Limbaugh – RAnt(hony)-ings

Dear Republicans. What Does Trump’s Cock Taste Like?

This should be the question that every pundit asks every Republican who won an office in the election on November 6, 2018, since every one of them swore fealty to King Trump in order to win their elections. The question should be asked every time they hold a presser. It should be asked every time they are seen in public. It should be asked in front of their wives. Their children. Their families. Everyone needs to have the blatant corruption at the heart of every Republican victory last night spelled out in the most graphic, disgusting terms possible. Trump can get away with the shit he says every day? Ask that fucking question every fucking day until they crack.

“what does Trump’s cock taste like, Mr. Senator? Mr. Representative? Mr. Secretary?”

Maybe, just maybe, they’ll fucking wake up then. But I doubt it.

In the meantime. The weasel will try to squirm out of harm’s way. The Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) has already signaled that he’ll play ball with the Democrats. Nothing doing. Not unless he turns states evidence on all his Russian contacts, fires all his children, divests from all his businesses. And when I say divest I mean sell every one of his properties to the highest bidder with all proceeds going to pay off the design and construction professionals he’s screwed over the last forty years. He has to agree to replace his entire cabinet with people who will not attempt to undermine their departments. Essentially he has to agree to congressional oversight of everything in the presidential administration, and he loses control of the military. He has to rubber-stamp everything the congress sends to him and he has to tell all his supporters how much they’ll love it.

Oh, and he also will have to insist on IRS prosecutions for the entire DeVos family.

If. If he does all of that, he can stay president for two more years. No running for re-election either. Take your pension, sit down and shut up after January 20th, 2021. If he doesn’t go for all of that, the anal probes start moving in on January 20th, 2019. Or he could just quit now and take his chances. It’s all up to him now. Let’s see which way the weasel runs.

I spoke too soon post-election. Ann Coulter and the Joey Goebbels of AM radio, Rush Limbaugh, scared the OHM into demanding congress do his bidding instead of trying to do something that made sense, like bow to the will of the majority of US citizens. He said (paraphrasing)

Build my wall with your money since Mexico won’t pay for it!

Unsurprisingly the answer from Nancy Pelosi and her majority of the House has been no. Also unsurprisingly, the art school turtle,

THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART – FACES OF DEBT – 9/14/2010

Mitch McConnell, refuses to do anything unless the OHM tells him to. So the OHM shut the government down. He, the president, the man charged with keeping the government running, turned the government off. Probably the most impeachable act we’ve seen a president do, ever. Another history-breaking action from this, the most corrupt, the most fraudulent, the most ridiculous president in the history of this country.

The standoff cannot last, and the OHM will not be getting money for his wall from the Democratically lead house. They know what kind of thief he is already. If the shutdown doesn’t end in less than a month, I predict impeachment hearings will begin to be discussed seriously. The only thing standing in the way of the government reopening is the idiot sitting in the White House not doing the job he was elected to do.

The government stayed shut down from December 22, 2018 until January 25, 2019. 35 days. For more than a month, there was no United States government. Let that sink in. There was no capacity to do anything that required the federal government to operate for almost the entire month of January, 2019. The president turned the government back on at that point. The house passed some meaningless legislation so that the OHM could save face, and he grudgingly allowed the United States to continue to exist, until he changes his mind again.

…and the outrage rolled on through the year of 2019. Trump’s new flunky, AG William Barr, ensured that the Mueller investigation ended. AG Barr then lied about what was in the report, and refused to re-characterize his assessment of the report even after Bobby-Three-Sticks testified before the House. Mueller said in very precise terms (paraphrasing)

If you want him punished, you (the House) have to do it.

Weirdly, people keep telling me Mueller didn’t find anything. That isn’t what I heard in his testimony. What I heard him say was he found a lot of stuff. He just couldn’t prove any of it as a prosecutor tasked with building a case against Donald J. Trump, because that guy is the president and a president has to be impeached. That is the prosecutorial remedy for bad presidents.

Finally. On december 19, 2019 Donald John Trump was impeached by the House of representatives. It was then that speaker Pelosi proved she was the canny operator that everyone says she is. She held the impeachment articles until after the Christmas holiday (Die Hard Christmas) so that the Senate would have had time to think about the job before them, and possibly get an agreement to call the witnesses that are needed to prove the case they’ve built against the President. That process is going on now, so I have moved this article forward in time to the day the House Managers began presenting the prosecution’s case in the Senate. That date (for the later clarity of this article, so I don’t have to re edit this fucker again. Editor) is January 22, 2020.

