would be just as naive not to think such an event will come as it is to question the motivation for it in the first place.

Sphere: Related Content

Obama is the Antichrist, the Sky is Falling, and Bigfoot is Coming to Take Your Soul

I shouldn't be astounded at the profound depths of superstition into which great chunks of America has sunk anymore. Really, nothing should surprise me when it comes to the extremes of irrationality that grips far too many people anymore. Nonetheless, it does. It truly does. Even as some of the world comes to better understand the world as it is, to peer deep into the heart of matter and prize out the basic mechanisms by which it works, other parts of it retreat further and further into the dark dungeon of ignorance and fear and bar the door behind them.

It is thus that we find that there are people walking among us who are utterly terrified of the supernatural implications of the last presidential election. Apparently, it's the boogeyman who will be moving into the White House in January. Hellfire is going to rain down upon the planet because of this. The world is ending.

The number one question being asked: Is Barack Obama the antichrist? I've received dozens of emails pointing out the odd fact that the day after the election, the daily pick-three lottery number in Obama's home state of Illinois was "6-6-6..."

I don't see anything shocking in last week's election. I do believe strongly that a dark demonic cloud has swept over the land, but this is how we should expect the end times to play out. And, I foresee more negative events to come. The only thing that worries me is the Christians who fail to see the danger that comes from prophecy being fulfilled in our day.

I believe we are entering a time when Christians really need to set their priorities. Your last chance to do something for the kingdom of God may be sooner than you realize...

— Todd Strandberg, "Fasten Your Seatbelts"

Ummm, yeah. See pp. 51-59 of John Allen Paulos' Irreligion about that first paragraph. On November 5, as on every day, there are several numbers drawn in the Illinois lottery, and the fact is that the Evening Pick 3 number was 666. By the same token, the Midday Pick 3 was 779 and the Evening Pick 4 was 7779. What to make of that set of two numbers numbers? The odds that the combination 7-7-9 would be picked twice in the same day is far smaller than the odds off 6-6-6 being drawn once, so it would seem to me that on purely probabilistic terms the first combination would be far more significant than the latter, but this is a classic case of confirmation bias. 6-6-6 has a special significance to some people, whereas 7-7-9 doesn't, so they notice one number while ignoring the other. It's also worth noting that 6-6-6 was also drawn as the winning number for the Midday Pick 3 of the Illinois lottery on 10/23/08, the Evening Pick 4 (as 0-6-6-6) on 7/5/08 (the day after Independence Day! Clearly, America is Satanic!), the Evening Pick 3 on 3/22/08 the first day of Spring!), and the Evening Pick 3 on 1/16/08, and nobody made a big deal about these other four instances of the same number being drawn on these other days in the very same lottery. Why is that? Simple: on those days, it was simply a random number, just as it was the fifth time it was picked in 2008 on November 5.

It's all in their heads, of course. Sheer superstitious nonsense... omens and portents and witchcraft. Some people who want to believe that the next President of the United States is the Anti-christ go out of their way to find evidence to support their conclusion, then trumpet it about the lunatic echo-chamber until it becomes some superstitious blogger's "number one question." Said blogger, sharing to some extent in the belief (in this case, that Obama may not be the Anti-christ, but he's certainly going to help set this mythical figure on some throne) doesn't do any research to determine if there could be any significance. He simply furthers the ignorance and insanity in which he shares and chucks out a bunch of self-serving babble drawn from something entirely unrelated to American politics, probabilities or evidence from the same lottery that might refute the very thing he mentions yet again. Why dispel a bizarre rumor with sound information when you can preserve it with gibberish?

But wait, what if Obama isn't merely the Anti-christ? What if he's Satan himself! Isn't that special?

I have never been one for making "political" commentary, and I'll admit I haven't deeply explored the issues, but watching from the sideline, I am seeing some connections between our new president, and our old prophecies. Seems like people have been looking for the Antichrist for years, and each generation has never been disappointed to find one, even several! Maybe we have moved past that now to something even more ominous - the beast...

I have heard of Christians who voted for him for economic reasons. They believe he will save the economy. If economics is the most important thing, then our focus is in the wrong place. We cannot serve both God and money. Incidentally, there is only one other reference that I know of in the Bible regarding the number 666, and it is regarding Solomon's gold. If the mark of the beast has to do with our love of gold instead of our love of God, then maybe this is the time when the man of lawlessness has been revealed. Just maybe.

— Nicodemus, "Obama Is Not The Antichrist...But Maybe Something Worse"

Who could possibly refute the argument that people being overwhelmingly concerned about economics during a period of economic stress and voting accordingly is evidence that the person they voted for is Satan? I mean, aside from anyone who wasn't already of the opinion that the person elected was some supernatural force of evil. That economic collapse itself might usher in a period of terrible hardships across the nation and around the globe isn't important. What's important is that anyone who doesn't agree with Nicodemus' priorities, based in turn on his religious ideology, just helped but Beelzebub in power. Shame on you, worrying about the possibility of your kids not being able to get a higher education, about not having money on which to survive after retirement, about being able to keep your family fed and sheltered. All of that's just a distraction! Your family doesn't need such things, because Jesus is signing unemployment checks.

Still, for sheer desperation to believe that Obama heralds the end of the world, it's hard to beat the blatant idiocy of "evidence" like this:

One thing that has amazed me is how Barack Obama is not only considered to be a president-elect of the United States, but also president OF THE WORLD...

The Economist reported that Mr. Obama "quickly scooped support from readers in China, India and most of Europe, as well as from the United States itself. Mr. Obama won the backing of an overwhelming share of voters in 56 countries — including the likes of Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Indonesia and South Korea — claiming the support of 90 percent (or more) of those who voted."

The world map was almost a monochromatic blue expressing strong support for Obama, including in the Philippines. The only exceptions were Iraq, Algeria, Cuba and Congo in favoring Sen. John McCain. The general result of this Global Electoral College poll may look lopsided, but it is not unexpected. Opinion polls including one carried by the BBC also revealed that Mr. Obama is the world's overwhelming choice.

