31 October 2011 , H.R. 2576 Cruel trick, no treat

          Downsize Grover Norquist just before the holidays

          http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/190179-house-votes-to-scale-back-healthcare-law

      “House votes to scale back healthcare law eligibility, 262-157

By Pete Kasperowicz - 10/27/11 10:58 AM ET

The House approved legislation Thursday that would tighten the eligibility requirements for participation in health insurance exchanges, Medicaid and other programs under last year's healthcare law, making it harder for middle-income Americans to qualify for these programs.

The House approved the bill, H.R. 2576, on a 262-157 vote in which 26 Democrats voted for the measure.”

Cassi Creek:

          There is so much hatred for Obama among the teavangelists, and so much fear among them that another person might actually be provided with medical care that they might not be able to afford, that the teavangelists are going to pick at every aspect of the 2010 affordable health care law.  Their propaganda organs play the advertising scenarios so that whites are played against blacks, blacks against, Latinos, and Asians against everyone else in an effort to convince the teavangelist base that their household incomes are diminishing because of minorities stealing medical services. 

          In reality, the standard ER in most city and nearly all rural hospitals is still serving a population of white citizens who are just as likely to be without health insurance as are minority citizens. 

          The bill cited above is another attempt to destroy access to health care for a large portion of the American citizenry.  By raising the threshold for eligibility for publicly funded services, the teavangelists will eliminate access to expensive nursing homes for patients recovering from illnesses and injuries.  That a good portion of those patients will have no place to go for rehabilitation and post-hospitalization care is just fine with the congressional teavangelists.  If the patients remain ill and need follow up care in hospital, the insurance companies that control who lives and who dies can refuse to pay for the admission and care, thus decreasing their payout and increasing the funds available to pay CEO bonuses and to bribe congressmen. 

          This is particularly despicable when the congressional representative voting to pass this bill is a former physician who mistook his Hippocratic Oath for the hypocritical oath.  Obviously, former Doctor Roe is a proponent of the teavanagelist health care plan for the non-wealthy – “Get sick, die quick!”

          This skewed loyalty and failure to actually represent his electorate makes me wonder what hold Grover Norquist has on Roe and his teavangelist colleagues.  Norquist has essentially suborned the House, so that the members now listen only to someone who is not entitled by law or by Constitution to have any say how the various members vote.  For a population that purports to want strict interpretation of the Constitution, they are entirely too quick to allow the rise of an un-official leadership chain. 

          This is a call to unseat any legislator who has allowed Norquist and his illegal pledges to subvert the manner in which we govern our nation.  Grover Norquist is not an elected official, but is someone who negates the ability of millions of registered voters to have their opinion duly heard by their “elected representative.”  We fought England to end government without representation.  We can do the same with K Street.

http://us.cnn.com/2011/10/31/opinion/frum-republican-tea-party-scenarios/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

            “Washington (CNN) -- A new CNN poll finds that about half of Republicans sympathize with the tea party movement. The other half either remain aloof or (5%) even express hostility.

That second group of Republicans has received remarkably little media attention this cycle. Yet their man -- Mitt Romney -- has held steady in first or second place for the past three years. Meanwhile tea party Republicans have bounced from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to (now) Herman Cain, transfixing the media every time they lose faith in one messiah and search for another…”

            “Washington (CNN) -- A new CNN poll finds that about half of Republicans sympathize with the tea party movement. The other half either remain aloof or (5%) even express hostility.

That second group of Republicans has received remarkably little media attention this cycle. Yet their man -- Mitt Romney -- has held steady in first or second place for the past three years. Meanwhile tea party Republicans have bounced from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to (now) Herman Cain, transfixing the media every time they lose faith in one messiah and search for another…’

            “…Possibility 3: A tea party Republican is nominated and loses.

From the point of view of a non-tea party Republican, the third possibility is the most tragic waste. A winnable election will be thrown away on an ideological adventure. Yet within the disaster might lurk a silver lining. At least the GOP will get the ideological adventure out of its system. For three years, Republican activists have lived in a fantasy world in which fringe characters like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain somehow "speak for the common sense of the common people." It seems incredible that anybody could believe such a thing. It seems crazy that anyone would actually need a presidential election to disabuse them of such notions. But as Benjamin Franklin said: "Experience is a hard teacher, but fools will have no other."