Side note. On January 14, 2020, the new P.M. of the United Kingdom (soon to be just the Kingdom of England and Wales once again. After Brexit that is. AB? Editor.) the infamous Bojo is also on his knees sucking Donald Trump’s cock. I wonder if he has an opinion about the flavor? The BBC reports that Bojo wants to Replace Iran nuclear plan with ‘Trump deal’. That’s rich. Like there will be a Trump deal with Iran short of full-out war. Yeah, that will happen.

I’m watching the case being put before the Senate as I write this (January 22, 2019, 6:30 pm) I decided to move this article forward to the date of the impeachment trial in the Senate while watching the endless arguments yesterday (01/21/2020) over the rules that the Senate would follow during the trial. I have now updated the article with links to some of the OHM articles I’ve written since the 2018 elections. Time to get busy watching this rare political event unfold.

C-SPAN – U.S. Senate: Impeachment Trial (Day 3) – Jan 22, 2020
Facebook – PBS News

…but make no mistake. If the Senate acquits the OHM without calling witnesses, every Republican Senator who votes to acquit will have taken their turn at sucking the President’s cock. Every. One. Of. Them.

More importantly, every one of them will be investigated by the next president who takes control of the office, and that investigation could very well be conducted by foreign governments interested in seeking favor with the president of the United States. They should probably think pretty hard about acquitting the OHM. You never know who the next person who holds an office might be. Just ask Barack Obama if he’s happy about his current predicament. Ask him if he thinks the future turned out the way he wanted.

BTW, it has been 3 years, 2 days, 13 hours and 22 minutes since Donald Trump should have been removed from office. It will have been a bit longer by the time you read this.

Editor’s note. I edited and moved this article forward for the first day of impeachment prosecution arguments (day three according to C-SPAN) because I wrote this article after the Democratic midterm victories thinking that we would see a change in the OHM’s behavior after the drubbing he suffered in that election. Once again, I was wrong. Against all the evidence of history, the Republicans and their president have continued on their merry way pretending that they haven’t got anything to worry about. The government shutdown derailed my train of thought, and I forgot about this article until I went back over the year’s articles trying to decide what I would use to anchor this first day of testimony that so many of us have been waiting for, for over a year. Finally, that day has come.

Hypocrisy in the Ingroup? Unheard of!

Frankly I expected this to not be a thing in 24 hours. The Twitters and the Facespaces and Instamessengers are all aflame, still. I think it has been more than 24 hours now. I’m not sure. I don’t care. Yesterday the conservative trolls started up with the what about Samantha Bee? questions on liberal groups everywhere. Here’s one example image. Conservatives think they’ve got a point, and that the point isn’t on the top of their heads. A point they’re willing to flog endlessly. As I said on that thread,

The finer point that is never made is that if you are offended by comedy sketch artists and think they should be punished for it (aside from losing their jobs. For not being funny enough) then you have completely missed the POINT of comedy. Get a sense of humor, everyone.

The in-group can do no wrong. This is a common problem in politics, liberals defending Samantha Bee when even she admits she crossed a line is just the most recent example of ingroup/outgroup bias. Something I’ve tried hard never to fall prey to.

I roundly criticized Bill Clinton in the 90’s because of his excesses with women, a fact that gets me in trouble with Democrats to this day. He had no business taxing that ass when that ass worked for him in the White House let alone at the governor’s mansion. That is simply not the way you relate to people from a position of authority. When Stormtrumpers throw what about Bill? at me I have always pointed to my own history of not putting up with crap from him, so I have no compunction with holding the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) accountable now.

The motivated numeracy that afflicts political groups is truly troubling. Conservatives do not see the degree of crimes that the OHM is guilty of as being any worse, and probably less detrimental, than what they believe Bill and Hillary Clinton are guilty of. Never mind that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are demonstrably different people and are not interchangeable characters (no matter how much they sold us on the two for one special we got when we put them in the White House) or that the Clinton murder list that they frequently cite is complete bullshit as are all the other dismissed charges that have been raised over the last twenty-five years.

I’ve started in the middle of the story again. Fuck. I hate it when I do that. Starting from the beginning:

Roseanne Barr set Twitter aflame with a racist tweet that she has since deleted and she was canned for the tweet by the network that airs her show. As I said on a friend’s wall on Facebook three days ago,

I hated Roseanne in its final years in its previous incarnation, I hated the new show from the beginning. What I would like is some honesty from the people who talk about how honest Trump is. The fakery in the new show was so transparent as to make the acting cringe-worthy. …having said that, if only it were this easy to fire a president over embarrassing tweets.

Why did I hate the last few years of Roseanne? Because she had become a fake. She had money by that point. She had plastic surgery and mental health counseling and a marriage failing over creative differences and too much money. She was no longer convincing as the domestic goddess that she was in the beginning. I remember her stand up routines. She has great timing and she is quick and clever. But she doesn’t pull punches and that isn’t becoming in someone who literally has the money to get her way pretty much all the time. Her brand of comedy doesn’t fit coming from someone with money and sense. Maybe she should grow a little sense and she could keep a job.