How about that? This is significant considering that the Antichrist will also have support of most of the world when he begins his reign. I cannot think of a time in history when an American president was viewed as an "overwhelming choice of the world."

Another fascinating feature about the antichrist is his charismatic personality that leaves people awe struck...

— Rich Wilbur, "Is Barack Obama The Antichrist?"

The fact that the election of Obama is celebrated by a world that has worried over the last eight years of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare against any nation we think might be some kind of threat at some point in the future is a sign of the apocalypse, you see. That Obama is charismatic, that he might have (shudder to think!) a global view, that he's not bellicose and threatening, that the world might breathe a collective sigh of relief... these are signs of an evil nature. Normally, of course, the United States elects uncharismatic presidents who are lazy and anti-intellectual, who view the outside world as a threat, whose finger trembles perennially just above the metaphorical big red button. The election of someone not like this, someone that the rest of humanity thinks might actually be a shift away from a dangerous America, is evidence that he might be the Antichrist.

Now, in all fairness this same author isn't fully convinced that Obama is the son o' Satan:

...Remember, the identity of the antichrist is not for us to know, but for the world to know. He will offer himself up to the world...

In the mean time, we will continue to watch and pray and make associations of what the bible says about the antichrist to Obama or anyone else who fits the bill.

Hmmm... then again, Rich Wilbur is saying that Obama "fills the bill." Wilbur doesn't know that Obama is the Antichrist, but he clearly could be, and Wilbur spends a good deal of time in this piece providing evidence that he is before leaving himself an out at the very end of his supernaturally paranoid screed just in case, you know, it turns out that he isn't.

Of course, we can save any of these bloggers the trouble by simply pointing out that history is filled with Antichrists pointed out by any number of Millennialists and the world is still here and they're still in it. The thing is, these people want to believe this nonsense. They're living in a demon-haunted world, a sort of paranoid parallel universe, inhabited by Christ and Antichrist, witches and ghosts and things lurking under the bed. Spooky stuff, that.

You know, sooner or later someone inspired by the kind of religious fear embodied by these three authors (and untold thousands more equally fretful true-believers; these are just three examples I happened across) is going to try to "stop the Antichrist" with a bullet. It's a pathetic likelihood, but I'm sorry to say that I think it's coming. It'll be someone like Jim Adkisson, some self-styled foot soldier who gets "the message" and decides to do something about it. Sooner or later, there's going to be one lunatic out there who thinks that he or she is going to be covered in glory for attempting to put a bullet into the 44^th President/Antichrist/Terrorist-in-Chief.

This is the sickness that confronts us, even here in the 21^st century, centuries after the Enlightenment. Americans still believe in evil spirits, and they believe that anything they don't like is the result of one of them. And then, sooner or later, one of them tries to kill it.

Sphere: Related Content

Ban on Stem Cell Line Development May End

I was in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad on the day that Dubya came on the airwaves and announced that the development of new stem cell lines was to be banned in the United States. He did this by executive order, a sort of edict open to presidents that Bush exploited to an extent unprecedented in American history. In any case, I remember where I was when the Dubya delivered his proclamation because it was a big deal to me at the time. It still is.

President-elect Barack Obama's transition chief said Sunday the incoming administration is looking to reverse President George W. Bush's executive orders on stem cell research...

Bush has limited federal spending on stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's...

— Source

It comes as good news, then, that Dubya's executive order is under review by the incoming administration. While it's not a done deal yet, Obama has stated in the past that he favored expanding stem cell research. If he comes through and reverses the standing executive order after taking office, the result could well be a boon not only to the treatment of injury and disease in the long run, but to American competitiveness in biotechnology in the short run. We've been losing out on both of these fronts for the sake of preserving discarded, frozen embryos for seven years now. Luckily, the research has continued in other countries and much of it is a matter of published record.

Change may really be coming. Whether this change will amount to an increase in funding for research limited to working on the few permissible (and far from the best) stem cell lines allowed under the Bush restrictions, or whether there will be the opportunity for the development of new stem cell lines is unclear to me. I suspect it will be the latter, though, if the incoming administration is honestly dedicated to letting research in the area advance.

Sphere: Related Content

Ralph Nader Reveals His Racism Yet Again

During the course of the contest for the presidency now ended, I was pleasantly surprised to note the absence of Ann Coulter from the airwaves. Coulter's slide into obscurity since the publication of her paranoid and bizarre screed, Godless, is one of the things that have given me some hope that America may be returning to reason and repudiating the visceral hatred of the radical right.

Leave it to Ralph Nader to remind us, in Coulter's absence, that old-fashioned racism and bigotry is still very much alive and isn't the exclusive domain of wingnutters. In a quote from Nader discussed in an election night interview on Fox News, Nader accused Barack Obama of being an "Uncle Tom" in his relationship to corporate interests.

Whether or not one agrees with the assertion that Obama is too accommodating to big business, clearly the assertion itself could be expressed without one of the most incendiary references to his race possible. In fact, the unapologetic Nader has gone out of his way to include the slur in his statement. What does it mean, after all, to ask whether Obama would be an "Uncle Sam" in the first place? Nader could simply have said that Obama was misrepresenting himself; there was no reason to do this.

Still, Nader has a long history now of making racist statements. Some prior instances of this have been collected here, including such gems as:

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American," Nader said. "Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white?

The assertion that Obama's ethnicity should make him predisposed to speaking a certain way and cause him to focus on a particular set of issues or to hold to some specific set of priorities is, without question, utterly racist. Obama, just like any other person in this country, is free to think about things in whatever way he wishes, to speak however he thinks best, and to prioritize things in whatever way he desires. The whole point of equality is that everyone enjoys the same freedoms and the rest of us get to agree or disagree without consideration of the coincidence of skin color. Clearly, Nader disagrees with Martin Luther King's contention that we should judge people based on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin.