            “…The tea party stands for a series of propositions that don't meet the reality test: that deficits matter more than jobs, that cutting deficits and tightening credit will accelerate economic growth, that high taxes and over-regulation are the most important reasons that growth has not revived, and that America still offers the world's best opportunity for the poor to rise. Tea party plans call for a radical shift in the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor -- and promise big reductions in government spending without touching any of the benefits of current retirees.

If put into practice, the tea party platform is a formula for political and economic crisis.

Cassi Creek:

          What this amounts to is a glimpse of non-teavangelist reality in a former GOP/theocon functionary.  Frum has recognized that the potential for the teavangelists to drive the bus over the side of the bluff is simply too great to allow them any further access to power. 

          If the teavangelists try to “starve the government, I will resist them in every manner available to me.  There is no benefit to any but the very rich in rolling the calendar back to the 1880s.  However, if the various teavangelist leaders would care to put their political futures where their bellies are, I’ll be only too willing to help them spend the next 12 months hungry, cold, homeless and without access to any form of health care.  Before they vote to condemn other citizens to those conditions, they should first be made to experience them.

30 October 2011 Do I look like a tourist guide?

Notes from last night and today.

            There’s Celtic music playing in the Dance hall and muddy mostly unintelligible verbal directions as the caller tries to teach the beginners class.  The aroma of cheap, Hershey/Mars chocolate emanating from the plastic pumpkin about 1/3 meters to my right-front.  The pumpkin is filled with miniature candy bars put there to be eaten by the dancers. 

            I like dark chocolate, high cocoa content food that has the intoxicating flavor burst when you first bite down on it.  I rarely eat it.    In the past two years I have used more chocolate for cooking, flavoring sauces, more than I have eaten.  So resisting the pail of chocolate is relatively easy. 

            We had steady slow winter-like rain Thursday and Friday.  Sunlight began to appear about noon today.  The prediction for tonight’s low temperature calls for 32°F.  I have a supposed thermostatic plug in use for the filter shed lamps.  I tested it last week with a positive result in the 35°-37° range.  If it works tonight I’ll be more comfortable using it.

            This is the Halloween dance.  The gamut of costumes is fairly wide, including a cardboard box labeled as a porta-pot. 

            I’m at least another 45 days from any possibility of a cortisone injection to either shoulder.  I put on quite a lot of lidocaine topical ointment tonight, hoping that I might be able to dance with Gloria.  But both shoulders feel like someone hit them with a hammer and chisel.  The thought of beginning a dance and then having to dropout is rather discouraging.  That seems to me to be discourteous. 

I’m sitting here watching the battery drain down.  I’m reminded of the WWII submarine war in the Pacific game that I had when a 386 processor was the upper limit of personal hardware.  It, quite realistically, required that the player keep a close eye on the battery charge levels.   Those diesel-electric boats lived or died by their effective use of batteries. 

Tour guide questions tonight:  Where is there a gas station?  Where is there a restaurant?  Are these (the candy) for anyone?  Where is the bathroom – female?  Where is the bathroom – male?  What time does the dance start?  Is there a dance tonight?  How much is it to get in – looking at the fee schedule on the table in front of them?  And, of course, the ever popular " Is my wife/husband/boy friend/ girl friend/date/neighbor/son/daughter/cousin here yet?"

There was an ambush in Kabul yesterday that resulted in the deaths of at least 13 U.S. troops.  It is quite probable that the explosive used in Kabul came across the border from Pakistan, where the Pakistani military is engaged in exacting revenge upon the U.S. for making them look inept when we killed bin Laden.  It is time we end our involvement in Afghanistan and bring our troops home quickly.  The Afghani government is likely to fall to the Taliban, but they will do that whether we leave tomorrow morning or prop it up for another century.

While my weather station recorded a low temperature of 33.22°F, there was ice on the deck and frost on the ground this morning.  The thermostatic controller did not turn the filter shack lamps on.  When I checked the interior temperature with an IR sensor this morning I was greeted by two mice of rather large size.  They are most likely the front-runners of a populace that hopes to winter in the filter shed. 

In checking the lamp cords for integrity, I managed to encounter the mice again.  After leaving several packages of d-con to deter them from gnawing on lamp cord insulation, I chased at least one of them out of the shed – only temporary I’m sure. 