But then not saying whatever thing comes into your head that sounds funny to you is not how you become famous as a stand up comic. So perhaps she’s still on the comedy track and I simply can’t appreciate her comedy anymore. That is entirely possible.

I don’t like either Roseanne Barr or Samantha Bee. I figured out who Samantha Bee was on The Daily Show. I rarely found her funny then, and I’m still not finding her funny often enough to take the time to watch Full Frontal now. I follow comics, it’s something I do for the occasional laugh. I stop following the comics when they stop making me laugh. I certainly don’t pay to see their shows if I’m not laughing. Most conservatives forget that they were pissed off at Roseanne a decade and more ago when she butchered the Star Spangled Banner at a baseball game, an event that was brought to mind by someone with a question about it on Snopes two days ago,

I remember this well. I remember that I thought it was an overreaction at the time. She was a stand-up comic. Her act (and most comedy acts) include ethnic slurs. If you can’t accept the humor, don’t watch it, read it or listen to it. That doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t get in trouble for her jokes told in bad taste, or for comedy routines (like the OP) that bombed.
What is telling is how many comics who pride themselves with doing mostly ethnic slurs end up supporting people like Trump. Very instructive.

Why are people listening to comics that don’t make them laugh? There isn’t a Rush Limbaugh fan who has laughed at him in a decade or more. Why is that?

Yesterday the creator of the G+ group Conservative Union a man with twenty-six thousand followers decided to troll the members of the G+ group Being Liberal. I’m not one to question the motivations of people who clearly have way more attention than most of us should be comfortable with, especially when their actions are bound to create more distraction and attention for themselves that isn’t of a positive nature. But he decided he’d demand answers of the membership of that group, a group demonstrably populated with more trolls than liberals. Perhaps what Being Liberal needs is a moderator that can make sure that conservative trolls don’t get into the group to stir up ugliness on a regular basis. Moderators that control content like Dan Lewis does for his Conservative Union group. But I’m getting ahead of myself again,

I mean, you post this bullshit here,just JAQ’ing off, as if you are asking something weighty. As if people who don’t follow shock jocks and outrageous comedians are offended by a lot of what passes for public discourse these days (take a number after “grab ’em by the pussy”) and simply adjusts their filters accordingly, and at the same time you demand that we all pay attention because you think this is important.
Well, it isn’t important. Roseanne hasn’t been important in twenty years and Samantha Bee’s fifteen minutes are about up. Nobody cares except for white nationalists and anarchists who want to see America made white again. People who support Trump and won’t admit that they are racists for supporting him. Those are the people who need to wake the fuck up.

He invokes ad hominems. Antifa. As if I should think that punching Nazis like Antifa does is somehow unAmerican. I can’t figure out why you shouldn’t punch Nazis, unless it’s some kind of official rally and cops would arrest you for punching them. That I get. Otherwise it seems like the most American thing to do, if you know the person at the other end of your fist is a Nazis. I’m thinking Inglourious Basterds here. Maybe punching isn’t a strong enough response? When I suggest that content control is something everyone profits from he alludes to Antifa. When I suggest I might block him for being a troll (demonstrated) and probably an anarcho-capitalist (suspected) I mean, he doesn’t let just anyone into his groups. Or as I put the rhetorical question to him,

How exactly do you intend to listen to the input of 8 billion people when they all try to speak at once? When every single one of them must be given the attention they demand? Take as long as you need to answer, since I know there isn’t an answer you will admit to.

And when he feigned incomprehension,

It’s a simple question. All 8 billion people on the planet will have something to say and according to the rules you have set up, all of them must be heard. How will you achieve this when all of them will want all of the time you have remaining on earth?

A little FYI is warranted here. I block people I determine that I cannot reason with. I do this on every platform and in every social interaction. If I start talking about the weather in a face to face conversation, you should know that I am blocking you right to your face. I have determined that you are not someone I can reason with. This fact is established over several encounters, so if I see you for the first time and I mention the weather, understand that I don’t say how are you? as a greeting, the most common form of blowing someone off while pretending to care. I simply don’t have time for a lengthy conversation on my journey from here to there. I do not exclude people for reasons other than the ones relevant to the conversation in question at any given time. For what it’s worth, those people are found everywhere, on all sides of every issue. It’s why several hundred people on any given platform cannot see what I write. It’s better for my sanity and health and it is better for their sanity, too. I would say their health as well, but I don’t want anyone to think I’m threatening them, so hot outside today, isn’t it?