I've previously made note of Nader's racist tendencies. This latest fuselade is in itself no longer surprising, just revolting. That it took an interviewer on Fox News, of all places, to call Nader out on his garbage should be an embarrassment to anyone who has ever put stock in the man enough to have even considered voting for him. At this point, Nader is no longer due any respect whatsoever from anyone at all. He should be cast onto the rubbish heap of history, right next to Ann Coulter.

Sphere: Related Content

First Wednesday in November: Obama Wins

In my recently less-than-sporadic efforts to bring you the latest news, I'm sure I'll be the first to mention that Barack Obama won the election and will be the next president. I'm glad for this. The alternative was clearly a very poor one and, of course, we're all aware by now about the historic context of his victory. This is big stuff, a sea-change, a climax in a struggle that began long before my own ancestors ever arrived in America.

I have followed the election closely for these past couple of months, even though I haven't had time to write about it. I have been all too aware of the hatred and panic, as well, that certain elements of our society have expressed over the impending turn in US history as my email box was besieged by dire and dirty "warnings" from Don Wildmon's American Family Association and their nethermost organ, OneNewsNow. To hear them tell it, we are all about to be swept up in a vast wave of stoned, gay, incestuous prostitutes in leather chaps, bearing pitchforks and crucifixes on the soles of their Birkenstocks. Their weather report, now that Obama has been elected, calls for periods of void-swallowing darkness followed by a rain of brimstone with a 30% chance of pale horses storming through the streets of America. In truth, or at least we need all hope, that these are the final fervent prayers and feverish visions of small people with tiny and malign minds, the kind that are ultimately drowned in the eddying currents of human progress.

In all honesty, one of the things that I most look forward to now that the election has been conducted and the ballots tallied is the impending absence of the whiny, shrill, nasal sound of Sarah Palin. I look forward, too, to the absence of scientific research being held up by the losing side every time they wanted to bring up an example of "earmarks" or "pork." Whether they understood basic research or not, the fact that McCain and Palin cited research into population genetic structure or molecular biology or a new projector for a planetarium — a place of science education — did not exactly endear them to this researcher. Had they won, I had visions of funding for research not entirely unlike my own simply vanishing in a puff of ignorance. They will not have the chance to do this, it seems. I count myself and my colleagues fortunate in this regard.

Aside from the historical coincidence (albeit an important one) of his ancestry, we have instead gotten a president elect who, as far as I can discern, is one of the most intelligent and well-educated in our history, and certainly in my lifetime. There are those to whom such qualifications make him, ironically, a member of the elite which, they believe, is a bad thing. There are those who will still judge the fitness of their governmental leadership on the basis of how much they'd like to have a beer with them, and those people will not shut up and go away based simply on the fact that their strange criterion has been repudiated by the electorate. On the other hand, I think that I would enjoy a beer with Barack. I would be very interested in sitting in a conversation with him without any beverages whatsoever, for that matter. We're not too far apart in age, after all, and more to the point I could easily envision a long and deep discussion of political and general philosophy with him. I felt no such thing in regard to McCain, certainly never have for Dubya, and I fear that were beer present during a one-on-one conversation with Palin, I might have sprayed it through my nose soon after she began wagging her chin. That would be rude, and I prefer not to be impolite when at all possible. The likelihood of any of this happening is nil, of course. I'm just Joe the Bio Grad Student and Obama has a government to run... and I have tarsomeres to measure. Still, my sense is that Obama gets it. He understands that the basic research of ten and twenty years ago is the technology of the present, and that once the pipeline empties it takes a long time to fill back up. America has dodged a bullet in a manner of which few people will ever be aware. It was a bullet aimed at our brain and the majority of my fellow Americans were smart enough to duck. Good for us.

So here we are on the first Wednesday in November. In about 60 days, ShrubCo at last begins its well-deserved dissolution and, we can be sure, a new track will be charted. We live in interesting times. Obama will need to exercise what I can only describe as greatness at a time when greatness may at best suffice only to staunch our collective bleeding as a nation. Anything less than greatness, anything short of a full application of his capacity to reason, to plan, to anticipate, is likely to result in a single term. Considering the smoking craters left by ShrubCo across our societal landscape, if Obama doesn't have greatness in him, it follows that we will need to find someone who does in four years' time. I am hopeful for now; the possibilities are endless and in most ways we have nowhere to go but up. Still, I am also a pragmatist, even in my idealism. I will say the same thing now to myself (and those who have read this far) that I said eight years ago: Let's see what this guy can do.

Having said all this, I do think it is important that Obama begin reaching out to the other side after this long and often fear-mongering contest. One way in which he could do this, I think, is to offer John McCain an appointment in his cabinet. As much as I loathe some of the tactics, even what passed for a strategy, in the campaign now ended, McCain should be given the benefit of the doubt and it should be recalled that he was not some fiend before the Ring of Power that was his quest for the presidency turned his Smeagle into our Gollum. McCain's strength, it has been said, was in foreign policy. He might be well-employed as a Secretary of Defense. Even making the offer would help to heal the divisions that were pried wide open in these past months. This might have another, even more important, effect in the near future.

Obama is in a good position, I think, to have an impact on the upcoming reformulation of the Republican Party. I believe that one thing that the GOP will learn from this election is that the base is not enough and, indeed, the very constituencies that make up what they have come to consider their base are, in fact, a polarizing power that precludes their having the support of more reality-based Americans. In the end, after all, McCain had to distance himself from Ted Hagee every bit as much as he sought to distance himself from George Bush. Obama could drive that point home with a few key appointments, I think. Few things could be healthier for this country, even for this civilization, than the showing of the door to the Dominionists and Millennialists by the party over which they have exercised enough influence to pry perilously loose from the reality of American life. We saw the base (and base they were!) "energized" by Sarah Palin, and we saw the GOP lose big. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan have recently said the same thing, so I don't think this idea is too radical. It's time to disentangle that which was supposed to be the party of fiscal conservatism from the business of attempts to legislate morality. Giving Americans a choice of a party in which these two things are no longer intricately wound together will be a boon for all of us, even if we are not ourselves fiscal conservatives.