Today is sunny, bright, and calm.  I’m fixing pork chops with mushrooms for dinner.  

29 October 2011 Here’s a real house of horrors

Cassi Creek:

          In today’s local newspaper was a feature column about a local church’s “Judgment House.”  This is an effort of proselyltization slightly disguised as a Halloween amusement.  The responsible preacher was interviewed and went into detail about how his program avoided really horrifying scenarios; seeking only to create more Christians by threatening them with Hell and eternal damnation. 

          To be fair, some of these church-sponsored houses are truly gory; stress all manner of murder and mayhem, finishing up by equating contraception and abortion with pre-meditated murder.  They intend to scare the people who might consider family planning, using morning after pills, and undergoing abortion.  They make no allowance for victims of rape, incest, or medical necessity to save the life of the woman in need of surgical abortion to prevent death by disease or disorder. 

          In today’s Washington Post, I found something that dwarfs these fright houses in intent and in malevolence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-an-anti-abortion-push-to-redefine-person-could-wind-up-hurting-women/2011/10/26/gIQAQSwGQM_story_2.html

“How an anti-abortion push to redefine ‘person’ could hurt women’s rights

By Jessica Valenti, Published: October 28

“A common message from anti-abortion activists is that “women deserve better than abortion.” Today, however, one branch of that movement is taking women down a notch with a new strategy that could prioritize the rights of fertilized eggs over the rights of the women carrying them.

“A question on the ballot in Mississippi next month will ask voters to decide: “Should the term ‘person’ be defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof?” This issue is before voters thanks to the “personhood” movement, which says that conception is the moment that a person, and a person’s legal rights, begin to exist…”

          This Mississippi effort at enshrining zygotic tissue and declaring it sentient is extremely dangerous to the rights of all women resident in these supposedly United States. 

          Under no circumstances do I consider a fetus to be a person from the point of conception.  I am old enough to recall when 7-month miscarriages were almost always fatal to the fetus.  We’ve developed technology that can fill in for uterine incubation in many cases.  However such technology is expensive and beyond the means of many women to pay for. 

          If these “personhood” acts become laws, the potential for stupidity-fueled, religious fundamentalism to become inserted into the lives of actual persons is frightful.  The same fundamentalists that demand person status and rights for fetuses will instantly abandon that “person” to poverty, hunger, poor education, homelessness, and unwanted status the moment it is expelled from the uterus. 

          Read the article.  The danger is real.  Our American Taliban is intent upon rolling back the calendar to the days when women were merely necessary breeding stock.  This must be stopped.  Watch for these attempts to declare a fetus a person coming soon to your home state.

          

28 October 2011 It always rains on Halloween

          Thinking back to my childhood, I can’t recall a Halloween that wasn’t cold, rainy, or both.  There were always children going door-to-door with their flimsy costumes covered up by their heavy outerwear.  By the end of the night, they were snot-nosed from the cold, sugared-out little creatures not fit to be around. 

          Today has been cold and wet, with a fine continual rain and temperature hovering around 47 °F.  So, of course we took advantage of the day to restock the larder.  The price of food becomes ever more outrageous.  We will have a roast chicken tonight with sweet potato for Gloria and an Idaho baker for me.

          Another Halloween customary occurrence was the late evening arrival of van loads of children from the outlying rural surrounds at the door of urban dwellers.  They younger ones were more-or-less shepherded it by their older siblings and cousins.  In Palmetto, we knew it was time to turn off the lights when the people arriving with their hands out were teens and young adults who didn’t even bother with pretence of costuming. 

          Now we live in the rural surrounds.  No lights will be left on; no one will park at the end of the driveway and send their progeny down the long dark driveway to beg candy from the “Yankees who don’t go to our church.”  There are no sidewalks on our road, no streetlights, and I’m not even crazy enough to walk that road at night. 

          Have a safe trip into town, folks!  Bundle up well and have a barf bag ready for the ones who gobble too much chocolate.  That theobromine can really upset some stomachs.

