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.

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Obligatory McCain-Palin Update

I haven't said anything about John McCain's VP pick yet, and after having read and heard a number of sources across the political spectrum talking about the subject, I find myself without much to say on the matter.

Puzzling it all together, Palin appears to be about as valuable in terms of political capital as Dan Quayle. In fact, whereas Quayle was an almost comedic figure — a sort of dumbed-down cartoon character — Palin brings the added baggage of a dictatorial management history in her time in public office. She's not only tremendously ignorant and essentially a primitivist, her history speaks of maleficence and a marked lack of concern for others. It's riddled with personal vendettas and bad decisions. If Dan Quayle, Scarface and Ted Nugent had a love child, it would be Sarah Palin.

This shouldn't be too surprising, though, because McCain reminds me not as much of the younger Bush as of the senior, although also with a vindictive nature. McCain also lacks vision and shows marked problems with being able to predict the impact of his own actions. I think the choice of Palin as running mate is nothing more than another example of yoga master McCain ramping up for his self-immolation sometime in the next month or so. At this point, I can almost hear the bomb whistling as it falls through the October sky.

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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.

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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.

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There's Something Wrong with John McCain

Listen carefully to this video of John McCain's comments about the Russia-Georgia conflict delivered during an interview on CNN:

Nations don't invade other nations in the 21^st century? That certainly explains a lot about why tens of thousands of American troops are in Iraq right now! We didn't invade Iraq and remove its previous government in 2003. What we did was send our military men and women over there for a long vacation. They were just having a nice picnic when Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party fell and the damnable MSM whipped up a bunch of nonsense that we had something to do with the situation. Barack Obama wants to end our forces' holiday and make them come home, but John McCain knows how hard they work and wants to keep the happy fun party going for as long as possible! There ain't no party like a Baghdad party 'cause a Baghdad party don't stop.

Nations don't invade other nations in the 21^st century?



What happened to the requirement that a US president actually be born a citizen of the US? Clearly, McCain isn't from the same planet as the rest of us, let alone the same country. Or maybe he's just figuring that since Dubya got elected to a second term after demonstrating that he had the IQ of a half-eaten Pop Tart he ought to get a jump on the game and prove to the public that he's stupid enough to be president. There must be some cunning strategy involved here. Or maybe he's just demonstrating to us once again that he's a yoga master capable of going into his famous "goat swallows his hoof" stance at any moment.

Still, I'm inclined toward the most parsimonious explanation of this latest air biscuit issuing from the mouth of McCain. That is, he's simply an idiot.

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I Admire John McCain's Flexibility: Candidate as Yoga Master

While I disagree with his politics, I have to admit that I admire John McCain's flexibility. Despite his being 30 years my senior, he has demonstrated yoga master-like aptitude for contorting himself into positions that I can't hope to emulate despite my relative youth. Try as I might, I simply can't do what McCain does on a weekly basis. I have tried, but no matter what I do I find myself unable to put my entire foot in my mouth in the effortlessly nimble manner in which Senator McCain does it.

Not only can he do it, he does it better and better every time he tries. The bit where he taunted Obama about not visiting American troops overseas and then villified him for doing it was a terrific bit of political yogasana, and his concerns about Czechoslovakia's future and the troubles along the Iraq/Afghanistan border will surely be included as examples of the foot-meets-uvula stance should a Yoga Hall of Fame ever be built. Still, this week he has surpassed himself in skill.

Everybody's heard about the latest campaign ad juxtaposing Obama with Paris Hilton. I've seen it and yes, I see the racial undertones of the ad, too, but that's pretty clumsy stuff. The true yogic mastery of that ad doesn't become clear until one realizes that Paris Hilton's father, hotel magnate Rick Hilton, has been an active McCain supporter and a major donor to McCain's efforts. You see, anyone can make a commercial that plays on prejudices about ethnicity, but it takes a master of the Goat Swallows Hoof yoga position to do that at the same time as one casts aspersions on the daughter of one's own allies.

Paris Hilton's dad: He's on record as a John McCain contributor

Contributors to McCain's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination included Rick Hilton. In fact, Hilton was so enthusiastic about his candidate of choice that, The Times' Tina Daunt reports, federal records show he donated twice as much as the law allows (the campaign returned the excess)...

Asked at a town hall meeting (what else) in Racine, Wis., if comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears was a flip-flop on his pledge to conduct a high-minded, respectful campaign, McCain replied: "There are differences and we are drawing those differences."