Which brings me, sadly, to the thing arising from this election that most drags upon my spirit this morning. It appears that Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, is going to pass by a narrow margin. It is for this reason that I prefaced this long and much overdue entry with the point that Obama's win marks a climax in a long struggle but not the climax. Just as there will continue to be intolerance to people of African ancestry in places in America, even though one will be our next President, just so we should keep in mind that others will still be marginalized as well. Even though they lost the Presidential election of 2008, those small-minded busybodies determined to stick their noses in everyone else's crotches as a test for righteousness are still very much with us and they may very well win this victory, as short-lived as it is likely to turn out, on the West Coast of the United States. They are, and will continue to be, dedicated to a "culture war" in which our own culture makes war upon itself. They will continue to seek to do harm in the name of nothing more than personal belief and preference.

They will be with us, I am sorry to say, for many years to come.

It took nearly 400 years for people somewhat like the man we have just elected President to get the right to self-determination, the right to own property, the right to vote as a whole human being (and not just some fraction thereof), and to marry whomever they liked. It took generations to get to this point, and it took sacrifice and struggle and, yes, the deaths of some very good people brought about by some of the worst people who opposed them. This is the course, too, that gay equality advocates have faced. It was once a crime punishable by death to prefer sexual friction with a member of one's own gender. It is not so now. As long as there are people courageous enough to speak out, progress will continue and the tiny, malign minds will, in the end, be swept away by the current of human history once again.

The leather chaps are, of course, optional.

Sphere: Related Content

A Bit of How the Religious Right Undermines American Rights

It may seem a small thing, but a recent letter to the editor in The Indianapolis Star makes for a pretty good demonstration of the sort of pretzel logic that the religious right employs in undermining all other civil liberties in the name of their strange version of religious freedom. It has to do with the objections voiced by a columnist to the two major party presidential candidates having their first almost-debate on a stage hosted by a preacher.

...Parker remarked on the recent interview of Barack Obama and John McCain by an evangelical minister. She termed this interview "supremely wrong" and "un-American." She opinioned that "the loser was America." She felt that it was odd for the candidates to talk to a preacher in a public forum about their positions on evil and their relationship with Jesus Christ. She stated that they should not have been asked.

If it is wrong for Christians to ascertain a candidate's position with respect to his religion, then why is it perfectly appropriate for homosexuals, abortionists, environmentalists, social advocates, labor unions, immigrants, women's rights groups and a few dozen similar groups to ask candidates to clarify their positions relative to their interests?

— Norm Ward, "'Jesus' question just as fair as other topics"
The Indianapolis Star, 8/30/08

The implicit assertion here is that same tired old assertion that religion equates with morality and that being a member of a religion means that the individual in question must hold to a particular moral code. In America, especially in the last 15 years or so, "religion" means Christianity. I guarantee that the bulk of Americans would not vote for a candidate who asserted membership in a religion other than Christianity at Warren's Saddleback Church. In fact, one of the smears that has been targeted at Obama from the outset is that he's a secret Muslim. If the criterion was religious belief in general (which itself is already unconstitutional), and not a particular religion, that wouldn't be a useful tactic against a candidate in the first place.

That cuts to the very heart of the matter as to why the column to which letter-writer Norm Ward objects was written in the first place. Paragraph 3 of Article VI of the US Constitution states:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

The reason that it is permissible, then, to question a candidate about any number of issues but that some of us out here on the rational fringe of America find it unacceptable to ask candidates explicit questions about their religious beliefs is that doing so constitutes precisely what Article VI prohibits. Such questions are not meant to determine the moral character of the person being so interrogated; that could be done by asking questions about moral views directly. Asking them about belief in Jesus or their understanding of Biblical texts, however, are attempts to explore purely religious issues. Suppose you ask someone whether they believe in Jesus and that person says that they do. What does that tell us about the content of their character?

It tells us nothing. People who express belief in Biblical religion commit murder, steal and rape. The very fact, then, that these candidates chose to appear in a forum hosted by an expressly religious organization and be questioned by a religious figure should throw up a red flag to anyone concerned with preventing American elections from turning into piety competitions.

The reason, moreover, that it's just fine for women's rights groups, immigration advocates, gay rights advocates or, indeed, representatives from the NRA to ask candidates to clarify their positions on issues of interest to those groups is that none of those groups are religious in nature. They may have religious members, certainly, but the charter of these groups requires adherence to no particular religious doctrine. Christians, Jews and atheists may all join the NRA or NOW. Can the same be said for the membership of Saddleback Church? Of course not; it's an expressly and purely religious organization that requires belief in a particular doctrine of faith from its membership.

Individuals like Norm Ward attempt to get around this simple difference by making everything a religious issue. They demand not only that morality be a subset of doctrinal consideration, but that everything else be viewed in terms of this doctrine from the outset. Thus, gay rights and maternity leave are cast as moral issues which, in turn, are (to their minds) religious in nature. They simply redefine "religion" as "morality," and so belief in their religion becomes the overriding issue and they can attempt the entirely specious argument that a question about the nature of evil or belief in a biblical personage isn't a religious test but a moral one. Disbelief in Jesus is an indicator to this worldview of an absence of morality. Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, then, are morally unfit to be President of the United States as opposed to failing a religious litmus test. That, they still know in some cloudy remnant of the rational mind, is still prohibited by the Constitution.