           Hope your church parties do a good job at keeping the children’s minds from turning to sin and witchery.  Don’t let them practice any of the old folk tale divinations.  Did you hear about how to see whom you will marry?  You need a shovel, some coals from the fireplace and …

Shabbat Shalom

27 October 2011 Why Do They Hate Us?

          “The original French is 'Qu'ils mangent de la brioche', i.e. 'Let them eat brioche' “

          Brioche, Challah, Na’an, Sourdough, Batard, Baguete, Blini, Pita, or any one of a thousand different names for that most basic of foods; if priced too dearly is worth more than those who have it can understand.

          People are less likely to march in the streets if their bellies are full.  Hungry people have nothing in common with those who know that they won’t be missing meals.  People who can’t afford to buy their next meal have a lot in common with each other even if they speak different languages.  The mother tongue (mame- loschn) of poverty, worldwide, is hunger. 

          We are beginning to see more reports of parents refusing to eat in order to feed their children.  For many U.S. schoolchildren, meals at school are all that keep them from malnutrition.  Not content with St. Ronnie’s conversion of ketchup into a vegetable, the teavangelists are now eager to cut school nutrition programs and WIC supplemental food programs along with cutting teacher positions. 

          The most certain way to improve the learning curve of U.S. students is to pack them into overly full classrooms, reduce the number of teachers, and keep both students and teachers hungry. 

          There is such a gap between teavangelists and the reality of the rest of the world that it is impossible to bridge it.  Of course, if teavangelists can pack enough hungry marchers onto a crumbling bridge, they can hope for the elimination of an infrastructure and a population/education problem in one demonstration of structural strength and gravity – neither of which teavangelists believe in.  If a bridge falls into the water without benefit of formal begging for divine intercession, is it magic or science?

          

26 October 2011 Will the Potemkin dock here?

26 October 2011  Will the Potemkin dock here?

          Sergei Eisenstein’s marvelous propaganda piece was important in the Soviet Union’ early development as a nation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battleship_Potemkin is the primary source for photographs and text reproduced in this post. 

          “Eisenstein wrote the film as a revolutionary propaganda film, but also used it to test his theories of "montage". The revolutionary Soviet filmmakers of the Kuleshov school of filmmaking were experimenting with the effect of film editing on audiences, and Eisenstein attempted to edit the film in such a way as to produce the greatest emotional response, so that the viewer would feel sympathy for the rebellious sailors of the Battleship Potemkin and hatred for their cruel overlords. In the manner of most propaganda, the characterization is simple, so that the audience could clearly see with whom they should sympathize…

            .. The most celebrated scene in the film is the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky orPotemkin Stairs). In this scene, the Tsar's soldiers in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of steps in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion, firing volleys into a crowd. A separate detachment of mounted Cossacks charges the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. The victims include a older woman wearing Pince-nez, a young boy with his mother, a student in uniform and a teenage schoolgirl. A mother pushing an infant in a baby carriage falls to the ground dying and the carriage rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd.

The massacre on the steps never took place, presumably inserted by Eisenstein for dramatic effect and to demonize the Imperial regime. It is, however, based on the fact that there were widespread demonstrations in the area, sparked off by the arrival of the Potemkin in Odessa Harbour, and both The Times of London and the resident British Consul reported that troops fired on the crowds with accompanying loss of life (the actual number of casualties is unrecorded). Roger Ebert writes, "That there was, in fact, no czarist massacre on the Odessa Steps scarcely diminishes the power of the scene ... It is ironic that [Eisenstein] did it so well that today, the bloodshed on the Odessa steps is often referred to as if it really happened. “

The battleship did exist as a pre-dreadnaught vessel.   Here are the links to the ship and its role in history.

http://www.cityofart.net/bship/ru_potemkin.html

http://www.cityofart.net/bship/ru_potemkin.html#specs

Cassi Creek:  Every revolution needs a series of sparking incidents to stir up the populace to the point of willingness to place their corporeal selves in the line of fire.    Those incidents can be small, serial events leading to a major event, as in the run up to the October Revolution of 1917.  They can be a continuum of personal insults sparking an individual to decide he’s had enough, as in Tunisia this year.   They can be real, imagined, or deliberately fictitious. 

