The wind picked up around 0600 this morning. After the last round of high winds, we’re a bit uneasy. We’re recording higher wind velocities since the Bradford pear was removed. The canopy it spread blocked a tremendous amount of airflow. The highest gust recorded this morning was 20 MPH. These winds are predicted to continue for another 18-24 hours. They will likely cause some power outages as trees and branches fall onto power lines. They may be responsible for some vehicular accidents as drivers fail to anticipate them or do drive defensively.
We’ll go to sleep tonight with the high, lonely moaning of an air mass being compressed and heated by its passage over the eastern divide and down into the funnel of Cassi Creek’s valley. My weather station has done a good job or data collection. As I feed the data into a national database via Weather Underground, a meteorology web site, it is combined with other local weather feeds and handed back to me in a graphic overlay that allows me to see the results of adiabatic cooling and heating, and their effect on the microclimate that I live in.
More disturbing than high winds in Tennessee, are the winds of idiocy blowing in Oklahoma now. They are not restricted to Oklahoma but the latest manifestation is happening there.
For some reason a fear of Sharia has become prevalent in this nation. Actually, the reason is easy to discern. Demagogues like Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck have been spreading blatant lies in an attempt to make people believe that Muslim immigrants are replacing our laws with Sharia. It’s not true, it’s not going to be true, it’s a damned lie; much like every other word, that ever leaves the mouths of Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck.
Unfortunately, much of our population has become unable to and unwilling to actually read unbiased sources in order to discover what is true and what is not in today’s America. These people pick up the idiot wind as it issues from talk radio, Fox News, or Palin’s ghost-written twit/face book apocrypha. Without bothering to fact check it, they pass it on in countless emails, tweets, forwards, and conversations. By day’s end, it has worked like any pyramid scheme to enrich the sources with mindless minions. It requires no intellect to be a minion and to spread the idiot winds over the landscape. It requires no intellect to believe the bullshit that Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck spew out daily.
As Gerson points out in his article below, there is no difference in the way Islamic fundamentalists and the most extreme Islamophobes view Sharia and the eventual end policies of Islamic fundamentalism. Change the deity, the book, and the clothing; greet the worst of the American Taliban as they present in the Christian Identity movement.
There’s no real difference in the Phelps family, hate-mongers of the Westboro Baptist Church claiming to speak with a deity who instructs them to spread hate, and bin Laden, al Alawi, or any other self-made mullah spreading his brand of hate because he hears the same deity with a different name send him out to commit mass murder.
If we see people living on the street in boxes, talking to unseen persons who direct their actions, we assume they are schizophrenic and, if funding is available, try to provide them with medication and therapy to help them learn to distinguish “voices” from reality. Give the same person a book to wave around inside a “sanctified” building, dress them in business wear, and suddenly the “voices” are “holy messages” and we are all supposed to follow their directives. The messenger is suddenly no longer in need of medication. At least, his minions believe so.
The damage from the high velocity winds last month and this month has been or is being corrected. The damage from the idiot winds is far greater in scope and far harder to repair.
Oklahoma has essentially become a state populated by minions. God forbid a Muslim should wish to live there and follow the tenets of his/her faith. God forbid anyone of a different faith should find their self in Oklahoma and wish to practice their faith if it is different from the predominant protestant fundamentalism that pervades the great plains.
I can enjoy the high lonesome sound of winds in the distance, wailing like an old steam locomotive at a grade crossing. There is no way on this earth that I can enjoy the anti-Sharia, islamophobic idiot wind issuing from the theocrats, plutocrats, teavangelists, and hate-filled bigots that make up the GOP today. I will never understand that idiot wind. Hopefully, I’ve enough reasoning power left to evade its grasp. I’ll never become one of the minions that travel on those winds, seeking and finding “voice” and instruction. But I know where those winds can travel and the sort of damage they have done and will do.
We’ve seen the work of minions in the destruction and death wrought by bombs in clinics, bombs at the Olympics, bombs in an Oklahoma City office building. Racial purity, political purity, Christian Identity, teavangelism, witch craft. All have been factors, all directed by a deity. Sooner than later, some minion is going to hear a voice on the idiot wind telling him it is time to play cowboys and Muslims, or cowboys and Catholics. I don’t want to be there when it happens.
Oklahoma's faith-baiting initiative
By Michael Gerson
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Just to be on the safe side, voters in Oklahoma this month overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment that prevents the Talibanization of the Sooner State. Henceforth, there will be no public stonings in Ponca City, no forced burqa wearing in Bartlesville, no sharia law in Lawton.
Even supporters of the referendum - which forbade state courts from considering sharia in their deliberations - admitted that the threat from Oklahoma's 30,000 Muslims couldn't be called "imminent."
"It's not a problem and we want to keep it that way," explains state Sen. Anthony Sykes. Sharia law, according to state Rep. Rex Duncan, is a "cancer that must be removed with a preemptive strike."…
michaelgerson@washpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111505173.html
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