We should be concerned about not only the failings of these two candidates in terms of this abrogation of Constitutional principle (and perhaps even moreso with Obama than McCain, as Obama has practiced Constitutional law), but about the failing of the American people to see through this charade. Whatever else we may say about the Constitution, however much respect each of us has for the principles it embodies, we should also keep in mind that it's ultimately just text. It's only a piece of paper that has the meaning that the people and the government assign to it. Like any old text, it can be re-interpreted to suit the prevailing philosophy of the time. Inconvenient parts can even be ignored entirely if enough people are willing to do so. Ultimately, it's not impossible to make fundamental and fundamentalist changes to it if the will to do so exists. For instance, the third paragraph of Article VI could be stricken entirely and a religious test explicitly allowed, even endorsed or mandated. If the political, and in this case theocratic, will exists, it could happen.

For those of us who don't think that a full merger of church and state would be a desirable situation, such an outcome would be an abomination and the destruction of the very principles that underpin American democracy. For those who assert that America is a Christian country, however, it's the very reason that they have any involvement in politics at all. The latter group is the one to which McCain and Obama catered by their performances at Saddleback without objection to questions explicitly about religious beliefs, and it is why the voices in the rational wilderness express their dissent toward the whole circus.

Sphere: Related Content

Whatever Happened to America?

There are days when it's hard to write anything, when I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of dumbness that flows from my monitor to my brain. It's depressing. Perhaps my vision of the past is seen through rose-colored glasses, but I don't remember things always being this bad in this country.

A man who lacks the intellectual prowess to keep track of how many homes he owns is running for president and at least half the population is ready to vote him into office. Meanwhile, the present administration is doing everything possible in its remaining months to make access to birth control as difficult as possible. Belief in evil spirits is resurgent. A majority of Americans believe that grave illnesses can be prayed away. Outbreaks of easily preventable disease are occurring because people with an irrational fear of vaccines are finding a receptive audience for their message.

The idea that my country could be sliding into an era of superstition and primtivism, one in which the dominant force is belief in supernatural authority rather than reason, is a profoundly depressing one for me. America has always had its share of crackpots, as I imagine any nation does, but their ever-increasing influence on our culture is a frightening thing to behold as it erodes the shores of reason as steadily as an angry sea washes away a sandy beach. These are the people in our national government now. They're making the laws and steering the national dialog. Both of the persons likely to become the next president allow themselves to be called on the carpet for the first time together not by scientists, artists or thinkers, but by a preacher in a forum whose goal is to determine how religious they are.

Dude, where's my country?

I'm going to hole up in my lab today and do science. I may leave for lunch, but that's about it. I don't want to hear anymore for the next 24 hours about how religious Barack Obama is or whether or not John McCain has been "saved." I know, it's a quaint thing these days to actually conduct rational, empirical investigation into some question of how nature operates as opposed to simply whipping out the old ouija board or asking the village shaman or the earth mother or what have you, but I reserve the right to be old-fashioned today. I find much more joy in measuring the segments of a beetle's foot than I possibly can in listening to the various supernaturalists gabbling, particularly when that nattering becomes law or political speech.

Have an ooga-booga day, everybody.

Sphere: Related Content

Ben Stein's Corollary to Godwin's Law: Hitler is Everywhere

I'm not sure whether Ben Stein is mentally deranged, has had some kind of stroke, or has just come to the decision that the "anything I don't like is Hitler" gambit used in Expelled should be spread about as much as possible, but there's something very wrong with him. Whatever the reason, he seems to have come up with something that I think should be named Ben Stein's Corollary to Godwin's Law, or Stein's Corollary for short. That is, anything that Hitler did, no matter how much it may have been done by other people, can be used in an attempt to silence any possibility intelligible discourse.

Stein recently employed this corollary while appearing on CNN's Glenn Beck Show in reference to the plans underway for Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination at an outdoor arena apart from the main convention in order to accommodate the large number of people who want to attend the event:

...that is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America... Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that's something the Fuehrer would have done. And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past.

Seriously, what neurological circuit has shorted in Stein's brain to make this kind of analogy and expect it to sound even remotely reasonable? He seems to be seeing the zombie Hitler everywhere.

Even if no other American politician had ever given a speech at an arena before, so what? Does the mere fact that both Obama and Hitler have appeared in an outdoor arena mean that there is some meaningful similarity between the two?

Hitler wore shoes. I wear shoes. Therefore, I want to exterminate Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. It makes every bit as much sense. But wait... I've never seen Ben Stein barefoot! He could be a Nazi.

But wait again... Barry Goldwater held a rally at Colt .45 Stadium in Houston in 1964!

Besides baseball, we also played for a Barry Goldwater rally in the stadium just before the 1964 presidential election. That may not have been the last event at Colt Stadium, but we were there.

— Source

Barry Golwater held a rally at a sports stadium, and Hitler held rallies at stadiums... so Barry Goldwater was like Hitler. So much for Stein's "we don't do things like that in America" delusion.

That a politician speaking at a large sporting venue automatically conjures up images of brown shirts in Stein's mind tells us nothing about the speaker and everything about the ongoing degeneration of Stein's relationship with reality. What's next... Obama wears shoes and Hitler wore shoes (anyone ever seen a photo of Hitler's bare feet)? They both prefer to breathe the same mixture of gases when appearing in public? Hitler is everywhere! Head for the hills!

Sphere: Related Content

Fundamentalist Hate-Spew: Comments from Molly Kagan

I received the following anonymous comment on yesterday's article on Molly Kagan, the Tallahassee Millenialist who insists that Barack Obama is a "false prophet" revealed in the Book of Matthew, and how her experience demonstrates the effects of a kind of child abuse visited on the children of Fundamentalists. I think the replies are very pious bits of writing, and since they came with a dare that I wouldn't approve them all I thought I'd bump them up to entry status:

Wow. What a disappointing piece of garbage you are. I bet your pussy is bigger than Molly Kagan's. Why don't you lift your skirt and show us your pussy, pussy boy?

and I can see why you moderate your comments. because pussypussies are afraid of the truth about them.

edit out my comments, pussy. i know about them, and so do you, and that's all that needs to know.