          I find myself wondering what sort of incident it will take to bring about a political revolution in the United States.  In my lifespan I’ve experienced the civil rights conflict, a black Americans tried to wrest human rights that they were and are entitled to from a white, racist, population that resents the emancipation of slaves by Lincoln.   I’ve lived through the assassination of one President, the attempt to kill another, the killing of a candidate for President and the attempt to kill another.  I’ve seen the murder of a civil rights leader by racists. And dozens of riots sparked by blacks protesting injustice while others rioted for no real reason but anger...  I’ve lived through the Vietnam War and the civil unrest it spawned, including the use of national guardsmen to suppress disorder.  I’ve seen to major recessions brought about by deliberate manipulation of the housing market, stock market, and financial markets.  In both cases, the culprits go un-punished and continue to fatten on the illegal operations that will, if left unchecked, bring about worldwide depression. 

          In another nation, any of those could have been the spark that began a revolution.  Yet they all failed to change the world, as we know it.  What will it take to cause Americans to rise up and demand a better economy?

25 October 2011 Drum Circles, Dancing Girls, and the Dialectic

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-are-the-anti-semites-of-occupy-wall-street/2011/10/24/gIQAP89eDM_story.html

Where are the anti-Semites of Occupy Wall Street?

By Richard Cohen, Published: October 24

            “Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry — not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to Google the phrase “Zionists control Wall St.” Google “nut case” instead…

            “Occupy Wall Street has become an event for its own sake, a destination for the aimless. It is something that occurs on countless iPhone cameras, a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums. The nostalgic scent of pot wafts occasionally through the air, and I feel so much younger. This, I’m sure, will bring an end to the Vietnam War.”

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

§  This was attributed to Trotsky in an epigraph in Night Soldiers: A Novel (1988) by Alan Furst but it may actually be a revision of a statement earlier attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Only a very loose translation of "the dialectic" would produce "war."
In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45027333/ns/us_news/#.TqbQkd41Rzo

By BETSY BLANEY

            “AMARILLO, Texas — The last of the United States' most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. The completion of the dismantling program is a year ahead of schedule, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, and aligns with President Barack Obama's goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons.”

           

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb

          Cassi Creek:  I’ll let Mr. Cohen debate with his self and others whether or not there is anti-Semitism at the OWS sites.  My personal opinion is that there is a continued presence of anti-Semitism in the “New and Improved American New Left” that first became part of the dialectic in 1967, when Israel became a proven military power.  Add that to the anti-Semitism resident in the American neo-Nazis, the various militias, and the Christian Identity church/cults; throw in the imaginary world banking conspiracy, and there should be no doubt that Mr. Cohen did not look deeply enough. 

          Your impression may vary.  Google “International Jewish Conspiracy” and you will be amazed at the depth of stupidity and hatred centered on the false belief that Jews are all wealthy and that they control the world’s finances, communications, and media.

          Drum Circles are one of those things that one either enjoys or does not. I personally don’t care for them.  While I appreciate polyrhythmic music, most drum circles fall far short of producing that sort of music. 

          Dancing Girls, Cohen is correct in his description of the zaftig young women who can’t sense or keep the beat in a simple 4/4 time signature passage.  Add in the cacophony and poly-disrhythmia of a drum circle and the attempt can be amusing.  However, watching zaftig young women move in dance or semblance of dance is always enjoyable at one or more levels.  Keep the dancing girls.

          The dialectic.  Imagine Lenon, Stalin, Trotsky, Khrushchev, and the rest of the successful revolutionaries who brought about the 1917 October Revolution speaking one after another for hours, non-stop, leading into a demand for the Marxian dialectic to evolve.  Think consensus search with no two people agreeing about the day of the week, month of the year, or anything else.  This is futility, a political stance developing out of boredom and fatigue.  The last speaker standing didn’t win but who cares. 

          "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you."

          So if you aren’t interested, don’t worry.  I’m not interested in sitting through all that political posturing any more.  I no longer think government by consensus is possible.  It was never practical. 

          Keep the memories close at hand but scrap the dialectic!

24 October 2011 Congressional reform I can support

Buffet's 'Congressional Reform Act.' Pass it on:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/buffett.asp

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes," he told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months &8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971...before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land...all because of public pressure.

Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011


1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present &future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time. If you agree with the above, pass it on. 

Cassi Creek:

          This piece of internet wisdom has popped up in many in-boxes over the weekend.  It’s a simple and acceptable means of reforming an electoral body that has become self-obsessed, unwilling to carry out the jobs it was elected to carry out, and self-perpetuating.  Simple things that might just work are usually too good to be true.  Therefore, I checked that aspect before passing it on to anyone else. 