He continued: "I'm proud of the campaign we have run, I'm proud of the issues we are trying to address with the American people. We're proud of that commercial."

Wow, did you see that? He did that Goat Swallows Hoof stance while flipping and flopping at the same time!

Seriously, this guy is good. If I tried a position like that, I'd be in the hospital with a cracked pelvis.

By the way, lots of celebrities have donated to McCain's campaign, too. For starters, there were Norman Lear, Harrison Ford, Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, Michael Douglas and Warren Beatty (source). I guess he doesn't need that support anymore.

The question that occurs to me is, how will McCain top is past performances? It's only August; it's still three months until the election, and he's got to keep building the kind of excitement and momentum that his political yoga has generated to date. He's a tough act to follow in this regard, but I think I see where all of this is heading. Look for a spectacular act of self-immolation in coming weeks. I don't think any Yoga Master in history has ever managed to put his foot in his mouth, flip and flop, and self-cremate in one unified movement, but I have faith. McCain-ji is building up to this.

You know, I'm still not one of the people whose excited about Barack Obama's candidacy. Still, I know I'm going to end up voting for him for the simple reason that he isn't John McCain. The senator from Arizona is making me rethink my notion that nobody could have worse judgment than George "Dubya" Bush. Dubya's eight years of chimp-fu have been impressive, no doubt, but this McCain... he's a force to be reckoned with.

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McCain's Energy Plan as Explained by Mark Fiore

Mark Fiore explains John McCain's energy plan as only he can:

Sing along to the tune of the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies!

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McCain: A Keen Grasp on Foreign Relations

Say what you will about John McCain, I'll give him this much: he has an understanding of foreign relations that few others have the insight to share. Just yesterday, McCain made a statement at a press conference in Phoenix, AZ that I guarantee you won't hear anyone else make:

I was concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days. One was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia. Apparently that is in reaction to the Czech's agreement with us concerning missile defense...

— Source

He's really hit the nail on the head here, hasn't he? In fact, I checked this morning and it turns out that Russia hasn't just reduced energy supplies to Czechoslovakia, they appear to have cut them off entirely! Then I did a little more digging and it turns out that the whole world seems to have ganged up on Czechoslovakia. Not only Russia, but China and the US as well, appear to have stopped all delivery of energy, medicine and agricultural products to that unfortunate country!

World leaders, what do you have against Czechoslovakia? What have they done to you that you would unilaterally isolate them in this fashion, starving poor Czechoslovakians and leaving them without gasoline to fuel their Yugos? From where will they get their supplies of laudanum and antimony pills?

Clearly, this must end, and John McCain is leading the way toward a more pro-Czechoslovakian world. I'm sure that once he's elected president of these 44 United States he'll spend millions of dollars on aid for our beleaguered Czechoslovakian friends. My understanding is that he'll also seek normalization of relations with the Ottoman Empire and free trade agreements with the Hittites and Ostrogoths... and isn't it about time?

Vote McCain for President in '84!

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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.

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Fossilized Thinking Revisited: If It Feels Good, Drill It

Maybe I was wrong about drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas as a solution to our energy woes. John McCain made a statement at a town hall meeting in Fresno, CA a couple of days ago that may force me to rethink my opinion. Who can argue with logic like this?

Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial.

— Source

I hadn't considered the whole "even if it's not effective, it feels good" angle. Why, that's not fossilized thinking at all! That's touchy-feely, New Age psychobabble scrumptiousness. No sense doing something that might be difficult and require real change and sacrifice when a silky-smooth non-solution can be caressed at will. Why didn't I think of that? Who needs an energy program when we can have psychological impact? We'll generate all the energy we need by banging our heads against a wall!

I'd like to offer the following campaign strategy to the McCain team at no cost:

What could have greater positive psychological impact than passing out free ice cream cones to every man, woman and child in the nation? Nobody can be unhappy when they're eating ice cream.

It sounds like this was the direction they were heading in anyhow, so they probably don't need my help. Who needs ideas when you can have ice cream? Voters can't eat ideas!

Readers, clip that coupon now. I'm sure it will be redeemable by November.

Hyphal tip to Thoughts from Kansas.

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Fossil Fuel and Fossilized Thinking

Every time the price of gasoline goes up there's renewed talk about drilling for oil in parts of the United States that had previously been off-limits for it. Whether it's in Alaska or the Gulf of Mexico, the idea is a seemingly simple one. We'll drill some new wells, pull the petroleum out of the ground, and before you know it we'll be paying 99¢ per gallon at the pump. Happy days are here again.