The troll and the defenders of Samantha Bee then proceeded to conduct their rolling orgy in a cesspool after I posed the content control question, because that’s what these trolls and the people who feed them do. I didn’t care less then and I still couldn’t care less now. Roseanne should have been fired because she has no intention to conform to some kind of societal norms. Maybe there is a return to decent stand-up routines in her future, I’m not the one to ask on that score. Samantha Bee deserved to be dealt with harshly if she hadn’t apologized. She has. It’s up to her network now, just as it was with Roseanne, when it comes to what happens next.

The thing I’m left with is the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy on all sides when it comes to these issues. Anyone who objects to Samantha Bee using the word cunt in reference to someone in a position of authority in our government (elected or not) should be outraged by this t-shirt proudly worn by Stormtrumpers during the 2016 election that gave us the OHM. Anyone surprised by racism coming from people who support the OHM were not paying attention during the election and have not been paying attention since he took office. Am I surprised by the hypocrisy? I’m surprised that anyone notices hypocrisy since the OHM descended the golden escalator in 2015 and started the shitshow we are in today. 1 year, 132 days, 6 hours, 46 minutes and 44 seconds. That’s how long the OHM had been president when I wrote this. Is he still President? Then the hypocrisy continues. Wake me up when the impeachment hearings start.

It is the work of the mendacious to claim allegiance to a past that we all share, all the while excluding those who don’t fit the mold they create with spurious data. Everyone who lives in America is an American. This fact is demonstrable. Conservatives cannot abide this kind of judgment because exclusion is how they secure the zero sum game they have created.

1 year, 290 days, 6 hours, 30 minutes into the Trump presidency. Yesterday I listened to an episode of Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara that featured Samantha Bee. I may have to revise my opinion of her. She is actually pretty funny in the episode.

I’m doing my best not to pay attention to the midterm elections going on right now as I type this. I’d like to think Americans are smart enough to know when they’ve been had by a shyster like the OHM is. It’s just a little more than disheartening to realize that Americans historically have been even more clueless than they were in 2016 when they voted for the OHM in the first place. So, I’d like to hope, but I have been burned before when trying to hope. So I’ll plan for the zombie apocalypse instead. At least that isn’t likely to happen. I hope.

If This Was Mandatory Reading

I just finished reading (actually, listening too) Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution and I should give a hat tip (h/t) to DecodeDC and Jimmy Williams for suggesting it.

There really is only one problem with this book. The people who should be reading it will never willingly pick it up. Every Trump supporter, Clintonista (been called that myself) and Bernie bro who thinks Clinton betrayed Sanders and the revolution he rode almost to a successful nomination should read this book. He explains in graphic detail how his campaign succeeded beyond his initial aspirations when starting, and how we need to correct the system as it was before January 20th in order to make it serve the American people as it was intended.

Unfortunately that system, like his candidacy, is part of history now. The book is still worth reading, but I have serious doubts about there being much of a system left to fix after we pry His Electoral Highness out of the White House.

A better and probably still more relevant book is Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism,

Here is the review I published on Audible.com over a year ago when I read his book;

Prof. Reich crystallizes the trends of today’s economics quite clearly, allowing us to inspect what the future holds if trends are not altered. it can be a scary future, or it could be a kinder future if we simply tweak the system in such a way that all can gain benefit from collective human progress. As all of us should benefit, being the product of previous generations of struggle. Everyone should take pause to contemplate this future, whether they agree with the forecast or solutions or not.

Just like Bernie Sander’s book, the people who could profit most from reading this book will probably never be willing to read it because of the politics of who it comes from and the president with whom Robert Reich is associated.

I find I am a complete weirdo on the subject of what I will listen to or read. I actively go out and try to understand the opposing views so that I can see what I’m fighting against. I understand that Trump voters are not openly racist or probably even homophobic. They are mostly evangelical and pretty certifiably stupid since they fell for the machinations of a con artist like Trump, but they don’t understand the forces that they have set loose upon this country. Yet. In their blind desire to have their own pain addressed, they have caused pain and suffering across a broad swath of America, and will not get one moment of relief from their own pains. I hope they can live off the schadenfreude, because that is about the only benefit that they will receive from their victory.

I took the time to listen to and understand conservative thought during my process of evaluating, supporting and finally rejecting libertarianism. I spent several aggravating months listening to Rush Limbaugh (as this blog can attest) as a part of this process. You cannot hope to defeat an enemy that you do not understand. Take the time to read their books, listen to their media, and understand their fears. Only then can you possibly present an argument that they will listen to.

Conservative? Liberal?