          Snopes says that the attribution, to Warren Buffett, is accurate.  That’s good enough for my purposes.  I will pass this on and encourage everyone else to do so, too. 

          So join me and millions of others in the hope that we can dump this Congress that has sold its collective soul for re-election funding at the expense of the nation’s continued existence; or at least scare the shit out of them. 

          We, America’s citizens, have no job security, no social safety net, no affordable health care, and no protection from corporate greed and theft.  Why should Congress have any of these things?

23 October 2011 Kill “Job - Killing”

Cassi Creek:         The most frequently used words to come from the mouth of a GOP/teavangelist these days are, “job-killing.”

          They brandish the pairing about as if it was graven in stone, or on golden plates, and handed directly to the current brandisher by a space-alien on a sociology field trip to a poorly acculturated, primitive level planet in the galactic equivalent of Zimbabwe or Alabama. 

          “Hey, let’s put a new word pair into the lexicon of this group and see how long it takes for it to become common usage.”

          It hasn’t taken long at all.  When one teavangelist utters the words, the rest will fall all over each other in their haste to parrot the first.  That they misuse it, misunderstand it, fail to appreciate either its origins or implications is of no concern to the teavangelists, to their official GOP over-seers, or to the millions of “the base” who will instantly believe that there is truth in the implication and application.  Since “the base” is in the control population – programmed by environment and acculturation to avoid reading anything longer or more difficult than the “how to” pictograms on a box of microwave macaroni and cheese, “the base” will unfortunately adopt the word pair and believe that the GOP/teavangelists apply it accurately and honestly.

          The word pair has become a simple code for “objectives of the opposition party and the non-base voting population.”  Therefore, the GOP/teavangelists are conditioned, much like Pavlov’s subjects to salivate, howl, hump each other’s legs, displaying pack solidarity for the corporations and lobbyists who actually wield political power in the nation today. 

          “Job-killing” is that effect brought about by the current government and/or other entities producing regulations and rules that prevent the corporations from polluting, pillaging, or destroying natural resources.  It is in the creation of government jobs that provide a livable income for workers in this nation.  It is in any effort to prevent the complete takeover of the economy by oligarchs, plutocrats, and theocrats. 

          Somehow, “job-killing does not apply to any action that increases the unholy gap in income between the ultra-wealthy, the corporate robber barons, and the rest of the nation’s residents.  It does not apply to closing factories and operations in this nation in order to ship them offshore to be performed by sweatshop workers living in perpetual 3^rd world poverty. 

          That seems to be the end goal of the political game, reducing modern nations into 3^rd world pits of the formerly middle class and formerly gainfully employed who will slowly starve or succumb to disease while the upper 1% of the test subjects grow ever fatter, richer, and greedier. 

          Stay tuned as the next group of external observers from the Milky Way Galactic sociologic experimental station plan and release the next cosmic joke into the test pool.  Will it be a Malthusian solution to population, an accidental misdirection of a ballistic missile, world leaders crushed by blue ice falling onto a meeting facility, widening in the Antarctic ozone hole?  Perhaps it will be a message in Morse Code transmitted by the flickers and flashes of the Aurora Borealis or Hebrew letters suddenly appearing on the face of the full moon.

22 October 2011 Teavangelists willing to destroy U.S. economy in order to unseat Obama

http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/article/216451/250/Tea-Party-group-Stop-creating-jobs

“ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- A national Tea Party group wants business owners to stop hiring! That's right. Tea Party Nation posted a pledge online Tuesday asking small business owners to stop creating jobs and sink our economy even further as a protest.

The organization says President Obama and the Senate want to destroy the country's economy so they can remake the U.S. into a socialist country. The irony is that halting job creation would destroy our economy.

Tea Party Nation's call says, in part:

"I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased”

The source of this idiocy is found at:

http://www.teapartynation.com/profiles/blogs/call-for-a-strike-of-american-small-businesses-against-the

Cassi Creek:         This is about as grim as it gets.  The teavangelists are trading in stupidity, hatred, and little else.  The party leaders of this Florida element have concluded that they will attempt to prevent businesses from hiring anyone as long as Obama is in office.  They believe that if they tank the economy it will somehow save the nation and the economy. 