The latest incarnation of this notion comes from John McCain and potential vice presidential nominee Governor Charlie Crist of Florida. Crist had previously opposed drilling in the Gulf of Mexico but now that he stands a chance of advancing politically as a running mate to McCain he's changed his tune. Both Democrats and Republicans in Florida's legislature oppose the idea, though, and so it's unlikely to happen.

For some reason people feel that if you go out, drill these holes, that the price of gas is going to go down... There are oil spills and there are a hell of a lot of them... You get a spill and you're shutting that beach down for 10 or 15 years.

— Dennis Jones (R-Pinellas County)

If I had to vote on it right now, I would not vote for drilling offshore.

— Ron Reagan (R-Bradenton)

A very good question to ask at this juncture would be, "Why are there still politicians running for national office who are thinking about oil as a solution?" This is fossilized thinking. The solution to the problem can't include depending on continuing the same problem into the future. What we need is a New Deal for Energy.

If drilling off of Florida and the like were permitted today, it would be at least five years before production began and then the impact of that production would be to drop the price of gasoline about 3¢ to 5¢ per gallon. Gasoline is already $4.10 per gallon on average across the country. By the time production started, we could reasonable expect that the price would average, conservatively, $5.50 per gallon. At best, we're talking about savings of perhaps 10%, and that's being rather optimistic. Even if the risk of doing harm to already stressed ecosystems were as ideally small as some believe, in terms of risk vs. benefit that's hardly worthwhile. Moreover, if the US increased production, that still leaves us open to the threat of other countries cutting production to keep the price of oil high. A few new oil wells are not going to change the bigger picture in terms of where world reserves actually lie, and even if we conserve energy not only will our demand likely continue to increase — albeit at a slower rate — but demand in India and China will also grow. This doesn't look much like a solution to me.

We really need to start thinking about some fundamental changes, and a good place to start would be to make automobiles less necessary. We need to have a massive project in public mass transit. I don't mean only within the limits of large metropolitan areas, I mean that the US needs to build a mass transit system that can get people anywhere in the country that they want and need to travel. Cars should be relegated to a last resort status. It should be more expensive to travel by car than by mass transit, even if one were going all the way from New York to Los Angeles.

This hypothetical national transit system needs to be designed for flexible energy sources, too. It should be capable of being powered by multiple means — solar, wind, gassified coal and biomass. In fact, it shouldn't matter what the fuel is. It should be able to run on anything, at least in the great majority of applications. If we're low on one energy source, or if we find a new one, it should be a matter of simply plugging that new source into the grid.

I don't think this is a solution that could feasibly be left to the alleged free market, either. It's been more than 30 years since the United States experienced its first massive fuel shortages and we still travel primarily by automobile. If the free market were ever going to fix this situation, we'd have real solutions by now. Corporations see profits by minimizing expenditures and maximizing returns; they'll take the most immediately cost-effective, bottom-line-boosting route every time. That's not what's needed here.

What we need, I think, is a solution that looks a lot like the public works projects of the Great Depression Era, or like the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950's. Both of these revolutionized America's infrastructure, and we need another such revolution right now. This is too big a project for a patchwork of corporate interests to tackle. A centralized solution is needed. Personally, I don't care if such a solution looks like something that one might see produced by Socialism. Who cares? The only entity that can potentially pull together and coordinate the enormous resources necessary is the federal government. They'll screw some things up, no doubt, but right now the closest thing we've got is AmTrack, really. That might be part of the planning, but it's certainly not the solution itself. We need much, much more to happen and the time for waiting for it passed us by in the 1970's. We don't even have a viable alternative energy system after all this time. A top-down approach is called for.

And while we're talking about alternative energy sources, why not horses? Yes, it sounds antiquated, but why not put some horses and buggies on the roads for people traveling relatively short distances in cities and towns? Oats are a lot cheaper than oil. We can even recycle horse manure into fuel for the rest of the national transit grid if we're smart about it.

I'm not an urban planner or engineer, but I don't think one has to be one to realize that big changes are warranted here. We should be looking at the end of the automobile era at this point. We should be looking at solutions, not at putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. America has done it in the past and we can do it again if the national will is there and we have people in national office capable of thinking of long term, big picture changes that won't leave us right back where we started by the time one or two more presidential administrations have come and gone. Fossilized thinking that relies on fossil fuels isn't going to cut it anymore. Poking a few more holes in the ground and hoping that rotten Carboniferous Period plant juice will come gushing to the surface is something that might mollify those whose own lifetimes probably won't extend a decade or two but it isn't going to change anything in the ways they need to change.