July 6, 2008 7:51 PM

A few minutes later, I also received a second anonymous comment. This one claims overtly to be from Molly Kagan:

This is a cease and desist notification. My blog is registered with MyFreeCopyright.com.

Molly Kagan

July 6, 2008 8:03 PM

Because I, like many other bloggers, use SiteMeter, I can see from where comments are coming and how the person leaving them arrived at my page. According to sitemeter, the person who left the comments came by following a link used for approving comments on the Tallahassee Democrat blogs:

http://sitelife.tallahassee.com/ver1.0/PersonaBlog/PendingCommentsFrame.rails?plckBlogId=20500f58c1874479b56a12336edf76a5&plckCurrentPage=0&sid=sitelife.tallahassee.com

I attempted to leave a comment on Kagan's blog pointing her at my critique of her Bible-fueled ravings in order that she have the opportunity to respond, and clearly she has... because only the author of her blog would be able to see that link. The comment was never approved. Only she could have seen the pointer and only she could have clicked on the link above.

Of course, the hypocrisy of someone criticizing me for having comment moderation turned on while refusing to approve my own comment on their blog is incredibly blatant, and I must admit that I had considered rejecting the "pussy boy" raving at first. It's exactly the kind of contentless stream of nastiness I occasionally receive from Fundamentalists — sometimes punctuated by the hysterical notion that the person who has written it will "pray for me." But I gave Kagan the opportunity to respond as she saw fit, and she did exactly that. Moreover, the string of epithets referring to her own genitalia with a derogatory term illustrate precisely the kind of self-loathing that the Fundamentalist abuse she suffered as a child engenders. It also, I think, well demonstrates the mentality at work and serves as a good example of what's roiling just below the Millenialist facade of piety and righteousness. These are people who've been brought up to hate the world and all the people in it who aren't like them. These are people who are waiting around to see mounds of bodies piled up in the streets.

The second comment is a rather vague threat. Neither this blog nor Kagan's are written for commercial purposes, and the reproduction of her rantings about Obama were precisely intended to reach the public free of charge. My quotation of them in no way impedes that purpose. Since Kagan isn't paid to write and neither am I, there are no possible damages here. As anyone who writes a private blog can tell you, our articles get reproduced all the time. Case in point, this reproduction of my previous article about the Texas Supreme Court and exorcism. This is part of life in the blogosphere. In my case, I used the reproduced material as a basis for a critique that is longer than the original piece, as an example that in the end wasn't as good as the string of epithets and threats issued by Kagan herself. I think it's covered by Fair Use and since there are no recoverable damages from my having quoted it, it's not really an important point.

The point that is worth noting is that there's no attempt made to refute the arguments I presented. There's no attempt to deconstruct what I've written, to demonstrate any inconsistencies or fallacious reasoning. When the Millennialist gasbag, who feels absolutely justified in trying to damage the prospects of someone running for president by resorting to fear-mongering and emotional appeal, gets punctured, she vents pure hate. That she would go so far as to insinuate that she has been damaged by a discussion of her claims is the same kind of hypocrisy that is exemplified by her criticism of my comment moderation after she rejected publication of my own comment to her blog.

This is Millennialism in a nutshell. These people are damaged goods at best, ticking time bombs of hostility and resentment toward humanity at worst. Their Bible makes for a fine justification, in their own minds, for their own hopes that others will suffer and, as importantly, that they'll get to wring their hands in sadistic glee while they watch their cosmic hitman level the sword at the infidel's neck.

I've approved Kagan's swearing and comments in this one case to illustrate the point of yesterday's article. Now that it's done, I don't plan to make a habit of it. Further bile such as this, should it appear here, will not be approved for publication.

Sphere: Related Content

Millenialism, Childhood Trauma and Barack Obama: The Sad Case of Molly Kagan

It's been a trend among some local newspapers to offer their readers the opportunity to create blogs attached to the papers' websites for some time now. Doing so probably garners these bloggers a larger number of local readers than they'd otherwise get. The Tallahassee Democrat offers such "reader blogs," one of which belongs to Molly Kagan. There are two things that can be safely said about Kagan; she hates Barack Obama and she loves Jesus. OK, three things. She's obsessive and paranoid about both, and this is pointed out particularly well in her most recent blog article. In it, she reveals that the Gospel of Matthew is trying to warn us not to vote for Obama whom, she says, "will play a major part in prophecy" — and not a good one.

Obama and Biblical Prophecy

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

I was raised in church and I remember seeing a movie when I was little about the second coming of Jesus Christ. It scared the hell out of me. People woke up and their husbands, wives and kids were gone. People driving were suddenly gone and cars crashed. Many people remaining knew what had happened and some ran to church. Jesus Christ had returned for believers.

In my more than seven years of experience with blogging, I've found that it's a good rule of thumb that anything that starts off with a Bible quote in red font is followed by a torrent of crazy. Molly, for her part, reveals to us the origin of her disorder. She was traumatized in a church, with the consent of her parents, no doubt, by a film designed precisely to frighten the credulous little children. She's like a casebook example for those who maintain that religion is child abuse. I don't think that's a necessary connection, but what was done to Molly Kagan certainly qualifies. It's sad to see someone later in their lives who was subjected to such abuse as a child and is now manifesting the kind of paranoia that follows in what she's written about a Senator from Illinois.

What does that mean? It means that you have repented to God and admitted that you are a sinner, believe that Jesus is the son of God and he died for your sins, and that you confess your faith in Jesus as your Savior and your Lord.

Sounds easy, huh? Well, in the movie their were a lot of people who had not done that and they were left to suffer quite a bit. They had to hide their faith and some were beheaded, etc. In today's world it is the same. The gospel has been told to many people who have turned their back on the Lord. No one knows exactly what will happen to the non-believers, but those of us who believe know the end is near.