I find it funny when people from outside say they, and then misattribute what it is that they think. Like when a liberal talks about conservatives as if they can know what conservatives think without being one. Or when someone from outside of Texas or any other state attempts to explain to a resident what it is that they think. I live in the middle of a very angry, red, conservative state. I live here by design, in the chill, blue, liberal heart of that angry red state.

I’m drowning in conservative (and religious) expression around here. You can’t escape it. There are more churches than restaurants in most Texas towns, which means there are more churches than libraries in most Texas towns. Conservatism rules in religion. There is always some tradition somewhere that is going to be contravened by any new thing you propose, and conservatism lives in tradition like it does no where else in human thought. If you love tradition, you are probably a conservative. You might not even know this about yourself.

The cities are hotbeds of liberalism because liberalism at its core is about exploring boundaries. Boundaries in thought, boundaries in expression, boundaries in behavior. City life requires boundaries to be tested because city life is not natural to human culture. City life is itself an adaptation from the rural tradition, especially in America and most especially in Texas. You’ve never heard someone complain more than when you talk to a rural Texan about those crazy folks living in Austin. They’ll wear your ears out bitching about Austin.

What is going on in the world today is rural vs. city life clashing; the reality of the fact that large groups of people working near each other can achieve more than a single person working on his own. The rural insight, the midwestern work ethic, is you have to work hard to get ahead. Everything must be struggled for, including basic needs like shelter and food. The idea that something as complex as healthcare could ever be provided without cost to the end-user is as foreign a concept to them as having crops harvest themselves and bring themselves to market. It just doesn’t happen in the experience of your average red state person. They are convinced that the poor get something that they aren’t entitled to since they don’t have to work to get it. All forms of assistance are cheating (as a disabled person, I see this virtually every time I admit that I don’t work) because someone has to pay for that, and you didn’t earn it.

They are angry, and conservative outlets like Fox news and Limbaugh tell them that their anger is justified.

But it really is just manipulation. Of the top 1% who control 95% of the country’s wealth, how many of them go out and earn a days wage? Let’s go further down the food chain, though. Amongst the angry ‘red’ crowd, how many of you actually get out and sweat in the sun all day earning a living?

Some of the angriest people I know only have time to be angry, because they aren’t doing a job they are happy with and it doesn’t occupy them. But they get to stay indoors out of the sun. By contrast, some of the happiest people I ever worked with worked in the sun all day (oddly, a good portion of them would probably be deported by the angry people) actually doing the work that angry conservatives think they do themselves. The angriest conservatives are city people with a rural attitude that no longer reflects the reality of the lives they lead. Were they not sermonized to, at every opportunity, about the evils of the lazy immigrant and the poor, they might actually come to this realization themselves.

…and that’s the crux of the problem. When I point out to people (as I’ve done a few times) that you cannot know personally that every person involved in creating the products that you use has been fairly compensated for their work, and so consequently you cannot know whether the assistance beneficiary paid their ‘fair share’ and are simply receiving the benefits of someone who worked honestly to get it, they go through the roof in anger. It contradicts the worldview of the average conservative, that getting something without paying a fee for it directly is always going to be cheating the system. Before you disagree with me, ask yourself; if someone sues an insurance company and wins a big check, do you feel happy for them? How about if they don’t have to sue, but get a nice big payout anyway? Do you doubt they earned that payout? Really?

Is a liberal worldview better? No. Most liberals I know (and I am a liberal. Have been one all my life) have no clue how things get done. They just expect things to happen when they want it, and couldn’t begin to explain how the systems around them work. In my experience, the group efforts resultant extra payout is in large part squandered by the middle managers who really are the lazy people in the equation. They’re the ones who don’t want to do the front line grunt work, and don’t want the attention that upper management gets. It’s why groups like Romney’s company will slash that part of the workforce first. At worst, upper management will have to deal with the front line directly for awhile (this is how you get a fiscal conservative like Romney running as a Republican. Strange bedfellows) a liberal sees these actions as detrimental, because they only see the loss of paid positions. Ask stockholders if they think cost cutting is a bad idea, though.

In the end, both sides of the spectrum are wrong; and they are wrong for the wrong reasons. The conservatives are convinced that a return to our roots is required (as if that’s even vaguely possible) and talk about morals and religion as if that’s the work ethic enshrined. It’s not. The liberals talk about safety nets and the rich, as if the rich didn’t get where they were by crafting their own safety net; as if they could simply print money until everyone has enough. There really does need to be a work ethic, and there really is enough wealth in this country that we can afford to keep people from dying on the streets (and don’t tell me it doesn’t happen. Happens all the time) I just wish the hate would stop. Tired of the stupid people hating. Hate is bad for the heart, you’ll end up a burden on society.

Posted originally here. I will personally drink a celebratory toast, when Rush Limbaugh finally goes off the air. Not that I’ve posted on the subject of Limbaugh Lies before, or anything like that.