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John McCain Breeding an Army of Trolls

I haven't written much about presidential politics in here. Believe me, I'm as happy as anyone that the end of ShrubCo is coming nigh after eight years of watching my country being turned into a deserved laughing stock. Of the eight presidencies during my lifetime, that of Bush II has been the worst for everyone except the super-rich and power-connected. I'll readily admit that I'm in full agreement with Dennis Kucinich who gave an impassioned, detailed and well-reasoned speech on the floor of the House a couple of days ago as to why the current presidency should not only end immediately but should have ended years ago. This hasn't gotten much buzz in the press, but I caught it on C-Span and various parts of it have made their way to YouTube, including the segment embedded here:

Still, as happy as I am about Dubya going back to clearing brush in Crawford, Texas on a permanent basis, I'm not all that excited about the two major party candidates. I started the primary season hoping against remote odds that Bill Richardson could get somewhere, but of course he didn't. Then I was marginally in favor of Hillary Clinton. Obama is my third choice from among the field of Democratic contenders, but I'll vote for him because if a bag of stale corn chips were running against John McCain I'd be casting my ballot for President Doritos in November.

The McCain Campaign's fiendish plot to breed an army of trolls chartered with spamming blogs with cut-and-paste text provided on their website doesn't do a thing to change my perception that McCain is insane in the membrane. While I may be channeling a bit of Dr. Seuss in that statement, I'm doing so here on my home blog.

The McCain campaign is exhorting the Xerox-minded to

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you've commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

Below those marching orders and commensurate promise of "points" appears a list of links to blogs. Below that appear "talking points" to be used on the targeted blogs.

To my mind, this is nothing but an invitation to troll. As you may have noticed, I moderate comments on this blog, and I do that in part because there are people who do exactly what McCain is asking his supporters to do with other cut-and-past responses. On any given day I'll delete a number of potential comments here that are nothing but cut-and-pasted Bible texts, commercial spams, and other such complete reproductions of what somebody else says. What McCain is asking his loyalists to do is really no different

Anyone interested in what McCain has to say can hear him on television, read his words in the newspaper, and even visit his website. That includes readers of Daily Kos or this blog or any other blog or no blogs at all. That doesn't require trolling the comments sections of those blogs, though. That's an annoyance, and I'm even less likely to vote for someone who is telling his followers to get in my face and do so in a manner which involves no reflection at all on their part. In fact, that's largely my problem with American Conservatism in a nutshell; it's mainly talking points and spin that relies on uncritical acceptance of authoritative statements. McCain's blog strategy looks to me like Rush Limbaugh's Dittoheads vomiting all over the web. Why in the world would I support such things?

All McCain's blog strategy does for me is point out that McCain just doesn't get it, and that's a big part of why I wasn't going to vote for him in the first place. Seeing him reward obedience with "points" doesn't change my mind about him one bit.

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Great Things in Boston Part 2: Laurie Anderson at the Opera House

Saturday night's concert at the Boston Opera House by Laurie Anderson on her Homeland tour was, in a word, terrific. The opera house itself is a magnificent place and the restoration appears to have gone well. The only downside of the place was that there's not much leg room, at least not in the mezzanine where we had our seats. Be prepared to get a little bit acquainted with the knees of the person sitting behind you if you go. Still, the acoustics are phenomenal and the decor appropriately regal in a Louis XIV way.

Having seen a few clips from previous shows on Anderson's tour as well as having seen her perform once before in Berkeley about 15 years ago, I was expecting a multimedia eye-popper of a show. I was thus surprised when the performance consisted of Anderson, three accompanying musicians, and a stage set with nothing more than numerous votive candles and a few glaring, bare light bulbs suspended above the stage from long wires. There were otherwise flood and spotlights throughout the performance but there were no high-tech visuals. This was a stripped-down, bare-bones show as far as that aspect goes.

The performance itself was technically perfect and Anderson is as much the consummate artist as ever. Ethereal, fragile sounds alternated with biting humor and poetically skewed analysis of the state of the Homeland. The show began with a poem about the birth of both memory and mortality in a time before the world began and there was nothing but endless flights of birds circling through unbroken sky. A lark's father dies and, not knowing what to do with the body, she buries him in the back of her own head — and so memory came to be.