Ah, Millennialism, that reeking pile of mental degeneracy that leaves its believers waiting for the cosmic hitman to come and start the beheadings. Can you imagine taking a little girl to see a film in which others were tortured and beheaded for not believing the right things? If I were to take my four year old niece to the kind of gory zombie movies that I enjoy on occasion, if I were to expose her to such blood and violence, people would rightly think that there was something wrong with me. They'd likely call me a child abuser and they would be correct in saying so. But apparently if I show her movies about the return of one particular living dead individual that results in death and dismemberment, it's excused as "religious education." This is sick and depraved stuff without question. This is emotional abuse, and the fact that a movie is shown in a church shouldn't exempt it from the same standards that would apply if it were shown in a theater. Both are public places, and small children shouldn't be exposed to this kind of violence in either place. Kagan's paranoia is testimony to the emotional impact and damage that results from such exposure.

Obama falls right into Jesus' plan for his return. Everything he says is subject to his whim, or polls, or his advisors. He was the most liberal Senator prior to his Presidential candidacy. Now, he has become more of a moderate. His wife is being given advice to soften and be less vocal. They are both deceptive and it is very obvious that although Mr. Obama is not the anti-christ, he will play a major part in prophecy. He is the epitome of the aforementioned bible verse.

Wait... I thought True Believers wanted Jesus to return. Kagan now seems to be worried that he'll show back up if Obama is elected. This strange sort of ambivalence is typical of people who have suffered childhood trauma. It's a psychic dissonance that crops up time and time again. These people have been scared shitless by their own religion all their lives and they don't understand that the condition exists because it's all they've ever known. As human beings, they're frightened of the ramifications of their own faith — as well they should be if they aren't complete sociopaths. The Christian Tribulation is a terrible thing, a holocaust of the greatest scale.

If Molly Kagan truly believed that the return of Jesus was something desirable, and that the election of Barack Obama would hasten that Second Coming, she would logically be Obama's biggest fan. A vote for Obama would effectively be a vote for Christ. As it stands, she sees the return of the Nazarene as a reason not to vote for Obama.

There are a good many reasons for which one might be concerned about an Obama presidency, but reading him into a text written nearly 2,000 years ago is not one of them. Seeing a modern individual in such a text is a kind of paranoia. The astounding bound beyond the confines of rational thinking required to arrive at such a conclusion defy the definition of a sound mind. Whoever wrote Matthew doesn't demonstrate any knowledge of there even being a continent that we now call North America or a country called the United States let alone that there would someday be a Senator from a state called Illinois who would run for president of that country. The Bible is replete with overt lists of nations of which the authors of its various books were aware, so the assumption that one of them would cloak the identity of some other nation to whom he was giving advice (which is precisely what Kagan is saying) has no basis in precedent and can be seen as nothing better than wishful thinking. Matthew 24:24 could equally be applied to John McCain, Robert Mugabe or Larry Craig as it could be to Barack Obama. It could be applied, in fact, to almost any politician from any period in the history of any tribe, city or nation. Politicians have always been deceptive to an extent, particularly in times and places where they relied on the good will of citizens to hold office. Politicians who require the ballots of the people — whatever people we might care to name — spend a certain amount of their energy on telling the voters what they think will appeal to the greatest possible majority. Kagan goes into her Bible-fueled, fear-saturated rant already thinking that Jehovah has picked a candidate (who just happens to be the one whom Kagan herself supports), so she applies the verse she's selected a posteriori to the one she doesn't like in order to connect with other True Believers on an emotional basis, to inspire fear of punishment. Essentially, Elohim are watching over your shoulder in the voting booth and will hold you accountable if you don't vote for the person whom Kagan says the God says to vote for. God the wrathful busybody is speaking to you through a blogger in Tallahassee, and you'd better listen up or you'll wind up beheaded while the righteous and prophetic Molly Kagan smiles down on the bloody scene from her vantage point in the clouds.

Does it get much loonier than this?

Please think about your vote. Think about Obama's constantly changing words. Think about what will become of our beloved nation. Repent and be ready.

Gee, it's a good thing that we have Molly to remind us to think about our votes. We would have forgotten to do that without her scary, scary reminder of religious violence and the end of the world and how the streets will someday run red with the blood of the infidels. I hadn't taken into account that I might have my head lopped off if I didn't cast my ballot for John McCain in November. Let me think about that for a moment...

Hmmmm.

Nope, I don't see it as a valid reason to vote for dogcatcher, let alone president. It still seems like a bunch of crazy nonsense cooked up in a roiling kettle of mental injury. She further reinforces her own outcome of childhood trauma with an appeal to another gibbering paranoiac; Kagan links to an even crazier article written by Michael Bresciani which, amongst the many bizarre contentions made, includes this following gem:

In thirty five years of teaching the Bible tenants of the second coming of Christ (eschatology) I have heard the question 'do you think he could be the Antichrist' asked thousands of times about dozens of people. Now I see the question being asked about Sen. Obama on blogs and websites and in fellowship halls more than any other name to date.

I don't believe that he is the Antichrist because according to scripture the Antichrist comes from and rules over Europe. But since the false prophet who aids the Antichrist comes from a completely different nation I am watching Obama's meteoric rise with that fact in mind.

We who love America and its constitution and original purpose are disgusted beyond measure with what is happening to our nation. We who love God and trust his word are seeing prophecy unrolling right before our eyes. It doesn't make it any easier to swallow but we are always thankful that warnings were part of Gods grace to us so we wouldn't be easily deceived or overcome. Christ comforted those who were to see the ugliness of the last days bring the world to its knees with a saying that calls the big cry for change for the sake of change what it really is; a cunningly attractive deception.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. MT. 24:24

Sound familiar?