Editor’s note, 2019. I did a little bit of wordsmithing on the first few paragraphs because the original verbiage relied on the now-vanished thread on Dan Carlin’s BBS Forum to make sense. I don’t even remember what I was arguing about now, or with whom. The Big Bowl of Crow should be cited here, too. I wasn’t yet ready to admit that there was a need for confiscatory taxes in 2012. The difference that eight years makes.

A Big Bowl of Crow

The Delusion of Money

Ol’ Joey gets 400 mil

The news that Limbaugh, or ol’ Joey as I like to think of him, has signed a contract worth 400 million really comes as no surprise. It’s hard to argue with success. AM radio was relatively ignored as a media outlet before Limbaugh re-invented talk radio. Populated by largely local call-in shows during the day, and low-budget national call-in shows in the evening and overnight, the idea that one person might be able to do a three hour monologue on a daily basis was probably considered crazy when he proposed it.

That I listened to the content that Limbaugh replaced, the level-headed local content that actually reflected the opinions of the people being broadcast to, probably explains why I rejected Limbaugh’s intrusion on my airwaves. His strident rabble-rousing has never played well in my household.

His views are no more the views of the people who listen to his show, any more than any other entertainer’s audience agrees with him. Limbaugh can strut around and pretend otherwise, but an entertainer is what he is, and an entertainer is all he will ever be.

Now he is an overpaid, drug abusing entertainer. He’s hardly the first.

FFrF Radio: Susan Jacoby & Rita Swan

Podcast Link.
March 29, 2008 – Special Guest: Author Susan Jacoby

The show starts with excerpts from Richard Dawkin’s television special The Root of All Evil(?)
A title Dawkins goes to great lengths to disavow every time the subject comes up. His words? “Religion is the root of a great many evils, but it’s not the root of all evil.” I think I’m quoting accurately. The program can be purchased from the FFRF online store; this was announced three weeks ago during the broadcast of Dawkins’ interview on Freethought Radio.

The Pagan pulpit deals with Bible passages that slander the unbelievers. Sticks and stones…

Susan Jacoby is a very engaging speaker. She was interviewed concerning her latest book, The Age of American Unreason. Her opinion is one that I generally find interesting, even if I don’t agree with it. The same mass media that she decries, I find very useful for informing myself. It’s all in what you watch and listen to, and how you filter it (for instance, if you think Rush Limbaugh is a news source, you’re one of the problems; if you would rather watch Dancing With the Stars instead of Dirty Jobs, you are also one of the problems) I was listening to infotainment on my Treo when I was listening to the Freethought Radio podcast while out on my walk. Yes, the dumbing down of America is disturbing. Yes, media has something to answer for in this. No, denying children access to television and their iPods is not going to remedy this situation.

[The Montessori school that my children first attended had a hang up when it came to technology. They were certain that children should not be exposed to screens. Television screens. Computer screens. It was a constant point of controversy between myself and the school. I have a word for people who are irrationally afraid of technology. I call them Luddites. This, of course, did not go over well at the school]

Her example of the attacks on Barack Obama by Clinton and others because he “speaks too good” are very telling points when it comes to the dumbing down of America (I blame the government schools) what to do about it remains an open question.

“Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.” -Abbie Hoffman

2007 Archive episode.

March 31, 2007 – Religious Dogma that Kills Kids

Rita Swan was the guest. Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty is her advocacy group. Over 40 states have laws on the books that give exemptions to parents and religious advisers who allow children to suffer and die because of religious belief.

Rita Swan’s story of why she is involved in this issue is worth the 40 minutes of time it takes to listen to this podcast.

The episode of Babylon 5 named Believers took up this issue several years ago. I bring this up because the subject is not nearly as clear cut as one might think. It’s related to many other issues surrounding the subject of children, and it really amounts to “how do you protect children from their own parents without turning the state into everyones parent?” I think the route suggested by Rita Swan is probably the proper middle way approach. Hold the parents accountable for a child’s death due to medical neglect. Render unto Caesar applies to these situations; whether your child dies because of your imperfect faith, or because diseases really do exist, your failure to do you duty by your child should be your responsibility.

Dan’s Sunday Morning Blues rounds up the episode on a lighter note, and Freethinkers Almanac brings it to a close.

Who’s a Libertarian?

This is a post I circulated concerning the speaker at the 2004 Libertarian convention. This was the beginning of my dissatisfaction with sharing air with Anarchists.

The tempest in a teapot concerning Boortz speaking at the National Conference isn’t about Boortz; It isn’t even about war vs. antiwar. If you go back and read all of T.L. Knapp’s “Life of the Party” series, it becomes plainly clear that the issue goes much deeper than that. It’s why the Boot Boortz camp have the audacity to suggest that those in agreement with Boortz should …be shown the door.