From there, Anderson launched into a piece about how experts manufacture problems in order to have something to solve. The music was dark, sad, sardonic and mesmerizing throughout. Anderson had the audience in the palm of her hand, eliciting laughter and stunned silence alternately. While most of the pieces she performed flowed into one another, leaving no time for audience reaction, there were a couple of moments when a piece would end and the audience took a moment to recover, as if they were trying to sort out in their heads what they'd just heard before gaining the ability to applaud. I know it happened to me; this was some powerful art. I don't think I can see myself sitting around listening to the material like I'd listen to mainstream music, but that takes nothing away from the performance itself. This isn't the Foo Fighters, after all, this is Laurie Anderson.

Judging from this concert, Homeland is some of the most political material in Anderson's long career. She's very clear in what her purpose is here; she mourning the death of democracy and the madness of America in the "post-911" world. In what was the most moving moment of the performance, Anderson invokes imagery from old Westerns; someone runs into a saloon and shouts, "There's trouble at the mine!" and everyone stops what they're doing to run out and lend help. Why, she wonders, isn't that happening now when the "trouble at the mine" is the dying of freedom? In an emotive male voice sounding nearly on the verge of tears, she implores over and over again, "There's trouble at the mine!" Nobody leaves, of course, and why should we? We have already been told in the opening piece, "Only an expert can see the problem, and only an expert can deal with the problem." She brings this dilemma to light in every thing from the Iraq War to global climate change to the struggle of everyday Americans to barely scrape by ("When you're 1.3 weeks away from homelessness... one paycheck away from homelessness... that... is... a problem.")

Anderson's Homeland tour will continue through mid-June. Check the tour schedule and if you're within 100 miles and go! This is intense stuff. If you're someone who regularly reads this blog, there's a good chance you'll be moved by Anderson's performance of this material — even if you've never heard any of her music before or never heard of Laurie Anderson before. Take the risk. It's worth it.

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Science Debate 2008 Date and Venue Set

According to a press release issued yesterday, a date and venue for Science Debate 2008 have been set and invitations to the remaining presidential candidates have been sent.

Candidates invited to debate science & economy
Intel Chair Craig Barrett joins Science Debate 2008;
Debate to be held at the Franklin Institute before Pennsylvania Primary

WASHINGTON – ScienceDebate2008.com, the citizens initiative calling for a presidential debate on science and technology policy, today announced that it has formally invited the presidential candidates to a debate on April 18 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, four days before the Pennsylvania Primary. The invitation to the candidates can be found here.

"The future economic success of the United States depends on out-performing the competition with smart people and smart ideas," said Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. "Without the best education system and investments in basic research and development we will become a second rate economic power."

“This is about the future of America,” said Shawn Lawrence Otto, one of the debate organizers. “Most of the major policy challenges the next president will face, from climate chance to jobs and economic competitiveness to healthcare to the health of the oceans, center on science and technology. Where is the next transistor economy going to come from? Is there going to be action to address climate change? Do we need a Marshall plan for science in America? What about peak oil? Why are our school children falling behind other countries in math and science, and what should be done about it? We are trying to elevate these important policy issues in the national dialogue. We want voters to have a chance to assess candidates’ in terms of their visionary leadership on these big issues and others like them. It’s not a science quiz, it’s about policy. We’re talking about the health of your family, the health of the economy, and the health of the planet. What are the solutions? We hope the candidates for president will want to explore these issues more thoroughly with the American people.”

The group, started in December 2007 by two out-of-work screenwriters (Otto wrote and coproduced House of Sand and Fog; fellow screenwriter Matthew Chapman wrote Runaway Jury), two scientists and a science journalist has garnered a series of impressive endorsements in recent weeks, including 97 major universities and other organizations, and leading business executives like Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel, as well as dozens of Nobel laureates and current and former government officials, including members of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and Clinton Health & Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. It is now cosponsored by the AAAS, the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The list is here.

Apparently only the four remaining "major contenders" -- Clinton, Obama, McCain and Huckabee -- were invited. Ron Paul and Mike Gravel were not. As they've been mathematically eliminated as viable major party candidates at this point, I suppose that's understandable, although I would have liked to have had an opportunity to hear their ideas about the role of science in America over the course of the next four years and beyond, too.

It remains to be seen whether all four candidates will accept the invitation to debate on this topic. This may be a bit cynical of me, but I have a seeking suspicion that at least one of the four may opt not to take part (Huckabee). Of course, that's my own bias showing through; I have no concrete reason to say this, so take it for what it's worth.

This is an important issue to me, and it's likely important to many other individuals in the scientific community by which term I include scientists, science students, and general members of the public who keep up with science and technology in general. Let's hope that more than one of the current crop of candidates feels the same way!

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