          This needs to be widely disseminated in the faint hope that enough voters will see it and realize how dangerous the teavangelists are.  This is a deliberate attempt to destroy the U.S. government and economy.  The powder kegs are stacked, soaked in gasoline, and the teavanagelists are furiously striking matches.

          The only time I have been this worried about the continuation of our nation was during the Cuban Missile crisis.  Please circulate this to everyone you know.

21 October 2011 Dark nights snowy ridges down comforters

          Tuesday night, at 1950, the power failed.  We had three hours to sit quietly in the dark, reading by headlamp and listening to the wind pour over the ridge and down the gap.  Then we had power again, just in time to see the rain begin.  The rain fell steadily Wednesday. 

          Thursday had periods of rain, driven by moderate winds.  When we came home from class Thursday afternoon, the ridgeline was covered by low clouds and snow was visible beneath the clouds.  Frost warnings were issued for Thursday night with follow-on freeze watches for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 

          Winter’s first pale gray pass is right on time. 

          We should see freezing temperatures tonight. 

          I’ve spent the last three days fighting with networkedblogs.  I can’t find a way to log in to the program. System restore failed to overcome the problem. 

          Shrimp Curry for dinner tonight.

Shabbat Shalom!

20 October 2011 tokens, taliban, and teavangelists

          Herbert Cain would deny that he is a token candidate, the comic relief in a drama playing out in televised pretences of political discussion and debate. 

Pat Oliphant sees it somewhat differently, as do I.  I’ll credit his perception and skills as a political cartoonist and let his pen and wit cover the “token” category today.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/19/military-backs-off-threat-to-pull-atheist-from-ceremony/?hpt=hp_t2

“Military backs off threat to pull atheist from ceremony

By Jennifer Rizzo, CNN

Washington (CNN) - After almost being pulled from a graduation ceremony for refusal to lower the head during a benediction, a soldier is now allowed to attend but must instead stand at attention.

The 20-year-old private first class, a proclaimed atheist, is graduating from Advanced Individual Training at Fort Jackson in South Carolina on Thursday.”

http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/

Should be on everyone’s reading list. 

Cassi Creek:

          This site documents the misuse of rank and pay grade by evangelical officers and NCOs to force other members of the armed forces into participation in evangelical Christian rites and rituals.  This is clearly unconstitutional and is proscribed by military regulations.   Please visit the site and read about the continual abuse of power in forcing American citizens into the practice, real or pretense, of evangelical Christianity.

          The teavangelists are intent upon forcing their particular brand of religious fanaticism upon all aspects of American life.  From conception through gestation, into geriatrics, they wish to control every social, cultural, and political second of life for all Americans. 

          This includes periods of military service.  Men and women in uniform are measured against a piety scale and. If found lacking sufficient teavangelism, are “encouraged” to increase their levels of obeisance to the criteria laid down by the professional priests of the dominant fairy-tale mythology. 

          In short, our military is being suborned and infiltrated by evangelical Christians who wish to make it the military arm of a church, not the military service of a nation. 

From commentary submitted to CNN this morning,

          “brad

I see this all the time. I have been active duty for a very long time and since day you there is always a prayer at every single ceremony. I just stand there quietly watching everyone else. No one has ever said anything to me. This seems like case of overzealous Christianity from someone in a leadership position. What saddens me is the fact that slowly but surely we are reverting back to the dark ages when the church ruled society. It is only a matter of time before science books get burned and the inquisition happens again.

          This matter concerns me greatly.  The divisive nature of refusing to participate in the groupthink of small units with respect to religion and culture can make it impossible for atheists and members of minority religions to carry out their roles in the unit.  They are likely to be excluded from social practices and overlooked for promotions.  Depending upon unit demographics, they may be harassed and physically injured by fundamentalists who claim a right and calling to “educate” non-Christians, or who have been encouraged by superiors to make outsiders compliant with the groupthink.

          The risk, in today’s political world, of establishing an internal inquisition is high, as is the risk of establishing a “crusader” mind set among many troops who grew up in and attend evangelical/fundamentalist churches. 

          While our founders tried to preclude and prevent any state religion, the current crop of teavangelists will do everything they can to change this nation into a theocratic dictatorship that exceeds Iranian and Afghani/Pakistani extremism in scope and practice.  This must not happen!