The issue ladies and gentlemen is this: Is government necessary or not? Does the structure we call government serve a legitimate function in a truly libertarian society; or is each individual capable of governing themselves sufficiently to render government as we know it useless? Let me explain why this is what is being argued about.

Libertarians don’t agree on whether or not government should exist. On the one hand you have those who believe that government is not necessary, and they offer suggestions for its eventual replacement by voluntary structures. Generally those that offer these types of arguments are known as anarchists. On the other hand you have objectivists and others who believe that government serves a vital, albeit limited function, and it should be maintained in some minimal fashion so as to preserve liberty. The label that has been generally applied to these types is minarchist. Not everyone accepts the above labels, and the current LP membership includes views, like those of Constitutionalists, that don’t fit in either camp.

The anarchist/minarchist schism has existed within the party nearly since its inception. There have been various attempts to settle disputes between the factions, none of them very successful. The most successful was the Dallas Accord in which the libertarians of the time agreed that they would not discuss whether or not government was necessary, and focus on the more important issue of personal liberty. The agreement has worked until recently.

What’s changed? 9/11, that’s what has changed. The foreign policy blunders that the federal government has committed for the last hundred years have come home to roost with a vengeance. The ‘terrorists’ have declared war on us, and we are under threat. We are now faced with a situation that must be dealt with, and all of the effective options involve the use of government power. The problem is this: If you acknowledge that government has a reason to exist, then that reason will most likely include defensive measures designed to secure us from the aggressive actions of others. No matter how you slice it, 9/11 comes under “attacks against the territory of the United States”, and we have the obligation to make sure that any more threats of that type are dealt with, and the guilty parties that conspired to conduct the attacks are hunted down and exterminated.

To further extend the logic chain, one can extrapolate several strategic reasons for a large ground force in the area that the attackers called home (the Middle East) and the benefit of soundly defeating the ‘biggest bully on the block’. Whether you agree with the strategy or not, it makes sense from a military standpoint… If you acknowledge that government has a reason to exist.

However, if you don’t believe that government should exist, then any action of the government is damnable from the outset; and any action which benefits the government directly (such as a war) is the worst kind of evil imaginable, and therefore must be denounced in the strongest possible terms.

…and that ladies and gentlemen is why the disagreement over Boortz speaking has taken on a life of its own. He has had the audacity to apply logic to the situation and determine from his own perspective that the threat posed by the ‘terrorists’ is sufficient to require actions against other countries. …and to further determine that the largest most vocal segment of the antiwar movement are also anti-american. To add insult to injury he speaks his mind about his beliefs to an audience of thousands, and categorizes himself a libertarian. As others have pointed out, on every other issue other than the war, Boortz is solidly libertarian. But because of this one issue, his belief that government has a reason to exist, he can’t be a libertarian.

Now the anarchists are regretting ever letting non-anarchists into their club; and some of them would like to institute a purity test so that the membership can be limited to those who profess correct beliefs. To hell with them. This is the reason why everyone who has an interest in furthering the LP needs to go to the convention and actively participate in the sessions. The core of the party has been controlled by too few for too long. If we are going to succeed in changing the policies of the current government, we are going to have to include more people, and gain influence. You don’t do that by kicking out those you disagree with.

For my part, I wouldn’t mind if they asked Rush Limbaugh to speak at the convention. It might make for some interesting conversation. It doesn’t even offend me when Bill Maher calls himself a ‘libertarian’. He just makes himself look like a fool to those who know better. To take exception to Neal Boortz speaking at the convention is more than a waste of time; it is the equivalent of picking the scab off of a festering sore. It will only delay the time it takes for the underlying disagreements to recede into the background where they belong.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

Goodbye to the BBS forum on KLBJ

Just went by the KLBJ website and discovered that they have removed the forums from their website. It would be sad, except that the moderators killed the forum ages ago.

I was one of the last of the “Old timers” there. My profile said I had 795 posts (although you could only find about 10 of them towards the end) and that I had been a member since 1997. I joined and dropped out because of overactive moderators, and then revisited the site a few years later because a friend of mine was getting active on the boards there. He, and most of the active members of the time, were eventually banned from the site by the same moderators…

[It’s kind of ironic that one of the other oldtimers, an anonymous user with the name TTLMS was one of the few people left the last time I checked the memberlists; and I would have had him banned, if not brought up on civil charges, for some of his activity on the boards there. But they banned the other users for being too vocal. Go figure]

…who then went on to reformat the forums, deleting 7 out of 10 forums completely.