This Millennialism or eschatology or whatever other names it may go by is a pernicious influence upon both our politics and our culture, to put it gently. It seeks to make what would otherwise be a very good reason for treatment with lithium and thorazine the basis for legal and political decisions. I hope there will come a day when children are no longer traumatized with the sort of horrific imagery that has resulted in this emotional disorder, resulting in adults like Kagan and Bresciani injecting their madness into the political process. As it stands now, it seems that America is saddled with far too many of these nuts. In the days before the internet and cable television, they would have largely existed as isolated individuals walking up and down the street screaming "The end is nigh!" as passersby rolled their eyes and sought to avoid them. Thanks to the vast worldwide network, they can find one another now. They can support each other's paranoia and take on an undeserved air of legitimacy that helps their numbers to snowball. They would have been given treatment, and treatment they need far more than newspaper-sponsored blogs.

Sphere: Related Content

Two Worthless Pieces of Garbage Who Make Me Embarrassed to Be an American

Until a few minutes ago, I didn't know who Kirstie Hartle of Rome, NY and Dean Johnson of Lanett, AL were. Thanks to an update on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I do know now.

I know that Kirstie Hartle and Dean Johnson are a couple of great, stinking floaters in the gene pool that were left here because somehow Mother Nature forgot to flush.

People like this embarrass me as an American. People like this make me want to vomit blood and bile until the sensation they produce deep down in my guts goes away.

I can't even write anything more about it. As much of a coherent response as I can muster to these two subhuman scumbags has been left as a comment on Ed Brayton's update.

I have to get outside for awhile now. The stink that Hartle and Johnson's words have left in this room are too much for me to bear. I can only imagine how foul would be their physical presence.

Sphere: Related Content

Ralph Nader Morphs Into a Braying Jackass

I have long respected Ralph Nader's work as a consumer advocate but I have lost any shred of respect I have ever had for Ralph Nader the man in light of his comments about Barack Obama. Again, I would point out that I am a lukewarm Obama supporter at best and inclined to vote for him largely on the basis of his not being John McCain. It's the same situation I find myself in at every presidential election. I wind up voting against a candidate rather than for someone I think would be a good president. Nevertheless, I find Nader's recent statements in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News to be utterly repugnant, racist and stereotypical. Here is some of what he said that I find so objectionable:

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white?

I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law. Haven't heard a thing.

He wants to show that he is not a threatening . . . another politically threatening African-American politician. He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.

— Source

I hardly know where to begin with this garbage. Who the hell is Ralph Nader to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't be thinking, saying or doing? For what reason should a candidate be forced to speak more on one issue or another based on his or her ethnicity? Why is it that a black, half-black, quarter-black, or bright green candidate should address poverty with greater frequency or vehemence than a Caucasian candidate?

Comments like these tell us a lot more about Ralph Nader than they do about anyone else. Nader is stereotyping. Obama apparently doesn't fit into Nader's neat mental filing system of what people of various races should do and say and think. I agree that Obama should challenge the existing political power structure, but not because of his skin color or ancestry. We need people in office who are willing to challenge what has become a horribly corrupt system that no longer represents the interests of the people it was intended to look after. We don't need black people or white people or men or women to do this, we need viable candidates who will do this. The coincidence of the origin of their ancestors, what set of genitalia they happen to possess or what language their parents spoke is immaterial. For Nader to say that Obama should act a certain way, speak a certain way or think a certain way is nothing short of racism. Nader should be ashamed of himself, but his enormous ego precludes any realization of how loathesome his statements really are.

What difference it should make is that he would be more sensitive and determined to bring elevated visibility and concrete programs to deal with these issues. Wouldn't a woman president be expected to be more responsive to women's rights? It's just more natural...

He wants to come across that he's not politically threatening to the white power class and the liberal intelligentsia. It's been a brilliant tactic...

— Nader Defends Remarks About Obama, New York Times

Brilliant, Ralph, just brilliant. Defending your racism by resorting to sexism is a true stroke of political genius. When I last checked, the current race is for president of the United States, not President of Dark-Skinned People or President of Women. Nader has revealed himself with these statements to be a relic, a thinker whose thoughts are every bit as fossilized as John McCain's. There is absolutely no good reason that we should expect that a female politician should be more concerned about women's rights than a male candidate. If anything, we should expect that a male candidate should be just as concerned with women's rights as he is with men's rights because both men and women are equally American and the office of the President is to protect and uphold a Constitution that applies equally to everyone. By the same token, it is more reasonable to expect that a Caucasian candidate should be every bit as concerned with the well-being of impoverished black citizens as he or she is with that of impoverished Caucasian citizens.

What Nader is saying here in point of fact is that the President should make the interests of one group of greater importance than those of others and that this prioritization is based upon whatever ethnic, religious or gender group of which that President is a member. In other words, the President is to govern based upon self-interest rather than the best interests of the nation as a whole. Oddly enough, we've already had eight years of that. The administration that is about to pass from power at last was one that gave its ear entirely to the special interest groups that ShrubCo of which itself was a member. We've had eight years of government for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans, eight years of faith-based programs that were a symptom of favoritism toward religious groups that agree with the theological ramblings of Dubya and his closest cronies. A Ralph Nader presidency — which I am happy to say shall never come to be — would look a lot more like another ShrubCo term than it would like the kind of change this country's leadership needs to make in its fundamental way of thinking about the nation and the world.

Let's extend Ralph Nader's insistence upon the special self-interest of politicians to Nader himself, then. Nader's ancestry is Lebanese. By ethnicity it would be fair to count Nader as Arab, even though he is a product of American society. Shouldn't Nader then be stressing the interests of Arabs over all else? As far as I can determine from his website, though, he hasn't a word to say about the situation of Arab Americans. People of Arab ancestry certainly face a good deal of prejudice in this country. Why isn't Nader forcefully speaking out on their behalf? Is Nader just trying to "talk white" by not challenging the liberal intelligentsia and power elite?

Or is it that I'm simply incorrect about Nader's ancestry? Judging by his comments, he seems to be speaking out strongly on behalf of jackasses. Could it be that if we were to delve into Ralph Nader's family tree we'd find that the majority of its branches are tipped by bigoted idiots?

Sphere: Related Content