For the last year or so the place has been a virtual ghost town, with me being one of the few posters (other than the spammers) that even visited the place anymore. It’s not surprising that they finally completely closed it down. Another gravestone (albeit a virtual one) that can be attributed to the control freaks of the world.

It’s probably a disturbing sign of the times ahead, although I’d rather chalk it up to coincidence. So long Freedom of speech. We hardly knew you.

It’s worth noting that a business, a radio station for example, cannot censor. Only governments can do that. It is a misconception to accuse a radio station of curtailing free speech when what it really wants is for internet trolls to go to another website and clog their bandwidth with irrelevant arguments that prove no real points. Not that I feel like defending the local AM station that still carries Rush Limbaugh. Feel free to take random potshots at them whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.

I appear to have run afoul of a bot or something with this post. I have reverted it to draft, kept it offline for a month and then re-posted it, and it still gets hit again and again and again. 9 hits today after a month offline, 6574 hits over the course of years (today is 2/18/2015, and I don’t even listen to this station anymore. Even Jeff Ward alienated me finally) the highest number of hits for any post I’ve ever written. Weird what comes up when you start checking stats.

If you are a person reading this, why? Here is the main page link. Here is the link to my page on Emergent Principles of Human Nature. Here is a link to my page on Me, Architecture and Meniere’s. No really, go read something else, please.

I’m thinking of appending random links just to throw off the bots. I’ll have to think of some really malware infested porn sites to send them to.

2017. Here are the stats today;

Going to try a different tack, duplication of the post in a new post with no hits. Same everything. See if it attracts traffic again. It says 7012 hits as I press the delete button. 44 more hits on the reposted one, trying altering the default link with a name change.

Limbaugh Lies: Hoof in Mouth

So, on top of kicking a cripple, attacking Michael J. Fox over his bipartisan support for stem cell research, Limbaugh can add admitting personal stupidity to his list of fumbles for the week.

In his morning soundbite today, he is once again kicking John Kerry for “calling the troops stupid”, as if he and the president didn’t beat that dead horse enough a few days ago.

However, if you didn’t rely on the president’s spin on what was said (and why not? He’s always been truthful when dealing with Kerry in the past, right?) and in fact listened to the entire speech leading up to the statement in question, it becomes quite obvious that Kerry is calling Bush stupid, not the troops. Keith Olbermann has been making great hay with these facts, every day that the White House has chosen to bring this subject up, including asking very pointed questions concerning when Bush was going to apologize to the troops.

It’s been amazing watching how many people want to pile into that camp, and all admit that they are just as stupid as Bush. Average citizens, concerned parents of Iraq veterans, Tony Snow (he used to sub for Limbaugh on occasion. He was an idiot then too) and the rest of the White House staff. Most of the media just parroted the White House insistence that the troops were being insulted, adding their names to the list of “also stupid”.

Limbaugh, as the premiere conservative media propagandist, has also added his name to the list, and now underscored it by continuing to bring it up, days after the story had any legs. I found Kerry’s admission to be quite straightforward. If Limbaugh has a problem with it, it’s because he’s still calling the president (and those who side with him) stupid.

I’m no fan of Kerry’s, and his creating this tempest in a teapot with his botched joke has me wondering if he’s still playing at being Bush’s fall guy. Still, stupid is as stupid does, and the stupid conservatives have completely botched the last 6 years that they’ve held power, and Limbaugh has been their cheerleader throughout. He probably shouldn’t have abused OxyCodone. It seems to have affected his brain as well as his hearing.

Time for the next group of stupid people to enter Washington. They’ll most likely be Democrats (I predicted it several months ago) no matter what desperate measures Limbaugh and the rest of the conservative propagandists will go to.

Try not to soil the furniture, we (your bosses, the taxpayers) have to pay for all that.

The Best Enemy Money Can Buy

Listening to ol’ Joey today, and I heard the Great Fat One bragging about how he predicted that we were going to ‘deal with’ Iran two years ago, and how this was now about to happen.

The day Bush named Iraq as the next target in the ‘War on Terror’, it was clear to me that the Joint Chiefs wanted to establish a ‘beachhead’ in the Middle East, a place from which to stage the pacification of the entire region, as needed. Obviously, Iran would be the follow-on target. That was a bit more than two years ago. If ol’ Joey only figured it out two years ago, then he must be slipping in his old age.

…The real question is, are the Iranian’s engaging in nuclear weapons research in anticipation of this event, and do we really want a nuclear Iran? I think the answer to the second question is “no”, but are we prepared for the consequences of that answer?

We’ve handed these people our money, hand over fist, for 4o years now. We’ve built up their infrastructure and taught them how to drill for oil. Sold them our weapons and trained them in their use. As always, we’ve gotten the best enemy money can buy. I wonder when we’ll learn to quit doing that?